Twitter | Martyn K Jones

About three weeks ago I received an invitation via Twitter to submit a short story for the Beyond Time competition at Inkitt. Digging around in the partial projects folders I found a piece from the Paul Calvin / Cerberus cycle of stories about a character invented for ‘A falling of Angels’. The title is ‘Oggie’, just over five thousand words on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, mean streets, kidnap, murder, and a little shot at redemption. It’s as close as I get to happy endings.

Buffing up the narrative and fleshing out the characters a little, I finished the story and fielded it off to my younger Stepdaughter for a test read. Jo likes reading, and sent me back a couple of pages of notes and suggestions, 90% of which I acted on. She’s a trained lawyer and reads voraciously when the mood hits. I also trust and prize her judgement like diamonds.

The end result gets submitted later today. I don’t submit many stories, preferring to publish online or via Lulu.com. No idea whether anyone else will like it, but here goes nothing.

The story will get it’s own page once submitted, see rough artwork below.

While looking around at cross-platforming my latest eBook and getting it listed by as many distribution outlets as possible, I came across a number of articles on Twitter Hashtags. This morning one dropped into my inbox from my LinkedIn membership; “100 Hashtags every writer should know”, and a quick browse brought up “Why use Hashtags?”. Also worth a peruse is “Why Hashtags fail”.

In isolation no article tells the whole story, but put together they’ve filled in important gaps in my knowledge. I’ve previously said that I suck at social media, but maybe by following the guidelines, there is a chance of becoming less sucky than before.