Trunk Writings
I excavated the trunk for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, I have no willpower when it comes to saying to a story, "You know, story, you just don't have a chance to make it in the real world." But since there are very few markets who don't view web-publishing as publishing, putting these stories up on the web is one good way to make sure that I let them go. Which brings me to my second reason--I can't just let them go! Even though none of these stories are my best work (I can admit that--I mean, I put them in the trunk for a reason), I think each one has something worthwhile about it, and the chance that any story might entertain even one person for just a few moments makes me happy. After all, that was the purpose in trying to sell these stories in the first place. It certainly wasn't to make money!
My third reason is because I think people can never have too much information. There are a couple of truly ungood stories in this batch, including attempted rewrites. If you learn best by analyzing stories that don't work, here you go--a slew of things that didn't make it out of the slush pile... actually, some of them did make it out of the slush pile, and then no further. Anyway. Enjoy.
This work by Merrie Haskell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Written when I was 18, I resurrected this story when I went on my flash craze. It didn't catch on. I got a couple of impassioned letters from editors who insisted on encouraging me to write more clearly, since I obviously had ability. Sort of embarrassing to get letters like that. Oh, well. The key here is that it was based on a dream that I had (at the age of 18)--the same dream the main character has. I think this story conveys mood quite well, but not much else.
This is trunked in part because I can't come up with any more likely markets -- it's not spec fic, for one thing, and it's too romantic to be literary, and the one romance market that might have taken it didn't, even though they said nice things about it. I wrote this during my late teens, after reading Anne McCaffrey's WWII romance, The Mark of Merlin for the third time. I still don't think that explains it.
I wrote this around the age of 18. I thought it was hot stuff. When I sent it to a market for the first and only time in my early twenties, I got back, "Too much like other alternate histories" scribbled in the margin. I was somewhat incensed at the time, but age and wisdom have revealed to me what he means. Frankly, the alternate history was a just a convenient way to play out the tropes I wanted to explore, but you can't just do that in speculative fiction--you have to make the fantasy part or the science fictiony part just as important and compelling as the rest of it.
Touch (later draft) / Touch (earlier draft)
Oh, this story so wanted to be something, and it so failed to be something. And I think it got worse every time I tried to do anything with it. I thought I could make it into flash fiction. Flash fiction is so much harder than it appears, for one thing--you can't just take a piece of a story and smile and call it flash, you have to make a flash piece complete and replete in itself. I think the original story needed things cut and other things expanded, and what I ultimately did was simply cut, expanding nothing. Thinking about it makes me quite sad--all I think I did right here was get some of the atmosphere of visiting a French chateau down. Which is nice, but it's hard to sell, really, when there are other stories competing that have story and plot and character. Anyway, I keep this one up here as a cautionary tale about writing flash fiction, plus not knowing where you're going when you're rewriting something. My only clear goal on the rewrite was to decrease wordcount. That's not a good enough goal.
