When a Stranger Tweets

I received a very nice and wholly unsolicited comment on my Machine of Death anthology story earlier today. I was at the MOD website to catch up on news (the lineup for the second volume will be announced at the end of October), and happened to note a tweet in their Twitter stream of MOD references:

""It pivoted toward hell with jackrabbit speed." Reading Machine of Death. Also, political commentary."

It's a curious thing to spot one's words in quotes being bandied about by a stranger.

Curiously cool!

So I tweeted my pleasure over spotting the initial tweet, and the woman who'd made the initial Twitter reference responded, "Awesome! It's been one of my favorites in the collection. Great characters. Realistic #MachineofDeath society." This more than makes up for the guy working on his graduate degree who admitted on his blog that he couldn't get into my MOD story. But then, he also made it sound like anything over five pages was a challenge to his attention. I'm sure that made Dickens sad, too.

In any event, now I'm waiting to see where the chips fall with MOD 2. With almost three times as many subs as the first anthology - and one for the second submission that neatly paralleled the title of mine (however improbably - I mean, when I tell you how close they were, you'll find you wouldn;t have put money on that parallel) - I have appropriate expectations. Read as 'somewhat lower than one might believe.'

I'm in a good way with short fiction right now - just had "One Man's Famine" in Bards and Sages Quarterly, the Kindle All-Stars picked up "Exhuming Harry Truman" and TOTU is still forthcoming with "Lorem Ipsum Donald" in their next issue. Couple that traction with some near-misses and validation from total strangers, and a case can be made for tightening and circulating the half-dozen or so tales that I have ready (and writing another half-dozen) and keeping the pot stirring.

So I wonder if this is the time to be climbing Longform Mountain after all.

I'm about 20,000 words into the first draft of a novel - The House of the Hours - which has come back front and center in the last few weeks. I like the premise. It has its roots in a number of things, but primarily in a series of nightmares I had sporadically across the first thirty or so years of my life. If not boiling over, it's got a good simmer. But the short stories are baby birds, and they're loud and hungry. In fact, one of them dictated a rewrite of an ending earlier today after three months of silence. But I wonder sometimes: if I don't drop everything to turn that sort of mental breakthrough into hard copy now now now am I'm inviting the magic and momentum of a piece to go away?

Hard to say without trying to strike the balance. I find I do better on the long form if I don't have distractions. Short stories qualify as such, with differing energies, voices and tones. And with X hours out of the day for writing, that can be a narrow pin head upon which to dance.