I’m feeling fairly righteous this evening. I’m sitting on over 3,000 words of edited first draft. This was a novella I wrote a couple of years ago which has been sitting on my hard disk looking for a market.

It seems the Kindle could open up as a market for novellas, where the traditional pricing constraints of tree books don’t apply.

It’s features my series character as police detective, investigating a murder on the British coast. As written, it came out at about 25,000 words. So far, I’ve stuck pretty much to the original pacing, but when it’s rewritten, I’ll look at how it reads to see if it needs more or less, or should stay the same.

After spending some time on the production and marketing side of my writing, and enjoying a fairly quiet Christmas with family, it’s time to write again.

In the Brave New World of Kindle (BNWoK), the traditional restrictions on size of novel have all but disappeared. Micro fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and epics can all be marketed and sold in the new electronic reading era.

So I have some ‘things’ I wrote a couple of years ago. In truth, they were two halves to my National Novel Writing Month submission, which both ended up at around 25,000 words. As such, finding a ‘home’ for them was almost impossible without changing them either up into full length novels (somewhere around 70,000 words), or down into long, short stories (say, around 10,000 – 15,000 words). Either would have meant an almost complete rewrite, but the stories themselves wouldn’t have lent themselves to being anything other than what they were – 25,000 word stories.

But now, such things can be edited, polished, and then published via the Amazon Digital text Platform (DTP), where they might find a few readers. This, to me, is much better than them sitting on various hard disks, having put many hours of work into them.

But then I have ideas for new writing. I have a post-apocalyptic story buzzing around in my head, and I have a development of my series character which could work out well.

Maybe I should stop hanging around on forums and Facebook (and updating blogs), and get on and writing.
#amwriting 🙂

I’ve got my second #SampleSunday piece up. It’s taken from my second collection of short and flash fiction, Bleak Midwinter Tales 2 Go to the #SampleSundaypage.

I hope you like it.

Next time, I’ll be posting one of my pieces of short fiction which I thought unsuitable to go into the collection.

Happy #SampleSunday.

My second collection of short stories is now up at Smashwords, available in Sony, Epub and other formats (including PDF), and can be purchased HERE

Please see the details page here for more information and a sample.

The first collection of short stories and micro fiction is now available, currently from Smashwords for Sony, PDF and others HERE , and from Amazon for Kindle very soon.

Please see the description page for more details: Bleak Midwinter Tales

After the brief lull last night to play with graphics, I decided to knuckle down and get my editing done.

And hurrah! It’s done! I have 25 stories for each of the collections, and around 15,000 words in each book.

Now, I have to do the boring bit of checking, formatting, rechecking, reformatting, re-rechecking, … etc etc. But, with a bit of luck and a following wind, the finished first collection should be uploaded sometime tomorrow.

Yes, I really do. I mean, I’ve done the difficult bit. I’ve written the story, haven’t I? I’ve crafted the work, created the narrative. Isn’t that enough?

The fact is, I’ve seen enough so-so stories, and just plain rubbish writing, that I know I have to do the absolute best I can with everything I do. It’s what I would expect, especially if I was paying for something.

But God, I hate editing!

That’s why I played with covers tonight, instead of editing, and created what I think is a rather nice cover for my collection of shorts.

I hope it’s successful.

I’ve started doing this ‘thing’ with fellow writers over at the Kindleboards forum. The idea is that you post a sample of your work each Sunday, and then Tweet it using the hashtag #SampleSunday. Then fellow writers will retweet if they like it, and thus publicity is created.

Hopefully.

Read it at: #SampleSunday