So I am Release day minus 2 on my first major project. The Wondering Wanderer, a collection of three short stories bound together with not only a shared alternate history but poetry to set the mood of each piece. It is the accumulation of 25 years of work for me. The stories inside began taking shape back when I was 15 years old. It was quite a different story then, a very different story; it was simpler, less complex. more that of a teenaged boy. It was still good, I think, but I have changed an awful lot in that time and so, too, has my writing! Each story seems to have morphed and evolved on it's own, guiding me to arrive at the final form it wants to be in. I am the vessel! I am simply the hands which the story lacks to write itself!
As release day approaches I grow steadily more nervous yet more serene (somehow) each day - I am anxious to see my final proof and approve it, of course, send it out into the aether to it's fate - but I am finally ready. I know at last that my story is written, written as it should be, as it wants to be, I am actually content and confident that I have put my very, very best effort out there. What I am putting out there for the world to see is the best I have for now. All I have left is to keep getting better and move forward.
Each of the three short stories in the collection is a seed. Each is a part of a larger project, a full scale novel or, perhaps even a series I started to write and am going to write! This experience of preparing this collection for release into the wild has taught me an awful lot! In the 10 day span it took to edit, prepare, re-work, re-write and re-think (that was pretty much all of the time) my stories again evolved pretty much on their own and aligned into part of a more coherent universe. Before I started putting the collection together, the idea of these three distinct projects being a part of the same universe had never occurred to me! Now, here they are; polished, primed, spiffed up and ready! I am still as nervous as hell though! Just so you know!
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