In a month, on October 10th to be exact, My third story will go up on Yesteryear Fiction, a website featuring short pieces as selected by Earl Wynn. Then, 5 days later, My fourth story will go up. (Here are stories one and two.) Drop by and explore the site because Earl has a varied and interesting collection of stories, poems and hard-to-fit-in-a-niche writing well worth perusing.
The first of My two stories that Earl selected belong to an anthology, in e-book form, already up on SmashWords, titled "Thirty Stories." You can see it advertised on the upper left sidebar of The Jenius' main page. The upcoming two stories are from a second anthology, amazingly titled "Thirty More Stories," which will become an e-book shortly. The peculiarity of these anthologies is that each story was written on one page or less of standard (8x11 inches) paper, about 700 words per story.
This month (September 2010) I will complete another anthology, blending old stories with new and introducing a new "kind" of character, albeit by name rather than by intrinsic existence. (I think that makes sense.) In October I'll complete a fourth anthology, a collection of stories I wrote between 1996 and 2003 and then, by December, I'll come out with a totally new e-book, what would be My fifth this year, this one of totally new fiction.
It's obvious that this "sudden" emergence of The Jenius as a fiction writer is not sudden at all. Although some would claim much of what The Jenius posts here is "lying crap," the fact and evidence have shown that "lying" is not something The Jenius does. (Crap, on the other hand, is in the...eye...of the beholder...) My push to getting My fiction out int the world is in response to an urge I've had for decades, very much since I had My first story published in a local school "contest mimeograph".
Since 1994, I have written more than 130 stories. Of that total, only 7 saw the light of publishing, whether online or in print. That percentage of "success" seems to imply that the quality of the writing is poor, at best. But the fact is that I only submitted 8 stories for publication during that time, scoring with 7. Two were good enough to win against solid competition and serve as the centerpiece for the printed anthology "The Best of Times," available now on Amazon as a $199.95 "collectible." (Note: The flood that washed away much of My possessions in September 2008 took some 18 copies of the book and several folders of stories, ideas and notes. That still hurts.)
With the encouragement of My Special One, My family, friends and numerous near-strangers who have ready My stories over the years and been unanimously supportive, I finally decided that if I was ever going to do something with this writing thing I have, then the time to do it was now. It's a fact that the Internet and e-book technology have greatly leveled the playing field so that writers and other creative artists can place their works in the global public eye with greater ease than ever before.
In that effort, I am happy to have the help of X-cito Media, a local (as in "Based in Puerto Rico") e-business seeking to develop a presence as a digital publisher. Unlike traditional publishing, where space is at a premium, on the Web attention is the coin of the realm, the limited commodity that determines level of success. Part of the effort X-cito Media and I are making to attract that commodity is to quickly generate a catalogue of e-books, which brings Me back to My past. And present.
I love writing. I've been writing since I was 13 and can't imagine having anything like a career without writing as a part of it. For years I subsumed the fiction part of My writing in favor of...I don't know. Money, maybe. Practicality, perhaps. Some misguided attempt at being "serious" about My time. In any case, that lack of fiction writing tinged every success I had in other endeavors with a slight shadow of "but..."
No buts now. It's time to write as much fiction as I can, enjoying as I always have the process of coming up with a story that I would love to read and hopefully, find an audience that wants to read that kind of story as well. Okay, there is one "but": No fiction in The Jenius. Hasn't happened and won't happen. For as long as I post here about what I see and think about My Island, it won't be fiction. Even though there are plenty of times when I wish it were.
The Jenius Has Spoken.
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