SOLD!

Contract is signed and story is with the editors and art group. I can safely say that I sold my first professional story to Terraform.

It’s still pretty unreal. Not so much the sale itself but the rapid response and the steady upswing my writing is on. It all feel unreal like a virus in my matrix.

The story is one I wrote to prove a point about the way men read (black)women’s writing. After many arguments where I stood my ground on experiences or thoughts or situations that were frequently said to be confusing, I decided to do a little trickery.

George Orwell‘s essay ‘A Hanging‘ was one of those bits of required reading that I used to encounter a lot in school. It’s a great piece, so it’s understandable. I always thought that the tight tension the story has was something that I wanted to achieve in my own writing.

Somewhere out there, there’s some writing advice that says a writer should copy word for word a story they admire to understand how it works on a mechanical level. By doing that, you could feel the weight of the sentences and the narrative flow would eventually take hold-much like a demon.

Mix that all together and you’ve got ‘A Crisis’. A short story about an African man in the army who is stationed at a robotic disenfranchising camp. It’s gone through several revisions since I wrote it. So have I, frankly. I’ve grown as a writer, thanks to this story, that writing advice, and the imagination to take it further by changing everything about it but its thematic progression.

TBH, I’m proud of the little dude(my story). You go, Glen Coco!-also me talking to my story.