About My New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Story Collection

  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!

Three Things I Learned From Self-Publishing On Amazon

  So as I’ve mentioned on here before, at the beginning of this year, I finally got around to releasing my debut story collection Little Life Lessons: Fifty-Five Super Short Stories on Amazon. Needless to say, I learned quite a bit through this experience, so I thought it’d be cool to do a quick little post detailing the top three things that I felt were the biggest “lessons learned” here, so to speak. So without further ado, let’s just dive right in:

1. Do Your Research! As Much Research As Possible!!

Shortly after I self-published the book, a friend of mine read it and had some constructive criticism for one of the story entries in particular, “Lost Causes.” Without giving away the ending, the story tells the tale of a teenage boy who wants to become a carpenter, but is pressured towards a more “respectable” direction in life by his strict, elitist father. Furthermore, he’s struggling in school, particularly in math class. My friend pointed out to two things in particular: Carpentry is actually considered to be a respected field of work amongst most people, and strong math skills are usually required to be successful in carpentry.

So basically, I jumped to conclusions here with this story, instead of doing more research like I should have. That being said, I suppose the reader could just assume that the father in story ignorantly considered carpentry to be a waste of time, and that he just simply wanted his son to go to university for something more “book-focused” and less “hands on.” I suppose the reader could also assume that the protagonist lost his motivation to improve in math once his father took the option of carpentry away from him. Nevertheless, I should’ve still done more research on this subject in particular, before finalizing the story. When you’re self-publishing, and not working with an editor of any kind, it’s up to you as the author to fact-check all of these things, and that’s something I’ll definitely make sure to do for my future stories going forward.

2. Format! Format! Format!

No disrespect to Amazon, as I’m thankful to them for even giving me a platform for my books in the first place, but their uploading process sure is tricky! Apparently it used to be worse, so kudos to them for improving it since, but it can definitely still be smoother than it currently is. Every time I tried uploading the document for my book, the previewer would show it all messed up, even when I made sure it was reading the page size correctly and whatnot. Whether I uploaded it as a word doc or a PDF, it would look wrong in the previewer every single time. This would happen over and over for both the paperback upload as well as the Kindle upload. I even had to download an app to help with setting up the Kindle version, and as soon as I downloaded that app, it vanished from my computer (and yes, I made sure to download the right version for my OS). 

Finally, my stupid ass realized (thanks to a point made by my mother, admittedly) that I needed to add page breaks in order to fix the error. Thankfully, this worked. However, as I was converting the stories over to a new document, one entry at a time, and adding page breaks, the format got messed up somehow and I lost all the italics. The reason this is an issue is because, in my old document, I used italics to distinguish characters’ internal monologues from the prose narration. At this point, I was so anxious to just get the book out there after so many failed attempts, that it was only after I had uploaded and published it that I realized I had made this error. Sure, I could go back and fix it now, but by this point a bunch of friends and family members had already ordered their copies, and I didn’t want to make things more confusing for myself and others than they already were. Besides, from what most friends have said, it was still easy for them to tell apart the internal monologues from the narration, even without the italics. Nonetheless, I should’ve still double-checked all of my formatting one last time, which is something I definitely will do now from now on (along with adding page breaks from the very get-go, of course!).

3. Adult Content = No Advertisements

So after I finally got the upload process right, Amazon presented a series of questions I needed to answer before allowing me to hit the “Publish” button. One of these questions was whether or not my book contained any adult content in it. I wasn’t really sure how to answer this at first, because the book itself is a collection of many different short stories that are all pretty different from one another. That being said, as I thought about it more, I recalled that some of the stories, mainly towards the end, were pretty dark and “mature.” One of them was about a sex slave escaping from traffickers, one of them was about someone who was being held hostage in a dungeon… You get the idea. So I decided to answer “Yes” for the “Any adult content here?” question.

…And then, after the book was published, I tried to set up some ads for it on Amazon, only to then find out that any books that were marked as “mature” weren’t allowed to be advertised on the main website, and that once a book was published, it was too late to go back and change that. If I wanted to fix it, I would have had to re-publish the book, and again, I didn’t want to make things more confusing for myself than they already were. A warning on this during the initial publishing process would’ve been nice. To be fair to Amazon, though, maybe there was actually a warning there, and I just missed it. In any case, I’m not really doing any of this stuff for money or attention, so I’m not too bothered by it. 

That being said, I noticed that once my book started to fall further and further down the Bestseller charts, it became more and more difficult to search for it through Amazon’s search engine. Their algorithm is clearly configured in a certain way so that, the higher a book is on the charts, the easier it is to find when typing it in the search bar. The only way to make my book show up near the top of a search now is to type out it’s full name, subtitle and all. And again, I have no problem with this. I just figured it’d be worth mentioning here in case anyone reading this is planning to self-publish something on Amazon for the first time in the hopes of actually making some money.

So there you have it! Those are my biggest lessons learned from publishing on Amazon for the first time. If you’re an aspiring writer like me, hopefully some of this has been useful for you!

Peace!

UPDATE: Also remember to double-check the book dimensions. I already messed that up twice in a row...

How My Short Story Collection Came To Be

  So I was originally going to tie this blog post into the release of my debut book, titled Little Life Lessons: Fifty-Five Super Short Stories. However, due to technical difficulties, the book still isn’t out yet. That being said, I didn’t want to sit on this post any longer, so I’m putting it out there now. Once the book finally is out, I’ll come back to this post and edit it so that it includes a link to the actual book itself.

        Update: Here it is!

So with that now out of the way…

I thought I’d make a blog post to explain what exactly this book is, and how it came to be! As the title indicates, it’s a collection of “fifty-five super short stories,” but when I say short, I mean really short! Have you ever heard of flash fiction? Stories that are only a thousand words or less? That’s what all of these story entries are. Why write a book consisting entirely of stories that are that small? Well, to understand that, we’d have to backtrack to the beginning of my “journey” as a writer…

So it was a few years ago, right as I finished college, when I decided that I wanted to take creative writing seriously. Initially, my goal was to write a film script in the realm of sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Something along the lines of the kind of films and books I grew up with. I knew I didn’t want to direct because I had heard horror stories of all the moving parts that sort of job entails. I figured if I could write a strong enough script with a low-budget “feel” and get it onto what they call “the spec market” (a place where independent scripts could potentially be sold to studios), then I could probably get somewhere with it… Needless to say, it didn’t take long before those delusions started to fade. Soon enough, I realized that even if I were to complete a script (and a good script, at that!) the chances of it ever getting sold were slim-to-none, and the chances of it actually getting made after being sold were even slimmer! Furthermore, even if it did ever get made, by some miracle, the film producers probably would’ve made tons of changes that I likely wouldn’t have agreed with, and there would’ve been nothing I could’ve ever done about it (once you sell your script, it’s not yours anymore).

Funny enough, these days, I don’t really take my art that personally anymore. But back then, I still did, and I quickly realized that I wanted to have full control of whatever it was that I was creating. So what did I do? To put it simply; I woke up one day and said “Screw it! I’m gonna write a book instead!” As a starting point, I took my script idea, which I already had an outline for, and started “transposing” that over to novel format. Rest assured, this phase didn’t last long either. I soon realized that different storytelling mediums required different forms of pacing. In other words; what works for a movie doesn’t necessarily work for a novel, and vice versa. I started making changes to my outline, which helped a little, but ultimately, I still struggled to get beyond the fourth or fifth chapter before feeling the need to scrap everything and start again, over and over…

It was at this point when I realized that I needed to take a break from writing altogether, and focus on some actual reading, for a change! I bought a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy books, things that seemed similar in one way or another to what I myself wanted to write. And it was here when I started to realize something… I don’t really like full-length novels as much as I once thought. It was also around this point when a writing peer of mine who had several more years of experience under his belt provided some profound advice; “Don’t start with a full book. Start by reading and writing short stories instead. Then you’ll see what to do.”

I didn’t believe him at first, but then I went to go pick up a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories and started working my way through those, and pretty much instantly, I realized he was right! Suddenly, I started to see storytelling from an entirely new angle, one which excited me far more than the long-form narrative format. And so, I took the ever-evolving outline for my story idea, trimmed out a ton of fat from it, and wrote it out as a short story that was about ten thousand words long (so a novelette, if you wanna get specific). I sent this to a friend who was kind enough to take the time to read it, and his feedback was that it felt like “a shortened epic.” Hearing this made me feel that maybe I had made it too short, so I wrote another draft that was double the length (so a novella this time). The same friend read this revision, and called it a “vast improvement,”which left me feeling elated, of course, but deep down, I knew something was still “off” with the story…

It was at this point when I started to truly learn and understand the concepts of theme and tone. You can’t just throw whatever you want into a story. Everything needs to “fit together” somehow. Once I was finally able to grasp that concept, I took another look at my novella draft and realized that I had basically taken multiple story ideas and squished them all together, without even realizing it! And so, logically, I started to break all those ideas apart again, isolating each of them into their own stories, and making sure to maintain consistent theme and tone in each of them as much as possible. From here, even more new story ideas started to prop up. At this point, I was still sticking to the realm of “genre fiction” (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.). As I continued to write different drafts of different stories and share them with friends, I kept receiving the same feedback from multiple people; “This doesn’t feel like a proper short story. It feels like it wants to be a full book.”

I was still missing something! I just didn’t know what, exactly. Then one day, somewhat out of nowhere, one of these friends I had been getting feedback from proposed an interesting idea; “Have you ever heard of micro-fiction? You may wanna look into that. I think it could help you a lot.” I knew that by micro-fiction he really meant flash fiction, which I had heard of already, but hadn’t explored much of yet. I decided to take his advice and shift my focus towards reading more flash. Around this time, another writing mentor of mine mentioned how he often practiced his craft by writing a form of flash called drabbles (stories that are exactly one hundred words). I began to take an interest to these types of stories as well, and found myself beginning to move away from the “genre” stuff and focusing more on story ideas that were set in “the real world,” if you catch my drift.

From here; I entered my “idea explosion” phase. Now that I was no longer limiting myself to “genre stuff,” I was coming up with new story ideas left and right, almost every single day! I made giant lists of working titles on my phone. I also used an excel document for this purpose at one point, but it was too difficult to maintain, so I quickly abandoned that approach. As you would probably expect, I soon found myself overwhelmed by all my different ideas; “Where do I even start now?!” Furthermore, I couldn’t make up my mind about how I wanted to actually release any of this stuff! “Do I submit these stories to a bunch of different magazines? Do I put them all up for free on a blog? Do I group them together as collections, and put those out on Amazon?”

In the end, I went with the last of those options. The idea of grouping everything together into collection books gave the stories a sense of “tangibility,” which boosted my motivation, and I specifically chose Amazon as my outlet because I knew that people would be able to order physical paperback versions of my books, and the thought of actually being able to hold my own work in my hands like that enticed me even further. But despite all of that, the same question still remained; “Where do I even start?!” After some more thought, I ended up grouping the stories based on “genre,” which meant one group for sci-fi stories, one for fantasy stories, one for apocalyptic stories, one for “real life” stories, and lastly, one for period pieces. I decided that these would become my “books,” so to speak. 

I then decided that the “real life” stories would be the first that I would tackle… The only problem was that I had sixty-three different story ideas for that group listed out. All intended to be flash fiction, of course. But still, it was a lot! Nevertheless, over the course of about a year or so, I worked through them all, and believe it or not, it was fun! Writing all those stories never once felt like a chore. As a matter of fact, I would even say that the act of writing them all was “therapeutic,” in a way. Throughout my year of this frequent writing, I essentially “tricked” myself into thinking that it was all just a hobby, and that I wasn’t writing anything for a book of any kind. I think this helped to alleviate a lot of the pressure, and therefore kept me motivated to keep working…

Once the stories were all actually done, I knew right away that the next step would be to figure out how to organize them. Make no mistake; this part was not fun! For months, I tried all different kinds of combinations, each of which gave me a raging headache. Eventually, I hit a point where I decided to list all sixty-three stories on a word doc on my computer. Next to each title, I listed a few “key factors” pertaining to the story, such as whether it was in first-person or third, whether or not the story was a drabble and/or double-drabble, and most importantly, what type of story it was. It was through this exercise that I realized that the vast majority of these stories could be distinguished by one of five different “types”; Family Stories, Youth Stories, Office Stories, Aspiration Stories, and lastly, Tragedy Stories.

Finally, I was starting to get some sense of “structure” for my work! It was also at this point when I made the choice to narrow the number of stories down to fifty-five (eleven per section). This allowed me to eliminate some of the stories that I felt were a little weak and/or redundant. I ended up eliminating more than expected, however, so I took the opportunity to write some new story entries at the last minute that I felt fit better with the new structure, as well as helped to “fill in some gaps,” so to speak.

But I still wasn’t done there! From that point onward, I was revising different stories all over the entire book up until the very last possible moment. This entailed changing certain stories to make sure they all stood out from one another, yet still “fit together” appropriately, among other things. Sometimes stories would move to different places in their respective sections, or be swapped out for one of the rejects, or something new. I even changed the cover art at the very last minute! It’s true what they say; revision is where the art really happens!

And so, eventually, I got to a point where I was finally ready to call the book “good enough.” Is it perfect? No, of course not! Could I have worked on it even more? Yes, of course! But sometimes, you have to just say “screw it” and be done with it. Move on to something new, which is exactly what I’m doing now! I still intend to finish and release all of my other short story collections (in some shape or form), as well as continue to study and write poetry (something I started to do only just very recently). Rest assured, I still plan to continue with this blog as well.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my writing journey here, and hopefully, some of my experiences and findings may help you on your own path as well…

Peace!

RELATED: About My New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Story Collection