When my friends get interested in poetry, I send them a link to my poems that have been online for quite a while. My poems are nothing to rave about.
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/bill-kirby-poems
Between the website, the blog and these poems, I have plenty of stuff online. But my friend said,"What? No fiction??" Right, no fiction. I tried it about 60 years ago. I wasn't good at deciding what should happen. I told him that I spent too much time deciding whether the bad guy was hiding in the basement or the attic. He advised me that basements are scarier and that I should drop bad 'guys' and switch to bad 'girls' who, he wrote, are scarier than bad guys.
I read that "it is not a story until something bad happens." I see that is basically true. If everything is rosy and there is no challenge or emergency, things get sleepy fast. I realize that what I think about matters. I don't feel like changing my gender and putting myself in a dank, dark basement so I can murder a nice old lady who lives in that house. I do read fiction and I like a good story but most of the books I read myself are non-fiction.
In fact, as I get older, I find fewer and fewer works of fiction of interest. I have been reading a long time and have found the guy and the girl do manage to get together and live happily under many imaginative circumstances, despite big obstacles. I have found that the space invaders turn out to be friendly or easily dispensed with using light sabers or salt.
