Two Very Short Flash Stories

Here are a couple of microfiction stories. They are VERY short - written to meet the 100 word limit on stories at Flashshot.

The first story was actually published at Flashshot, but it went up right around when my father died this past fall, and I completely missed it when it was on line.

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MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER
by Camille LaGuire

THE BODY LAY beside the lectern, dead of three gunshot wounds. Overhead a banner proclaimed "No One's a Loser - Your Path to Success and Happiness."

"He called ME a loser," said his wife. "You should have heard him. The man who encouraged everyone else! He never had a single nice thing to say to me. Then he said he was leaving me for that bimbo."

She sniffed and looked into the detective's eyes.

"For the first time, he said something that really motivated me."

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THE CORONER'S LINE
by Camille LaGuire

DETECTIVE WINSTON WAS gorgeous. The Coroner was completely smitten with her, but she was always all business. He could never think of anything to say. He'd get his nerve up, but then he'd just say, "Where's your corpse?"

She pointed him to the bag. He noted that the hands were bagged, the clothing preserved properly. Oh, and there such interesting bruising, and that wound on the forehead....

"I'd like you compliment you on your body," said the coroner. "I hope you will feel free to hold it against me."

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Yeah, yeah. Bad jokes are all very suited to the ultra short microfiction. I won't be doing a Story Notes on this one, though.

Tomorrow, I'll post a call for beta readers for my work-in-progress. If you think you might be interested in reading The Man Who Did Too Much before publication, check out the info page (where the beginning is available for download -- 5 chapters, 15,000 words or about 40-50 pages).

Update: New May Goal (already)

(LATER NOTE: a repetitive stress injury to my shoulder deep-sixed my writing output in mid-May. So I won't be meeting the May goal -- but I still hope to have it ready for beta readers by the end of June.)

It is SO nice to be caught up on sleep. You should try it. You really should....

Still not ready to go back to my regular posting schedule (I'll do that in mid-May) but I am already feeling quite refreshed. So much so that I realize I should also postpone even my interview posts until I return. The point of this break is to keep my focus on writing.

I realized last night that I am actually closer to finishing The Man Who Did Too Much than I am on the "almost done" novella I was planning to do. Man Who has had some nice shelf time, and seems ripe now, so....

The goal for May is to finish The Man Who Did Too Much. I don't know exactly how many words it needs, so I'm keeping the word count goal at 30k. I'll work on other things too, anyway.

For those who have been following this blog from the beginning, you know that this book has been giving me fits. It goes wonderfully and then stops. Then goes wonderfully again, and then stops.

I think, though, my biggest problem with this book is that it's the most "commercial" book I've written. (Even if it is in a relatively slow genre -- cozy mystery -- and I'm coloring just outside the lines as usual.) I was planning on traditional publication for this book, and when I shifted to indie publishing, this book got caught between two mindsets for a while.

I was going to write something about that shift in mindset, but I was interrupted too many times while I took notes, and pretty soon it made no sense even to me. So I'm saving it for another time.

So right now I'm reading what I've got on the story, and scribbling scenes. (If you're curious - I've put together an info page with a rough description.)

I've also had some interesting adventures in illustration for The Misplaced Hero, and so I'll be blogging about covers and art and all that when I come back.

(The cover you see here, is not the final cover for Man Who. It is, however, the version I like best so far, and I've LOST the original. I do have all the parts, so I guess this is the way Fate has chosen to make me do more work on the figures....)

The Winner of the Hemingway's Baby Shoes Microfiction Contest!

We only had four entries in the Hemingway's Baby Shoes Blogfest and Microfiction Contest, but I was pleased to see four quite different stories, and it made for entertaining reading.

(A quick reminder to those who may have forgotten, the stories had to be under 1000 words, and had to be spring from Hemingway's six-word story "For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.")

I won't hold you in suspense, the winner is:

*Door-Stepping by Jez Watts

This story stood out as a touching tale of grief and revenge. It was well written, moody and vivid. It's a reminder that a thousand word story can indeed be a full story and it also (imho) illustrates why Hemingway's story is not enough.

And here are the others:

*Green & Gold by Mike Miller.

This is a story like I would write -- taking the concept of the Hemingway story and setting it on its ear in a more cheery way. It could potentially use a little more work on sowing the seeds of the ending better into the beginning.

*He Wore His Son's Baby Shoes by Kaye Linden.

Another vivid story of grief and healing. It was a bit too vivid in terms of grueling detail for me, but it also brought a lyrical folk culture element to the story too.

*Goodbye, Kids! by Uddhav Parab.

This sf story used the Hemingway story as more of a spring board for a story of another family tragedy, as an old man has to make a choice for his grandchildren. The details and language were sometimes a little hazy, but the old man's dilemma was vivid.

And for the blogfest there was my own story (not an entrant and therefore it exceeded the word limit):

"The Real Unexpurgated Story of The Baby Shoes Which Were Sold Unused."

I want to thank all of the participants. I hope to do this again, perhaps in the fall.

Story Notes - The Curse of Scattershale Gulch

Yesterday's posting was a very short excerpt from "The Curse of Scattershale Gulch." Here is how that story came about:

ABOUT EIGHT OR nine years ago, I saw a posting for an anthology looking for mystery stories with a ghost element. That sounded like a promising theme and I cast about for an idea for, oh, maybe three seconds before I thought about Mick and Casey.

Now, it's true that the Mick and Casey Mysteries are all straight forward mysteries. No supernatural elements at all -- because after all, supernatural elements are a cheat when it comes to a whodunnit. I have to admit, though, that there is a certain element of Scooby Doo and Nancy Drew about Mick and Casey.

Furthermore, Dame Agatha herself liked a good ghost story, and certainly ghosts and mysteries have gone together since the first ghost story. In some ways, I think the modern cozy mystery really has more in common with gothic ghost stories than with any other kid of story. Most ghost stories are actually mysteries. How often does the plot of an old-fashioned ghost story involve solving the riddle of the ghost's murder or mysterious death? Or resolving some long standing injustice?

And many non-supernatural mysteries have elements of a ghost story. The theme of seeking justice for the dead, or being haunted by memories. That's often what a straight mystery or crime story is about. (For instance, LAURA, Otto Preminger's 1944 Noir movie, in which the hard-boiled Dana Andrews is haunted by the portrait of the woman whose murder he is investigating.)

But to take this back to Scooby Doo.... The bad thing about Scooby Doo is that the mysterious elements always turned out to be a hoax, just some old crank in a monster costume trying to trick people. That's fine for a bit of black-out comedy, but you lose something with that kind of a story.

Even when there is no magic in a story, and a ghost or a lurking evil is merely a symbol, there is still the magic of the mind. That need for justice haunts us for real, a fear of evil calls to us to defend ourselves. Those themes have resonance and no matter whether the story has real ghosts or not, the story has to take those themes seriously.

At the same time, if you do have real magic and a real ghost, you have to take the factual mystery seriously as well. The ghost is a character, and its identity, motives and actions are in question as much as anyone else.

Those two elements were the driving forces for me in writing this story -- Murder will out, but a puzzle is still a puzzle, and everyone's a suspect.

The Curse of Scattershale Gulch wound up too long for the anthology. I edited it to the bone, but only ruined the story in the process, so I threw that version away. I never found a market for the longer version.

I do know though, that I enjoyed mixing genres, and I'd love to do more "seasonal" writing for Mick and Casey. Sure I'd like to do another Halloween story, but I think next I might try a Christmas story -- "Six-Gun Santa" in which Mick has to stand in for the jolly old elf when a crazy old drunk calls Santa out for a shoot out. There are orphans to save and a mystery to solve, if Mick can talk his way out of getting shot....

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The Curse of Scattershale Gulch is an 8500 word novelette, available for just 99 cents at Amazon's Kindle Store, as well as Kindle UK. Smashwords has multiple formats for all kinds of e-readers -- including just reading it right there on their site. (It should be available on Apple's iBookstore, and Barnes and Noble's Nook store within a week or so.)

The Curse Of Scattershale Gulch - an excerpt

For Sample Sunday this week I give you an excerpt from my latest novelette -- a Mick and Casey Mystery with a little ghost story mixed in.

In the first chapter, Mick and Casey expected to meet a friend, Oren, who works as a "messenger" for a stagecoach company. But Oren has died of a fall from his horse....

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Chapter 2 of The Curse of Scattershale Gulch
by Camille LaGuire

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I WENT OFF to the saloon, a dark little place with a couple of little rickety tables and a long bar. Casey and Turcotte the lawyer were standing at the bar. In the corner was a couple of guys playing checkers, or maybe taking a nap. I couldn't tell.

I told Casey about Oren's misfortune. She took off her hat and slapped it on the bar and raised her glass. Distracting as it was getting a rare glimpse of her bare forehead, I found myself watching Turcotte, who had turned pale and was now staring at me.

"Died? He...fell?" he stammered, and he turned to the bartender, who appeared to already know about it, since he was nodding. "In Scattershale Gulch?"

"Yeah," said the bartender.

"That's the same as...." Turcotte finished his drink instead of his sentence.

"Same as Bronco Annie," said the bartender, filling Turcotte's glass again. Turcotte leaned over his glass and looked pale, but then tightened his fist around it.

"Damn recklessness," he announced, like it needed a label. "That's what it was." He looked at me, and licked his lips, and then looked at Casey, like it was her fault. "Bronco Annie was reckless, too. Like that one," he said, and he pointed at Casey. "You should have seen this girl jump off the top of that stage. Damn recklessness. That's the trouble."

I picked up my beer and stepped back to be out of the line of fire between Casey and Turcotte, but Casey wasn't sure she should be offended. She put her hat back on and tilted it back and then leaned on the bar, which was a little tricky since she's so short.

"How'd this Bronco Annie die?" she asked.

"You having second thoughts about recklessness?"

Casey took a drink of her whiskey and shook her head.

"Nah. Wondering if it's how we want to go," she said, and she wagged her thumb at me to include me in her plans for a wild demise. I didn't mind. I was willing to go where she went.

"It was nothing to aspire to," Turcotte snapped. "I was here that night. She was drunk, and in a brawling mood, and it was dark, and cold and wet outside. And then somebody brought word that her favorite mare was in foal, and she jumped on that half wild stallion of hers and went tearing back to her place. She took a short cut, down a gulch with a steep trail. The footing was bad and the horse took a misstep, and they both went down and broke their necks."

We paused in silence a moment, and then Casey set down her drink in disgust.

"Well, that's not much," she said. I had to agree. As stories went, it was short and dull. Casey was clearly in the mood for something more embroidered, especially about a woman like herself, and she scowled. "That ain't much at all. Anybody could die that way."

"Sure, and anybody did!"

That came from behind us, a female voice as Irish as my Aunt Fiona. We turned and saw a young woman, maybe my age--early twenties--but she looked as young as Casey. She had hair as pale as sunlight, which rippled back to where it was gathered with a black ribbon, and her skin was flushed with sunburn and scattered with freckles across porcelain. Her eyes were a pale blue, almost silver, like maybe they were washed out by the sun like her hair.

And I thought, she's the gal Oren was coming to see.

She had a plate in each hand, with steak, eggs and potatoes. They were nothing special, but they smelled good. Casey, though, was not as easily distracted as I was.

"You mean Oren?" she asked. "When you say anybody?"

"I mean more than Oren." She went over to the rickety table and set the plates down. Then she held out a pair of forks toward us. "Mr. Smith thought you might be hungry, working as messengers and all."

"Thanks," I said, and I took the fork from her before saying, "but we ain't messengers."

"No?" she said, and she looked pointedly at the guns slung on our hips. "And what are you?"

"Range detectives," said Casey firmly, and she shoveled a big fork of eggs into her mouth.

"And there's a difference?" she asked.

"A messenger's got a steady job," I said.

Casey swallowed her eggs, and narrowed her eyes at the woman.

"Who else died riding wild?"

"Perhaps not riding so wild," she said, "but down that very same trail there were a few. Bronco Annie was the first. Then Mr. Turcotte had his own little accident, didn't he? Scared him so bad, he left town."

Turcotte took a deep breath. "As you can see, I'm alive."

"After that it was a rancher named Ben Lattimer, and a year later it was his brother Luke. And now it's Oren. All down the same trail into Scatter-Shale Gulch."

"A dangerous trail," said Turcotte. "Bad footing."

"Dangerous in the dark for sure," said the lass. She looked toward the window. "And so I had better be going while there's still daylight. Wouldn't want to be on that trail at night."

She drew up her black shawl and headed for the door. I noticed that her dress was patched and, plain. And black. She turned as she got to the door.

"If you're range detectives, perhaps you'd be interested to know," she said. "When they found Annie's horse, he'd been shot. Through the breast."

She laid a hand on her own breast to illustrate, and then she went out. I stared after her for a minute, and then I turned back to Turcotte and the bartender.

"Is that so?" I said.

"I don't know, I didn't see it," said Turcotte. "And I went to Johnson City soon after that."

I looked at the bartender. He nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "Ben Lattimer said he'd shot it. Put it out of its misery."

"Lattimer is the guy died on that same trail later on."

"Yep."

The bartender didn't look too comfortable about that. I didn't blame him.

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Tomorrow I'll post some notes on the writing of The Curse of Scattershale Gulch.

The Curse of Scattershale Gulch is an 8500 word novelette, available for just 99 cents at Amazon's Kindle Store, as well as Kindle UK. Smashwords has multiple formats for all kinds of e-readers -- including just reading it right there on their site. (It should be available on Apple's iBookstore, and Barnes and Noble's Nook store within a week or so.)

Quick Note about May Dare

I realize that April is almost over -- so I should at least post some goals.

While I didn't do that much in terms of meeting the word count on the dare, I did write rough drafts of 7 stories. I only hit 8000 words out of 30,000 however. We'll see how much I add tomorrow.

For May, I'm just going to roll over the existing dare goals: 30,000 words for the month, on any project which suits me. The first two weeks will be awful because of the day job, but I should be able to make up for it in the latter part of the month.

For my goal of publishing something every month: I haven't decided on my May project yet. I suspect the story I would like to do won't quite be ready. However, I would like to get a paper copy of Have Gun, Will Play out. I have the interior laid out and uploaded. I just have to do the cover and proofs.

I also want to get some of the stories I wrote this month out to magazines.

eBook Experiment Update - Better Than A Poke With A Sharp Stick

I really haven't set the world on fire with my ebook publishing. I haven't even done as well as I'd hoped. But I haven't done all that bad either. In February, the most recent month for which I seem to have full data, I sold 81 books across all channels (not including freebies). I think 33 of those were at Amazon.

When I started, a little over a year ago, I knew that I couldn't expect Konrath-level success. So I sought out people who were more at my level. I have published a lot of short fiction, and had a certain amount of "almost" interactions with editors and agents on books. I also worked as a first reader, script reader and competition judge.

But I have not won out in comparison with these colleagues. After a year, I'm at the lower end of the spread.

However, I do believe I set my sights artificially high: Let's face it, the people who are quickest to tell about their experiences are those who have had the best experiences. Those who aren't doing so well don't really want to talk about it. (This happened when I was writing for eHow too -- everyone had an inflated idea of how much money an "average" article would make for members. When we did polls, we found out the actual average was lower.)

Maybe it's my ego speaking, but I suspect I'm a lot more average than it seems, and for that reason I figure I should talk about it.

And while my ego is speaking (so take this with a grain of salt) I'll look back on the year, and what I've observed, and tell you the reasons I think I haven't burst into the stratosphere:

1.) I started with the wrong book.... or did I?

The people who have done really well at indie publishing are mainly people who write a marketable, commercial book, and have a consistent body of work -- in other words, the same books and writers who are likely to do well at traditional publishing. Sure, a lot of them had a hard time getting published anyway, because it's a crowded market, and publishers thrive on scarcity. Each publisher will publish only so many paranormal romances, even if the audience is hungry for them.

It's really easy to match those books with that hungry audience, even if the author is pushing the envelope this way or that way. And once the book is matched with the audience, it's up to the book itself to sell.

For me? Last year, the future was still very hazy, and traditional publishing still looked like a good idea for my more commercial books. So I decided to test the water with my non-commercial books. My "what the heck genre is this anyway" books which I never intended to even try with traditional publishing.

So why would that be a problem for my whole career? Well, when I put out my more commercial work, any audience will find these other books confusing. Will they like my other stuff? Should they try it? And if they were to try it and dislike it, would they then be turned off everything I write?

So why would this NOT be a problem? Because everything I write is somewhat hard to categorize. Everything is a little bit non-commercial. I might as well start with the hard stuff.

And that is a nice segue into the next reason:

2.) I write in inconsistent and dead genres (and not even all the same genres).

It isn't that everything I write is not salable, it's just that everything I write is not what people expect. It's hard to raise anticipation when people can't tell for sure what something is. Is a mystery western going to be too westerny? Is it going to be western enough? Is there going to be a history quiz, or should we expect John Wayne? And the silly title... does that mean it's going to be Tarantino silly, or Bugs Bunny silly? Am I going to be wincing during the shootouts? Or am I going to be bored with how sanitized they are?

In the mean time, I have learned something over the years about my writing: editors and fellow writers, etc., always start out thinking I did certain things by accident. Then they realize I did it on purpose, and they have a moment of confusion. I meant to do that? And then they get it, and ask for more. (Or run screaming away.)

The reason it's hard to get at first is not because I am too different, but because I'm not different enough. I like to color close to the lines, and when you do that, people expect you to stay inside them. They think you made a mistake when you slip just outside the line. If you meant it, you'd go further...wouldn't you? That bugs people. At first. Until they get it. (If they get it.)

And I'm not going to stop doing that, because it's fun. (I do it when I'm driving too. I like ruts, but I don't think they should be so well defined. So I drive on the edge of the rut.)

3.) I can't afford a cover which would please me, so I'd rather be displeased with my own free covers.

Covers are important, and I'd definitely do better with better covers. But given points one and two, a really great cover will probably mislead the audience anyway. (For instance, Harsh Climate has a cover which looks more commercial, more serious, and less quirky than the story really is. Is that a good thing?)

4.) Since my books are not so easily marketable, I have chosen a much slower path toward fame and fortune.

I don't have a book in a hot genre, so there really isn't a point in getting a slick cover, pricing at 99 cents and promoting the heck out of it.

My sales were higher when I did more promotion. But the time and effort spent was not at all worth those results. If my body of work were more standard, I might put in more effort on that front. I do believe that under the right circumstances, promoting the heck out of your work and spending money and lowering your price and all that can pay off in dividends later. I don't think I have the kind of books which benefit from that, (and I don't know that even the kind of books which can benefit will always benefit).

Some of my books are commercial enough, though, that when I have several that go together, regular marketing will be more worth my time. But I'm not there yet.

So what is my strategy going forward?

Given what I've said above, it's pretty clear that I've got to get people used to my style. Which means:

1. Go back to basics; You must write. Good Old Heinlein and his rules. Get a lot of work out there and spread it around. That means I will be doing a lot of short fiction, as well as finishing up my novels and working forward on the next.

2. Get the work out there. I will be submitting fiction to commercial markets again, and also looking for guest post opportunities for short fiction. And, of course, the Story Sunday here, which will include excerpts sometimes, but I really want to commit to having fun short fiction here every week.

3. Stop worrying about strategy. Which book is next? Should I do this or that? I've got too much to do to take time to fret. If I put that energy into writing, I'll get to all the books faster. (And when I get enough books done, my body of work might start making sense.)

4. Keep working on the art. Whether it's buying a cover, or working on my own skills, a cover reflects your brand.

5. And speaking of brands, this blog is important to building a relationship with readers. This is the most comfortable way to put myself out there.

So for this week, we finish up the Hemingway's Baby Shoes competition -- the deadline is Saturday at midnight EST. I might be a little lenient since I don't have many entries yet.

I will post a list and links to all the entrants on Tuesday -- and if I don't get flooded with last minute entries, I will post the winner then too. (If I DO get flooded with last minute entries, I'll let you know Tuesday when I expect to announce.)

In the meantime, I will post my usual Story Sunday (an excerpt from The Curse of Scattershale Gulch, I think) then the story notes on Monday.

See you in the funny papers.

Story Notes - Alphabet Soup

A long long long long time ago, I wrote a story for Highlights for Children. (Not this story -- another story.) I had read their guidelines and I could not believe you could write a story that short. Under 400 words? That's short.

So of course, I took it as a challenge and wrote one. It sold. Highlights wanted "Work For Hire" rights, but I figured okay, because I actually did write the story for them, and they were offering me $100 for it, I figured it was a really cool professional credit.

A few years later they started reselling the rights to that story to educational publishers, and sending me a cut of the take. And again and again. I've made more money on that little story than I have on anything I've written since. I still get regular checks, thirty years later.

And it was SO easy.

Can I replicate that effort to save my life? No. That one idea for that one very short story that happened to be educational and have the right reading level and be fun -- that was it. It's the only suitable story I've had for Highlights. Ever.

It isn't even like I submitted a bunch of stories and they rejected them. I just couldn't come up with anything that fit the criteria to submit. But I tried.

"Alphabet Soup" was one of the attempts.

I have always liked this story because, even though it's not a Highlights story, it's very much a me story. Maybe it's the influence of all those silent movies. I learned from Buster Keaton that inanimate objects can be very contrary.

And the lesson of a story like this? There isn't one. Just like a Buster Keaton movie. We dig ourselves in to holes and sometimes, improbably, we manage to fall out of them. All we can do is survive, and mean well, and sometimes eat our words. That's not really a Highlights kind of story.

Cutting Back on Posting for A Couple of Weeks

I have a cold, I'm feeling burnt out, everybody around me is sick, and it's the end of the semester when day job issues ramp up to a fever pitch. Therefore I'm going to cut back on posting for a couple of weeks (until the semester is over).

I will do five things each week:

• Story Sunday
• Story Notes Monday
• Character Wednesday Interviews (but not this week)
• Friday Update
  

And I'll update my progress every night in the "Current Dare Progress" widget in my sidebar.

I'll skip this week's Character Wednesday, because I haven't actually contacted the author with the edited post yet.

I will post the Story Notes for "Alphabet Soup" tonight, and on Friday, we'll have an extra spiffy edition of the update: I'll take a look back at my eBook Experiment, and update you on where that stands.

I expect to start back on the regular schedule on May 15.

Plans Gang Agley

Had to deal with an emergency tonight. All is going well now, but I did not have the Story Notes post done, and so I'll post it tomorrow.

Alphabet Soup - a little fable for writers

This week for Story Sunday, I give you "Alphabet Soup." I wrote this originally as a children's story but, like a lot of my fairy tales, this really seems more like a fable for writers. Sometimes stories really do act like this.

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"Alphabet Soup"
by Camille LaGuire

THERE ONCE WAS an author who ate a lot of soup. Like many authors and artists, he lived in a garret, which is a cold little room in an attic. In his garret he had a bed, a chair, a table, a stove, a pot and a shelf. On the shelf he kept the books which he had written.

He had written a lot of books, though nobody had read them. The words inside the books felt they were quite special anyway. After all, none of the other things in the room could think. The words could think a lot, and they thought mostly about themselves.

"We are the most important things in this room," they thought. "Words make up ideas, and ideas are the most important things ever to exist."

They were very proud of themselves.

The author, however, was not very proud of himself. Nobody ever read his books. Every time he showed them to someone, it seemed like the words had moved around, and the story was not as good as when he wrote it. People did not buy many of his books, so he was very poor. He never had much to eat.

One day he had nothing but some broth. It was very thin broth, almost all water. He heated it up on his stove and took a sip to see if it was ready. It was so thin that it did not have any flavor.

"This soup is just going to make me feel worse," he said, and he decided to go to bed without eating it.

The words inside the books were worried. Why was the author so poor? Why, they wondered, did no one buy them and make him rich? They started to talk about it, but soon they began to argue. (Because, after all, arguing is what words to best.)

"Our book is the best book ever written," said the words in the first book. "The rest of you are so bad, it must be your fault that nobody wants to buy us!"

The other books, of course, all said that they were the best books ever written. They argued and argued. Then the chapters within each book started to argue with each other, each saying it was best. Then the paragraphs began to argue, and then even the sentences. Pretty soon each word was arguing with every other word. They got so noisy, that they woke the author up. He sat up in his bed and looked around. He could not tell where the noise was coming from.

Then the words began to break apart, and the letters began to fight with each other. They couldn't really argue anymore once they weren't words, but they could make a lot of noise.

"Rrrrrrr!" growled the r.

"H h h h," panted the h.

"T t t t!" tisked the t.

Then the capital A kicked the small h with its foot, and the h swung its top around to hit the A back. It missed and knocked the dot from the top of the small j. Suddenly every letter was fighting with every other letter. They poured out of the books and onto the shelf, piling into a great battle that amazed the frightened author.

The shelf began to shake, but the letters didn't even notice. Then the shelf broke and spilled all the books on the floor. The letters fell into the pan on the stove.

The author jumped out of bed and picked up his books. The pages were empty. Not one letter had stayed in the books. He felt terrible. He had spent his whole life writing those books, and now they were gone!

His stomach growled, and he remembered how hungry he was. He looked at the soup on the stove. That's when he saw where all his letters had gone. They were in a thick jumble. He would never get them back into order.

But now his thin broth was thick soup.

He was hungry.

Oh well, he thought. I might as well just eat it. At least I will have a full stomach. He ate the soup, which was very satisfying, and then went back to bed. All night he digested the letters, and when he woke up he began to write the books all over again.

This time the books really were the best ever written, because the letters had learned their lesson, and this time they stayed where the author put them.

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I hope to put a few more of these fables for writers together, and maybe make a collection some day. In the meantime, read my Story Notes about "Alphabet Soup" tomorrow.


You can read more of my fantasy fiction in The Bellhound, Four Tales of Modern Magic at all Amazon Kindle Stores: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE. As well as at other ebook retailers: Smashwords, Barnes and Nobel, Apple iBookstore, Nook, and Sony.

Woolgathering, and Chocloate Donuts with Sprinkles

Somewhere in the second act of the movie The Fugitive, Marshal Sam Gerard (played by Tommy Lee Jones) catches his junior deputy woolgathering.

"What are you doin'?" he says.

"Thinkin'," says Newman, the poor innocent junior deputy.

"Well think me up a cup of coffee and chocolate donut with those little sprinkles on it, while you're thinkin'," snaps Gerard.

I love that line because it's so unexpected... and so right. Gerard has already been established as a real unforgiving guy. We know he sets people up, and what you answer to any question might be a trap. In an earlier scene he rips the prison guards and local cops solidly for their incompetent reactions.

So when the newbie is caught woolgathering, we expect his head to get bit off.

But it turns out Mr. Sam "Hyper-Competent" Gerard is not dismissive of thinking. He's a thinker himself. If the kid had said "nothing" he would have ended up a smear on the pavement, but since he claimed to be using his head, he was given a task to use his head on.

So don't stop thinking ... but while you're thinking, think up something tasty.

==

...perhaps think something up for the Hemingway's Baby Shoes Microfiction Contest! (How's that for a segue?) We have one more entry this week:

He Wore His Son's Baby Shoes by Kaye Linden

Check it out, and if you're thinking about entering, there's not much time left. The deadline is midnight EST on April 30.

How To Find (Other) Places To Publish Your Fiction

I notice that a lot of indie writers don't know how or where to submit stories for publication these days. Which makes sense. If all you're going to do is self-publish, you don't need to know how to find markets....

Unless you want to use them to help promote your work. Traditional magazine and webzine publication is a place which will pay YOU to display a multi-page ad for your work (otherwise known as a "story").

Or maybe I convinced you in yesterday's post, that you want to start your very own rejection slip collection.

How do you find magazines to submit your fiction to?

The first thing to realize is that there is no such thing as an up-to-date or complete market listing. Markets change constantly.

So even though there are some great market databases listed below: the very first thing you must always do when you find a new market, no matter where you get the info about that market, is find the market's website and look that site over thoroughly. Find their writer's guidelines. Read them. Obey them. (I mean, yes, I said you want to collect rejection slips, but you don't want the story to be rejected out of hand if you can help it.)

It's also a good idea to read a few stories if they have them published on the site. And not a bad idea to buy a sample copy or two if they don't.

The Market Listings:

DuoTrope: DuoTrope is currently the best known of the free online market databases. They don't have every market, but they do have a heck of a lot. They also have a search engine to help find different genres or pay rates or other criteria. Some anthologies list here.

Ralan's Webstravaganza: Ralan is a little like DuoTrope, with perhaps an emphasis on science fiction, fantasy and horror, but covers everything. Some anthologies put out calls here.

Gila Queen's Guide to Markets: Gila Queen is a paid subscription newsletter with themed issues. Lots of anthologies and other temporary and changeable info. Lots of news about markets closing down or the movement of editors. It's put out by Kathy Ptacek, a really hard working woman who has been doing this for many years, and very much worthy of your money.

Writer's Market: Writer's Market is a huge enterprise, with books, websites, more books, magazines. WM has always suffered from being very popular and very out of date. However, they are now completely online, which means their database is more regularly updated. It's a subscription service, but if you are cash strapped, you can subscribe for just a month (or even use their 14-day trial) and use the heck out of it to gather lots of market ideas. You won't find anthology calls here, though.


Writer's Organizations:

The Society of Children's Bookwriters and Illustrators, and the Science Fiction Writers of America are both famous for their rosters and listings. I was a full member of both of them and I can vouch for the useful info I got from them. There are lots of other organizations out there, and the only downside is that most of them cost money to join... and many have membership criteria to meet. (Although most have an "associate" sort of membership for those who don't have full professional qualifications.) One that doesn't have a membership fee or qualifications is the Short Mystery Fiction Society -- which was formed to promote the genre at a time when short mystery fiction was on the wane.

A few others I know off hand: The Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Romance Writers of America. I never belonged to these organizations, so I can't tell you about the quality of their rosters and lists -- but I can say they have lots of good info for everyone (not just members) on their websites.

Finally, you can talk to writer friends -- and watch for where they have published! Get "Best of" anthologies and look where the stories were originally published. If there are listings of stories nominated for awards, odds are you can find the magazines which all the stories put forward were first publsihed.

You can even use Google. Search for magazines and site which publish fiction you want to read. (And it's a good idea to read them too.) Most of them will have guidelines posted on the site.

Of course, if you're looking for exposure rather than rejection slips, you can also look for blogfests (such as the Hemingway's Baby Shoes Microfiction Contest I'm sponsoring - only a little more than a week left), and sites which take guest posts. Or you can do as I do and publish some short fiction or poetry or jokes or songs on your site regularly.

Preferably you'll do all of the above.

Tomorrow I'll post a little on the value of woolgathering as well as links to at least one more entrant in the Hemingway's Baby Shoes contest. Then on Sunday, a fable for writers....

See you in the funny papers.

I'm Number One! (in Germany, sort of)

We interrupt this blog to bring fun news:

THE BELLHOUND IS NUMBER ONE (in English language fantasy anthologies in Germany).

These ratings tend to roll over fast. I'm enjoying the glory as fast as I can. (Danke, Deutchland!)

===
Find The Bellhound, Four Tales of Modern Magic at all Amazon Kindle Stores:
Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE
As well as at other ebook retailers: Smashwords, Barnes and Nobel, Apple iBookstore, Nook, Sony

I Miss Rejection Slips

Maybe I'm weird.

When indie writers talk informally, one thing they seem to agree on is that it's nice to be free of the dreaded rejection slip. We all have funny war stories about the rejection slip that came back so fast it must have been mailed before they even saw the story, or the form rejection printed on the back of a subscription slip, or the many strange reasons for rejection. ("We don't publish religious fiction" when the story has nothing religious about it at all.) Or my favorite, the manuscript returned without a slip at all, just the word "No" penciled on the top of the first page.

Me? Rejection slips are probably the biggest thing I miss about traditional publishing.

When I first started, I heard that you have to acquire at least a hundred rejection slips before you get published. It was just a random number, but it seemed about right when we all compared notes. We all first published when we were at least getting in the upper double digits. Maybe 70 or 80.

Sometimes one of us would get a lucky break earlier, but then it often took longer to make the second sale. Even those who delayed submitting stories so that they would be better writers still found they had a lot of rejections to collect. (Although it went faster, because they had a lot more stories to submit, and when they got rejected, they could follow up quicker.)

We saw rejection slips as a badge of honor, like scars of war wounds. It was a posture, a way to display toughness and take the sting out of it... but in reality it's a lot more than that. And I think underneath we all knew that.

Rejections don't make you a better writer. Not directly. Yes, some editors send suggestions toward revision, but unless they offering to buy the story, those notes are of limited value. Because unlike writing class, the real world is not built on an absolute scale of quality. Editors look for stories that suit their markets. They make suggestions that suit their magazine but don't necessarily suit anyone else's. Still you learned something from them.

But what you really gain is maturity. Seasoning. Forget the badge of honor, forget the individual little lessons and realize that rejections are also progress markers. They're like hatch marks on a fighter plane, or the marks a mother draws on a wall so her children can see their growth. They just say that you've done something. It's what you've done that makes you a better writer.

What have you done?

1.) You wrote. You can't acquire a lot of rejections without writing a lot of stories.

2.) You did research to find markets to send stories too -- thereby becoming knowledgeable about what is available and popular.

3.) You studied writer's guidelines for those markets, and you checked out what else they published... so you became aware of what readers were used to and what they liked, and what was old hat and what was new.

4.) You took a second look at any story which was rejected to see what could have gone wrong -- not so you could revise it, but so you knew what to do better next time. And a lot of rejections means a lot of looks at each story.

5.) You talked to other writers, especially those who had successfully sold a story, and you got their opinion on why that editor didn't like that story which seemed perfect. In other words you got advice relating to your story, not just your pricing and marketing and where to advertise (which is the advice most indie writers seem to seek from each other).

Note that all of those things focus on your writing and on gaining a wider perspective of how readers react to it. You learn to see you work from other points of view, and to recognize who your audience is. And not just on a theoretical basis. Instead of getting wisdom as a summary of truth, you see it in detail in it's infinite variety.

And you get to see it in action. In all that variety, in all it's extremes. This is what it really means to be sophisticated. We tend to pretend that sophistication is the the acquisition of certain sophisticated attitudes, but what it really means is that you have a lot of experience that allows you to more quickly see how something new works. How to look past the surface and poke it with a stick in just the right place to make it jump the way you want.

While I think surface sophistication is highly overrated, real sophistication -- knowing how the world works and having a lot of in depth experience -- is to be prized above chocolate. Prized above chocolate, bacon, and oyster sauce (which is the bacon of the Asian world -- it makes everything taste great).

Self-publishing has traditional publishing beat in terms of the rewards, but it just does not compare in terms of gaining experience and sophistication. Part of the problem is that it's too accelerated. It's great for the advanced writer, but for the beginner, it's a terrible way to learn. You don't have to do any of the things listed above before you have your work out there in the world. You only have to write one thing, and you can publish it without learning anything except how to format.

So if rejection slips are a badge of honor -- which show what you've done and that you've behaved heroically and professionally in putting your work out there in front of a specific critical audience -- then you have to think of self-publishing as an act of faith. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if anybody will notice it or read it. It's like leaving your manuscript on park benches and wondering if anybody will notice, or if they'll just throw it away. You kinda, sorta learn from the experience, but it takes longer and the lessons are more vague.

Every now and then indie writers become frustrated at the the whole uncertainty of the business. They see readers looking at us with mistrust, and hear the criticism of old pros and reviewers -- most of which is vague so it's hard to tell how much applies to their own work -- and they think, it would be nice to have some sort of independent seal of approval. Maybe we could have an organization of some sort to certify things? That proposal always gets shot down, because in the end, who's going to create and run and set the standards for such an organization?

In the end, the debate about that is pointless, because we already have a system by which we gain experience and get a seal of approval.

We call it "Traditional Publishing."

You don't have to give up on indie publishing to realize that traditional publishing still has a lot to offer the writer... especially in short fiction. Or even articles and poetry and jokes. There are markets out there for your work. If you can break into them, they will not only pay you, but they will give you exposure to a new audience....

And they will give you rejection slips.

No matter what kind of writer you are, you haven't really proven yourself until you've collected at least a few rejections.

Tomorrow I'll talk about how to find some of those markets so you can start your own rejection collection.