book details

Book: Wacky Stories for Women Volume 1 by John M W Smith

5 stars based on the 3 most helpful Amazon reviews

categories: Book, Short Stories, Surprise Endings, Relationships, Scary, Contemporary Women's Fiction, Chick Lit,

John M. W. Smith

about this book: I have created a 4-volume series of ebooks entitled Wacky Stories for Women (vols 1-4) and its ‘sister’ series, Scary Stories for Women volumes 1 and 2. So this makes a total collection of 6 ebooks published on Amazon, each volume comprising a collection of short stories with a twist in the tale/surprise ending. I decided to do this because there was nothing like it on the market (and still isn’t)----so what made me think that I had something which people would like and buy? Simply the fact that I managed to get accepted a number of such short stories by the high-circulation women’s weekly magazines here in the UK, and, judging by the handsome amount I got paid for a single story, I became convinced that there had to be enough people out there who liked this kind of short story enough for the magazine to pay me so well. And that these stories are infernally difficult to write, although people like me who can write them make it look easy! This fact was reinforced when I connected with a few twist in the tale blogs and got the blog owners saying they could never write the way I did, even after they had tried their best. This was high praise for which I am humble, because I have no financial resources to promote myself online, the way someone like John Locke did----although I should very much like to spend the money to do it, I can only spend what I can afford to lose. And I don’t have the spare cash to lose.

All these short stories have a main female character who is confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem in her life, and she has to find some way of solving it in a peaceful and novel way, using only her wit and imagination. How she does this is what the story is about, and I challenge any reader to guess the ending, for it is not what I carefully lead the reader to expect through subliminal hints. So this is why such stories have a twist/surprise at the end and are called twist-in-the-tale stories. All the stories are about contemporary working women, and the problem is usually to do with a man in their life.

There is no research. You either know enough about modern life and the problems that women are faced with, or you don’t. You either have the ability to provide a twist or you don’t. It really is as simple as that.

I suppose from my point of view the most amazing thing is that women cannot believe how I, a guy, can write so well from a woman’s viewpoint, to the extent of getting inside the female head and accurately depicting how she thinks. I have been overjoyed at remarks made to me along these lines by reviewers who have read my stories and published reviews on Amazon, especially as I am simply an ordinary guy in every way, the sort you might want to stop and talk to over your garden fence if he lives next door. There is nothing unusual about me.....I just happen to love women.

What did I learn from writing these books? I loved writing them. I can write many more. I can make the stories a lot longer. I have no chance of enough people getting to know them unless I have help in promoting them. And, what’s more, I can write these stories for men, too! And for children---in fact I already have, and it is called Wacky Stories for Kids, also available on Amazon.

I think my best moment of all came when, out of the blue, I was approached by a Russian language teacher from inside Russia, saying she had seen my stories on Amazon and wanted to translate them into Russian for her students! Indeed she has done this, and I would not accept any payment from her. It is such an honor!