Why I Hate You and Other Stories or I May have a nearly finished book on my hands.

I think I'm a lot closer to having a completed book than I thought.

I've been going back to a writers group lately, in some small part because of a girl there I have a crush on and am hoping to impress, and in doing so rediscovered how some of my earlier writing fits into the larger theme that i've been working on for years.

The new book that I've been slowly writing stories for I've intended to be titled "Why I Hate You and Other Stories" I had originally intended it all to be written in the style of a letter that described great annoyance to another person or thing but couldn't be expressed verbally.

I realize that this forced attempt at style was really just a copy of the popular literary zine McSweeneys. There are many writers on there that write stories in a similar fashion to that.

Okay. let me get to my point. I guess I got a little carried away.

So last week at my writers group I read one of my older pieces from my very old website joshdudley.tripod.com which houses all of my older works still in existence, circa 1997 or so till about 2003.

The piece was intended to be a travelogue about my trip to New Orleans but ended up being about how much I hate airports.

When I read this piece to the group, I had them on the edge of their seats. Literally nearly every person in the room laughed at almost every single paragraph. They were enthralled and I think just about everyone came up to me afterwards expressing admiration for it and the way I read it in my deadpan voice which some of you may be familiar with.

I was so delighted with the reaction to this older story that I realized that it actually did fit in stylistically with the new works I was writing, and that the overall theme of my modern writing since high school has been mostly about my deep and abysmall hatred and annoyance with nearly everything.

Basically since 1997 or so I have tried to write several different books, but stopped on each one after getting like 30 or so pages in because I lost the inspiration for it, ie didn't have a girl, or an audience to read it to.

Now that I do. I realized that a lot of my old writing is still fresh and really good. I went back and read some it tonight and found myself just enjoying it.

With the 3 uncompleted books I had previously attempted to write, plus material from my old website thats like almost 100 pages of material plus the stories for the book that I have already been working on.

A lot of it needs some editing due to my earlier fascination with long run-on sentences which forced the reader to adapt to my point of view (or so I thought at the time). But I really think I can make it all work and wow. if it does work that puts me up to like almost 150 pages of material.

Seriously is this going to work? I just think it might and after I dust some of them off, I will probably periodically be putting them on here as well.