As we near the month of May, I’m reminded that in less than two weeks, it will mark two years, on May 6, 2013, that I published my first story on Amazon. It’s a short story called, “Something the Wind Blew In,” with a post-apocalyptic setting. I originally wrote this story one evening after I read about a contest that Apex Magazine was having, a number of years ago. The call was for post-apocalyptic Halloween stories falling within a certain word length.
Unfortunately, entries were due by midnight, or some such hour, the day I found out. So I scrambled my brain coming up with an idea (and if you’ve read the story, you get that part), and sent it off with not much time to spare. I didn’t win, but ended up sending it out to a few magazines. The Weird Tales editor of the time, Ann VanderMeer, liked it, but said it wasn’t quite the right fit. She asked me to send something else to her. I sent a story called “Orange Crik,” which she didn’t like as much as “Something the Wind Blew In.”
Then life got in the way, I had a job change and a move, and my writing got put aside. But the catalyst for publishing on Amazon came about when I decided to buy a Kindle and discovered that you could actually publish your stories through their Kindle Direct Publishing arm. This opened a new world for me. People, at least a few people, were actually buying my short stories! And sometimes I’d offer them for free, and people all over the world were downloading stuff I’d written. Amazing. Needless to say, many more people have downloaded my stories for free than those who purchased them, but I was happy to just get my stuff out there for family and friends to have access to (although I’m happy to say that I’ve had 24 continuous months of having at least one person purchase something I’ve written). “Something the Wind Blew In” may not have 75 five-star ratings on Amazon, but many people who have read it let me how much they enjoyed it.
One of my upcoming projects will collect all of my previously published short stories, along with a novelette and a novella from my Dreamworld book, into one volume. But it will have to wait, because I’m currently working on a novel in the Apocalypse Weird universe, of which I’m very excited. And if you like the Apocalypse Weird books, you may just enjoy reading “Something the Wind Blew In.” I know the cover is bad (except for the cool picture of the sky my wife took), but I had zero experience at the time. For a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s fun, it’s different, and it’s just 99 cents, so what do you have to lose? Just click on the link and check it out.
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