Copyright (C) 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up as web pages I had the notion of simply also putting up these unpublished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.