Category: About Writing

I just dawned on me that I’ve been working with a subset of my older writings. I’ve been flipping through a yellow folder of papers which seems to contain some/all? of my old poems, but I don’t have any of my old stories — and I have tons. I think I know where they are, I just need to dig them out.

Many of the missing stories would work well in this blog format since they are quite short. I was the master in my youth of stories of one or two pages, many with ‘surprise’ endings. (Oh! the characters aren’t people at all, they’re actually ants! I didn’t really write a story like that, but maybe someday… 😉 )  I think perhaps when one is younger and less sophisticated, stories with surprise endings are kind of like poo poo jokes to young children — they enjoy them much more than do adults.

I also have some longer unfinished stories including one about a guy who’s a janitor at a university but lives in a fantasy world where he views everyday activities as if he were a medieval knight: he throws chalkboard erasers thinking that they’re daggers, he rides a cleaning cart believing he’s in a jousting match, etc. I wouldn’t mind completing that story.

It’s interesting — as I’m flipping through my old writings, I occasionally need to google what I’m looking at to ensure it is original. It’s not like I’m that good or anything, it’s just that I have a tendency to occasionally write down other poems or song lyrics that click with me, so I sometimes have other people’s work mixed in with my own. Plus I’ve written so much stuff so long ago that I don’t always remember having written it. One such example is The Friggin Falcon (link), which I love as a poem, but seems to lack as a song in every version that I’ve heard. I wish wish wish that I had written it. To me, it sounds like something that I might have.

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ADDENDUM: I reread posted info on The Friggin Falcon, and discovered that: (1) it was written by the science fiction author Theodore Cogswell, and (2) it was written as a poem and not a song. This last fact makes me feel better when I’m critical of musical versions that I’ve heard.

I considered adding separate categories for funny poetry vs. serious poetry (note that you can filter what category of post you are viewing), but I’ve realized that I have some poems that I’m not sure which they are — funny or serious. What does that say about me?

When the post title includes ‘classic’ it means it’s something that I wrote years ago. I’ve got boatloads of old stuff and, as I type them up here (many are handwritten or typed on a typewriter), I notice that most of my old stuff is silly and/or gruesome. ‘Morbid’ is an accurate word. For example, I was just glancing at a poem about someone seeking revenge on some people who hurt him, so he kills them, then kills himself so he can torment them forever in Hell. Hmm.

I’ve got to ensure that I balance creating new stuff with typing up old stuff. Old is fun, but new allows me an active outlet for my creativity.

I have decided to start sprinkling in some of my existing writings [=’classic’] which are generally decades old — and some of which I don’t even remember writing. I make an occasional wording tweak if it helps. These bits are probably no better or worse than my new original writings, but over time it will be nice to have most/all of my shtuff in one place (here).

Everything in this blog that doesn’t say ‘classic’ is brand new, written the day of posting.