Category Fiction Tidbits

All weekend long, my novella, CELESTE, by Michelle Devon, is free! Amazon.com has listed it for free for the entire weekend, and I’m very excited to see I’ve already reached a couple of their best sellers lists. For example, I made it to #4 in best selling short fiction and #11 in thrillers/suspense. I made it to #304 overall too, but that’s not quite high enough and I’m already dropping this morning!

If you enjoy shorter reads, this one about 55 pages long, that will keep you guessing until the end, then please consider picking up my novella today! Share the links to it with your friends and have them pick up a copy too, and if you feel so compelled, I would love an honest review of my work too.

Thanks for everyone who helped me get to this point! Ya’ll rock!

Love and stuff,
Michy

The odds of winning the last mega-millions big lottery that was all over the news were something like 1 in 176 million chances of winning. That’s pretty long odds, right there. Yet, ever hopeful, people buy tickets to the lottery every day. Why? Because human beings seem to like playing the odds. One of the reasons hang-gliding and mountain climbing and even something as simple as roller coasters are so adrenaline pumping and exciting to people is because there is a risk of death (or at least serious injury), however small, that comes with the rush. If there were nothing to fear, there would be nothing exciting about it. You get excited because you faced risk and death, and you win… you survive. You beat the odds while staring them in the face.

We play the odds all the time: every time we get behind the wheel of the car (sober or not, driving or not), we risk death. Every time we take a new medication from a doctor that we’ve never taken before, we risk death. Every time we walk out our door, we risk death, and just staying in and doing nothing risks death in a different way. After all, did you know that more people die from accidents and injuries or illnesses that happened in their home than all other crimes and causes of death combined? Most of us, if we die, are going to start that process in the relative safety of our own homes.

The point is, we are constantly at risk of death, every one of us, and yet somehow we function every day in spite of it. We are gamblers, human beings are… yes, we are. We play the odds. We hope for the best, even though we know the odds are stacked in favor of the house, because we know, deep down, that someone is going to beat the odds. We believe, with prayer and fantasy, that we will be that someone.

And sometimes… we are. Or as my uncle said to my mom once–and you’ve probably very likely said it before yourself: Someone has to win the lottery. Might as well be me.

And yet, in the end, we all die. Every last one of us is going to die. We can’t escape that eventuality. But some of us die sooner than others. There are reasons for that. We don’t all get to live a good, long life and slip into the next plane of existence quietly in our sleep. Blessed are those who do.

BEATING MY OWN ODDS

I’ve been doing a lot of reading ...

Since becoming a writer, many have asked me the source of my inspiration, what it is that compels me to write. The answer is always different, depending on my mood, what’s foremost in my mind that day, or what is currently inspiring me. Though the answers are almost always different, they are all true. If I had to pin point the reason I write to just one thing, just one impetus that moves my fingers, I’d have to say it’s the ‘what ifs’.

When I was a child, what ifs got me into trouble with daddy. He would tell me to do something a certain way, and I’d asked, “What if I did it this way instead?”

I mean, I didn’t think it; I would actually ask...

I had a friend, who is writing her first novel, recently ask me if writing short stories was a good idea for a writer. The honest answer is, I don’t know, but the more I thought on it, the more I do think it’s a good idea.

Writing short stories and getting them published is a good thing for many reasons, in my opinion, particularly if you can get those short stories published in a paying market of any kind, online or otherwise, but excluding internet ‘content’ sites.

There are a ton of short story internet sites now that are paying anywhere from $10 to as much as $1500-2500 bucks for one quality short story. There are also anthologies that are paying to publish shorts too.

Now, anthologies are essentially books that are full novel sized books, but instead of one story, it contains several short stories, usually by more than one author (not always). There are several different ways payment for anthologies work.

Books like the Chicken ...