@braindeadmaggot replied to your post “You drop a small piece of food on the floor, and decide to kick it...”
This was the most beautiful thing! Condolences and I hope your doing well
Being suuuuuuuper honest, if I’d realized how many people were going to end up seeing this post (like, thousands?) I probably would have kept my grandma and ma out of my tags. All the people being kind is super sweet but it’s also kind of... hm, disconcerting? (This is not to pick out brandeadmaggot, because I’ve gotten hundreds of replies like this, I just recently figured out how to do the thing.)
Thanks to everyone for their condolences. I was having a really rough night and writing helped.
@anemetz replied to your post “You drop a small piece of food on the floor, and decide to kick it...”
This is just fantastic. I got the same feeling I had reading Stephen King's Night Shift the first time.
man I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful and sweet compliments but I gotta tell you being compared to King is pretty fuckin sweet, especially his shorts, which I’ve always felt were much more visceral and weird and scary than his longer work (though occasionally the premise is hard to swallow, The Mangler was fun but difficult for me to swallow, possibly because I haven’t seen that particular piece of industrial machinery).
I haven’t read Night Shift in for-fucking-ever tbh, might be fun to rediscover that.
(Thank you again and again for this compliment, it has made my week.)
Short stories are kind of their own thing, you know? You can get down and gritty with them, without having to expound upon them. You can plop something down and people just have to deal with it. You can kill off the protag, because people haven’t spent hundreds of pages cheering them on. there’s no time for exposition, you just gotta deal with the premise and accept it or not.
I don’t know what the hell I’m blathering about at this point, it’s late and I had a long weekend at work, but I just want to thank everyone again who bothered to reply to this post, for all the people who’ve shared it and all the followers I’ve made out of the bargain. I’ve got a busy week coming up, but I’ll try get some more writing out in the next couple of days.