This weekend I was responsible for a heinous genocide committed against…my own work.

I’ve had some solid success over the past two years, but I wanted to tighten up the effort I was spending on my fiction efforts. I won’t go into specifics, but in short, I was packaging the rotten apples in with the good ones and spending equal time on them all. Long-winded, slower-paced tales were being given the same time in the ole’ submissions basket as more promising pieces. It was getting to be too much to manage — akin to the “small get-together” that turns into fifty people at one’s house. Inevitably, one must don the hospitality boot and begin steel-toeing people out the door.

In my case, I took these hangers-on into the street and shoved them in front of traffic. The only reason I kept them around was out of some egotistical determination to see them elevated beyond a status other than “trunk story” — but most of them had been rejected more than ten times — where my published pieces had usually been snatched up within one of their first three or four “hops”.

It seems I was deluding myself, buried in my work that just hadn’t panned out, much like Tom Hanks sunk into his ceiling in “The Money Pit”. So into the trunk went these forlorn derelicts.

That brought me to the super-secret project, which had become an icon of stubborn pride, at 23,000 words in. The. Outline. I really despised doing so, but I forced myself to go back to the point where I felt in control of the story, felt the flow of the story’s veins — and cauterized the sucker right there. Everything in the back half went into the trash.

Horrific stuff, but like the biblical metaphor of pruning, just being out from under the weight of the convoluted travesty of the tale’s back-half outline I’d been writing set me free to grow the story into something stronger. And it’s been great so far.

This leaves my last bugbear: my typing. I’m cursed with huge fingers and have always found them difficult to type with. Somewhere along the way I — *gasp* — learned to type incorrectly. My hands basically float around the keyboard. While I’m sure it might have saved me some hypertension of the wrist, it’s also become embarrassing and has led to occasional peaks down at the keys. So I’m forcing myself to break the habit.

I think that about covers it for now. We’re coming up on mid-month, so it’s almost time for some more free flash fiction. If you have a specific request of subject matter, feel free to hit me up at jonathancg@gmail.com. Maybe I’ll use your favorite subject in my next little piece here on the site.

Stay tuned.