Recently, I followed a train of thought until it started to spill out into a little story. And when, after much drama over how to open the link, my husband read it and gave me some feedback, I decided to go ahead and send it out. I haven’t done very much story writing in the last year, and it was nice to find that one. Plus, I feel like there are more stories inside that train of thought.
At the end of last year, I finished one story that had languished without an ending for several months. And even though it also received the spousely stamp of approval, I didn’t do anything with it at the time. I wasn’t interested in collecting more rejections. But I’m feeling more optimistic now. So I put that one out on submission as well.
I think working on the standard print versions of my Hike with Me books helps keep me in a writing frame of mind. The conversion from large print to standard is fairly mindless, but when I’m doing it, I’m focused on book production. And maybe that spills over into other times, giving me an excuse to go ahead and think about stories more.
I’ve finished the standard print editions on 6 out of 9 of the books. Two of the remaining are pretty short, one very short. The second Wild Coast book is one of the longest, so that will take a while to convert, especially because when I reduce the print size, the space for pictures changes. For a couple of the other conversions, I’ve had to completely redo my picture plates so that I can fit everything without leaving big tracks of white space in the text (a waste of precious page space!). I’ve been able to make it work, though there are a lot more pages of consecutive pictures than in the large print versions.
And I’ve updated the large print editions to conform to the style guide that I really should have started a few books ago. Mostly, it’s adding borders to the photos so it is clear what is a caption and what is text. Though I did have a number of the large print books in 20 point font, and I later changed to 18 point. So, I switched all the 20 point to 18, because that reduces the page count and allows me to also reduce the price (a smidge).
If writing more stories is happening because I’m working on these books, then I might just have to figure out other publishing tasks that I can work on when these conversions are done. Maybe it’s time to publish a collection of short stories that have been rejected. Just because they weren’t to any particular editors’ taste doesn’t mean they aren’t good stories.