ABCTales a spirit of e-ntree

For the first time in history, electronic publishers can offer
readers an opportunity to hear voices from the margins at a speed of
light. E-pub seem to be in the third millenium the new entree of
spiritual streams snaking towards the mainstream trade paperbacks and
desserts.

If you're going to create, create a lot. Creativity is not like playing
the slot machines, where failure to win means you go home broke. With
creativity, if you don't win, you're usually no worse off than if you
hadn't played
-Scott Adams

We hear often of the sweeping developments that take place across the
world. Cold Wars, Hot Wars, economic booms and busts, the rapacious
scramble for resources: we hear the warnings of countries, the shouts
of other countries in greedy triumph. We rarely see the ways in which
these changes impact mere individuals.

My small personal voice dreamed and dreamed about telling a story. All
dreamers are, however, aware of Gumperson law of corollary. Gumperson
put my dreams to tell my story together in his now famous law which
runs like this: "The probability of something happening is in inverse
proportion to its desirability."

Storytellers cannot live exclusively in an unreal world born of the
rejection letters, because when we cease to hope and dream and imagine
wonderful things to come, our very souls and spirits wither and die.
Bookies have a saying, "There are three horses who have never come in
win, place, or even show. Their names are Coulda, Woulda, and Shoulda."
Bookies live-and sometimes die-by the accuracy or inaccuracy of their
predictions. The same can said of storytellers.

Anyone involved in the bookselling race is aware that getting published
without rejections is like sex without sin or the taste of real freedom
without dizziness.

It is said that telling writers how to get published is the same as
trying to explain how to ride a bike. Think you can tell a child how to
ride a bike? "It is rather easy," I was once told. The same thing I
recently told my daughter Gabriella.

"Okay. What do I do?"

"Just get on the bike."

"How?"

"What do you mean, how? Just put your foot on the pedal, swing your leg
over the bar and pedal."

She tries but falls over and cries: "But I can't! When I try to swing
my foot over, the bike falls over."

"Okay. Well, don't swing your leg over until you've got better balance.
Just lean the bike down a little and step over the bar. Then sit on the
seat and pedal."

She does as you say and it works ... up to the part where she sits on
the seat. She falls over again.

"You've got to balance!" you say.

"Sure!" she shouts. "But, but, but how do you balance?"

Getting published is just like that. You learn to tell stories by
sitting on the seat and falling on your face. Then, when you get back
up, the reasons supplied inside the rejection letters can help you
figure out why your mouth is full of dirt.

When a man is rejected in the publishing world, it hurts.

I fell, of course. (Ouch) But also I was lifted. (*grin*)

Hearty e-places such as the ABCTales are in a process of teaching me
how to ride that bike. Above all else, they are to teach writers like
me to DREAM the right DREAMS. At e-pubs and e-zines, the philosophy
begins with the assumption of the power of story in human lives.

It is the creative e-pubs that seem to offer storytellers like myself
the opportunity to express our small personal voices with a speed of
light.

My articles seemed destined to fade from memory as just another
survivor's story. Then, one fine day in October 2001, one of my
articles was recommended as the 'Story of the Day,' (for five days-
grin), at the ABCTales. Now I have several readers knocking at my door
demanding admission to the full story.

The mysterious aspect of success is that those who seek it as such
never find it. It is not a destination or a goal, it is written in the
ink of imagination. It is only found as a byproduct of our ability to
dream. Many people spend an unhappy life searching desperately for that
which is always within their reach, never realising that it is a
treasure not to be found from without, but from within. A storyteller
is a storyteller is a storyteller whether they are published or never
published. Storytellers touch people, inspire listeners, move them to
action, change their mind-sets, and open their eyes to imagination and
dreams.

http://www.abctales.com is filled with imagination and dreams ...

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our
attention by external opportunities.
-William Bridges