Many many moons ago, I wrote a short story. That was the beginning of my obsession with writing.
The time saw winter of 1998, and my daughter was about a year and a half. She was the inspiration behind my short story called Amy. I wrote the 1,600 word piece on an afternoon, and felt pretty proud. It wasn’t because I felt the story was top shelf stuff. Heck no, it was my first real story that I completed. Until then, I had started many stories, just to get bored with each of them one after another.
Over the years, I had shared the story with various friends and family, and tinkered with it from time to time. No major story tweaks, but just enough to make me think it was better than before. For the most part though, the story stayed in a drawer (or hard drive for the technical aspect of the situation) unloved.
That all changed a few months ago. That is when I got the wild hair up the behind to actually get published. I had decided to actually finish a book, and self publish by my birthday in September. I was happy to announce that I hit my goal, and I was very excited. BUT, what that taught me was that not all of my writing sucks. It’s not great by any means, but it does not suck.
Having this new way of looking at my writing, I spent a bit of time on that old writing drawer (ie: hard drive) and found a number of short stories. I read through them and found a few that had potential. Amy was one of those candidates.
Ironically, I had also been spending a bit of time on KBoards.com. One day as I had just wrapped up editing a few scenes from my book, I read a thread on KBoards soliciting short story submissions for an anthology. I wasn’t too quick on the draw though, as the thread was several weeks old. I wasn’t sure I mad it in time. I emailed Stella anyway, and to my surprise, there was room for Amy. Before sending it off, I had one of my editors do a run through, and although there was a few ‘odds-and-ends’ corrections to it, it remained pretty much as I left it in my drawer years ago.
Long story short (too late?) is the anthology has just been released! The book is called Something to Read on the Ride: A Charity Anthology. The following is the blurb from Amazon:
[box] An excellent collection of short stories aimed at commuters and travellers who have only a limited amount of time to read on the journey. This book is a Charity Anthology, with all proceeds (not just profits!) donated to children’s charity.Suitable for all adult readers from 18 – 80. This book covers a large range of subjects, from space travel to zombies, romance, humour and tragedy, and from unusual occurrences to every day situations. Stories were donated by a wide variety of authors, all with very different styles, so there is plenty for everybody.
Authors: Neil Bursnoll, Samuel Clements, Andrew Vu, Amanda Brice, Stella Wilkinson, Neil Sweetman, L.G. Castillo, Landon Porter, Debbie Bennett, Frank Zubek, Pru Moran, Louis Hessey-Antell, Dan Brady, J. David Core, Monica La Porta, Paul B. Kohler, Dan Fiorella, Ruth Banda-Banda, Penny Darling, James Griffiths and Pauline Drummie. [/box]
As Stella Wilkinson is the editor (and wrote of one of the stories), a big round of applause goes out to her. Great job.
Please do click over and check it out. It’s only $3.99 for 26 short stories, and ALL the proceeds goes to charity. How awesome is that? Seriously, go now! Go have a look-see.