Today marked the publication of my story “Scheduling Issues” over at Horrific Scribes!
This is a story I first wrote a version of maybe 20 years ago, when I had just ascended to the management group at Red Storm and was really uncomfortable about certain aspects of having done so. The draft I wrote then was overlong and overwritten and lacked a certain maturity, in that the core of the story is the conversation between the protagonist and his wife, and at that point I was freshly married and honestly didn’t understand how marriages worked years into the arrangement.
So I messed with it for a while, and then I moved on to other stuff because I couldn’t get that one where I wanted to go. It faded into an old working folder that got passed along from computer to computer over the years and pretty much lost in the process, until a couple of months ago, when in a burst of procrastination I decided to tidy up my hard drive and accidentally found that lode of long-abandoned fiction.
Like a fool, I opened it and started reading the 20-odd stories in various stages of completion in there. Some were absolutely terrible. Some were very much “product of the times” pieces that would no longer speak to anyone. And a few still clearly had good bones, and if I could polish the language and cut about 30% (mostly adverbs), I might have something.
This was one of those stories, largely because of that quiet conversation between loving husband and wife in the middle. There’s no fight. There’s no fireworks. Just a moment of raw, painful honesty that opens the door to both liberation and destruction.
So give it a read. And think twice before your next meeting.