The Ansleigh Arc is Finally Being Released
I won an honorable mention for my short story, Edwin, several years ago in the Writers of the Future competition. Then, I wrote How I Ruined My Life in about two or three months, published it, and disappeared. I reappeared a couple of years ago to write The Ansleigh Arc, which I then submitted to the Writers of the Future competition. Then, I again received an honorable mention (this time, I actually attended the event in Los Angeles, which was an awesome experience).
Hey, if you just want to get the book, you can click here.
I had no plans to re-enter the same short story into the competition (or any competition) in the future, so I had every motivation to publish The Ansleigh Arc and really put it out there. Yet, I didn't. I kept putting it off, and have continued to put it off, for a long time. It's fully edited, it's a decent enough story, and it won an award, yet it's just sat on my desktop, untouched.
Well, today I spent the two hours it took (wow, did not expect it to be that fast) to put it in an eBook and slap a mediocre (at best) cover together for said eBook. It was more important than anything that I just get the content out there and make some progress. If I really end up liking it in the future and others seem to enjoy it, I'll consider hiring an artist for the cover. Given that it's only a short story, though, I don't intend to invest much money into it.
What matters most to me, really, is having a higher-quality work out there between the release of How I Ruined My Life and the upcoming "rewrite" Keeping Secrets from Friends (tentative title). I also do intend to finish up the short story I have in my Imperfect universe, "Beneath Magenta Rain" (again, a tentative title) before I finish Keeping Secrets from Friends. I aspire to publish that one after the competition concludes, too (hopefully a lot sooner after it concludes than I did with The Ansleigh Arc).
The Ansleigh Arc is being released as part of the Kindle Unlimited program. As such, it is available exclusively on Amazon, and only for Kindle. However, there is no DRM associated with the work. If you know someone who has a Kindle that can get the file for you, by all means, have them go and grab it! All I'd ask for in exchange is a review on the page on Amazon. Having people reading my story is a lot more important to me than making money off of it is.
This is a short story written for a competition with a maximum word count of 17,000 words, and I came in well under that. On average, it'll take between thirty minutes and an hour to finish reading. I enjoy writing big, long works, so keeping stories like this short is a real challenge! That said, I think I was able to concisely convey the message that I wanted to within the framework of the competition's guidelines.
You can grab the Ansleigh Arc here.
Just going to casually drop that my life is still just chugging along; key changes are that I'm no longer moving overseas at this time, I'm fully vaccinated, and I'm going to start traveling again as soon as this month! I fully intend to post photos of my time in the Smoky Mountains in a few weeks, so keep an eye out for those.
Oh, and my crypto is way up. I'm feeling good about early retirement in a few years (or maybe sooner). I'm hopeful that soon I can escape the clutches of IT and focus on the creative works that I'm truly passionate about.