The Third War

So we just published Unidentified Love as a Kindle book and we wanted to tell you how that came about.

As it happens, each of the chapters in UL began life as three prompts from the bi-weekly meetings of the Kickstart Writers Group.

While the original idea was to write 500-word flash fiction pieces, most of us have strayed from that length. The Ben and Nick stories are definitely not that short!

Each story we wrote felt, to us, like it was going to be the last one for these characters. Especially as they were created completely out of order: 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7. No two adjoining pieces of the story were written together and each one was intended to stand alone.

Once we’d finished five stories, we were sure we were done. We shared them all with Kyros’ husband David. He said, “But why didn’t Ben ever tell Nick the truth?” That led us, prompts in hand, to the honeymoon story. So we wrote that piece and thought, “Ok, now the story is done.”

Then we shared it with Kyros’ mother, Mona.

She loved it but demanded to know what happened to the boys afterward. She asked, “Does Nick ever get to go to outer space?” and, “What happens when they retire?”

That inspired the final piece of the story.

Of course, there are plenty more stories that could (and might someday) be told about Ben and Nick, but we felt that the seven pieces we had made a great story arc. That should have been the end of it. However, the more we thought about these characters and how much we liked their story, the more we wanted to publish them together as a freestanding short story on Amazon.

Then the work really started. Mostly on Kyros’ part, for the technical stuff like formatting in Scrivener. We spent several days together online at bigstockphoto.com, trying to find the perfect representation for the cover. Originally, we wanted a pic of the two as teenagers, but that changed to them on their wedding day because we didn’t want readers to think it was about kids. The UFO in the sky was almost a battle royal, as we each had different ideas of what the spacecraft should look like. We finally settled on the classic flying saucer.

Kyros’ other husband, Scott, took all our ideas and pics and fonts, mashed them up in Photoshop, and came up with our beautiful cover. Thanks, Scott!

Our time scrolling through what felt like thousands of pages of photos wasn’t wasted, though. We found representations for most of our characters from Dreaming of Xeres, the first novel in our Third War series. Comparing each of our internal pics of them and coming to a consensus was an interesting process. You may see some of those pics on future covers.

Next came all the stuff around the story itself: title page, copyright page, dedication, authors’ pages, Amazon blurb, and info on our other book. Phew!

Finally, today, we published it live! Wheeeee!

Now, on to promoting it!

Remember, if you read this or any of our other written work, please review it online at Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else you can find. It helps us to get the word out about our creations and makes it possible for us to write more.