The Author Guy Blog

1st January 2025.  Hello out there, Welcome back, and greetings on this very first day of the new year 2025. I hope it is a glorious one for you and those near and dear to you. This portends to be an exciting time for me in what is now my 11 th year in my author journey. We have a confirmed date of Tuesday, May 5 th , to launch the 2 nd Edition of my award-winning novel Blue by You through the vast marketing and sales infrastructure of Simon & Schuster. And as I am well along in the process with my publisher for my fifth novel, For the Love of Charley Chaplain , I’m hoping for its release by the Thanksgiving / Christmas holiday season at the end of this year. Another thing I’m hopeful of realizing is inspiration that will result in a Christmas-themed book I mentioned a few weeks ago. I’m confident it will happen – just need to be patient. In the meantime, I’m working away at crafting short stories for online publication and potentially inclusion in an anthology I’ll published ...

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...