Q's Views

One of the things I enjoy about LitNet is the Short Story competition. I like to read the stories and vote. The choice is usually hard to make. The first competition of 2009 was won by a story entitled "The Button War". Congrats to the author. We may never know who that may be. If the story wins at the end of the year, the author will be announced, but until then, we'll never know. Only the loser can announce themselves. I'm one of the losers.

I haven't written anything of substance in over 25 years. I flirted with a novel for about 8 years before I fnally decided it was crap. Since then, I've had ideas, but nothing of note. Finally, I started to have this idea. I think the idea is a novel, if I can sustain the voice for a major work. This idea was a character called Johnny Kickstool. Johnny was human for a time. He was going to go on some country wide rampage of violence and reckless behavior of all sorts. It felt a little too much like Natural Born Killers so he had go somewhere else.

I brought Johnny to life as an employee of Death, the senior vice president of the suicide division. I entered the story in the competition to see if it would draw any votes. My story got 9 out of 25 total votes cast.

Just a brief note on the number of votes cast. There are thousands of members of Lit Net and only 25 of them took the time to read the stories and vote. We've got thousands of posts, but 25 votes. For myself, I could care less. My purpose in competing to see if there would be any interest in my idea. There was. That's enough for me. The other writers deserved more.

Anyway, I want to thank dramasnot6, lugdunum, Neely, Pendragon, pussnboots, Virgil, Zippy, and ~Sophia~ for voting for my story. I'm flattered.

And now the apology. I voted for myself and I want to apologize to my fellow authors for doing that. After I did it, I felt bad about it. If I was going to vote, I should have voted for another story, but frankly I didn't feel that I could. My choice would have come down to the winner, which I feel has a wonderful voice to it but has what I perceive to be a flaw of detail I can't quite get past, and the story that got zero votes.

To the author of The Inheritance of the Meek: you tried to cram a novel into less than 2000 words. There was a lot going on, but it seems like a novel idea more than a short story.

Peace,
Q