Sherri Cornelius

I have this story called "I Can Fly". You can see it over there in the sidebar. It's very short, like 2k words or something. When I put it on Smashwords I was hoping I'd get the same kind of closure I got with Mon Petit Ami. I did get some, sort of, but not the same palpable sense of release. I decided to take it off Smashwords and give Amazon's KDP Select a chance to earn me a piece of their Prime lending pot.

(Aside: KDP Select has been a waste of time for me. None of my three publications has ever been borrowed, so basically I'm giving Amazon exclusivity for free. Great racket they have going there. I won't use it again.)

A couple of months ago I read ICF through for the first time in a long time. I downloaded my two shorts to test on different apps, and on the Kindle app I encountered the problem, which was the damn ending! And yes, I'm really mad about it!

I hate writing endings. I struggle with the ending every time and never feel satisfied. If I have an ending in mind when I start, I'm not light on my feet enough to switch it up when the story takes me in a different direction. If I don't have the ending, that keeps me from finishing at all.

I guess that's why I got the closure with MPA. It couldn't be published until I got the ending right. It finally came around, mostly satisfying, published and BOOM, closure. "Oooh, must have been because I published it! It's out of my hair and out of my mind, because I put it out there. This is a sure-fire way to get rid of those nagging stories I can't stop editing!"

Ahem. No.

With ICF, I did fix the ending, but the pacing was bad. And this is why they say let your stories sit a while before you read them again, and to print them out. The different format--a Kindle reader app--and a few weeks gave me the separation I needed to see why I couldn't stop thinking about it.

But so once I was to that point, Skin & Scales was racing down the track. I thought, that's fine because I Can Fly is in KDP Select. It's exclusively on Amazon and at 99 cents. Nobody's borrowing, and it's highly doubtful anyone would pay a dollar for a story of only 2,000 words. ICF could wait while I focused on S&S.

So that's what I did. And then two days after I received my first real copies of Skin & Scales somebody paid a dollar for I Can Fly! Huzzah! Finally, a sale for this little story. Then I felt guilty as I realized I hadn't fixed the ending yet. Bummer. I hope they don't hold it against me.

Anyway, this lit a fire under me. If people were going to be paying, it better darn well be the best I can make it. I took the laptop to the park with us so the kids could play and I could plug in at the pavilion. I reshaped the ending to I Can Fly with little trouble, much to my relief. Only thing is, now it's pretty obvious that the title for this new story should be "The Girl for Me." Not pretty obvious, really obvious. But I already have a cover I'm satisfied with! People already know it by its old title! What do I do, what do I do??

I already changed Black Veil Angel to Skin & Scales pretty abruptly, but that was before publication. I'm glad I changed it. But I Can Fly is an established title. I guess it can be transitioned a couple of ways--maybe a subtitle, or in the description I can say "formerly I Can Fly"--so as not to confuse those who've already downloaded it.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of it.

It wasn't supposed supposed to be scary, self-publishing a book on Kindle. I wasn't particularly excited about it. I saw self-publishing as a way to get Black Veil Angel out of my hair for good. It worked so well with the two shorts I published, after all, and I wasn't really nervous about those two. It was really no big deal, and once they were published, even if by myself, they were finalized in my mind. I had struggled so long with BVA--and even after deciding to publish, the process dragged on and on.

But then it just stopped dragging.The instant I saw the image on iStockPhoto I knew it was THE ONE. I had been looking for months, but I'm glad now I didn't try to force it with another image. As the final cover started to come together I got more and more excited.

I'm really happy about the title change. "Black Veil Angel" had a couple of things about it that I thought didn't represent the book. First of all, if you've googled it, you know that the term black veil angel is a common name for a type of angelfish. It wouldn't be a huge leap for a reader to expect at least some symbolism involving a fish tank. Another is that confounding word "angel." It's used in the Christian angel way so freakin' much that I thought it would give potential readers the wrong idea. Especially with the Light on the cover.

Skin and Scales is more descriptive, fits the tone of the story, and plus I think it sounds pretty cool.

I wasn't going to do any promotion beyond a quiet link here on the blog. But once the cover was finished and I started the actual publishing process, I found myself making author pages on Goodreads and Amazon, almost like sleepwalking. I wrote a blurb and all the front matter of the book in a single afternoon. No major problems formatting the manuscript. It was just time, I guess.

I had planned not to care, based on my previous self-pub experiences. What I didn't take into consideration is the fact that this is a full-length novel. A novel I worked on for several years. A novel which ushered me through the hardest time of my writing life thus far. (Hopefully forever.) Maybe I do care, a little.

Skin and Scales will be available exclusively on the Kindle for three months. Woo!

 

I can feel the weather change right between my eyes. It’s been a spring-like few days—I wore shorts yesterday and today we’ll have a chance for thunderstorms. Not that it’s unusual to have ups and downs through the winter here in Oklahoma, but this year I have whiplash from our quick-change weather pattern. Whiplash and migraines.

But anyway, yesterday was awesome weather, a day not to be wasted by sitting indoors, a day to frolic in grass and flowers (of which there are neither, but our Bradford pear trees did start to bud). Gorgeous day. So what did I do? I sat indoors and got a new li'l shorty* ready to put on Smashwords.

I CAN FLY: Warren’s pickup line gets him nowhere—until he meets Edith. When he confides his power of flight, they know they’re meant to be together. Too bad not everyone sees it that way, but whatevs.

Since I only uploaded it yesterday it’s still not in the Premium Catalog in Smashwords, which only means it won’t be distributed to other online retailers yet. I manually uploaded it to Amazon this morning, but they also have a review process. So for now it’s only available on Smashwords.

This is an old story, but then again all my stories are old. I haven’t written with any kind of purpose for a couple of years. I feel like getting these old stories out there, for good or for bad, is a turning point for me. A slow awakening of my creativity, long dormant. Clearing the cobwebs. Of course it would be lovely if I got a ton of reviews and shared a million times, but that’s not why I’m self-publishing. Once I have Black Veil Angel on there, that will be the last of the work I would feel comfortable having online. It’s like I can feel new stories waiting for the older ones to be put to bed, and the only way I’ve found to do that is to publish them.

So look for Black Veil Angel to be published soon!

 

*I’ve been calling my short stories “li'l shorties” lately, and the novels are “wordy bastards”. Who knows why, but I like it.