I Did a Fiction
Please enjoy my new short story, "Nectar of the Gods"
I’m very happy to announce that a short story I wrote was just published in “dissident” art magazine, The Asylum.
The genre: a dystopian sci-fi chick lit romance.
But before you read the short story, here’s a short story about it:
This is not the first fiction I’ve written. Like every writer, I have some unpublished novels and a few scripts lying around. Maybe one day I will publish the novels (YA mysteries, in case you were wondering), but not this day.
In college I developed something of a fixation for the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His poems were evocative, melancholy, and haunting. One in particular aches with the poignancy of nostalgia for the past.
As with so many things in my life, I first discovered Yeats and this poem via an 80s movie—Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 film, Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking time travel movie where a woman (Kathleen Turner) faints at her 25 year high-school reunion and wakes up back in the 1950s as an 18 year-old. She falls back in love with the handsome beatnik kid she always had a crush on and in one scene, he recites Yeat’s romantic ode to lost love and spent youth, “When You Are Old” as he attempts to seduce her (it works.)
Years later I had a vision for a story about these same themes: what would it be like to be old and looking back at something precious you threw away? And how do you cope with that? And what would life be like in the future, years from now, for very old women who ended up alone and filled with regret?
And so, I wrote a dystopian romance set half in the present, half in the distant future.
If I could, I would write fiction full-time—it is the most fun thing there is to do!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it: here it is again:
Nectar of the Gods, a short story
Let me know what you think! Warning: it’s 18+ for a few cuss words and mild allusions to romantic encounters…
—Peachy
I too am a fan of WB Yeats. Your story is lovely. Made me cry. Elderly people who we view as one-dimensional, cartoonish figures, can still feel the same as they did when they were in their prime. Thank you for reminding me of that fact.
Peachy, as one who spent much of his life until relatively recently writing fiction and screenplays, and luckily making something of a living at it, I can tell you it isn’t always the fun you envision. The grass, as they say, is always greener. So don’t entirely give up your job writing witty political commentary. You do it too well and the times need it, perhaps more than yet another novel about une femme solitaire.