I’ve taken the plunge. At 75, it seems unlikely I’ll suddenly be discovered as a New Thing by the dwindling number of established publishers, book or periodical, who handle short fiction. Accordingly, although many publishers avoid works that are “already published,” I’ve decided to post all my (readable) stories online, for anyone to read, for free.
I’m probably shooting myself in the foot by doing this, and it’s no way to make money, but who’s making money writing short stories, anyway? A couple of dozen full-time authors, almost all of whom write novels, too. Agents and publishers just don’t expect any profit from selling one author’s story collections — especially if there aren’t any novels to fill out the product line. I don’t write stories as a product line, and I’ve only written one short novel, so I’ll have to live with that.
Hey, I did include a PayPal donation button on the new site, so it’s always possible some generous and appreciative reader might send money for no tangible reason. And of course some fiction editor from a great periodical or anthology might stumble onto the site and become a sudden fan. … Yeah, right.
So there you have it. If you like free short stories, in a wide variety of subject, style, and length, check out Cave-Paintings.com. There are about 60 stories now, and they’re all narrated in case you don’t feel like reading. Or if you want to listen in your car, you can right-click the MP3 player under each story for a download option. Eventually there will be some essays, too, and visual art, sound compositions, videos, etc.
Finally, the obvious boomer.
I’ve always been annoyed when people younger than I identify “the sixties” with the stupid memes of Nehru jackets and bell-bottom jeans, etc. What I remember was that Time, Inc., coined the terms “hippies” and “flower children” to fabricate News out of them, as if they were real movements on a demographically significant scale. These times were meaningful to us boomers — because we lived them, not because of the labels and marketing BS. Remember movies like “The Trip” and “Beach Blanket Bingo”? This crap was exploitation of us, not something we created, and most of us found it repulsive. Sure, “Easy Rider” was reflective of the age, but Peter Fonda wasn’t a boomer (1940).
So, finally, someone has pointed out the obvious: young people don’t create the society they’re living in — they consume and respond to the world they grow up in. So the sixties, revolutions and tacky “modernism” and all, was mainly the product of the 20’s and 30’s (and some 40’s). In other words the “establishment” that a few of us were trying to get away from.
New Yorker Article
The subtler values of the sixties, represented by a very tiny percentage of us, are of course quite real, and are probably not very different than the visionary values of any generation. Laudable and insightful and cosmic, perhaps, but it doesn’t look like many of these dreams became real in the next generations. Some progress seems to have been made, but the orange idiot is himself a baby boomer (1946) bent on undoing as much as possible, right back to the 50’s, before our generation fades into oblivion and facile stereotypes.