Kelly McClymer's Blog

Wow. The Apple iPad isn’t even shipping yet, and Amazon has announced it will change its pay structure to meet Apple’s 70/30 split (with the publisher/author getting the 70%!).

I’m planning to Kindle my out of print historical romances, and I just decided that I’m going to Kindle my entire file drawer of short stories (this would be about 23 stories, ranging from a story I submitted back in college (typed on a typewriter!), when I  was a sophomore, to a few that were published in various small presses (most back when submissions were done through snail-mail!).

I’ve held on to these stories, collecting them in a file drawer, hoping one day to see why they never got published. I love these stories, but I have to let them go. Sometimes no amount of revision will make a story publishable, and it is time for me to acknowledge that fact about these stories that have been workshopped, submitted, and taken up space in a file drawer for two decades.

So, I thought of a way to share them in an instructive way. I’m going to Kindle the stories, and then I’m going to blog about them — why I wrote each story, the history of submission, the reaction I had after reading the story a decade or later, why they were rejected.

For other writers out there, you may feel my pain at the sight of these beloved stories that were just not right for any of the magazines I targeted for them. For readers, you will get a glimpse of a writer’s development and a flash of insight about what makes this writer tick in terms of themes, craft, and persistence.

I’ll start next week, with more details forthcoming at the time. I’m hoping that I’ll learn about the Kindle process with this experiment, so I’ll be ready when it is time to re-release my out of print historical romances (still trying to decide whether to revise before re-releasing…am in quandary, but will work my way out, I’m sure).

And I’ll finally set these stories free from the confines of their filing cabinet prison.

Kelly