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    A Story About You
    A Story About You
    A Story About You
    Ebook10 pages8 minutes

    A Story About You

    By Darren Domsky

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    About this ebook

    If you haven’t read the story yet, then please, stop and read it now, before you read the rest of this extended description. These paragraphs are addressed only to those who understand--first hand--the importance of attaching this spoiler alert.

    (If you have not yet read the story, and are reading the rest of this long description anyway, I want you to know something: I didn’t stop at the spoiler alert either. Believe me, I know how odd that sounds. I *remember*.)

    I may be its author, but I never created this story. If anything, it created me. It arrived almost 25 years ago, out of nowhere, without warning, and for no apparent reason. I was an ordinary 14 year old boy at school, bored, slouching, and caught, somehow, in someone else’s daydream. I knew right away that I didn’t like this daydream, and I tried several times to make it stop. But the daydream continued anyway. That daydream took me to some truly unbearable places. And when the worst was finally over, the daydream did just what its spoiler promised me it would do. It redefined worst.

    For nearly 25 years now, I have been doing with this story the only thing that I could: I have been paying it forward. Until now, paying it forward has always meant telling it forward, always in person, and always to people that I already had a personal connection with.
    This raises some good questions. Why spend 25 years only telling a story? Why not also submit it for publication? And, whatever my reason was, what has become of that reason now?

    My reason was always clear, but difficult to express. I owed this story so, so much. And every time I would pay it forward, it would *breathe* again. How could I suddenly just send it away somewhere, and abandon it there? How could I tell it a final goodbye, and let fall its hand? But these are the things that I would have had to have done. Those were the rules.

    To understand what has become of this reason, we need to understand what has begun to become of traditional publishing. For a long, long time, published words only existed in paper coffins. Yes, we built mausoleums for them, and occasionally we even visited, but the truth was that published words were always dead words. They were for mourning.

    Do not misunderstand. These words were never killed *by* their coffins. They were killed because that’s how things *get* coffins. They were killed for the sake of prestigious pre-approval.

    And don’t get me wrong. Dead words can still be very, very beautiful. They can dance, and they can even sing. But look closely, and you will notice something that is always missing. They never breathe.

    Suddenly, a brand new, almost synchronistic realization is beginning to dawn on us. Words don’t actually *need* coffins. In fact, words don’t even *want* coffins. No, what words need is something else completely; and what they want is the one, magical thing that can provide it.

    What they need is *air*.

    And what they want is *smashing*.

    This isn’t about technology. It’s about us. For a long, long time, we have relied on prestigious undertakers to decide what we should read. This has its benefits, but the problem is that prestige is the lapdog of worry, and worry is the patron of stagnation and trivial variation. Today, we are finally beginning to discover how to rely on each other instead.

    And the rules are changing.

    ***

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDarren Domsky
    Release dateApr 25, 2012
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