Kate Robinson

I grew up in Iowa and spent three decades in Arizona. And I've now nearly spent a decade in California in three wonderful but different environments on the Pacific coast. My best stories are intimately tied to the places in which I've lived or visited. I'm still catching up to stories culled from my childhood and adulthood in Iowa and Arizona, but I expect some writing inspired by my golden year experiences in California to kick in soon!

That's a great question and there are quite a few stories behind the making of The Contest and Other Stories, a collaborative collection of linked short stories that began in the mind of author Joe DiBuduo.

Joe is an artist who works in many media—glasswork, sculpture, and painting. So he has a natural bent for art and a strong interest in art history, a great love of coffee table art books, and of visiting art galleries and museums. His walls at home are filled with paintings and his front yard is filled with his massive sculptures.

As Joe was learning to write fiction, he chose to sometimes to use artwork as story prompts and envisioned a coffee table art book with paintings and stories inspired by the paintings. While he crafted the stories using classic paintings by famous artists as prompts, he felt the collection would be interesting if linked with a more contemporary story about a young man who inherits a failing art magazine from his uncle and keeps it afloat by adding a short story to each issue, solicited via a fee-based contest. the protagonist is the only child of a controlling father, a banker who disdains any connection to the Arts and Humanities. So the young entrepreneur must struggle not only with the financial realities of his business, but also with all the shade and obstacles his dad casts at him. It's an archetypal and universal plot that we hope we've infused with a fresh slant.

Joe brought me onboard as co-author when he had a rough draft of the project and felt daunted by the task of bringing the project to completion. He originally wrote 33 stories inspired by paintings and I culled the collection down to 19 that meshed reasonably well together. Some stories were nearly completed, but many more were rough drafts. Because the stories are historical, they required research as much as imaginative flights of fancy for both of us. The connecting novella and the manuscript also needed developmental restructuring. In retrospect, Joe had the initial vision and the initial go at writing and organizing the collection draft, and I followed up with my two cents. I also designed the print book interior, did the ebook conversions, and some marketing in the form of submitting a handful of completed stories to journals and anthologies to drum up interest in the final collection. We had a half-dozen stories published in advance of the book. It was a fulfilling process to bring our unique talents as writers and publishers to the creation of The Contest and Other Stories.