Everything Old is New Again

Thirty years ago this September I became a published author when my first story appeared in Woman's World magazine. I remember not being able to believe that it had really happened. I went into a local bookstore I frequented and bought several copies of that issue and couldn't wait to tell the clerk that the story that week was mine. She hesitated, as if unsure of the truth of that, and then asked if it was true. I thought she was asking if it was true I was the author. I almost took out my driver's license to prove my identity! She was really only asking if it was a true story. I replied no, it was fiction, something I had made up. I went on making up stories after that, selling a number of them to that particular magazine.

I had always thought it would be nice to put the stories together in an anthology, but no print publisher seemed interested in that sort of thing. Now, with the advent of e-readers and digital publishing, it's possible to make that happen. Luckily, I kept all the copies of the magazine that featured my stories, because they were mostly written on a typewriter; a few of them on a computer but saved on floppy disks that have long since gone the way of the dinosaurs. So this publishing venture included sorting through the stories, deciding which ones had similar themes, updating, and ultimately retyping them all into Word documents that could be formatted for the digital world. Wow, what a project! But totally worth the effort.

Thanks to my son-in-law's help with the formatting (he wanted to learn the process as he's presenting a program on e-publishing at his library), and the magic of the digital age, the stories will now be available on Amazon and I'm hoping they will find a new audience.

So today I'm announcing the release of the first of my short story collections, An Uncommon Prince and Other Short Stories. It's been a fun and interesting venture and I can't wait to start on the next volume. How lucky we are to have the choices we do today for writers and readers, and I'm excited to be able to make the stories available once again.

 

 

To view An Uncommon Prince and Other Short Stories