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I've got some good news and some bad news for storytellers.

I'll start with the good news: Technology has lowered the barriers to entry.

Let's take the would-be novelist as an example. Not long ago, the only outlet for her work was to find a home for her manuscript at a mainstream publishing house in New York City.

And then technology happened.

Today, a novelist without a publisher can find her audience through a self-published, digitally printed-on-demand book with little setup cost and no warehousing expenses. This book can find an enthusiastic audience on Amazon and sell plenty of copies through BookSurge. (In fact, in doing so she may end up with a nice book deal after all.)

So that's the new world in which we live. We've had a revolution of sorts, and that revolution isn't limited to novelists. Technology now allows you to share a story through a Twitter feed, on YouTube, or in a Podcast. Alternatively, if you are the type of crafty fiction writer who can create particularly frightening urban legends about seductive internal-organ thieves or HIV infected needles on movie theater seats, you can send your story in an email that will eventually reach my mother, who will in turn forward it to everyone in her address book.

The point is that it's a great time to be a storyteller. As screenplay guru Robert McKee observes, story consumption is at an all time high. Which is good, for the most part, but McKee tells us there's also a downside: The average American now spends a mind-blowing number of hours each day taking in stories through television, movies, and novels, and therefore has become quite sophisticated in his understanding of narrative structure. In other words, he'll lose interest at the first whiff of cliché.

So we enter this new decade at the intersection of two important trends (the good news and bad news I mentioned earlier): the potential for the storyteller to reach a worldwide audience with unprecedented ease, and the reality that this audience is a cynical bunch with a higher bar for creativity than ever before.

It was the second trend that presented a particular problem for me as I set out to write my memoir. My goal was simple. I wanted to share my story. It was the story itself that was problematic: I lost lost my leg to a rare form of bone cancer at age nine and went on to become a ski racer on the United States Paralympic Team.

An inspiring story, you might say, so what's the problem? The problem is that it's been done before. We've seen this story already in countless ra-ra we are women not breast cancer victims memoirs, and in Disney-esque feel good sports movies that end with an inevitable slow motion sequence to bring our hero his victory (in sports and, symbolically, in his personal life, too) as the clock reaches zero.

But mine was a memoir, so I couldn't obscure the facts merely to avoid cliché. If my life did happen to follow an inspirational story arc, well, that's just how it happened. For my book to connect in this marketplace, I would need to find a creative way to share the story, an approach that would break through today's cynicism.

I decided the best strategy was to bet the book on a fresh, funny, and unique voice. Since most of it was going to be about my childhood, I chose to write it in the voice of the child I was when I experienced the events in the story with the hope that such an approach would break through the clichés and stereotypes of inspirational memoirs.

This week I'll be writing a few entries about the unique challenges and opportunities I found to be inherent in writing from a child's perspective.

For more information on Josh Sundquist, visit his website: www.JoshSundquist.com

 Josh Sundquist, Just Don't Fall, Paralympics, athletics, skiing, Penguin Books