I've been writing fishing stories and poetry for 30 years, but it's always been on the back burner, behind jobs that pay, family, novels, actual fishing, and so on.  About once a year I take my bundle on the market, submitting here and selling there.  But ambitious stuff about fishing and the outdoors is not exactly a hot property.   The poetry that gets bought tends to rhyme.  The fiction that sells and reads is of the Santiago genre.  You know it:  man vs. beast, in which the man is old and savvy or young and callow; the beast is hoary, cagy, scar-lipped, monstrous-racked, and endowed with curiously human faculties and attributes.  Hemingway and Faulkner mastered the ambiguous extremes, and everybody since then has covered the rest.  Maybe it's because I don't catch enough big fish, or because I fall too obviously between callow and savvy, but that style of story has never worked for me.  I get going on the epic struggle or the strange simpatico and suddenly veer off into irony or existentialism.  I can't help it, which is why I put like 40 hours a week into my day job.

Recently it got worse:  I challenged myself to write a flyfishing story in which nobody catches a fish. I aimed for humorous realism, maybe with a clever analysis of the skunking every angler has to take now and then.  Gierach, here I come.  I liked the product (though Gray's did not), so I went it one better:  I wrote a fishing story in which nobody fished.  The market liked that one even less, but I liked it so well I haven't been able to write anything else since.  At this rate, my next story will feature a dry river and a party of anglers slaughtered like sheep.

With my market choices dimming, the logical choice was to create my own market.  Since I pushed the button on StoryArc, my acceptance rate has risen sharply.  Self-publication is a long, hallowed, and only slightly embarrassing  tradition.  You might find it pathetic, but I prefer to imagine myself in the company of Whitman and Thoreau.

If you find yourself in the same boat--stuck with unsalable stuff and too lazy to market hard or too stubborn to write what the market wants--send it to me.  (storyarccontact at the Google dot com.)  It's only slightly unfair that I'm both the main contributor and the editor in chief, but everybody gets paid the same.  The site will remain simple, streamlined, and specific:  words, words, words (and the occasional photograph).  I'll publish what reads, even the Santiago stories, but I'm looking for harder stuff:  literary, challenging, subtle, political, muscular--you know, all the adjectives that came with the English degree.  And no spelling or punctuation mistakes.

I'm assuming my work and money are going down the memory hole, but if some profit unexpectedly turns up, I'll share until I become greedy and my values are corrupted, then, well, you know.  But if Random House suddenly wants your work, they can have it; what I publish remains yours.  If you have other terms, I'm happy to hear them.

Salud

Dave Motes