Nighteyes Annotations

I never expected, years ago, that my first publication to book form would be a serial flash fiction series. When I first decided to become an author, a full length novel was the only thing I had considered as a possibility. As of this writing, I do have two other books, one entirely finished, but neither is slated for publication yet.

Due to one of Holly Lisle's courses, I was inspired to create my blog. Again, through her courses, I began doing regular flash fiction. These two things combined as you are probably well aware and the results have been interesting. One of my experiments resulted in this book. I attempted to do a serialized flash fiction thinking it would be a minor challenge and realized just how major an undertaking it was only after I was already committed.

I struggled to make each entry stand alone as a complete story, but still be part of a larger story arc. Wow. After three or four posts, trying to make the stories all make sense, fit into the greater whole without rehashing too much was a real challenge. This was especially true since I was setting a limit of roughly 600 words as the maximum range.

The end result felt like a whole story and I admit I was happy with the results. The decision to release it in a book form came to me through a conversation with someone and I realized that it might be a nice early book to get a feel for the paid self-pub waters with. Editing was a must, but also I wanted to add a little more. It doesn't feel right to charge someone for something that I had been offering for free, so I added three more chapters to create a sub-plot.

If it was hard to write the original, it was doubly so trying to fit a new plot thread into the existing series of stories without it feeling awkward or shoehorned. I believe I was successful in this. Next came the ordeal of editing. I'd not had any funding to spare, but did have an editor friend who owed me a favor. She was more than happy to edit the work free of charge.

It went downhill from there. The first two files sent ended up being unreadable for some reason. When I finally got the file to go through uncorrupted, her life went crazy. It isn't my place to talk about someone else's private situation, but in the end things resulted in a few months of waiting for what should have taken two weeks at most. I spent the time working on getting a solid cover and even had newsletter members helping me to improve the final version. I don't begrudge her, but it was fairly frustrating. In the end, I had to get another person to do the editing instead.

So now with the work edited and ready for publication. I had a decent cover for it and I had the programs needed to do conversions into the required formats. So it was that I began dipping my feet into the publication waters. As a little bonus, I spent a few days completely reworking my website to be a lot more user friendly and more easily navigated. The intent was to relaunch the site at the same time as the book was released. It's been an interesting journey and I have learned a lot from it. I suspect that it will go a little more smoothly when I release the next book at least.