Another Kind of Return

I recently wrote about our return to Korea, and about the return of some manuscripts I’d thought lost. But I’ve had another return recently, and I thought it’s worth commemorating in a post. That is: I’ve returned to fiction writing. 

I haven’t written a new story in several years—since well before the pandemic—and most of that had to do with having a kid around, and a (more than) full time job, and translation work on the side. I did some RPG writing, including publishing a couple of books over the past few years. But I’ve wanted to get back to writing fiction, and had plans for what I would do when I did finally return to it. Of course, those plans were laid aside for something else. 

I was invited to contribute a short piece of creative writing to a journal here in Korea. Whether they’ll want what I’ve written—a ghost story set in Gwangju—is an open question, but I’m happy to have written this ghost story. Writing fiction for the first time in a while wasn’t like pulling teeth, either.

At the same time, it’s also worth mentioning that I’ve finally finished revisions on a manuscript of poems. D&D poems, to be specific, and to be even more specific, old-school D&D poems. I have no idea where I should try to get them published, but I’m going to start with sending some of them out to magazines and see if anyone wants them in smaller doses, while I look around for a likely poetry publisher that might consider the full manuscript. 

In any case, that’s my update for the moment. And now, I need to get my head back down into our ongoing projects—one translation that we’re drafting, and another that needs publisher’s edits gone through—both of which we’re working to get through before the middle of next week.