I Like Blogging (for the most part)

I like blogging but sometimes I have problems finding stuff to blog about. I pretty much rely on the news for most of my ideas and then my crazy rants make up the rest. That’s too bad because sometimes days like today creep along when there was nothing exciting on the news (other than the Mitt Romney spokesperson defending Mr. Romney’s business practices at Bain Capital by telling us we need to recognize the difference between “outsourcing”, which is bad, and “offshoring”, which, I guess, is okay. Regardless, I’m sick of this campaign already and it’s not even July yet so I’m trying to tune it all out and save myself for the time when the mudslinging really heats up.) and I have nothing to rant about which totals up to nothing to write about.

As a person who likes to write (I’m still working on that “Writer” identification) I read a lot of bloggers who write and all of them share their writings. Aside from the occasional 100-word micro flash fiction story challenge I take part in now and then, I never share anything I write here. Part of the reason for that is that nagging little prick who tells me I’m not good enough, but the main reason is because my goal is to have stories published somewhere and once I post them to the blog they’re considered published and I won’t be able to submit them anywhere. Maybe that’s being selfish, I don’t know, but it’s not like I’m Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe or some other short story writer whose name I can’t think of right now but whose name is necessary to complete a comfortable list of three, so I’m really not depriving the world of a lot.

I guess I’ll just keep on with what I’m doing and every once in a while I’ll struggle and there will be a blog posting like this that really has nothing much to say while I sit on a veritable treasure trove of fantastic stories and prose.

To be honest, I’m also a little paranoid that someone will come along and steal something of mine and pass it off as their own work. I don’t think any of the other bloggers who come here would do that, but I do think there are people out there trolling blogs and websites and stealing content. We know it happens with pictures (here’s an interesting story about one such incident) so why not with stories?

About a year and a half ago I entered a short story in a contest and I didn’t win, but I was a finalist. The publisher took the finalists and published them all in a print anthology which was really cool for me. My story’s title was “Showdown at Diablo Flats” and last week I googled the title of the story to see what it would show and there is some person named “RM Bacchus” selling a story called “Showdown at Diablo Flats” on Amazon.com for 99¢. Is it my story? I don’t know, but it does seem odd that someone else would write a short story with the same title. I just think that anyone who was going to steal a story would at least have the sense to change the title first. I tried searching “RM Bacchus” and found nothing about the person, although I did find six separate pages of short stories for sale on Amazon.

That’s it, I’m done assaulting your eyes for the day. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.