Followers of this blog may have noticed that I haven’t bothered publishing any more from the Stone Force novel. That’s because I largely lost interest. I don’t particularly care if anything I write on here gets comments or “likes” (although I appreciate them when I do get them) but I get the feeling that nobody has read them. If anybody had read what I put up so far then I take the silence as an indication that they were unimpressed. That wouldn’t surprise me, as I’m publishing selections from a first draft of a project that I abandoned years ago.
It finally dawned on me that I’ll probably never do much of anything with the Stone Force universe. I had whole worlds of it in my head for decades. I still amuse myself from time to time with daydreams of what’s happening with Irrono and his gang of crime-fighters. But the truth is that these stories would work best in comic books, which is one industry I have no connection to. I could potentially make a web comic, if I could somehow summon the patience to do so. I can draw to some degree but I never had a great passion to practice. Even if I don’t let the quality of the work get to me I still don’t think I would care enough to see the project through.
So, as far as getting this fantasy universe out into the public is concerned, Stone Force is dead. I doubt it would have become successful, anyway. It wasn’t exactly original other than the fact that I threw so many influences together. It’s weird to me to think that I only came up with all of this for my own benefit.
Which raises the larger question in my mind: how do I tell the difference between what I let out into the world and what I keep to myself? I feel like as a writer I should let everything out, at least as far as the drafting stage, and then decide if I’m going to do anything with it publicly. (Obviously this philosophy doesn’t apply so much to my regular blog posts.) But how far does that go before one can consider such a practice as a waste of time?
I think what it comes down to is that I never outgrew my sense of play in regards to my imagination. Instead of running around in the backyard of my childhood home pretending to be a new G.I. Joe character I’m pacing around my apartment pretending that an imaginary band that I’m in is playing a local bar. I like to have fun, entertaining fantasies. Sometimes they still include the Stone Force world that I created when I was a kid. It’s hard when I have so much of this world in my head that I have to accept that it isn’t going anywhere.
I’ll keep what I published on here for now. I’m sure that with this blog post I piqued somebody’s interest. But unless there’s a demand for it I won’t publish any more and eventually I’ll take down what’s there. As I’m trying to write something more “serious” I decided that it might not be in my best interest to showcase a first draft from something that’s far from my best work. It’s time to abandon it for real. Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind in the future. But for now I need to focus my creative energies elsewhere.
Ragged Good Looks 