Publish Yourself! Self-Published Authors Talk About Their Path To Print

I’m one of the authors!!! This event is at the Lafayette Public Library, in Lafayette, Colorado. It begins at 2:30pm this Saturday, April 26th. Here’s the official announcement. I’m super excited!!!

Publish Yourself! Self-Published Authors Talk About Their Path To Print

This afternoon for readers and writers features a diverse panel of five area writers who have made the increasingly popular choice to publish their own books. Contributors include Marty Banks, Andrew Burt, Anne Eliot, Jamie Ferguson and Chris Myers, each of whom will discuss their path to print, as well as reading from their recent work and answering audience questions. Authors will also be on hand to sell and autograph their books. This is a great gathering for book groups and readers, as well as for writers who are looking for some inspiration to take the next step.

Already off the rails …

Back in January I set my writing goals for the year. This was great: I had a plan! I was excited. Motivated! And I acted on my plan. Everything was going fantastically well.

Until I got to the second short story … which apparently wants to be a novella.

For a while I thought we could work out a truce and the story would be willing to become a novelette instead of a short story, but at this point I know I’ve lost. I submitted the first chunk to my critique group the other day, and found myself breaking it up into chapters. The best I can hope for is that it really is a novella and not another novel. That probably sounds weird, but I was happy with my plan for the year. I was going to whip out this story and get back to the novel that is actually supposed to be a novel, but now I need to finish this one. And yes, I know I could put it down and finish it later, but I want to be more disciplined. I’m trying to fit in more writing time, make better use of the time I have, and stay focused instead of writing for a while, then sneaking in 57 games of Threes while “taking a break.”

In all fairness, I should point out that the novel I had intended to be working on right now also started as a short story. As did my book With Perfect Clarity. And several other books on my to do list. With every short story I write, I now think: please, please stay short …

There’s no “official” definition of what length qualifies as a novel or novella or anything, but there’s a good overview of all of this on Wikipedia. I’m going by the chart they list, which shows the definitions and word lengths that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America use for the Nebula awards. They are:

Classification Word count
Novel over 40,000 words
Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words
Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words
Short story under 7,500 words

My guess is that this story will settle down at around 20,000 words, but it is clearly stubborn so it will be done when it says it’s done. I’m enjoying writing it – the only real downside (other than it’s messing up my plan!) is that this story was supposed to be one of the five for my next collection, and it would have worked very well because it fits in with the ‘choice’ theme. Alas.

The working title for this story is The Warmth of the Crystal. I’ll revisit that when I’m a little further on. It’s about a woman who ends up with a crystal ball that shows her bad things in other people’s futures. Because she knows about these events ahead of time she can prevent them from happening – if she chooses to do so. But imagine you suddenly have a power to help other people, and you really just want to take a nap, or maybe you need to go to work. It’s not only somewhat inconvenient, it’s also a tremendous responsibility.

Speaking of responsibility, I should get back to the story. I’ll end with a happy dog photo.

2014-02-22 Sanitas Valley trail

The power of choice

The short stories I’ve been working on lately all have very different characters, settings, and plots, but they have one thing in common: they all deal in some way with making choices.

I’ve noticed over the years that I have a set of common themes that I go back to over and over. One of my major themes is choice. I love putting characters in horrible situations where they have to choose between something that would help them versus something that would not help – and might even hurt – them, but which would be the ‘right’ thing to do.

I stumbled across Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning a few years ago. The first section is about Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps during World War II. One of the most powerful things I remember is Frankl describing how people who were literally starving to death would give away their own food to others. Here’s a quote from his book:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

These people chose to help others, even though it meant giving away something that they themselves desperately needed.

My next short story collection will focus on the theme of choice, so for the first time I’m intentionally writing with this theme in mind. Last night I finished the first draft of my first short story for this collection. This story doesn’t deal with choices like those made by the courageous people Frankl wrote about, but even the smaller choices have meaning. I’m looking forward to seeing what other stories I come up with while focusing on this theme.

In the meantime, I’m very happy with two of the choices I’ve made over the past year!

2014-02-08 Shanahan Trail