Brief Update: Original Flash Fiction with a Short Meditation on Hack Writing for Profit

I've been reluctant to post my work online. Why?

First off (this one is obvious), I'm not one of those writers who is very willing to share their writing for fear that it sucks.

Secondly, I'm not one of those writers who like to do a lot of work for nothing. I'm a mercenary. I'm a self-styled hack.

Don't get me wrong: I don't need a lot of payment for my work. Considering many of my favorite writers were pulp hacks, I romanticize getting paid crappily for spinning yarns.

And yet, I think payment validates artistic efforts. Unlike many literary artists who historically fear the market as a contaminate, I believe a modicum of profit motivation keeps writers "honest".

Blasphemy you say? Let me explain!

Off the top of my head I can think of two substantial justifications for why writing for money is good and productive:

1) The pleasure of the audience doesn't become wholly subordinate to the artistic vision of the writer. 


2) The writer must respect the fundamental "communicational" nature of language, its social utility; thus, "money-writers" are more reluctant to withdraw into solipsistic flights of subjective delirium. 

I don't mean for this to sound cynical nor do I mean to downplay the power Modernist aesthetics.

Forsaking the market and writing for themselves and themselves only was a move that Modernist writers made that produced some of the most stirring and enduring literary masterpieces.

My strange attempt to celebrate hack writing is not to denigrate pure literary art. That's not the point!

My point is to celebrate lowbrow writing that was written for cold, hard cash with specific markets, audiences, and, if you will, social needs in mind (being entertained is a social need, yes?)--writing that was puffed up to eek as much money out of a cents-per-word markets as possible!

I believe this kind of writing, in moments of intensity, effects a unique and profound type of beauty.

For many pulp writers making good art was concomitant with making a sale.


What does this have to do with the introduction of flash fiction to my blog?

Well--I feel less guilty leaving a 500 word short flash fiction on my digital front porch with nothing but the honor system protecting it than, say, a 10,000 word short story or a 30,000 word novella I've spent hours of my time and lots of my emotional energy on.

But I do feel compelled to share some of my fiction and would be honored if you glanced at it.

Some self-imposed rules: the fiction I release on this blog will be written for this blog and will not exceed 600 words in length. These fictions will be complete narratives--nothing unfinished will be posted. And they will be of diverse generic modes. I might try my hand at a science-fiction one month, a horror another, a fantasy another; I might do serials. I might do stand-alone narratives.

Here is the inaugrual one, a sword and sorcery about a rogue who assassinates a god-king with a sorcerer's demented trinkets: The Rogue and the Emerald Eyeballs.