The Fiction Garage (1): Webster

Digging up the old to make the new: can it be done?

[The opening paragraphs of an uncompleted Webster story, “The Glade.” I have no idea when I wrote this, or indeed where the story was going after the page-and-a-half which survives. Still, this should give you a vague idea what the stories are like… what Webster himself was/is like, for that matter. Visually impaired visitors can hear this passage spoken — only by me, alas! — using the media player gizmo below, or via their preferred audio player by following this link.]

One reason I looked forward to retirement, four years ago: My writing! My writing! Specifically: My fiction! My fiction! And finally, micro-specifically: The WEBSTER STORIES!

This long-suppressed enthusiasm all dates back at least to the late 1980s, early ’90s. At that time, I stepped aside from corporate/professional life and, eventually, from my home state. My objective: to see if I could write stories, book-length or shorter, which people might want (even better, might pay) to read. I had a whole 18 months to decide if I’d return to my old job, and until then I was free to set my own routine in my apartment outside Richmond, Virginia. The routine consisted, roughly, of this:

• Tuesday through Saturday, I got up, made a cup of tea, and went straight to my writing table. This was a folding card table against the exterior wall in my apartment’s bedroom; I wrote everything in longhand first, and more or less stayed planted there for the next five hours or so, stopping only for more tea, a snack, and bathroom breaks as needed. In the afternoons, I’d visit one library or another, stop by the post office, shop for groceries, catch up on research, write letters.

• Sunday was a day to do Absolutely Nothing of Consequence. (I even left my hearing aids on my nightstand, which pretty much assured the outside world ceased to exist for at least the first half of the day.)

• Monday, I dealt with “business”: paying bills, submitting stories to magazines, keeping my computer up-to-date — the dull mechanical stuff of existence.

So what was I actually, like, writing?

The very first complete “thing” I produced during this time was a short story, “The Head.” It turned out to be just the first in a series of stories I wrote over the next 15-20 years which featured the same protagonist, a guy named Webster.¹

One Webster story — the second one I wrote, called “The Shot” — actually got published in a small literary journal in 1992. (It was this one, although, alas, you can’t read “The Shot” or much else from the issue there.)² I submitted several of the others to that magazine and others over the years; but I have always been a lazy marketer of my own work. If a piece got rejected, I filed the rejection away and then might or might not ever submit it anywhere, ever again: very, very lazy.

It’s hard to say what the problem was— Well, no, scratch that. I know what the problem was. I’d always suffered from Big Fish/Small Pond Syndrome: I was the best writer (I was constantly assured) known to anyone who knew me personally. If I’d lived in New York City, say, or Chicago, or Boston; if I’d been affiliated with a strong (hell, any) university creative-writing program; if I’d had mentors in influential positions… if any of those things were true, and I’d received such praise, then my confidence could at least be explained, if not necessarily justified. Without any of those things, all I had to drive me forward was, well, self-satisfaction: a fatal drug for any creative soul, especially if not diluted by real-world exposure…

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So anyhow, back to post-retirement.

At this point in 2024 I retain almost no ambition to be professionally recognized for my writing. All that drives me forward with my writing now is that I want to offer what I’ve got, in as finished a form as I can offer it, unpromoted, to anyone who might want to read it: family, certainly, who might’ve sorta-kinda gleaned that I’d written something in the last 30+ years.

So that’s why I’m now revisiting the Webster stories: for self-“publication” in an anthology to be called Webster, Unabridged.

That’s what I hope to chronicle, somehow, in this “Fiction Garage” series.

1. You can read some background about the Webster stories in an early post at Ye Olde Blog.

2. The most recently written and almost certainly last Webster story, “The Job,” appeared in a 2018 anthology of Christmas-themed horror stories, Dark Tidings: Tales to Read by the Fire. Dark Tidings was created as a joint project with a handful of other writers, the proceeds of which go to supporting a non-profit called Reach Out and Read.