William Mangieri's Blogs: The Origins of Things I Could Get OUT OF MY MIND (and a Coupon to See For Yourself)

In each of my short story collections, I include an “afterword” called ORIGINS that speaks a little about where the stories came from, and since my writing for Swordsmaster (and this blog) has suddenly halted at the insistence of a new story (“Pipes”), now is as good a time as any to explain how these things happen.

Below is the ORIGINS section from my first collection, titled Things I Could Get OUT OF MY MIND. And below that is a coupon for 50% off from smashwords if you decide you’d like to read it.

Just saying…

Origins

People have on occasion asked me how I write - more specifically, how do my stories “happen”. I’m not a great planner - even in life I tend to fly by the seat of my pants, and my writing process reflects that.

I don’t do outlines - at least not for a first draft; it would be foolish, since I rarely know where the story is heading (I know where I want it to go, but I can’t be sure it will get there.) I just need a starting point; it can be a phrase (I’m fond of puns and double-entendres), a single word, a full sentence, a piece of tech that I’ve read about or envisioned. I start writing, and the story pretty much builds as I go. I rarely try to write a story to a particular word limit - the story is as long as it wants to be. Sometimes, I don’t know how it’s going to end until it does.

“Passed Life” started as a project exploring FATE for a college class on mythology. It was brief (1700 words), but I was in love with the idea, and when I decided to become a writer as my mid-life renaissance, my first attempt was a rewrite of this ... year-old story (hint - I still had the original printout from my brand new Apple II.) The image of the colonial merchant bending over a newspaper machine in the rain is always in my mind.

“B.I.T.” resulted from a writing exercise book in which I had to write down fifteen potential first lines that I would never start a story with. When I tried writing from “My dog doesn’t know who I am”, my first thought revolved around a dog with Alzheimer’s, so I threw that idea out and let the dog have a legitimate reason not to recognize the owner, and this grew into “B.I.T.” Self- identity confusion seems to crop up a lot in my thinking...

“Through Her Eyes” was triggered by a writing challenge (I never entered) about the victim of a haunting. I thought of letting a ghost communicate with their blind former lover by passing her visions into his mind. The story I originally envisioned was much longer than “Through Her Eyes” became, but I was more interested in the vision idea than in writing what could have turned into a melodrama. Although I still have a lot of images floating in my mind related to this...

“Business is Business” was an attempt to tell Rumplestiltskin from a perspective that made the fairy tale a fairer tale. I always felt the miller’s daughter in the original tale was a bit too innocent to be believable. Her father lied, the King was greedy, she makes a deal with the gold-spinner, gets what she wants and then regrets it and wants to reneg on the deal. Rumplestiltskin even gives her a way out; why is he considered a monster? And why did he want the child in the first place?

“A Dish Best Served” started simply with a desire to use an x-course meal as the vehicle for a story. I started writing with the critic vs. chef theme, and the rest of the story came out of the pen on its own (or with the help of my favorite Poe story, “A Cask of Amontillado”, which has been floating in the back of my mind for most of my life.) I really didn’t know if Bonaventure was going to survive the meal until HE opened his mouth and complained at the end. Always a critic...

“Quiet!” came from an idea I wanted to explore about encountering a hive-mind organism on a fictitious planet, different enough from us that we might not notice them (or how we were effecting them). The planet turned into our moon when I was thinking about how little we’ve really done with manned space exploration since the Apollo missions wound down with Apollo 17 in 1972. I find it hard to get excited about orbiters like the ISS, but I’d be thrilled for a chance to step on another planet (I’d like to make it to Mars in my lifetime, but I’ll settle for the moon if I have to.) I wrote the story, then researched the Apollo 17 transcripts for a place to connect my fiction to reality.

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Our featured work this week (surprise!) is “Things I Could Get OUT OF MY MIND” - here’s the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/178302?ref=NoTimeToThink

Use coupon code KY65W to save 50% off the list price at check out on smashwords. The coupon is good through July 20^th. Enjoy!

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William Mangieri’s writing can be found in many places, including: