A.J., who lives a distance away, shared some super story starts with us that she’d been too busy to complete.

The four of us decided to have some fun with them by enjoying a series of story lunches. We would take turns hosting a home lunch and afterwards we would read our completed stories to each other.

At our first meeting, we had each worked with a different story start that A.J. had sent us and each read to one another our completed stories.

Then we thought how much more fun it would be if we all completed the same story start to see if our completed stories were similar.

When we met again, we discovered it was a lot more fun – from the very same start, our minds had zoomed off in such different directions. It was fascinating to see how one author picked up on something in the setting and made it crucial to the story, while another ignored that facet entirely, choosing to focus on a particular character instead. It was so entertaining we decided to keep doing it, eventually working through ten story starts to give us forty completed stories.

Other friends found it very exciting and were keen to also enjoy these stories so we decided that we’d produce a book.

We then were very fortunate to attend the Big Island Book Festival Jam. Many of the other authors were super encouraging and several even provided mentoring on how to improve our very basic book copy into a self-published print and e-book through Amazon.

Keen to engage in new ventures, we started researching and then invested in Vellum, the particular software required.

Having mastered this software program to produce an e-book and print file of our manuscript, we set about locating a cover designer who could create a professional cover for us from our basic ideas. We knew from the start that we wanted to incorporate symbols from the stories into our cover, such as the “goblin’s” face from The Hag Stone, but we needed someone with some artistic chops to make our idea look good.

Several designers were reviewed and we were delighted to be able to use a local person rather than needing to outsource outside Canada.  

Our designer, Natalie Evans, provided us with four possible cover designs and fortunately a unanimous decision was made to select the one that now favours our book.

There were a number of small modifications that we requested to be made and we were very lucky that Natalie was most obliging and graciously fulfilled all our requests.

While these ventures were happening we also returned to our previous entertaining afternoons of lunch and story reading which will probably result in Book Two.

We will now have to think about how to promote this fun book which has so many varied genres. There are stories that should appeal to many folk looking for a little escapism. 

Finally our first copies of Crazy Twists have arrived!

Oh horror! We realized there are mistakes on the cover that need to be corrected! Can you find three corrections from the front cover and spine?

Once Natalie made the changes, we were accepted for Big Island Book Fair registration. Now we had to make our outfits for attending. Of course, we wanted our costumes to highlight our book, Crazy Twists!

Meantime, we thought we’d send a fun letter and copy of our book for promotion to the Globe and Mail. We don’t anticipate a response.

Hello Mighty Editor

Here is a very different short story collection to titillate the entertainment senses. A J Terlesky wrote the start of ten stories and then four other authors, Heather Deane-Clark, Nina Goodman, Brenda Tee and Susan Ward continued those creating a diversity of outcomes in forty tales. This innovative approach to the short story covers horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, amusement and social topics of our times. Please find time to read, relish and recommend the enclosed copy of Crazy Twists.  

The polished self-published book can be purchased in print or ebook at www.amazon.ca/Crazy-Twists-Innovative-Short-Stories.

Hoping that you can favour we Lilliputian Canadian folk a break,

Nina Goodman

(on behalf of the authors of Crazy Twists)

We also were fortunate to have a promotional local newspaper article in The Record.

And here we are in our costumes attending the author’s jam at the Big Island Book Fair and the following day at the Fair itself.

The Book Fair was wonderfully organized and great fun for us but regrettably, not well promoted so poorly attended by the public.

Our book was also featured in Crown Isle magazine.

In November, we attended the Evergreen and d’Esterre House craft sales. The attendance and response to our book was super.

SOLD OUT of our first printing!!!