The holidays are over. I already miss 2019 as much as I missed the previous years. Where do the years go to, friend? One day you look in the mirror and you're old. I watch a lot of movies to help me assuage the passage of time. I think it might help me become a better storyteller. If nothing else, it provides me with lively party banter. And there is one more party left this year. New Year's Eve will arrive whether you want it to or not. It sort of makes me envious of people in insane asylums who are stuck in time. 

But let's talk about stories. They seem to happen to me all the time. I thought if I stayed indoors I'd be safe, but stories afflict me like a glass of absinthe in a Paris cafe. Why do I mention Paris? Well, I'm doing what most people rarely do: I'm adapting a screenplay into a novel. Why isn't this a good idea? Because screenplays typically are 100 to120 pages in length. Try selling a novel that's under 200 pages to a publisher. It's not easy. I'm on page 176, with three pages left in my screenplay. Should I hang out and ask random strangers about their misadventures in Paris? No, I know what I must do. I must extrapolate. This is a fun word that means go off on tangents that run on forever. Like two hundred pages more than they should. This technique is a useful one when a writer is bored, and is being paid by the word.

Recently I was invited to a party. It was slated to be a lesbian Buddhist party. It felt a lot like the tea party in Alice in Wonderland, with too many old Alices. I took two stories with me. I should have taken my guitar and sung a few songs; maybe Shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. It was sort of interesting. But bringing the stories was a mistake. There are few things straight writers can write that won't offend militant lesbians. So I offended the host, who touts herself as an old crone dike. Another straight woman there, (or maybe she's bisexual), read my story, How Does That Make You Feel? and said it was a stream of consciousness. She's a hack writer who left her husband for some guy from South Africa, and espouses to be part of a coven. I haven't talked to her about her new religion. Witches aren't my thing. This woman's poems have to do with feminist concepts that never seem to go away in Seattle, decorated with lots of profanity. Man Hating is a popular theme. The host objected to my How Does That Make You Feel? story because I'd had the audacity to go inside the head of a woman who was questioning whether she was a lesbian. My protagonist's head wasn't the only head I'd pried open in the story. I pried everyone's head open. The story is from the third person omniscient, in the Vonnegut tradition. I thought writers are free to write from any point of view, human or inhuman. I thought this was America where we're all free to fly our freak flags.

A RECENT SHORT STORY PUBLISHED BY RED FEZ.

The publisher of a recent story, Somnambulist in Love, was supposed to give me X hours to do edits. 

Nope. They published it with few modifications. Let me give you a summary: A sleepwalker in San Francisco is torn between two women. Until recently, he didn't know he was a sleepwalker (a somnambulist). It's laced with comedy, as most of my writings are.

https://www.redfez.net/fiction/sleeplessness-somnambulist-in-love-972

One of the rich ladies he's involved with has paid for the best neurologist-psychiatrist in S.F. The man must make a choice about being with Lydia or with Nancy. Or make no choice at all, and continue living a lie. It is comedic, but I'm sure it will offend someone. There is no escaping offending someone. But if they keep turning the pages and read until the end, how bad can the story be? I used to be a sleepwalker. I wouldn't know about it except my mother told me of my shenanigans. Undoubtedly she didn't witness all of them. This went on from age five to age eight. It might still be going on. Or maybe I just became an insomniac as I got older. Who knows? My son suggested I dust the floor by my bed with flour and check for footprints in the morning. That won't work because I am up and down all night. I'm doomed. All writers with active minds are doomed.