Anonymous

His face is smooth, beardless, trapped in a netherworld between adolescence and the prime of manhood. His coat is too big, beginning to slip from his left shoulder. His hair is thick and sensuous, the glory of his youth. His expression is resolute. What little remains of his story is captured in the tintype taken of him after his enlistment. There is nothing more.

Inspired by a photograph taken of a young man after he volunteered to fight in the war between the states, my illustration clothed him in blue and gray since bullets, bayonets and cannon did not discriminate based on the color of the fabric covering the soldier's frail flesh. His name forgotten, the side he fought on unknown, what can anyone tell us of his dreams, his loves, or his fate?

Due to the invention of photography and the preservation of hundreds of pictures like these on the internet, his image has lived on, even though his story has not.

Untold tales like these keep me awake at night, their ghosts floating wraithlike in my imagination, their voices sometimes laughing softly, or crying out with incoherent rage. The drive to reverse their anonymity, to breathe life into their moldering bones and reawaken their mortal frailty occasionally moves me from casual daydream to art. I have dreamed more stories than I will ever have the time to fully develop and write to my satisfaction.

In the modern age it's hard to imagine ourselves suffering the invisible fate of the youthful soldier in the illustration. Our digital footprints, like electronic shadows, leave well-marked trails across the world wide web. A single internet search can generate hundreds of texts and emails, all in pursuit of a sale based on tracking and collating our interests.

Programs anticipate our desired entertainment, guides us to merchandise that pledges our undying support for our favorite sports teams or connects us with charities we did not know existed. The images that we post on Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram and other social platforms will remain in the virtual ether for thousands of years whether we wish them to or not.

I post on Vocal because I am a storyteller. But just because a story is posted on a virtual platform does not mean it will find readership. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Can a story exist apart from its readers? Since only a few people have read my stories, I sometimes feel almost as anonymous as the nameless soldier whose tintype is miraculously preserved on the internet.

My stories taunt me when I visit my profile. Reading them, I ask myself again and again, why have they gained so little readership? Is there an audience for my stories and if so, how do I reach them?

My desire to write began on the porch of my grandparent's little brick house as I experienced the southern oral storytelling tradition. My father grew to manhood as the eldest son of a poor family in Mississippi. Our family made an annual pilgrimage to his homeplace from Minnesota to spend two weeks in the heart of summer visiting my grandparents.

We spent sweltering evenings sitting on their dark porch while my grandfather, uncles and aunts shared tales of their youth as well as the stories they had learned from the generations that preceded them.

It's not surprising that my love for their little brickhouse has enshrined it within my psyche like a land lost in time. Its forever laughter and sense of belonging anchors my writing in the sentiment and romance of a lost and romantic age.

My early reading interests reflected that age as well. Like many boys of that time, I read 'Tarzan of the Apes' and 'The Lost World' as well as many other adventures by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle. I also read the abridged Sherlock Holmes Casebook. This was in the 1960's, mind you. The publishers wanted to avoid corrupting the youth with Holme's cocaine addiction and occasional opium use. They failed. Did I mention that this was in the 1960's?

I was also deeply influenced by science fiction and fantasy writers from the 1950's, which did little to modernize my reading patterns. Only in the last fifteen years have I begun to seriously tackle living writers. Of note, 'The Things They Carried,' by Timothy O'Brien, 'Cold Mountain' by Charles Frazier, 'Belle Canto' and 'The Dutch House' by Ann Padgett, the magnificent 'Circe' and 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller, 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers, and 'Creatures of Passage' by Morowa Yejide.

But even today, I still turn to writers long dead when I need a quick reading fix: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Robert Heinlein, Philip K Dick, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

I cannot overstate the influence of the writers that I have turned to most often to my own writing. My style owes more to Kipling, Conrad and Lewis than all the remaining authors combined. I often wonder how greatly my writing technique and subject matter limit the number of like-minded readers on the Vocal platform. So how do I find them? Or more importantly, how do they find me?

This is my primary writing goal for 2024. To find my audience.

I only posted seven stories in 2023 on Vocal. From January through May I needed to work eighty-hour weeks at my job making it very difficult to find the creative energy that good writing demands. It does not help that with the limited time I had for writing that I tend to write slowly.

There are exceptions. The first story I ever posted on Vocal, 'Where the Purple Mushrooms Grow' I conceived and wrote in three days. Prior to that I had not believed such a thing was possible for me.

But the short time for Vocal contests have forced me to write far more quickly than I was previously accustomed too. I wrote 'The Dragons Remember' in a fever dream over three weeks. At the time, I was working roughly sixty hours weekly.

To complete the story prior to the contest deadline, I worked into the wee hours nightly. At the end I was utterly exhausted but believed I had created a relatable story. I did the same thing for 'The Runaway' and more recently with 'The Dragon's Daughter' and 'The Soldier and Death.' Unfortunately, no one read 'The Dragons Remember' or 'The Soldier and Death' and one person each read 'The Runaway' and 'The Dragon's Daughter.' I believe that all four are compelling stories worthy of the readership that they did not receive.

On the extreme end, I labored over 'A Fair Exchange' on and off for three years. I believed strongly enough in this story that I submitted varying versions of it to three separate contests before I even knew that Vocal existed. I received complimentary notes from the judges of two of them, which I greatly appreciated. The other sent me a note suggesting I read one of their quarterly journals to see the style and genre of writing reflecting the editor's publishing interests. Oops!

Other than Vocal and Linked In, I do not post on any other social media. Since my friends and family are not interested in visiting or posting on Vocal, my hope of readership is mostly based on luck and positive attention from Vocal curators. Unfortunately, neither is working for now.

I am both disappointed in the lack of readership I have experienced on Vocal and that none of my stories has received top story attention. My writing is strong. Several of my stories are very good. But the merit of my writing has little value if no one reads my stories.

I have tried to generate clicks by creating or curating strong and carefully crafted visuals but with a single exception that has failed as well. The one that did generate attention was a photo of my wife that I took on our honeymoon and used for the poem 'Dreams of Youth.' It appears that in addition to me, two hundred and thirteen members of the Vocal community fell in love with her as well.

My fear is that Vocal's curators pay only cursory attention to stories that general readership are not reading. An even greater fear is that they read them but do not like them.

Nonetheless, I intend to continue posting on Vocal in 2024. I cannot write other than who I am, so rather than attempting to adapt my strategy for the prevailing winds of the times, I plan to expand in presentation and genre.

I am currently illustrating and writing a children's book that I expect to complete in early spring. I am not sure of the most advantageous means of posting the artwork and may need to reach out to the Vocal staff for assistance. Since my love of art is a near equal for my love of storytelling, I would love to expand on the art side as a creator but am not sure if Vocal is the appropriate platform for it.

I am also interested in Graphic Novels and animation. Please let me know if there are plans to provide a community for visual storytelling.

I plan to continue entering Vocal contests that pique my interest and would like to write one or two essays for the Feast community in 2024. I worked as a baker for seven years and I'm a competent vegan cook. My wife and I have collaborated on many recipes over the past ten years that might interest other vegans and vegetarians.

Over the past three years I have posted in Fiction, Families, Human, Criminal, Poets and Horror and plan to continue.

I also have three stories that I plan to complete in 2024 as well. One each for the Fiction, Criminal and Horror communities. The best of the three I have toiled on for almost three years. I have found that the more I write, the more I write.

Finally, I plan on spending more time reading the work of others on the platform than I have had the time to do in the past. Recently, I was able to reduce my work hours to part-time and that has greatly helped me to refocus on my storytelling as well as opening time for reading more of the work of my peers on Vocal. I'm continually amazed at the high quality of the writing of so many Vocal contributors!