The Author Guy Blog

8th January 2025.  Hello out there, Welcome back. My wife and I just returned to our Kentucky home after welcoming the new year at our South Carolina beach timeshare condominium. It’s been a magical place for me to vacation every yearsince 1985, and I look forward to our return in September. For most of those forty years, I’ve decamped with a full briefcase and laptop, either for work prior to my retirement or to nurture my literary pursuits that began in 2014. I’m happy to report that the computer has not accompanied my for the past few years and the freedom has been a wonderful change. My time is now absorbed with walks on the beach, dining out at restaurants during the off-season and, mostimportantly, reading upwards of a dozen books during the seven days we’re in residence. As a novelist, my interest leans heavily toward fiction, especially by the works of authors I admire and from whom I can learn so much. But at the encouragement of my son and other great friends, I’ve begun ...

28th June 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. In my tenth blog, back in January of this year, I wrote about works of fiction that had made an impact on me, and, in fact, inspired me to become a novelist. My focus then was on brief books – what today would be known as a novella – and how some of them gained worldwide reader acclaim and awards such as the Pulitzer and the Nobel. I’ve self-published four novels (word count greater than 40,000 – mine were around 65,000) and my fifth, to be released early next year, will come in at around 75,000 words. But when I began my author journey ten years ago, it was the novella (21,000 to 39,000 words) I envisioned myself writing, and it’s a place I believe I will find myself returning to with my sixth manuscript. An even lesser word count, traditionally topping off at no more than 8,000 words, is the realm of short stories. I recently read of the passing of Alice Munro, a Canadian author who published fourteen collections of short stories over fiv...