I hit the publish button for Hot Flashes eight days ago. It was a big moment for me. I could now call myself a professional writer since anyone who wanted to read my eBook had to cough up 99 cents to do it. So far, 12 people have.

Technically, it isn’t the first time I made any money through my writing. Back in the 1980s, I interned at a weekly paper in Santa Barbara and was paid 10 bucks a pop for a couple of fluff pieces I contributed. Perhaps somebody scanned them and they’re still out there, gathering dust in a digital archive somewhere. I wouldn’t bother trying to find them though. If memory serves, they weren’t very good.

That was over three decades ago so I figure there’s some kind of statute of limitations in effect. Besides, it’s not about the money. I already have a job to keep a drink in my hand and a roof over my head. I just wanted to have a showcase for my stuff other than my blog and since I doubt any legitimate publisher would have anything to do with me, Amazon KDP seemed like the best bet.

The idea for this eBook has been in my head for at least five years. I was inspired by Etgar Keret, whose fiction tends to be very short and twisted. Hey, I told myself, I write very short and twisted stories. Never mind that my work lacks both the literary value and underlying human decency of Keret’s stuff.

I decided to put out a collection of flash fiction. To make sure I was doing it right, I looked up flash fiction on Wikipedia (which had already become my go-to to learn about anything). To paraphrase, flash fiction is a story with a length of 1000 words or less.

I pulled the fiction posts off my blog to use as future eBook fodder. Stories short enough to be flash fiction would be candidates for Hot Flashes. The rest would perhaps be included down the road in a collection of longer pieces.

It soon became obvious that as is, my eBook would be no longer than a pamphlet. I looked at my other work to see if any of it could be trimmed down enough to qualify. Some stories needed tightening and fit right in. Other stuff was legitimately bulky or morbidly obese. In either case, there was nothing to be gained from trying to editorially shoehorn it into a pair of skinny jeans.

In the end, I still needed more material so I set about churning out new stuff. Over the next year, I wrote 14 stories to flesh out the collection to an even 30.  A lot of attempts along the way were discarded, either for being appallingly bad in their own right or just an inferior rehash of stories I had written before.

Nearing completion, I secured permission to use a photo I liked for the book cover. All that remained was a little cleanup before I unleashed it upon the world.

Then I walked away.

Four years passed without my giving the project more than a passing thought. Then one day a couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my cloud backup out of boredom and came upon those writings. They weren’t bad and some of them actually made me feel proud of myself.

I spent the next week polishing these 30 little turds and handed them to Becca to give it a proofread. On the night of August 13, I submitted them to the Amazon Kindle Store then Becca and I went out for a celebratory drink.

One of the buyers of my eBook was an old, dear friend who dutifully sent me screenshots of typos. There weren’t many, but enough for me have another look at the manuscript. I found some more. I asked Rebecca to have another look. She found a lot more.

It was a learning experience. One lesson was that I can’t proof my own work for shit. Maybe it’s because they’re my own words, they look all right to me even when they are wrong. The other lesson is that checking for errors takes time. Becca did a rush job at my urging. Stuff got missed on the first go and that’s on me.

Last night, I submitted the updated work and it became available for download at around six this morning. I’m sure there were a few errors that went undetected. Even major publishers churn out books with a blemish or two. It is better now though thanks in large part to Becca’s diligence and patience.

As for the 12 of you who bought damaged goods,  sorry about that. Try to think of it as a collector’s item like a postage stamp with an airplane flying upside down. Typos or no, I hope my debut effort can still manage to offend you in the best possible way.