Calgary, June 2023
About a year ago I wrote a story about a haunted house, where a ghost of a dead writer was wandering through the property. The house was for sale and Diana, who didn’t believe in ghosts, bought it. But one day she found a strange man sitting at the basement of the house, staring into a flame of a candle. The man introduced himself as Martin, told her that he wants to contact the ghost of the dead writer to ask him if he too can be a writer. Diana, being a nice person, organised a séance for him, there was a psychic medium, the séance was a success, and my story ends with a following dialogue:
“The medium was your friend, wasn’t she?” asked Martin.
“True.”
“And you told her what to say.”
“Also correct.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to make you happy.”
Martin smiled, leaned to her, and gave her a nice, long kiss.
Since then, Diana and Martin became friends, perhaps even lowers, and under Diana’s encouragement Martin began to write his first book. But it turned out to be more difficult than he thought. His regular work plus daily choirs took most of his time, and he could write only in the evenings. But Martin was determined to be a writer, he followed a rigged schedule and finished the manuscript. It was a romance, so sweet it should be prohibited to diabetics, but it wasn’t very good. Even Diana admitted that. Martin rewrote it, then rewrote it again, and then, when there was nothing more to improve, decided to publish it. There was no chance that a traditional publisher would accept it, so the self-publishing was the only option.
Martin soon found out that self-publishing is just as difficult as writing. First, he had to find an editor to go through his book. Then he bought the software to format it. Then he needed a graphic designer to design the book cover. Then he had to get the ISBN number and write a short book description for the marketing. It all took time and money, but finally came a great day, and Martin’s book appeared on Amazon Kindle. Diana bought a copy, Martin’s parents as well as Martin and Diana’s friends also bought copies, and that was about it. Amazon publishes 11,000 new titles daily and the chance that the public will ever read Martin’s book was about zero. Martin was looking at the dismal statistics and was wandering if he will become a great writer, as the ghost of the haunted house predicted.
“You definitely will be a great writer,” said Diana. “You are a character in my story and all my storis end up in a happy end,” she told Martin and smiled at me.