Learning from Authenticity

It was ironic reading over my short Authenticity again. This is the story I contributed to Saucy Chronicles 1: Unicorns. This week I’ve talked to friends and family who have purchased the book. Real people spent real money to read a story I wrote. I think that is all kinds of cool.

The feedback I’ve received has been positive, which is part of what makes my own reading ironic in my mind. I’ve always heard stories about writers who cringe reading stuff they’ve written in the past. I never understood why they would do that. I figured I would always be proud of my work. Now I understand those stories so much better.

When I read over Authenticity I saw lessons that I have now learned right in black and white on the page. I obviously hadn’t learned when I wrote it, even though Authenticity was the best writing I had ever done.
What was really bothering as I read Authenticity again was knowing that if I sat down to write it again today, I would write it better. I’m actually a bit reluctant to push Unicorns too hard, but their are some really well done stories in there. So when I said on Thursday I was promoting more for the others than for me, I meant it.
The good news is that we, as a group, are planning on doing a second anthology. We are just now in the planning stages, but I’m already looking forward to it. I learned so much from Chronicles 1, and I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn from Chronicles 2.

One day I would like to take all my Saucy short stories, and maybe throw in a couple of others I’ve written that I still have the writes to, and put together my own anthology. That would give me a chance to dust off Authenticity and revise it one last time.

Another lesson I learned was this was watching, from afar, how much Steve had to go through to get the book formatted just for Kindle. Our original hope was to have all eBook formats covered, but that ended up being an even larger amount of work. I need to figure out how to climb that mountain myself soon. The only thing holding me back is that by the time I’m ready to publish something, new tools might be available.

Have you ever epublished something? How did it go?