Messengers from the stars
More than ten years ago I had a blog (when blogger.com was the real thing), back then I was an aspiring writer. I was most influenced by Lovecraft, Poe, Stoker, etc., all the romantic horror-goth writers. As an aspiring writer, I dreamt about having a book published.
Nowadays, I can see that I was quite bad on writing. I had good ideas. However, my writing skills (in Portuguese) were not good. The main reason for that was that was reading a lot just recently. Therefore, I didn’t have the vocabulary, knowledge, and experience that anyone must have before starting to write. However, the ideas were great, some of them were not so original as I was still in the learning process phase of “imitating”, then it was quite obvious which were the mains inspirations for me.
That said, I had two publications. The first one was in an online magazine of one editor, Saida de Emergencia. It was a short tale about death, it was inspired by a short story from Jorge Luis Borges. In a nutshell, it was about what happens when someone dies. The thesis was that when you die you freeze as you are but you are still conscious of everything — but everything is frozen for eternity. Then, you “live” in an infinite boring world with yourself and just your thoughts. The moral of the story was to feed your memory as much as you could to have something to do when you are dead.
The second publication was more serious, in a real book. However, when I was asked to participate in an anthology of sci-fi tales I was already “away” of my writing aspirations. Therefore, it was hard to decide if I would try it or not. Moreover, I didn’t have any sci-fi story to improve and submit. My short tales were already published online, and I had no patience to select one and re-write it. My only alternative was to start a new one. I don’t remember how much time I had, but the first theme of the anthology was about an alternative Portugal History if the Lisbon Regicide didn’t happen, and therefore, the monarchy didn’t end. However, don’t remember how the subject changed and then we had the permission to write anything — I think. Then I decided to create a cyber-punk in a dystopian Lisbon.
The book was published, was in stores, it was not a huge success, as I was expected. Moreover, I don’t feel proud as I would some years before. Back then, I was more focused on my thesis than in writing. Some months ago, I was invited again, but I politely refused. I don’t have time to spend with the deserved dedication to a new story. Maybe someday I will try again.
May 11| 365 Days of Writing Prompts | Success: Tell us about a time where everything you’d hoped would happen actually did.
