by Jon Herrera

About that book I’m writing. . .

Long dark months ago when I started this blog I mentioned that I was writing a new novel. A bit of boffo sci-fi in the near future, end of the world as we know, how will humankind ever survive kind of thing. Well, I am still writing it, but very, very slowly. It is a bit, well, bad. I have fallen into the greatest of all traps and let myself do little more than copy the best bits out of every story I have ever read and paste them together. This is not always a bad thing. The Matrix was a bit of everything thrown together. Just about every movie made in the last ten years is just a lot of slop tossed in a bowl and given a bit of a stir before serving. But I was aiming for something a bit more than a movie novelisation, without even the bother of a movie to start with. So it may be that this novel ends up being a screenplay instead. I used to have a drawerful of stories and novels, but not too many screenplays. A whole new field to garner rejection within.

Speaking of which, I went on a bit of holiday/working holiday a couple of weeks ago. Just a small trip to a not too distance tourist trap. The plan, to write about said trip and send this brilliant bit of fluff off to a couple of dozen newspapers, as everyone says newspapers are the easy way to go. Well, maybe they are after you have published the piece in a major monthly. Or maybe if they find a space that wants filling. So I am working on three little articles about the trip and how swell it was. Or I would be if I didn’t spend all my time blogging, watching movies, watching TV, planning the next trip, or well, any writer out there knows the drill. Anything to keep from writing.

The bits are all but done and just want the images burned to a CD and the whole shebang shipped off to my local purveyor of paper and newsprint.

And still I sit and delay. The worst that can happen is no one will want them. The best is that they will be published, once or twice and I can pay for my little excursion. The next best would be a no thanks, but maybe next time.

Back in High School, those glory days when I knew I was going to be a writer and had never heard of a church directory, I submitted every damned thing I wrote. I’m talking essays, letters to the editor, movie reviews, short stories, restaurant reviews, poetry, that last hurts the worse, those were some god awful poems. I was rejected for one and all paying gigs. I had three or four letters to the editor publish. Big whoopee at the time.

Now, after two or three years of this, I stopped getting form letters telling me to bugger off, I got nice hand written letters telling me to keep at it and try them again with my next story. It was right here, gentle reader, that I stopped writing with anything like serious intent.

It would be years later, as my writing life came to be me reading books about writing, that I would see the light- that I had fucked up royally. Those little hand written letters of encouragement are the first sign that they will likely publish your stuff one of these days. Once it is good enough to publish. Alas, I didn’t know that then. And life has been a damned busy bit of business since and I have not written a decent story in years.

And yet the desire to be a published writer still burns away below the surface like one of those little fires near Chernobyl, invisible below all that earth and concrete, but still smoldering away. So I am heading back to the grind stone and sending off a couple of things with something like hope in my heart. Of course, I can’t send them yet, as I have not properly finished them yet.

I’m sure there is something I want to watch on TV coming on soon. . .

Jon Herrera
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Published by Jon Herrera

Writer, Photographer, Blogger.