Copyright (C) 2004 David Alexander. May be be reproduced in whole or part if credited to author.
A new addition to this site is a
page with what I call my lost hardboiled stories. They’d actually been on my PC
all along, copied from drive to drive over the years with each new upgrade and modification.
I’d forgotten about these files in the course of pursuing new writing projects
and only stumbled onto them by accident. I thought they were good and decided
to rework and/or complete them.
One of the
reasons the stories were lost in the first place was because I hadn’t found
publishers for any of them. They came from a period during which I wrote
hardboiled fiction out of love for a genre that had fallen out of vogue. In
fact hardboiled fiction is still out of vogue, except for a resurgence on the
web and in small press print media, as I discovered when I investigated potential venues where the stories might find
publication.
In the
relatively short time since I started up DavidAlexanderBooks.com as a way to
reach a reading public that I had previously had no way to communicate with
directly my efforts have been rewarded by an increasing number of hits on the
site. Since a lot of these hits are for stories I’ve put up as web pages I had
the notion of simply also putting up these unpublished lost stories and leaving
it at that.
By definition written works are
published when they’re placed before a public audience, either for sale or free
of charge, and judging by the number of monthly hits the site logs I reasoned
that the stories would probably get as much or more exposure than they would in
many another venue. Yet there’s another aspect to publication to be considered,
and that’s imprimatur.
To me it’s also important to have
the recognition of your peers before your writing sees print, and so I sent
some of the stories to several web and print publications. The result was
mixed. Vendetta was accepted by one web publication but within a month or two
of its publication the venue had vanished and my story disappeared into the
cyber. The rest of the stories were held onto by other editors for months, (and
at this writing I’ve not yet heard back from any of them).
In the end I decided to just publish
my lost hardboiled stories on this site and damn the torpedoes – and imprimatur
right along with them. I realized I was playing today’s game by yesterday’s
rules. I wouldn’t let my stories stay lost a minute longer. I’d worry about
imprimatur some other time. Traditional publishing has changed radically from
the days when stories were submitted on typewritten pages and when writers
could count on certain amenities being observed. Today all bets are off. This
is the age of no mercy and rules that change from person to person and from
moment to moment. There used to be literary canons. Those canons have
apparently been mothballed.
As I see the stories up on my site
I’m glad I did what I did. Web publishing might not be a panacea, but it sure
beats hell out of the alternatives sometimes.