A box of books arrived today – my author copies of a new children’s book that will be officially published in June.
There’s a moment of such strangeness when you see your story in print as a book, a real book, not this vision that was in your head, but something you can hold and read and place on a book shelf. An actual object.
What was previously just an idea, so flakey that you were embarrassed for anyone to see the first few scribbled pages (anybody reading those early notes would know for sure you were crazy). Now here it is, complete with its little book jacket, carrying its own ISBN number, listed on Amazon, finally respectable, not at all crazy. Like an outlaw that’s gone straight. That’s what happens when you’re published. And it feels very strange.
Terrific Books
Terrific Books, Writing Your Own History
fiction: an imaginary tea party
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 4 Comments
When you want to fictionalize your life in a short story or a novel, your props might be a theme that you want to explore, a true life setting, some characters who may be real people in your life (more about them later), and emotion. The emotion is important. And it’s not really a prop of course – it’s the engine of your fiction. Hopefully you also have fragments of a story. Something happens in fiction. Your characters want/need something, they struggle for it, things go wrong, and in the end they either get it (happiness, peace, the girl/boy, money, property, understanding etc.), or they don’t. But there’s action in the struggle. They don’t just sit around thinking about it like we usually do in real life.
