Cold Hard Type III: Backspaces

If this blog were a place it would need a good dusting.

These are some strange and terrible times we're living in right now. Between the pandemic, institutional racism, radicalized home-grown terrorism, and eventually an attempted coup of the United States government. It's had me down. Way down. So very down. As a dystopian author, it's hard to watch the genre spill so effortlessly into our everyday lives.

Admittedly I withdrew most of my online presence, and social media. It's not a particularly nice place out there. Pulling back and slowing down seemed like the way to deal with this.

So I took a break. I planted seeds. I baked. I watched way too much news. I built things. I raised animals. I sewed. I knitted. I waited for the storm to pass.

No, the storm hasn't passed. Thunder rolls in the darkened sky. But I think it's time to clear away the cobwebs because it could honestly be years before the storm has passed. At least with a new administration, I see hope as a dim sliver on the horizon. I don't think the next few years will be easy. But we will all continue to do what must be done.

What am I doing? I'm choosing to poke my social media back to life and admit that I haven't lived in complete stillness. 

I have some writing projects to come. Some moving much more slowly than I want. But I realized I've never even mentioned that I had another short story published. 

While I was watching the storm roll in, a call for submissions was put out for a new book called "Backspaces: Typewritten Tales of Time Travel." from Loose Dog press. I was immediately interested.

They put out two books in a series called "Cold Hard Type" in 2019 that were a wonderful combination of short stories and poems about post-digital worlds and typewriters. These were: "Paradigm Shifts: Typewritten Tales of Digital Collapse" and "Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds" Clearly dystopian worlds and typewriters are absolutely my thing. 
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As if that wasn't enough, they made Cold Hard Type I & II even better, the stories and poems are typed up by the authors on their own typewriters and then the typewritten images are scanned and put into the book! Before I read any of it I flipped through it over and over just looking at the various typefaces. How fun. I didn't submit anything to the first two books because I hadn't found them before submissions were closed.

I was giddy about the possibly of taking part in such a fun project. Cold Hard Type III was supposed to be about time travel and typewriters. Surely I could come up with something.

Sorry, we. I meant WE could come up with something. So we sat down to my beautiful 1965 Smith-Corona Galaxie II and went to work. After a couple of false starts a ghost story began to coalesce, and we managed to write up a first draft. Then a second, and a third. We edited until we were sick of looking at it.​

Somewhere in the early days of the pandemic we finished and submitted the story, "Ghosting."

To my great delight the work was accepted. After a solid rewrite and some more editing we were ready to type up the finished story on our Brother Charger 11

The finished story can be found in Cold Hard Type III: Backspaces. It's called "Ghosting" by Denise Terriah. Check it out if you get a chance.