I'm a Published Fiction Author Now
By Alan Dove
As anyone reading this blog should know, I’ve been working full-time as a writer of nonfiction since 1997. I’ll admit that I’ve also played around a bit with writing fiction over the years, but this year I decided to make my first serious effort at producing a proper short story. It was hard, fun, educational, immensely rewarding, and now it’s published in an honest-to-gosh fiction outlet. They even paid me for it - about enough to buy a good hamburger at my local pub.
The whole process was a great experience, but my favorite part was actually the editing. Grayson Towler, one of the editors of Electric Spec and a longtime writer of speculative fiction himself, provided one of the most helpful edits I’ve ever received. His comments not only spurred me to improve the story in several places, they also gave me some great tips on dialogue, characters, and pacing that I’ll certainly try to incorporate in future stories.
While I don’t plan to quit my day job, I definitely hope to write more fiction during gaps in my regular workdays. In the meantime, I hope others enjoy reading my first story, “Half Lives,” as much as I enjoyed writing it. The 5,000-word story (about a 20-minute read) is free to read online, so please check it out.