A quirky collection of short stories

This post is about the process of writing and publishing this collection of short stories.

While I finish editing my three novels (see other posts), I thought I would test the publishing water by trying a small book first. It’s a way of learning on the job, my publishing apprenticeship.

ME-TIME TALES:

TEA BREAKS FOR MATURE WOMEN AND CURIOUS MEN

Now available as a paperback http://bit.ly/1ePueza and e-book. Amazon http://amzn.to/1ijii8n i book, Kobo editions also.

And there’s a Give-Away currently on Goodreads

Me-Time Tales is a collection of ironic short stories with a dark edge. Each one has a character self-absorbed in some way. I didn’t research them, I met them, listened and later someone like them popped into my head as I wrote.  

In Me-Time Tales, each story has a very different starting point. The only research I did was to observe and record. There’s nowt so funny as fowk. I believe that’s a Yorkshire saying? (I should rush and research that). Observations: a woman moaning about her boyfriend’s lackadaisical responses; another fussing about her health; a further complaining about the eating habits of her (now nervous and inhibited) child. At some point, I sat down and wrote, not necessarily with those people in mind but perhaps a sentence they’d uttered, or a sentence I was writing made me summon up a character similar to them. I don’t know why I wrote any of the stories on any of the occasions, except that I had fun.

Of course, it’s not enough to create a character. They must have a voice and something in their life must have meaning or impact upon the reader. As Robert McKee says in ‘Story’ “…the life story of each and every character offers encyclopaedic opportunities.”

I wanted one younger woman to struggle with a moral dilemma and I didn’t want her to be any kind of weak pushover. I invented her from scratch.  An author’s characters live and breathe as result of his/her interactions with the world over the past – however many years lived. I really don’t know where all my characters, their sayings, peculiarites and weaknesses come from except that they are present in everyday life somewhere, and I’ve come across them some time even if I don’t remember that now. It all goes into the unconscious into a morass of mini experiences and observations.

I wrote the Me-Time Tales at different times in different places. It was only four years ago that, scanning through my documents I saw that I had several short stories I could group together. I had one hundred copies of the collection printed to trial them. If there had been no interest, that would have been that. But they were well received.

Last summer, I tweaked, rewrote, proof-read the stories before they hit the print rollers. A few I wrote especially to make the collection up to a reasonable size. Then I used an editor, tweaked and proof-read again. That doesn’t sound like a fun time. It wasn’t. However, fun found me.

I was told that for marketing the book I needed to engage in social media, including writing a blog. After thinking about that challenge, I decided to let Me-Time be the blog owner and to let the characters do the talking. They took over straight away and were often quite hard on me.  The blog is truly a dialectic, a characters’ dialectic. If you haven’t visited it, it represents the second face of my ‘characterfulwriter’ logo. You will find the fun blog at http://fictionalcharacterswriting.blogspot.com. I found an image for each character to summon up either their personality or their story.  Here are three of them:

ELAINE: Look! I didn’t ask to get into this.

JESS: Yeah right, you rate my tat?

DARYL: Who will change old lamps for new?

Doing the Me-time blog has made me smile. My characters have been bitchy, challenging and feisty. Strangely, they have attracted visitors from everywhere except Australia, and the total visits in its six months of life has now exceeded 7,000. I’d love to know why Russia visited suddenly and in huge numbers, ranking highest of all for two weeks, then stopped. Blogging moves in mysterious ways, at least, to me.

The Me-Time blog continues even now that the book is published. My characters are so feisty, I hardly have any say in it.