The Gunman in Black is now self-published on Amazon.com

My short-story collection The Gunman in Black, 5 stories of crime, is now live. It took me two weeks to proofread, edit, copyright, and upload. I'm happy with the result. There are only one or two formatting mistakes and they are minor. Because the two weeks of editing was more work than I had imagined, I was unable to write a new short story a week. So, my goal of writing fifty stories this year might not be do-able, unless I hit a strong writing streak. But, I'll be happy if I can finish forty or so stories. I have some ideas, and now I can get back to writing.

The cover image fonts had to be reset over and over again, because the words on the cover were not readable as a thumbnail. The present cover seems to be the best.

A new cover can be added at any time, but I'm happy with this one for now.

The biggest challenge was in converting the .docx to Web Page, filtered. It's necessary to make this change in order to insert hyperlinks to allow a reader to go from the index directly to the story she wants to read without scrolling through each page to get there. Actually, switching to Web Page was relatively easy. What confounded me was going back in new files to .docx. I spent hours trying to figure that one out. I finally joined Microsoft Community, explained my problem, and within a few minutes someone gave me the answer. I was so relieved, you can't imagine. There is so much help out there if you just look and ask.

If you get a chance to read the stories, I hope you enjoy them. And, please send me a comment via e-mail, or on this blog, or a review on Amazon.com about the stories. I'd like to know what you think.

Writing Short Stories (2)

My plan this year to write about fifty short stories and publish them in a series of collections of about 12-15,000 words each is coming along. I've just finished writing the fifth story for the first collection, which will be about 13,000 words altogether. I now have to revise and polish these stories, design a book cover, and publish them on Amazon. I'd like to get it done within one to two weeks. I also hope to write one or two new stories for the next collection while I'm finishing this first collection. It'll be a challenge. But I'm up for it.

I haven't felt this much excitement or optimism about writing in a very long time. I've basically accomplished my goal thus far. I'm eager to see how it all plays out. Sometimes, I wonder if I'll ever work on a novel again. This is just so much more pleasant. The requirements for a short story are much different than those for a novel, much looser. I guess the question is, do I have fifty stories in me. A couple of months ago, I wasn't sure I had even one story within me. So putting out five in about five weeks has surprised me, pleasantly. 

Write what I like, or write what readers like?

As a writer, you have to decide if you write what you like and hope readers will like it, too, particularly today's readers, or do you write what you think today's readers like, and hope they  will also like it? Of course, if your mindset is "I like writing horror," or whatever, and many readers love horror, then you have the ideal situation, that is, you and the readers enjoy the same thing. Of course, I'm talking about writing for publication and financial survival. If you don't care about either, then the point is moot.

I've come to the conclusion that the majority of fiction readers today do not care much for nuances, subtle variation, or poetic language. What do they care about? They want extreme emotion: extreme hatred, extreme love, extreme sex, extreme friendship and the extreme straining of that friendship (maybe it's always been that way, now that I think about it [Sophocles, Homer, Shakespeare, Hugo, Camus, and on and on and on]). The more extreme the better. Of course, it has to work as a story and, preferably, a fast-moving story.

Perhaps it's the result of the television and motion picture industries that we've come to the point we're at now. Slow moving, "normal," has become boring. Abnormal has become appealing. We want our characters to be bigger than life, and their struggles titanic (and violent). We want our characters to be beautiful, but flawed, but beautiful just the same. We want our stories to enthrall.

This is a pretty tall order. But it is doable. We writers have to realize the reality of today's literary marketplace and go for it. Otherwise, our chances of being published and reaping financial success are limited at best.

I'm attempting something that is, for me, new. I'm venturing into crime fiction. I've completed three short stories that I will self-publish as part of a collection when I've written enough to complete a decent-sized collection, say a total of twelve- to fifteen-thousand words. Right now, I've written almost eight-thousand words with the three stories I've completed. I've written a story a week for the past three weeks, and am planning a forth one now. I'd like to write a story a week to reach the five or six or thereabouts stories, revise (proofread primarily), and self-publish. Hopefully I can have a Beta reader or two. But I'm really not too concerned about that. I'm following what I perceive as the Jack London plan of action: just write it; don't worry about perfection. Not every story written by every great writer was a masterpiece. As long as the reader likes it, that's what matters.