25th Anniversary of The Leap

I wrote and published a book of short stories in the year 2000.

The Leap & Other Mistakes: 35 Stories | David Barringer | Publisher: Xlibris | 292 pages | Pub. Date: December 2000

Copies are still available at these sellers: Amazon; Alibris; Ebay; Abe Books.

So what’s the deal with this book published 25 years ago?

The deal is that writers have milestones in their careers, and this, for me, was one.

In the Nineties, I was writing short stories. I loved short stories!

Agents, however, told me no one wanted to publish books of short stories by new writers. They told me to write a novel. 

A novel! 

Like it was just that easy.

I hadn’t written a novel. I wanted to write one. Of course, I wanted to write one. But I was married with two kids and a job, and I was still in my twenties. I didn’t know how to write a novel.

Honestly, I hadn’t committed myself to learning how.

Let’s skip ahead. Somehow, I wrote a novel. I made myself do it. I sent it to agents.

Agents, however, told me no one wanted to publish a debut novel by an unknown author. You had to get your name out there by publishing . . . short stories. 

So . . . write a novel instead of short stories . . . but write short stories before you write a novel.

It was a kind of Catch-22, I supposed, but in the end, I took it all to mean that no matter what you wrote, what agents and publishers really wanted was assurance that there was an audience prepared to buy a couple thousand copies of your hardcopy books.

Well, whatever was the prevailing advice from the publishing world, I wrote fiction and kept writing fiction and am still doing so today.

Okay, let’s back up again, to the origin of this particular book.

In high school, I wrote a few short stories for fun, but in college, I made a serious effort to write them. I had more creativity than control, more passion than technique. I wasn’t going anywhere with them. They were dense and stilted. I’d been reading too much Jorge Luis Borges and Donald Barthelme.

In 1992, when I was twenty-two, I published my first article in the magazine Details. While I went to law school, I continued to work as a freelance writer. I wrote articles, essays, and reviews for magazines and newspapers, like the ABA Journal, New York Times, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, Mademoiselle, Detroit Free Press, Detroit Monthly, The American Prospect, Metro Times, and many others.

In my late twenties, while I had kids and a real job, I got scared enough to give myself a deadline for writing a novel. I told myself I had to write a novel before I turned thirty. 

I did not want to turn thirty without writing a novel. Real writers wrote novels in their twenties. Time was running out.

I gave myself that deadline. 

Before I turned thirty!

I needed to impose that deadline on myself. No one else was going to do it. And it worked. I focused every day. I wrote a novel.

I wrote the novel Johnny Red.

So by the year 1999, I had published some short stories, and I had my first novel manuscript. I thought it was time to query literary agents again.

This was when they said that, yes, it was great I had a novel manuscript, but I needed to publish short stories in magazines, journals, and online outlets in order to get my name out there: meaning, in order to create an audience for the eventual novel.

I put my head down again and wrote short pieces like crazy. The online world of ezines, humor ezines, and literary ezines was exploding at that time. It was a perfect world for me. I fit right in. With my background in law, literature, and journalism, I could make fun of current events, classic books, and the latest trends, and I could have fun writing in a dozen different styles.

After I’d written well over three dozen short stories, parodies, and satires, I collected them in a Word Document and sent them to a company called Xlibris, a new company that, for sizable fees, helped authors publish their books.

Xlibris, at first, was more than a vanity press. They had editors who proofread your work and graphic designers who designed your book cover and typeset your manuscript. They provided a measure of distribution so that booksellers could order your book. Customers could order the book online directly from their website. This all sounded great.

Remember that this was the year 2000, when authors felt newly empowered by this technology. 

We were so young!

So I self-published a book of short stories through Xlibris, promoted the book online, and learned a huge amount about the entire process. It was an educational experience. I learned what to do, what not to do, and how to do it all better. 

Most importantly, I learned that if you love to write, then you find and use whatever trick inspires you to keep writing and keep publishing . . . you impose whatever deadline on yourself that you can . . . you get your work out there however you can . . . and you don’t quit. 

You don’t beat yourself up about any of it. You don’t look for excuses to quit. You look for reasons to keep going. You keep writing. You keep publishing.

For years during the 2000s, I continued to publish short pieces in print journals and online magazines: Quick Fiction, Nerve, Epoch, Wisconsin Review, Opium Magazine, Barrelhouse, Sweet Fancy Moses, Word Riot, Dezmin’s Archives, Pindeldyboz, Eyeshot, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Small Spiral Notebook, Carve Magazine, Drunken Boat, Del Sol Review, Failbetter, Haypenny, In Posse Review, Tatlin’s Tower, CrossConnect, 3AM Magazine, The Furnace, The Styles, Raised in a Barn, Taint Magazine, Foliate Oak, Spoiled Ink, The Edward Society, Flak Magazine, Konundrum Engine, The Paumanok Review, Prose Toad, Cenotaph, Outsider Ink, Spoken War, 42 Opus, Punchline Magazine, Minima, Ballyhoo, and Blue Planet. 

I had a lot of fun. If you were one of the people who published one of my stories back then, and you think I forgot you, I didn’t. 

I made the leap, and so did you.

Thanks again.

_____