Over the Top and Onward - Thailand Stories Tops 1,000

With three stories yesterday, the 16^th of November, we have broken the 1,000 submissions mark at ThailandStories.com. I'd like to personally thank all the contributors and authors for their help, advice, friendly comments and wonderful writing along the way. I hope the next one thousand can be as fun, interesting and enjoyable as these first one thousand have been. I do think our stories site can continue to be a source of fun, amusement, and interesting reading for us all who are interested and love Thailand in all our various ways.

I'd like to let you all know that Mo and I are working on a few new projects to ensure the site stays healthy, diverse and interesting, and continues to bring in new writers, authors, and readers. We are looking into having a story contest with prizes, which we hope to have judged by a few of the established published authors you all know and probably have read over the years. We are planning to do a series of interviews with the many authors of these good books, and already have permission to do interviews from many of them. It’s all a matter of having the time and doing the work now to set this in motion and get them up on the site.

We also are trying to find ways to sponsor and help the published authors set up some book fairs/book signings in Bangkok where all interested can meet the authors, buy their books and have their copies signed by the author. We feel this could be a lot of fun for all concerned. Ideas for this and venues for holding these are welcome. I do have some ideas for this and will be speaking with a few people while I am in Bangkok for the Thanksgiving Day holiday. We are also looking to interview one of Bangkok's publishing house owners; when I get the chance to contact him over the next few weeks to see if he would be interested in doing so.

I have recently contacted a few more authors, old and new, and we hope to be able to display for your viewing pleasure more of the 'first chapters' of their novels for you to enjoy looking over. I have a long list of authors who have published books on Thailand (I was somewhat surprised really at how many are out there really) and have many of their e-mail addresses as well for contacting them about this. As I was out of the country for three weeks recently I am a little behind on this project. Hopefully this will help them sell more books if they take advantage of our offer to do so, to also have them take an interest in our site, and possibly get them to contribute some of their own short stories here, as well as interest them in commenting on some of our stories on here and passing along some tips on writing and publishing from their own experiences in this. We think this would be great for the site and for our writers and the readers as well who enjoy the stories here and these already published authors’ novels.

Thanks again to all who have sent in their stories, articles and poems, and to all who come here to read and comment on what we have to offer the reading public. Mo and I have had a lot of fun building and maintaining the site, and have met some wonderful people in the process and had a great time reading your submissions since we first opened ThailandStories.com. We plan to do more and hope you all help us to make our site the best place on the internet for reading Thailand stories. I think we are the best site for this, and we intend to make it even better over the next year.

Thanks all,

     Mike
     mike@thailandstories.com