Hey all. While I’m attempting to write another novel (my seventeenth), I’ve decided to go back into my files, a mix of digital and written on paper, and look for every short story I’ve ever written to see if I can clean them up and publish them. Since my novels are somewhat serious, ten of which being Christian end times, I figured I’d do something light-hearted.

With that in mind, I remembered one that I started writing back in 2008 when I worked in a library, before I had independently published anything online (I first vanity published with iUniverse for Out of Time in the later part of ’08, KDP wasn’t letting in self-published authors just yet & Smashwords was a couple years later), and it was a story that I really kind of just wanted to make my co-workers laugh. I have this weird sense of humor sometimes, when I’m not an oh-so-serious introvert, and I was thinking of having various characters from the books in the library meet each other in a goofy kind of way, maybe magically, maybe technologically.

The library staff in the story gets mixed up in all sorts of shenanigans from Sam I Am randomly appearing to Nancy Drew investigating the various mysteries of the goings-on in the library to the actual physical card catalog causing book classification anomalies because of Melvil Dewey himself to The Communist Manifesto and The Federalist Papers arguing with each other in the background on the The Shelf of Disputed Ideas. The staff gets everything sorted out at the end of the story-or so they think….

The story’s name is Guardians of Genre. It’s for anyone who love whimsical fantasy, libraries, metafiction, satire, and genre mashups, and might appeal to people who like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. It’s probably not for everyone, but what is?

Here’s the cover.

This is a ten chapter short story. Thirty pages, 9400 words. Depending on how well this does, I’ll probably make it a series. I will release this first in ebook and paperback and then I’ll make an audiobook.

Will be widely available, instead of just on Amazon, and I’ll also put it on my website bookstore to give away copies for free. If you want a free copy, just let me know.

Here’s the Amazon Kindle sample: