I uploaded my first piece of fiction tonight to Amazon KDP’s “Kindle Vella” platform. It’s an entry in their “2024 Velly Awards” competition, which is essentially a popularity contest when you examine the rules and judging criteria.
My wife ran across it somewhere and suggested I enter. Having nothing to lose except my dignity, I took her up on it. (First prize is USD$25,000.)
I already had an idea (got plenty of those) and so I began writing. Today, Espisode 1 of “Ghosts of the Apocalypse” is in the process of going live as I type this.
I never seriously gave Kindle Vella much thought, although it was always in the back of my mind as an option of sorts. What kinda option? I dunno, exposure, feedback, maybe even some revenue. Bwahahahahaha!
I can hear you saying, “Big deal, so you wrote a story and self-pubbed it. Lots people here have done similar.” Yeah, and so have I. I’ve been blogging since January 2007, have 4 self-pubbed books under me, with decent to good reviews (a few bad, but it doesn’t seem they read the actual book I wrote or read Amazon’s fine print on length.) So, I am not new to getting feedback or seeing my name up there.
But this is {{{fiction}}} Like I wrote in this blog post yesterday:
This is an historic moment for me on a personal level. This will be my first piece of published fiction, ever. I have always has aspirations of writing. I wrote and submitted terrible short stories to all the major science-fiction magazines way back in the 1980s. They were mercifully rejected. One never even merited a rejection letter. I guess they thought it was so bad that they weren’t going to waste postage on telling me so. In 1991 I moved to Southern California to hopefully become a writer for television. I even submitted a script for “Star Trek: the Next Generation,” but it was rejected. I piddled with a few more but but never submitted them and then alcohol happened and I gave up writing for almost a decade. (The stereotype of writers is that they drink a lot. When I wrote, I didn’t drink. When I began drinking, I gave up writing. When I gave up drinking, I returned to writing. I sometimes do things backwards, I guess.)
I never entertained thoughts that my writing would be a Catholic spirituality blog along with devotional booklets. No, I was going to be a beloved writer of soft sci-fi novels and stories, and maybe a bunch of Star Trek episodes, to boot! But, no. Not that I am resentful. I never gave up the dream and have been working on miscellaneous pieces for the past 10+ years.
There is one post in these forums on Vella (Vella is a waste of time) and it is generally looked down on (because Amazon and the weird royalty thingy). But I don’t care. I don’t have to keep at it (though I will finish the story, hey, I might get lucky and win something) or develop better, more consistent writing habits. And if Vella is considered the gutter of the literary world, so be it. I’ve seen gutters.
Anyway, just wanted to share this nerve-wracking thing with you all. (Again, ‘nerve-wracking’ because of the personal meaning to me of my firstbfiction piece, regardless of the medium it’s on.) And Scrivener (and Scapple) helped. A lot.
Later…
(I unpublished the story. It wasn’t as good as it could be if I had more time to devote to it. I will probably ‘fix it’ and turn it into a KDP ebook/POD