Anyone else want free e-books?

Cover via Amazon

I recently joined a group called Story Cartel. It was set up by Jeff Goins and Joe Bunting as a way of ensuring reviews for new e-books.

The idea is that they send you notice of new e-books, and you can download them for free. In return, all they ask is that you write a review on Amazon.

Seems like a good deal to me – who doesn’t want free books? And they say one of the best ways to improve your writing is to read. Plus I’m hoping that one day I can put out an e-book and get reviews in the same way. Its all win, win win!

While I was downloading today’s free book, Roxy by PJ Reece, I checked out the authors blog and saw that he has another book out about writing stories – Story Structure to Die For. I had a look on Amazon uk and it was £1.50 (!!!) so I thought what the hell, lets see what he has to say. I really like his ideas about heroes and tragedies, and how to draw your readers in. I’m going to try his ideas with the re-write of my nano book.

Incidentally, just in case you didn’t know (because I didn’t until fairly recently), you don’t actually need a Kindle to read free books – you can download an e-book reader on your laptop or your phone, and voila!

Ok, that’s enough plugging stuff today I think. I’ll post another story next, I promise!

Let’s write a short story!

Today, I am studying Joe Bunting’s excellent e-book  “Lets write a short story'”. So far I have only read the introduction, but at the end of it, Bunting asks us to ‘promise’ to use the knowledge we gain from the book to write a short story and submit it for publishing BY THE END OF THE MONTH….

I’m excited.

I’m scared.

I’m expecting to be rejected by EVERY literary magazine I submit it to, because, Bunting tells us, it is statistically easier to get accepted at Harvard than it is to get a short story accepted for publication. But rejection will be a ‘badge of honour’ and failing is the fastest way to learn.

It almost feels like it would be easier to just chuck my manuscript in the bin when I have finished, and have done with it.  Or press delete on the only saved copy on my laptop. But where would the fun be in that?

And what if…what IF I get lucky?

I might buy a few lottery tickets while I’m at it.

Short story reversing!!

I read a page on the internet a couple of weeks ago that urged writers to start with short stories as opposed to launching in with the first novel.  The author, Joe Bunting, makes some good points – you only have to start looking through all the thousands of blogs by would be writers to know that this is an uphill struggle. Most of us will never get books published, never mind become best selling authors. So starting small and getting something,  ANYTHING published, seems like a good idea to me. Plus if we get ourselves noticed who knows what it might lead to?

With this in mind, I began to think about plots. Various ideas came to me, but I decided to look on line at some published short stories to get an idea of what I was aiming at.

I probably started in the wrong place…I had a look at an anthology of ‘ best short stories‘ (it is a book being sold by Amazon, but you know how some of the books invited you to ‘look inside’? So I looked inside…), and read the first couple of paragraphs of the first story.

It was good. Oh my goodness it was good –  how was I going to compete with this????

Feeling somewhat deflated, I went elsewhere online to look at the fanfic I had written for friends a few years ago. It was Harry Potter fanfic, but I had put my friends in it too, so they could imagine themselves alongside some of JKRowling’s amazing characters. It was easy to write – I didn’t have to explain what anyone looked like, or what sort of person they were. No character development was needed what so ever because the audience I was writing it for (my friends, Harry Potter fans like myself) already knew the characters well. So I was able to concentrate on the narrative itself, and it flowed from my fingers like…well, like magic.

English: British versions of the Harry Potter series My own collection ^_^ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Going back and re-reading them was fun. And I realised that actually I’m not a bad writer!

So I decided that rather than trying to think of new plots and stories, I’m going back to my fanfics and doing the whole thing in reverse. Before, I already had the characters and just needed a story to go with them. This time I will take my stories  and develop characters of my own.

We’ll see what happens.