In the history of writing and publishing, the internet has given birth to a strange new phenomenon: the spontaneous publishing and abandoning of personal writings. All across the world, amateur writers sit at personal computers, writing memoirs, science fiction and literature that will eventually be hosted on private or commercial websites at no cost to the reader. These stories, however, are rarely ever posted in their full and complete forms. They are published in pieces that range from three pages to more than a dozen at a time. Chapter by chapter these stories appear on the internet, sometimes gaining huge fanbases that watch and wait for each new update to the story. The quality of these stories often varies from phenomenal and nearly publishable, to incomprehensible and littered with webspeak. All of these stories, however, have one thing in common. More than seventy-five percent of them will be abandoned before their completion.
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. For reasons that are often unknown, a creative and talented writer will abandon a promising story without ever completing it, leaving it to fade into the background of the internet. Authors themselves also often disappear, erasing all of the files on their blogs or websites and leaving fans wondering why they left and where and when they may resurface, possibly under a new name and with a new style.
As I prepared to leave my current archive and start a new with a fresh site, all of these issues came to mind. When I deleted these stories from the internet, what would happen to them? They
would never be completed, but did I really want the unfinished fragments to disappear forever? Not a single one of them was perfect the way it was, but nonetheless they were important. No writer should ever allow anything that they write, regardless of quality, to vanish. Every single one of them is an important landmark in my progression as a writer, and even if only for a day, they were the most important things in my life.
With this in mind, I decided to compile all of the unfinished novels and short stories that I had written between May of 2005 and November 2006. Although they would disappear from the internet, they would not vanish. There would always be proof that they existed, if only briefly.
The book you hold in your hands is that proof. The stories within it are in their original, unedited forms to preserve the characteristics that made them either memorable or easy to forget. They are complied in no specific order, unfinished novels followed by short stories. Although some of the short stories were intended to stand alone as they are, several were written with the intent of using them as stepping stones for longer works that never came to fruition.
Some of the stories contained in this book are my personal favorites that I was forced to abandon for a variety of reasons. Zanzibar, which ends abruptly with the introduction of a cat, was abandoned after my own cat became ill and passed away, which made the cat plotline too sensitive a topic to continue. Others, such as Evil Breeds and Braille Penthouse were put aside to make time for academic and collaborative work.
Even though they are unfinished and of questionable quality, the stories in this book are important reminders of a stage in my life and in my writing, when humor was the most important aspect, and the world was easy to exaggerate. From a personal standpoint, these works are important reminders of people and places, and each and every one has a story behind it. They may not be the best stories you will ever encounter, but just like those who read and heard them before, I’m confident you will find at least a few of them enjoyable.
