How to beat a venue mismatch, the Ravania way.

Good day children! And by children I mean (mostly) adults. And by good day, I mean hey look I've written a new post.

A long time ago, I thought to myself, hey you know what would be pretty sweet? Having some of my short stories appear in literary magazines, that would be pretty sweet.

Cue furious writing at that point.

I made up a few short stories, which was a bit of a shock to the boys at Ravania, as up until that point, it was happily assumed I was incapable of writing anything under forty thousand words.

A bit of an aside right now to explain that, the first ever story I finished start to finish was one I wrote for Aaron Smith's Genesis Project series, called 'Sons of an Empire.'. The instructions he gave me was to write a short story. But at the time, I had a tenuous grasp on the concept of short story. As I started writing it, and handing off page after page for his review, dear Aaron noticed that I may not have understood the instructions. Rather than stopping me and saying that I didn't understand the nature of the task, he let me continue, compelled by the strength of the story I was writing. It ended up clocking in at about half the size of one of his normal novels. Not a short story by any stretch. Later on, I decided to write another, to try and redeem myself, and it also ended up being about half the size of one of his novels again.

Happily this ended up not being a bad thing, as we will be slapping the two stories together and calling it a Genesis project book. Look for that at some point in the future.

Anyway, all of the above meant that I was then ridiculed for being incapable of writing a 'short' story. I never really thought it was much of a handicap, it just meant I had a lot of story to tell. However, when I decided that I want to try my hand at getting a story in a magazine, imagine my discomfort at seeing the rather limited word counts.

Rather than let this stop me, I learned how to write short stories. I wrote... about three I believe, and started submitting them around, however the result was almost without fail, 'We like your writing, but we don't think it matches our venue'. This happened with what I thought were clearly matching venues! Now that did frustrate me a little.

So what does one do when his writing doesn't match the venue he wants it in? Well if your part of Ravania Entertainment, which I am, you make your own venue.

Turns out the boy's have been cooking up the idea of doing our own literary magazine of sorts, now this will digital thing, as we are a rather small group, but it will be a way for us to show samples of our writing to potential readers and let them get a taste of us before they throw down some money on books or sweet merchandise. (both available here. :P) I for one am extra excited by this, and am also excited to be able to dust off my stories with no venue, and make new stories for it.

Now I'm not allowed to say anything about the date in which we plan to launch this, but let it suffice that I believe it will be worth the wait.

Thanks for reading dear children, and by children I mean (mostly) adults. Though if you are a child, that's good too.