By Bob Strother
When I started my journey into creative
writing in 2005, my first steps involved joining a statewide writers’
association and becoming part of a critique groups. While diverse in terms of
length of membership, craft knowledge and literary aspirations, most of the
group’s members focused in one of two areas: short stories and novels.
I was full of stories. They rattled around
in my head like arcade pinballs. I wrote furiously, trying to get them down on
paper while they were still fresh. That first year, I amassed about three dozen
stories, fed them through the critique process and, after careful editing and
proofing, began submitting to literary journals.
My first acceptance came on September 30,
2006—quite by chance, the day I retired from my professional career. The
literary journal moonShine review published “Gray Area” soon thereafter, and
for the first time in my life, I truly felt like a “writer.”
I kept on submitting and, although the
rejections far outnumbered the acceptances, by the end of 2006, I had a healthy
portfolio of published stories. Including two more stories published by moonShine
review. A critique group colleague asked why I would resubmit to a journal
where I’d already been published. I understood his logic. He and several other
novelists in the group wrote and submitted short stories only to build up
enough publishing credits to, hopefully, attract an agent (the more different journals
under your belt, the better). Still, probably because they were the first to
publish me, I had a soft spot for moonShine.
Over the next few years, I continued to
write short stories and continued to be published twice a year in moonShine
review. In 2010, the editor of that journal suggested I compile a collection of
stories. She knew the publisher of Main Street Rag, a small press publisher in
Charlotte, North Carolina, and felt he would be interested in publishing the
collection. As a result, Scattered, Smothered, and Covered, was published in
2011. Then in 2013, again with assistance from the moonShine editor, my first
novel, Shug’s Place, was published by the same press.
In 2015, with the release of my novel, Burning Time, I was honored to become the first author published through the newly
created moonSHINE review press. The
sequel, A Fire to be Kindled, was released April 1, 2017, and I hope to
complete and publish the third book in the trilogy sometime in the next year.
I might have secured an agent at some
point, had a book sold and published at some point in time. Or, I might still
be sending out those query letters and hoping for divine intervention.
In the end, I’m glad I didn’t follow the
typical path of agent to publisher. I would offer that building relationships
with literary journals—people in the business who know other people in the
business—might just be the right path for you.
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Bob Strother is an award-winning
author and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee with over one hundred publishing
credits in a number of literary journals and magazines both at home and abroad.
In addition to his short story collection and three published novels, his short
story “Doughnut Walk” was adapted for a short film that premiered at the 2014
Expecting Goodness Film Festival. Bob lives with his wife, Vicki, in
Greenville, South Carolina. One of the quotes Bob Strother likes best is from a
Doonesbury cartoon where one of the characters is referring to a novelist: “He
lies for a living.” Bob thinks that’s all right—to make up stories that aren’t
true about people who aren’t real—that done correctly, they help us realize
truths about ourselves. https://moonshinereview.wordpress.com/moonshine-press-releases/new-a-fire-to-be-kindled-bob-strother/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/bob.strother
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