Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

So I finally finished a story. I started writing it quite by accident, it was a distraction from my 'masterpiece' (which is anything but!) and somehow the story got away from me and became its own thing. It was a 2000 word short story that picked up right in the middle, but the more I wrote the more I wanted to explain why the main character was the way he was, so i went back and wrote a whole lot of backstory. Before I knew it I had written 20k words!

I do struggle a bit with how much to say about the story. There is one main 'twist' although it is hard to say how much I telegraph what's going to happen. It's not a long book so I don't want to give the game away, but at the same time I want people to have an idea of what the story is about! Who knew that writing a book was only the first step in a very long journey :)

I'm really happy to share copies of the story if anyone would like to take a look. Ping me below.

Interesting aside, I decided that a good way to get some exposure was to make the book free on Kobo. It took a while to reflect the price change so i contacted Writing Life support (who were excellent btw), but making it $0.00 did eventually change it to a free e-book. However customer support did mention that free ebooks aren't picked up on the dashboard report, so if you're like me and trying to see what impact making your book free has on readers then just be prepared for the fact you can't currently track this on Kobo. Customer support did mention this was on the list as a future enhancement.

Whats the name of your story? I will take a look at this as I have a KOBO.

Hey Brian. It's called getting lucky which was a bad choice of name because there are twenty other books with the same name. Try searching with my name (Craig Anderson). I'd love to know what you think.

Thanks

Craig

Craig.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Work projects and newborn son have ganged up and prevented me from reading much.

Anyway, managed to blitz through it this week and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even before the meeting with the doctor it painted a good (or should that be bad) picture of life on the streets and it was easy to become attached to the main character in his day to day routine.

Overall it worked very well; not too short, not too long. Good characters and good descriptions of locations (something I struggle with).

***** SPOILER BELOW *****
The only thing I would have considered changing would have been to up the stakes of the ending and instead of just being the dogs owner I would perhaps have had more of the family there (wife and kids) for that moment of Lucky's decision.

Nice work. If you haven't already, I'd recommend putting a price on it now. It's worth it.

Craig,

I don't normally like asking for reviews especially on a like-for-like basis but I have a short story posted on this website that I'm struggling to get much feedback for. If you have time and wouldn't mind I would be very grateful.

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...

Brian

Thanks Brian, really appreciate your feedback and glad you liked it. I'll totally take a look at your short story and let you know what I think.

So I made my book available through Goodreads too, it's completely free - you can download a copy of it here - http://www.goodreads.com/ebooks/downl...

Please let me know what you think, if enough people enjoy it I'll write more stories about these characters :)