SMILING LIKE A ROBOT BEATNIK

Seven days since I wrote that my writing days might be over. In those seven days, I've rewritten one story and added three new stories that I believe may be the sort of stories that get published. How it came about?

I was rewriting a tale now called "All About Jane" for the who-knows-how-many times since I first scribbled it long hand on college lined paper when I was struggling in graduate school at Southern Illinois University. That would be 53-some years ago. 

The plot was influenced very much by the symbolic young man I was at the time. It concerned a high school boy who could not bring himself to have sex with a willing wheelchair bound, very intelligent high school girl. She represented the world he was having trouble accepting because it was such an ugly world, but they eventually had sex and all was well with the world afterward. 

Every time I rewrote it, I cleaned up the language [not sexual language], a too florid style. Eventually I changed it so they don't have sex, and the boy much later in life looks back at what he learned. Still not satisfied, this last time I changed the final line of the tale and brought the story into the way I look at us robots these days, and, voila, there it was—finished? Then I wrote three more stories from a robot's pov.