A Closet for a Dragon and Other Early Tales<\/i> was my second experiment in self-publishing. It\u2019s a collection of stories I had written over many years, the first one in 1961. I went through my files, looking for anything that I felt was good enough. Most of them were not, and some were unreadable.<\/p>\n
I had one story, \u201cA Closet for a Dragon,\u201d which I really wanted to publish. It was the first story I wrote after I had the insight into what a story was.<\/p>\n
In the early years, when I was doing mostly short fiction, I got mostly rejections, except for \u201cSand Painting\u201d and \u201cCarion Troll.\u201d One time an editor told me that he liked the idea for the story I had sent him, he liked my characters, he liked my writing, but it wasn\u2019t a story. I had no idea what he meant, and I no longer remember what that story was. A long time later, having been rejected over and over again, I lay in bed, trying to figure out what published stories had in common that made them stories. Then it came to me as a kind of epiphany. (I had had two others \u2014 the sun doesn\u2019t cross the sky, world turns under it; and, I really can\u2019t read all the books I want to.) I wrote the idea down, reworked it, and this is now what I believe to be absolutely true:<\/p>\n
Story is a narrative about how somebody overcame an obstacle to achieve a desired end \u2014 or failed \u2014 and brought about a change, in himself or the world around him. If what I write does not have all these elements \u2014 narrative, character, obstacle, objective, change \u2014 then I may have literature, I may have fiction, but I don\u2019t have Story.<\/p>\n
I will not discuss that further here, but I will in person.<\/p>\n
I had published Cat Tales<\/i>, as a Kindle only, though now it has been republished in paper, and I wanted to do something more. I had \u201cCloset\u2026,\u201d \u201cSand,\u201d (the oldest), \u201cSand Painting,\u201d and \u201cCarrion Troll,\u201d so I selected enough stories for a book, added a collaboration I had done with the late C. Bruce Hunter, \u201cThursday\u2019s Child;\u201d and \u201cDorian\u2019s Choice,\u201d which had been published in Phase 5<\/i>. I talked Darcy into letting me publish one of her stories. I rewrote parts of most of the stories, gave those which were unpublished and strictly my own to Leona Wisoker, then a free-lance editor I trusted, then fixed everything up and did a Createspace version and a Kindle version.<\/p>\n
Shall we say that I learned a lot?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Closet for a Dragon and Other Early Tales was my second experiment in self-publishing. It\u2019s a collection of stories I had written over many years, the first one in 1961. I went through my files, looking for anything that I felt was good enough. Most of them were not, and some were unreadable. IContinue reading →<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-331","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","no-thumb"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/331\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}