Go-Nowhere Stories

I'm a well established darling-killer ...

Kipling had his Just-So stories, I have my go-nowheres.  Every now and then I get an idea and start writing something, but there is no ending, and I never even have any intention of finishing.  Short stories tend to crop up in my brain, I write for a a short while – long enough to feel limbered up – and am satisfied, with no conclusion.

I have, over time, shared two of these with my writing group looking for some way to wind up, and found nothing – and have tried to donate the ideas, actually.  They like the beginnings, and want to see endings, and at *least* one of my group’s members, I think would be really well suited to do these errant plot bunnies justice in a way I clearly don’t care enough to do.  Of course, it’s like shoes – once someone else has walked in them, it’s either kinda-gross or just uncomfortable to take them for a walk secondhand.  So these stories die on the vine, and I don’t particularly care.

It’s good writing, I’ll say that.  One in particular has some description in it – short passages, but highly effective ones – I have that consistent experience with, when it comes to my own writing; that I don’t feel ownership over the words, that I know “I did that” but I don’t feel possesive nor even proud, so much as pleased in much the same way I am pleased by ANYBODY’s good writing.  Reading good words is enjoyable, and credit for them is beside the point.  I don’t own whatever talent I have – it is simply the result of experience, of education, of my unique sensibility.  So I feel free to like it, and that’s fun.

Oddly, most of this stillbirth writing is sci-fi of one type or another, fairly “hard” (not fantasy, just extrapolations from possible science and so on).  The oldest one came many iterations of real technology ago, involving a magical cassette tape which could counteract sound waves in real time, in any given space, from the loudest to the most infinitessimally slight, and create for a listener the sensation of *absolute* silence.  If I ever even wrote any part of this (I’m sure I did), it was twenty years ago, and the remnants are lost.  Still, the idea remains – indeed, it is perhaps more viable than ever, with advances in digital sound – and that is all it does.  The idea was going to be that actual, perfect silence would in fact drive someone insane, or kill them, or something dire of that sort.  Silence doesn’t really exist – even in a quiet room, we can hear our blood in our ears, we can hear our own breath.  There is always some vibration in the world, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Anyway, freshman-philosopher 101 stuff, but it *could* be done well by the right hand.  Probably has.  Maybe fifty times.  Clearly, I don’t read enough to know.

Several years ago, I started a police procedural, set in the near future, in which breath-contact could be measured.  If, as Sherlock Holmes gave us to expect, ANY contact produces some manner of transfer – fingerprints onto a surface, fibers onto a person or vehicle – what if the DNA or some such signature could be measured from the humidity of our breath?  What if we could measure how long a person had been in an apartment – and where – by their breath-contact?  What if this could be simulated by “bagging” – by secretly stealing the breath-contact signature of a person from space they routinely occupied, or by stealing it surreptitiously in their presence, and planting that in a space they never had been, or by increasing their signature in a space they had been to, but only seldom?

This is the one that my writing pals have asked me most enthusiastically to do something with, but … “that’s all I got,” as the man says.  That’s all there is.  A police detective named Raheema following up on a fishy chick with a shaved head, a delicate portable scaffolding for a crime scene which keeps anyone from so much as treading on the floor, some forensic techs measuring signature from the walls and surfaces in a flop apartment, and “bagging” breath signature.  That’s it.

Without a verb (or even two), the thing’s dead in the water, and I won’t force it and I don’t care enough to save My Darling from oblivion.  I write enough I expect *will* get seen; for me, go-nowheres are little more than intriguing exercises.  Which is frankly bizarre, as I seem to suffer from a completist neurosis in every other way in my life, especially reading.  It is all but impossible for me to not-finish even cruddy writing, no matter its venue, if I start.  I’ve gotten easier going about that with age, but it remains a “thing” in my brain, that an article, a story, a poem, a book, must be finished, if started.

Not with writing.

The final piece I actually might like the most, might most care about someday completing – and, oddly enough, it was born of an assignment The Sarcastic Broads gave ourselves, and never saw through.  (Yes, it is true – writers occasionally set goals we don’t bother to meet.  Shocking.)  I don’t know how we started, but we decided that each of us was going to write a ghost story, and we’d relaunch the SBC blog with new material.  New blood, even, perhaps – given our chosen topic.  Heh.

This story, for me, is actually more personal than infantile philosophizing or prospecting for The Future, it’s all meaningful and junk, and I think it would be good to look back at the piece while I’m querying again.  To work on the novel in progress is probably more than my brain can take while dealing with the shilling process, and it might be interesting to see if I can get the thing to tick.