I never really thought about it before, but it’s quite interesting (and perhaps a bit strange) that I can write so many blog posts full of random thoughts, and publish them for the world to see, but with all the stories I write, I’m very selective with who I share them with.
I think my justification was that different people like different kinds of stories, and a lot of people I know don’t read fiction at all, so it seemed kind of pointless to openly share a story that might not be well-received.
Yes, I know this is true of blog posts too — any singular reader is not going to be interested in every post I publish — and I have no qualms about people skipping blog posts they’re not interested in, but stories are just … different.
Likely it’s because a lot more effort goes into writing stories — for me, anyway. A blog post I can put together within an hour, typing whatever comes to mind, and then proofread and publish the same day. A story, however, is something that takes several days, weeks or months to develop and polish, depending on how long it is. If a blog post is a quick mid-week dinner, a story is an elaborate multi-layered cake with some impossibly delicate tempered chocolate adornment on top.
But anyway, after much encouragement from fellow writer/creative Colette, I’ve decided to share some of my story-writing on this blog. I don’t want to give away any details of the story I’m going to share, or create any preconceptions about it, but I didn’t want to send it out into the world without some sort of introduction.
The first story I’m sharing is a short story I wrote many years ago (I’m not entirely sure, but I’m guessing I wrote this at least six or seven years ago). It was inspired partly by random people I saw in places I went, and I just made up stories about them. I also had the random idea to name each part of the story (of which there are six) after the first six letters of the Nato Phonetic Alphabet: alfa, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot.
I must admit, however, that, at the time, I didn’t know that I had misspelt “alfa” as “alpha”. Rather than correct this mistake, I am going to keep it as is because, for one, that is how the original was and I don’t want to edit it now after so many years, and secondly, “alfa” looks weird to me, and doesn’t fit the story.
On that note, I’d also like mention that I had no definite plan for the story when I started writing it. I only knew that I wasn’t going to go past “foxtrot” because the next word is “golf”, which doesn’t exactly inspire anything poetic in me.
I don’t want to preface it with much else — I’ll let it speak for itself.
Each instalment will be published at 24-hour intervals, starting Monday January 3rd at 11am (Brisbane time). No particular reason for this — it seemed as good a time as any.
Enjoy
pistachio conspiracy #63 