A Writing Update

Hope you all had a great holidays and New Year. I’ve been in a little funk since losing my cat last month and haven’t had much inspiration for a new story. When I can’t come up with a new idea I will peruse my older works that haven’t been published, and the other day I came across a short story I wrote back in 2001.

If you are too young to remember or not born yet, this was a time where the internet was still fairly new. Most of us connected to the internet through a dial-up modem, and you browsed the net on a large computer. Android and iPhones didn’t exist. Neither did social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky. No YouTube either. The infrastructure just wasn’t there yet to support it. I remember it took an entire day to download a single song, and a week for an album! Crazy when you think about it. Now it takes less than a minute to get Metallica’s new album on your phone.

Writing forums did exist where we could upload our stories and critique or praise each other’s work. Similar to this Substack, but the difference is that now you can read stories anywhere on your phone and there are more readers connecting with authors today.

Submission services to traditional publishers were different too. I had typed out this story on a Compaq computer, running one of the three flavors of Windows popular at that time; XP, ME, or 2000.

Maribel was written on a computer like this.

Keoki, my writing buddy at the time.

It was then printed on paper, taken to Office Max to make copies, then sealed in manila envelopes. Stories had to be sent through snail mail to agents in hopes that they would accept it and sell it to a publisher. The entire process could take months to get a reply of acceptance or rejection. Now, we can submit our stories directly through a submission service directly to the publisher and get a quicker response. Hopefully. Indie publishing is even faster. Write a story and share or sell it within minutes.

This is a screenshot of the first page of Maribel’s Lighthouse when I wrote it twenty-five years ago. As you can see at the top left is my pen name at the time, with my home and email address redacted. To the right is the approximate word count. It’s a little longer than a typical short story, but I believe there’s more story to tell.

Which is why I am reworking this story. It has been brewing in the back of my mind throughout the years, and I am reminded of how happy I was when I first wrote it. Though my writing was amateurish then, I still like this story.

Below is the first page in case it’s difficult to read the graphic.

My death had never occurred to me when we first moved to the island.

Living on the water had always been a dream of mine since the day I understood the difference between it and land. The island lighthouse caught my eye when we visited from Tennessee, and it wasn’t long before my wife and I bought it. Though her excitement was not like a dog being fed table scraps, she agreed to the change of scenery if we would revisit our hometown of Nashville annually.

Located off the coast of Shadow Bay just north of Fort Lauderdale and east of Andora, the island connected to the shore by a gated, private road. Constructed by steel and sandstone, the one hundred-and-twenty-foot tower tapered as it rose to the gallery at the top. At the center of the gallery was a beacon surrounded by a ten-foot walkway.

I cringe at my writing then. (Still do sometimes now, just not as much.) First off, I give away a major spoiler at the beginning: the protagonist is dead. Now there are some stories that start off with a dead protagonist and it works well, but it doesn’t add anything to this story. Part of the second paragraph is just laughable in my opinion. I hope my writing now is more mature, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Anyway, I am excited to be reworking this story and plan on having it completed in a few months. In the meantime I will give updates and probably more short stories. The hard part is deciding whether Trent dies at the end.