So at the beginning of this year I released my debut story collection Little Life Lessons: Fifty-Five Super Short Stories and wrote a blog post explaining how it came to be. At the end of that post, I mentioned that I had ideas for similar collections, and that I would begin to work on those. Since then, however, I realized it made more sense to combine all of those ideas into just one anthology… And I’ve now done just that!
Ladies and gentlemen, my sophomore effort, Real Enough: Forty Short Stories & Poems, is now available on Amazon. And just like last time, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a blog post announcing it.
Unlike Little Life Lessons, which told stories loosely based on my own life and observations of the world, Real Enough consists entirely of science fiction and fantasy entries, split into four sections (Low Fantasy, Sci-Fi On Earth, Sci-Fi In Space, High Fantasy). As you may have noticed from the subtitle, some of these entries (exactly half, as a matter of fact) are actually poems. All four sections of the book alternate back and forth between prose and poetry. As I mentioned at the end of my post announcing Little Life Lessons, I had wanted to also start experimenting with poetry, and quickly saw an opportunity to express some of my sci-fi/fantasy ideas in the form of narrative poems, rather than prose.
While I’m proud of all forty entries, there are a few in particular that are longer than most. I call these the “flagship stories” of the book:
Soon
Highway to Avalon
Racing Death
Survivortown
Sunrise Order
Next Star Over
The Prince of the Island
Long Gone Magic
And just like last time, the process didn’t go perfectly. With the last book, the italics got lost. This time around, the last line of almost every poem was shifted to the side instead of being centered (all of the poems are supposed to be centered). When I saw that, I said to myself “Eh, screw it. Let people think it’s a stylistic choice or something.” There were also some other errors (extra blank pages at the end, extra margin spacing all around, a few typos in the story Soon, etc.). As I said shortly after I released Little Life Lessons, not everything is going to go according to plan, and as an independent author, you’re gonna have to be okay with that…
Honestly, I don’t have much else to say beyond that. I want to let the book speak for itself, after all! The question now is; what will I do next? And the answer is… I don’t know. I definitely want to keep this blog alive, and might even start posting here more frequently again. As far as other books go though, I think I might take a bit of a break now, before figuring out where to go from here…
In the meantime, if you choose to purchase Real Enough, I would like to thank you. Writing sci-fi/fantasy is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a little kid, so I hope you enjoy reading this book, just as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it…
Peace!
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