As the conclusion to The Fairy Tale was published a few days ago, it's the time to move on. There are new projects, new works and new stories, of course.
As I noted months before, the story is a few years old. But I never really got round to publishing it. Actually, I never tried. Why? Because of its length. It's too short for a novel. If it somehow got published, it would be a thin book of one hundred pages. On the other hand, its extremely long for a short story. I don't remember the word length, but I suspect it's somewhere on the novelette/novella border.
Quite troublesome to get published, I'm told. However, it's hard to write a tale that has an intricate plot on few pages. When I started writing, I used to write tales about ten A4-format (the large paper) pages long on average, keen on the plot. There simply had to be a plot. A twist. A conspiracy. As I grow older and refine my writing and tastes, the number of pages grows. Fifty is nice. For publishers, it's a novella. For me, it's a nice short story with a plot.
Five pages is an excruciating limit. Yet most short story publishers nowadays like the shorter tales. An impasse. If I wasn't as lazy and drew a picture, there would be two grassy hills beside each other. A graph depicting the relation between number of sales and story length. My short stories fall right between those hills. So the question is... why haven't I written a book yet?
As for The Fairy Tale itself, as time paces forth, I realize the tale has its flaws. For instance, I wanted the "intermezzo" between Worg's banishing of the monsters and Worg's attack on the castle to be different. Perhaps shorter, perhaps longer but more grandiose. This way, it's somewhat in the middle and I admit it's somewhat boring. However, back when I was writing it, I felt I couldn't just jump to the conclusion and be done with it. After all, my imagination writes and I simply follow. I guess it was trying hard, but couldn't succeed in the end.
So that's all about it. Now fast-forward to the present.
First of all, a little bit of thought. Nowadays, I have so many ideas and so little time to write about them. Right now, I'm fascinated by history. Remember ancient Greeks? How revered they are for their erudite ways and intellectually advanced society?
What if I told you they weren't that different from us?
While our contemporary western civilization is viewed as a gluttonous and depraved, ancient Greece is believed to be the pinnacle of human society. Yet if you think about it, what difference is there between now and then?
As time paces, the bad is washed away and the monumental is made eternal in books. Nowadays, people complain about enormous levels of corruption in governments and their institutions. They complain that many wars are done because of oil and greed of politicians and corporations who want money. They complain about Obama and his stance on foreign affairs, spying and so on. Hundreds of years forward, Obama will be remembered as the milestone in the history of the USA. Probably revered too. The first non-white president. All the bad will fade away with time. Is it right? Or is it wrong?
And didn't that happen to everything in our history? From ancient Greece to today? Without the wrong and the evil, there would be no need to debate and hold scholarly discussions. Yet in truth, those scholarly debates weren't prevalent, like in today's world. The majority was like us, if our ways of life could be compared.
How many people actually followed the ideals of Kalos kagathos and how many just dreamt of them but lacked the will to follow through? And how many contemporary people adore the Hollywood standard of perfection... and how many actually reflect it? The idealized and perfect world is hardly a reality.
Socrates was said to like to wander in the streets and engage in debates with people, challenging their wit and intellect. Imagine this happened today. What would people think of him? They'd shook their heads. And that's what they probably did in ancient Greece.
Now that you read this, doesn't our history look grotesque? We view it as something illuminating and distant. But we haven't changed a bit, stripping our history books of the facts and leaving only few inspiring and thoughtful details in. Yet what about the nuances? The minutiae which constitute the facts?
Isn't this all a great prompt for a story? An under-explored one?
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