Anybody who reads my work knows that most of what I do is short. Short stories, short poems just plan short. It isn't that I don't have a lot of words, it is that I don't believe it wasting them. A short story is a snap shot of time, a scene to an act in the life of your characters. Sometimes that snapshot will complete itself in just two pages and sometimes it is more like thirty of them.
Most of my tales average out around ten pages. Now since I write in what I like to call series I bet you are thinking why dont I just hold off and put them into one book? You see I take a common thread and write a lot of different tales under that thread.
In my Death Walks Through series the common thread is Death. He is not the main character of each tale but he is there, in the background most times. Those stories are ghost stories, not the scary, creepy ghost stories that are so popular on tv and in movies but little tales of souls searching for the end to their tales. So far I have written ten of these little tales. They truly are little tales because these ten little stories all total up to 25K so far.
My next series of tales, Guardians of the Gate City, just got combined into a collection and published. Six tales that come up over the 50K limit for a novel. These stories are more interconnected than the Death stories because they focus on the main character, Harry Lionsey. I have worked through a couple years worth of his life and introduced side characters that will be getting their own series. The first Guardians of the Gate city side stories will be out next month. That series will focus on characters like Sheldon, the dragon information broker.
Thirdly I have the Echoes of Elder Times series. Now the tales in this series might not seem to be connected but they all have the feel of the ancient world to them. Modern tales with ancient themes is what I planned when I started putting the tales out.
Next we have the Worlds Apart series. These tales are of course about different worlds than our own. They are written as science fiction or fantasy but the idea is the worlds are separate from our own but hold theme and characters that could have been our own.
Then I have Beyond Realities. Like the series above it is our world but not our world. Stories of just a step to the side of our own world.
My newest story series is going to be Myths of Love. I have had The Knight Protector up for ages now but I had a handful of stories in the works that were more romance than the rest of my tales. I recently added the series title to Knight Protector. I have one more that will be going up next month and two more right now in the works. They will be odd fantasy romances they may or may not have a happily ever after.
Of course I have collections out. Two complete erotic collections in fact. One with interconnected stories and one that is just a mix of a lot of erotic tales I wrote. Two other series are of different kinds of erotic tales that I will some day compile into separate books, but not for a long while yet.
Then there is Gates. This was the book that kicked me into self publishing. The six tales in the Gates book all have some type of gate in the tale and if the publisher had done more than take my rough files and publish them I think it would have gone further. For now it is a nice little collection and the first book I have in my hands of my own work.
Of course i have been found in a lot of anthologies over the past year. Between my poetry and short stories I have added up a nice little set of anthology entries. And speaking of my poetry I now have three collections of my poetry and photography up for sale.
I have rambled a lot here but that is the point. There are a lot of ways to do your writing and writing short stories is one very fine way of doing it.
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