I ‘ve revamped the blurb for A Matter of Perception, changed the order of the stories so that the one that got all the accolades is at the beginning, added the blurb for Give Me a Break at the end, and written an introductory story called A Drop From the Well of Creativity. (Do you like the serial commas?)
Here’s the new blurb. It’s a big improvement on the old one.
Take a journey into a world where the hidden becomes manifest and the lines between fantasy and reality blur. This collection of imaginative and entertaining stories about ghosts, sirens, light spectrum mages, realm hopping gods, alien monsters and ordinary people will warm your heart and make you smile, shiver, and maybe even wonder about the nature of reality itself. The theme of individual perception as a result of our assumptions, beliefs and emotional experience bind these otherwise diverse stories into a unified whole.
If this inspires you to purchase the book – at $1.99, why not? – click the cover for Smashwords, where you can get every kind of file you could ever imagine needing, and here
Here’s the new introductory story – it’s short, only 500 words.
Splosh. Inspiration falls like a drop of mercurial silver into the vast depths of my open mind. It hovers in space and collects, then merges with a gaggle of ideas and images until it hangs pregnant and heavy with a pressing need to deliver. Synapsis fire in my brain; I press a button; a screen lights up and my fingers fly across a keyboard spewing out words as if holding them in would cause me distress. It would.
Silence would be destroyed by characters screaming to escape the confines of mental existence. Their world would remain in limbo, an excruciating place, half in and half out of existence like a baby caught in the neck of a womb. Over time, their untold stories would fester and fall apart; some aspects would be lost forever, some might reappear in a different context or a different form, but without those fingers tapping on that keyboard, this drop would forever remain unborn – a deadly state for both baby and mother.
Luckily, I know this, so the wet washing remains in the washing machine, the floor remains un-vacuumed and the dinner is late. Luckily, my family know it too, but when their stomachs complain, so do they. So my fingers reluctantly cease their flurry, and my mind, its stories only partially disgorged, turns to more mundane things – until tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. And so a collection of stories is born. In the following months, I wash them, feed them, cut their hair and nails, and generally make them presentable, then I send them to visit editors of various magazines. They never get a job and come back feeling as if they’ll never fit in.
“I’m not like the others,” they tell me.
One story almost wins a competition, and she feels proud about that, but when I look her over again, I find a pimple on her face. How could I have sent her out with that blight on her? No wonder she didn’t win. I wash that pimple off but don’t send her out again. I don’t send any of them out again. It’s clear they won’t get a job, not because they’re bad – they are, in fact, very well behaved – they just aren’t what editors are looking for, and they’re quite happy sitting on my desk in a pile.
Time passes and many other drops of inspiration fall and follow their path to manifestation, then one day, one of those drops says, “Why don’t you publish those stories yourself? They might as well go out in the world.” Why not, indeed? So, I spruce up the stories, dress them in a pretty cover and write a few words to hang around their neck. And here they are in all their sweet, puzzling, surprising, and sometimes slightly disturbing, but always entertaining, glory.
Norris is the youngest, but like all little ones, he’s cute, and since everyone loves him, I’ve given him star billing at the beginning of the book. Take it away, Norris…
What do you think?
Being able to make these changes at any time is one of the things I love about digital publishing.
