I went to bed late on December 30th and had trouble sleeping — an idea for a story was brewing and wouldn’t let me rest. At 2:30 a.m. I got up and banged out a couple hundred words that would serve as the skeleton. Yesterday, I got up and started filling out the story. By 2:00 p.m., after several passes it was done — I’d written nearly 1900 words without much of a thought or a fight; the story was just there.
The New Year Memo is a very dark story; I’ve filed it under “fiction: occult & supernatural” because it boils down to Death holding a grudge.
Mike and I have been talking about selling on Amazon for a while but I hadn’t really considered it a place for short stories until another friend started promoting his own work there. The process for building a .mobi file is not the most straightforward, especially for Mac users, but I had it figured out and completed inside about 90 minutes. This morning, I awoke to find an email confirming that the file had been crunched and assessed and was ready for sale as a Kindle Edition for just 99 cents. (BTW, you don’t need a Kindle to read it; there are Kindle apps for most mobile devices and operating systems.)
The whole story is a little over 4 pages (standard 8×11 single spaced) long so it’s not going to take a lot of your time to read. Here’s an excerpt:
It was New Year’s Day and the work was stacked up as it always was following a night of revelry. There was nothing to do but start with the first assignment. A smart phone with a cracked screen in a zip-close bag was at the top of the stack. The instructions said “play voice memo” and Richard Tan always followed instructions. What he heard would surely inform what he had to do next so he sat down at his desk and pressed play.
“Last year, I lost everything,” it started. His pen was poised above a yellow memo pad to take notes but something in the woman’s voice held his attention so closely that he forgot to write a single word.
If you do buy it, and read it, I’d love for you to leave a review. Thanks, and Happy New Year!