Welcome

It's funny how you come to an idea, a thing you have committed to creatively, something you became passionate about, and naturally you begin to doubt it, but only after it's too late to fold up the tent and cancel the show.

You wake up one day, look over your work and what you see is somebody else's failure. You can't even conceive the mental process of the idiot who wrote this. You are, in fact, sympathetically embarrassed for the poor guy.

Then you remember it's you.

I learned by rote that the best way to circumnavigate being embarrassed for yourself, to avoid feeling like an adolescent, terrified and humiliated when your big brother snatches your journal out of your hand and reads it aloud, from the diaphragm, to the whole lunch period. You just do it. Send the submission, put the blog up before you’re even close to being ready, dive into the shit-your-pants pool and swim.

Okay, I was an only child. But that doesn't change the analogy; it fits. This is self-publishing; blogging, whatever applies. I am a relatively nubile writer, I've written eleven short stirs, and am yet to finish a novel. However, I've been saying I was a writer for much, much longer. And I don't have early experience with inviting the opinions of others as part of the creative process. In other words, I didn't have any friends for a long time, and I didn't ever go out. I read, and the more I read the more certain I became that I would want to be read. As you can tell, though, I embarrass easy. You have no idea how cringing it will be to read this posted on the blog.

I'm caught up in that shit; and I think other people are too, maybe. Also I have a pathological tendency to never shut up about a book or a story I read that I was very impressed by; describing it, extolling it and forcing it on people. Always I think I lean towards more speculative literature as a, idea than any real ambition to write the stuff. It's one of those things you want to be a part of, or just be near it.

So I conceived Unternet Fiction to facilitate; to provide the silverware. And maybe to offer up myself a bit. I wanted criteria candid enough for the kind of stories you go and tell people to read, if that's even a quantifiable characteristic. I heard someone somewhere say--and I'm paraphrasing-- that if you're not prepared to risk looking stupid, then you'll never make progress. I'm not one for aphorisms, but UF could be my war against appearing stupid. It may be your war too.

I mean that in a good way.

Enjoy.

--Alex Mastroianni