Tea & Tales with Mabry
One of my short stories was reviewed! Over on Youtube, there is this wonderful person, A.L. Mabry. She has a show over there called Tea & Tales with Mabry.
The link to her episode with my story is here:
Tea & Tales with Mabry reviews Monsters by Frank Montellano
Although she wasn't a huge fan of the story, I really appreciated her taking to the time to review my story. It was very odd experience, having someone read my story aloud. I didn't listen to the whole rendition, which led to an interesting conversation with my wife. I wasn't really interested in hearing my story read aloud and wondered if I was an odd duck or if she thought that was typical of authors. Her thoughts were that it should be a milestone moment, sort of a "Hey, look it's something I made!" and another author also had the same opinion. So, maybe I am an odd duck.
It does remind me of a trip I made to Vroman's bookstore in California to see Neil Gaiman read a section from his book Stardust. I was enraptured, loving to hear the words read by the author himself. I drew a picture of him, and he signed it afterward, so that was pretty cool. Makes me think maybe one day I will read aloud one of my stories. Anyways, while I am not interested in hearing my story read, you can click on the link and hear the whole story. It's sort of a horror piece, sort of a fantasy piece, and sort of military story. It will be one of the thirteen or so short stories to make it into my short story collection scheduled to print within the next two years.
Hope you enjoy it!
In other author news, I worked on editing one of my first stories I wrote, about a family of Travelers (otherwise known as Gypsies, though they consider that term derogatory). I am lengthening and improving the story for inclusion in my short story collection. Taking some of Mabry's comments about my other story to heart, I added in some sensory details as well.
Picture for today: Inuit Cartography. They used carved bits of wood shaped like coastlines to find their way from place to place. A different way to make maps. Hm, now that I think about it I hope I haven't done this one before!
