A Happy Discovery!
When you pack to move out of state, sometimes you find things you thought you'd lost forever. Once in a while it's something priceless.
It wasn't a physical object, not exactly. It was something in my backup files buried in an odd subfolder of the Stories folder inside Robert's Folder > Robert's Folder from several successive backups. I was checking it to make sure that I actually did have all the novels I wrote in 2009 on the backups in my USB key, because my 17" HP laptop has been having problems lately. I wanted to be sure I didn't lose any more files.
Deep in a subfolder of Stories marked 2002 Sales was this - my acceptance letter for "Crossthought on the Hatestream," my contract for "Crossthought on the Hatestream" and a .doc file of the final version of the story. That was the first pro-paid short story I've sold in my life.
It's horror. It was fun to write and the editor's suggestions improved it mightily. I got $100 for it and spent the proceeds on my Escape from New York - long exciting story that might go into a memoir someday. By 2006, I thought I had lost it forever. No one I knew had saved off a copy of it while it was up on Gothic.net. I hadn't had the sense to save off an extra copy of it while it was up on Gothic.net. The email address I had at the time where I'd backed it up and never deleted the correspondence got deleted for inactivity.
I thought it was gone forever.
I kicked myself for it good and long, because I could've been submitting that proven success as a reprint to every horror anthology on Ralan's from 2004 on, the point the contract ran out. Yeah. This story is worth a second harvest. Whether it's the best short story I ever wrote is moot - it's the one an editor could get at a bargain rate with the security of knowing a professional editor beat it into shape before they saw it. Famous short stories get that way because the author sensibly submitted them as Reprints to every anthology remotely in spitting distance of its theme and genre.
Things change. I'm now weighing submitting it to anthologies or going directly to Amazon to make it available on Kindle for cheap. I know one plan I had for it was to get it back, write a dozen more cool horror stories and use it as the main attraction for 13 Tales of Terror. That'd be a pretty cool Kindle title too.
I'm going home to San Francisco and I found the most successful short story I ever wrote - the historic one. However good any of the other stories in that file are when I get them into magazines or anthologies, whatever people say about it when I've got a lot more stories in print, it's definitely the one and only first. I have it back. That feels so good.
It's also safe on my USB key drive. I checked.
So here's the 99 Cent Question:
Should I take it directly to Kindle so you can get it right away for less than a buck, or go to Ralan's and find its next home in a horror anthology?
Please comment and let me know.
It wasn't a physical object, not exactly. It was something in my backup files buried in an odd subfolder of the Stories folder inside Robert's Folder > Robert's Folder from several successive backups. I was checking it to make sure that I actually did have all the novels I wrote in 2009 on the backups in my USB key, because my 17" HP laptop has been having problems lately. I wanted to be sure I didn't lose any more files.
Deep in a subfolder of Stories marked 2002 Sales was this - my acceptance letter for "Crossthought on the Hatestream," my contract for "Crossthought on the Hatestream" and a .doc file of the final version of the story. That was the first pro-paid short story I've sold in my life.
It's horror. It was fun to write and the editor's suggestions improved it mightily. I got $100 for it and spent the proceeds on my Escape from New York - long exciting story that might go into a memoir someday. By 2006, I thought I had lost it forever. No one I knew had saved off a copy of it while it was up on Gothic.net. I hadn't had the sense to save off an extra copy of it while it was up on Gothic.net. The email address I had at the time where I'd backed it up and never deleted the correspondence got deleted for inactivity.
I thought it was gone forever.
I kicked myself for it good and long, because I could've been submitting that proven success as a reprint to every horror anthology on Ralan's from 2004 on, the point the contract ran out. Yeah. This story is worth a second harvest. Whether it's the best short story I ever wrote is moot - it's the one an editor could get at a bargain rate with the security of knowing a professional editor beat it into shape before they saw it. Famous short stories get that way because the author sensibly submitted them as Reprints to every anthology remotely in spitting distance of its theme and genre.
Things change. I'm now weighing submitting it to anthologies or going directly to Amazon to make it available on Kindle for cheap. I know one plan I had for it was to get it back, write a dozen more cool horror stories and use it as the main attraction for 13 Tales of Terror. That'd be a pretty cool Kindle title too.
I'm going home to San Francisco and I found the most successful short story I ever wrote - the historic one. However good any of the other stories in that file are when I get them into magazines or anthologies, whatever people say about it when I've got a lot more stories in print, it's definitely the one and only first. I have it back. That feels so good.
It's also safe on my USB key drive. I checked.
So here's the 99 Cent Question:
Should I take it directly to Kindle so you can get it right away for less than a buck, or go to Ralan's and find its next home in a horror anthology?
Please comment and let me know.