Alaska Adventure
I didn’t post anything for the last couple of weeks mainly because I was visiting Alaska and also because of a new writing project I’m working on. I was born and raised in Alaska and I love to get up there and visit family, friends, and the great state itself. Even though I’ve lived in Utah for the last 16 years, I still feel like Alaska is my home and every time I leave, it is like leaving home for the first time all over again.
Even though our time was short, we had some great adventures, like a six-wheeler trip near Eureka Lodge. We experienced rain and got stuck in the mud, but it is great to get out where the moose and bears outnumber the people. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any wildlife, but my granddaughters still loved it.
As a writer, it is important to get out on adventures. It is hard to write stories with characters doing physically difficult things when we haven’t done them ourselves. Adventures also engage our emotions and help us figure out how to put them into words.
We also had some plans that didn’t turn out, which is a part of life as well as a part of writing our characters. Still, we made the best of it and had fun. Even the failures ended in beautiful views.
Kindle’s New Vella Format
The project that is distracting me is a new service from Amazon Kindle called Vella, which launches soon.
Vella is another way to publish stories in serialized form. Wattpad does something like this already. Coming in July, I believe, this service will become available where readers can read the first three chapters, or ‘episodes’, for free. If they like what they’ve read, they can purchase tokens to use to read the rest of the episodes as they come out.
What are serial stories? Many books started out like this. Take Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities), Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars), and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian). Many of their first books started life as serialized episodes that were first released in newspapers or magazines and later compiled together into book form.
When I heard about this format, it seemed perfect for me. I wrote several serialized stories for another company but it sadly went out of business before all of my stories could be finished. Well, Vella is providing a new opportunity for me to get these unpublished stories out, so I’ve been reworking and editing them so that I can have at least one of them up in its entirety. The others might have to trickle out a week at a time but maybe, depending on when Amazon actually launches it, I’ll be able to have a couple of them up. I’m working on Tales of Myrick the (Not So) Magnificent, Volume 3: Magic Socks be Darned right now. But it’s a lot of work and I need to get back to it. I’ll do another post with more details about this later.