Years and years ago during semestral or summer breaks one of my personal projects would be to write as many short stories as I could, which I would later badger Mrs. Therese to read. She was a good friend like that, having to endure endless pages of neurotic ramblings. She would return my stories a few days later with lots of comments, which are funnier than the stories themselves. Since residency happened I’ve stopped reading a lot of fiction, which led to me not being able to write fiction as well. My theory is my short story writing style is greatly affected by the last author I’ve read. The last time I’ve written fiction was in July 2010. It was a short story about a young doctor’s first experience to sign the death certificate. Just typing that already makes me retch. I’ve asked Smoketh to read it before I submitted it to a national publication, and she labelled it as “crap” and a “sell-out”. It got published in a national publication. I showed it to Smoketh after I got a copy in 7-11, now in magazine format. Smoketh still labelled the story as “crap” and a “sell-out”. I never told anyone in the callroom about it, until someone got hold of it for some reason. Eds read it out loud. Everyone fucking retched at every sentence AHAHAHAHA. Rightfully so.

Fiction is just more difficult to write than, say, a blog entry where everything goes. The structure is more complex, you can’t go on forever unless you want everyone to go back to facebooking, and in terms of submitting one for actual publication I find it tricky to sort of balance what the current standards of short fiction are with my own personal style. In the aforementioned story there appeared to have been no balance, hence it being a total fucking sell-out. It is also infuriating that, having been in the hospital for the past ten years or so the first characters that come to mind are healthcare-related characters. The setting has becoming very limiting, which is obviously just an excuse for stunted imagination.

Certain events have led me to want to try my hand at fiction again. Maybe I’ll pepper this blog with those practice stories and bore everyone to tears.

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