April 10, 2008
The Room
The Room is an episodic novel I am writing. The first five episodes have been published at Combat, the Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones, an online labor of necessity and love by a man committed to exploring the psychological impact of warfare. http://www.combat.ws/
The names of the stories, found by a search of the Combat site, are:
Outside the Door
Cliché
BRB
A Second Opinion
The Big O
They begin an exploration of the impact of torture on the people in a society that condones the practice. A single instance in “the room” in the war zone leads to other rooms until we arrive by a very circuitous route at “the room” where torture was authorized in the first place.
Fiction seems to be the right place to explore issues that once found their way into Islands in the Clickstream. I have published thirty stories in the past few years. Coming up next are: “The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared” in Karamu, a literary magazine published at Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~english/karamu/index.html), and “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark,” in an anthology to be published in November in London, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream. http://www.elasticpress.com/
Allen Ashley, the editor of Subtle Edens, wrote: “The story is gripping and fascinating. Your narrator's three off-world trips raise questions of science, philosophy, religion, consciousness, reality and much more.”
And did that ever delight me! Why? Because he got it! He knew what I was doing! What more can any writer want?
Well ... a writer might want to find a publisher interested in a collection of all this published short fiction called More Than a Dream: Stories of Flesh and the Spirit (many of which can be found at www.thiemeworks.com), or a writer might want to find a publisher interested in looking at The Room. If you happen to be one, married to one, live next door to one, or know one, let me know ... publishing in the digital age is a little tricky. We are all trying to figure out how best to get our writing, music, films, and other digital creations into the world. The old models are breaking down and the new ones are not yet clear. Maybe they’re slouching into outer space to be born. And more people seem to be writing these days than reading. The Indiana Review noted, “We receive more than 10,000 submissions a year, yet our subscriber list is less than 500.” Only subsidies keep them alive. The rest of us are heading to the Web.
Posted by Thieme at April 10, 2008 11:19 PM
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