My Return to Writing
A Piece of the Beyond
I called this blog Tales of Karnum and Beyond because not everything I write occurs on Karnum. My fantasy world is my primary focus, but I have a sci-fi world I created not long after I started forming my fantasy world. I also get random ideas that I run with to see what could happen.
One of those random ideas returned me to steady writing at the end of 2020. Most of us found that year frustrating at best. I sat down and wrote a dystopian novel with some fun sci-fi elements to pound out my thoughts about the system and our culture. I write stories rather than a journal for therapeutic release. It took me four and a half months to write around 85,000 plus words. When I was done, I knew I needed to take my writing seriously. So 2021 led to a conference, more writing groups, and figuring out how publishing had changed all because of pulling off a rough draft of a novel that banged out some angst.
Fall 2022, I learned about Kindle Vella. It is a writing platform for publishing stories in serial format. Each piece is an episode. Most of mine are one scene in a 1300 to 2200 word range, making for a few minutes of reading. I used my dystopian story, badly named Cataclysm, like too many others, as a test run. I honestly still can’t think of another name. I used Canva to make a title picture and put up the first three episodes. Vella allows readers to read the first three episodes free, but after that they must use tokens to read further.
Cataclysm is a story that has not had a professional edit. I would love for readers to give me comments as they read through it. I put author notes encouraging such in the first fifteen episodes, but stopped soon after that. If they had read that far, I felt they didn’t need reminders. Though I found out they could not leave comments yet, but that feature is out of beta as of March 2023 and being rolled out to all stories.
So what is Cataclysm about? Let me share the blurb here along with the link to it.
Colonel Jaxon Conway returns five months after his plane crash with proof of a miraculous head surgery and a fractured memory. He becomes a fugitive when the military believes aliens saved him and he asks for a bible. The aliens are his Irish relatives coming home from space. He goes below the ninth with their aid. He finds a church and the disenfranchised. Will he survive long enough to remedy the ills of an imposing city state and help his space relatives find home once again on Earth?
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/product/B0BP8D4SQ3
Let me know what you think. The best thing you can do is give it a thumbs up if you like it and reviews help stories and books to be seen by more people. Leaving comments on the episodes will help fellow readers (commenting just came out of beta and is rolling out to all stories). I do not expect everyone to like it or read it. It’s definitely aimed at people who like the genre and want a Christian worldview in their stories.
Your help with my writing adventure by supplying feedback is appreciated, even if you give me a constructive comment about something you don’t like. I published this story on Vella to gain feedback and improve it based on what readers truly think.