Truly a workday--and a bit of self promotion

 

Nothing on my calendar all day—a day to knuckle down and take care of all those brush fires on my desk. So I answered emails, checked comments on Facebook (yes I check to see who has commented on my blog because I want to be polite), straightened out my calendar (somehow I had confused Saturday and Sunday for January 1, until a friend pointed it out to me—then I had to correct with people with whom I had made plans). I wrapped a couple of gifts, wrote some Christmas messages to my grandchildren (yes, the kind with green inside) and filled out that awful form to return a package. I ordered socks for one of the girls, a tiny thing, and the sent me a large, navy men’s shirt. The return form requires a twelve-digit item number be squeezed into a quarter-inch space—impossible and frustrating! I filled in the holes in the bibliography for the Helen Corbitt project and corrected some format problems in a short story.

And that brings me to the blatant self-promotion I want to do tonight. I am so grateful to so many of you for following my career as a novelist and, I hope, reading my books. But did you know I have written short stories. Note that’s in the past tense. I probably haven’t written one in almost ten years. My theory is the right impetus has to hit you for a short story. I can’t sit down and say to myself, “Okay, I’m going to write a short story. What should it be about?” I must have the idea, though sometimes the idea can come from a direct challenge, such as the opportunity to be included in an anthology of WWII memories. I wrote “An Old Woman’s Lament about War” in a day for that one. More often, my short stories came from small incidents in the past—I’d read about something and think that would make a story.

The point of my rambling tonight is that my short story collection, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories, is available on Amazon, and I’d like to suggest it to you if you have someone on your guest list who reads in short bursts. That’s what short stories are for. Mine are almost all about women—I think of one exception—from the nineteenth-century American West to the present. A couple of them have won Spur Awards from Western Writers of America.

The title story, “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance,” was inspired by a Dorothea Lange photograph of a Depression-era mother in a battered old pick-up, her wan and depressed children clustered close to her. One of the saddest pictures I’ve ever seen. But I balanced it with the memories of an old woman who once, young and beautiful, had danced in Fort Worth’s Hell’s Half Acre. “We were never wicked,” she insists.

“Fool Girl” comes from an incident in Harry Halsell’s reminiscence, Cowboys and Cattleland. I simply did a gender switch on the main character. Halsell’s book, by the way, is available in several editions but almost always with the same material. Part of a long line of cattle ranchers and connected by marriage to the Waggoners of Texas, he was the father of journalist Grace Halsell, author of Soul Sister, among many other books. Soul Sister is the feminine equivalent of John Howard Griffith’s Black Like Me.

But I digress, wandering away from my own short stories. The story that still makes me cry at the end came from a record in Fort Worth’s Log Cabin Village files about a Commanche attack on a settler’s homestead. “The Art of Dipping Candles” won a Spur from Western Writers and a Wrangler (Western Heritage Award) from the National Cowboy Museum. It like several others, was written quickly, as though once the idea came to me, the words just poured out.

If you’re inclined to read short stories, please check it out: Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories - Kindle edition by Alter, Judy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

And forgive me for such an outright bragging about my own work. I just felt, as I reformatted “The Art of Dipping Candles” that the short story collection is often overlooked.