The Village Gaarden--a free short story

No, that's not a typo. "Gaarden" is how Norwegians would spell "garden," and my short story features Kelly O'Connell in what may be the closest thing to a fantasy tale that I'll ever write, fantasy not being my natural bent. Short stories are hard for me--either a crystal clear idea suddenly strikes or I stare at a blank computer screen. But when I realized a lot of mystery authors write short stories I decided to try my hand at it. This one that feature Kelly from my Kelly O'Connell Mysteries, still in her Fairmont neighborhood, just sort of came to me. I'm not sure I can even tell you where the idea came from, but I shaped and worked it until it was became a story that incorporated a family story and recipe. So, sit with Kelly in The Village Gaarden, leave the real world behind for a moment, and enjoy kjottkaker or, as we call them, Norwegian hamburgers. So good. You can download the story and the recipe here free:http://www.judyalter.com/files/shortstory.pdf. If you haven't met Kelly yet, I hope this will give you a slight idea and make you want to know her better; if you have met her, enjoy this different glimpse of her.
I have written fewer than twenty short stories in what has been a relatively long writing career. Fourteen of them, previously published, are in my collection Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories (available on Kindle and Smashwords for ninety-nine cents). But this is not a plug for that book. It's about mysteries and short stories and The Village Gaarden," which is special to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Are short story collections dead?

During the last ten years or so that I was director of TCU Press, we routinely rejected short story collections, usually without reading them. The policy was based on bitter experience--we had published collections by well-known Texas authors, stories that I really thought were high quality. And we inevitably lost money on them. In this day of POD and  e-books, they may be more profitable, but I came away with the impression that readers don't want short stories. They want to immerse themselves in the world of a novel. Short stories were saved for literary journals and the occasional commercial magazine that publishes them. Remember when POST published all those stories by authors either already famous or soon to be? Those days too seem gone (oops, just dated myself--I mean I've read about the history of that magazine).
In the past I was asked to contribute to several themed anthologies of stories, the most difficult among them the time I had to write about some sort of firearm--I required a tutorial from my longtime friend and mentor, Fred, and if I remember correctly I wrote about a derringer--and a young girl out for revenge. "Pegeen's Revenge" was one of my favorite stories.
Today my publisher, Turquoise Morning Press, publishes themed anthologies of romance short stories. Recent titles inlude Men in Uniform, Foreign Affairs, and Be Mine, Valentine. They must be successful or TMP wouldn't continue to publish them.
I have one collection of fourteen stories in print. Sue Ellen Learns to Dance is filled with stories about what was once my focus--the lives and loves of women of the American West, both historical and contemporary. Originally published by Panther Creek Press (thank you, Guida Jackson), it got some nice blurbs and reviews but it never sold much. When I asked for permission to post it as an e-book, Guida gave me her blessing, and up it went on Kindle and Smashwords. Recently, a couple of fellow members of Sisters in Crime/Guppies have discovered the title and said some quite nice things about it but mostly it languishes.
I have two books posted myself on those platforms. One, Mattie, sells quite well. The short story collection simply doesn't sell. I know a redesigned cover would help--the current one has too academic a look, so a friend who owns a gift shop tells me. It didn't sell for her. You can comment on the cover as seen above. The photograph, which is eloquently poignant and sad, is by Dorothea Lange and was my personal pick. But at this point, I'm reluctant to put more money into redesigning the cover. Then again, maybe I didn't market it enough, put enough oomph into it (yes, this blog post is an effort to remedy that).
I don't know the answer to Sue Ellen's status, but I'm curious: do you read short stories? Collections of them? Don't get me started on poetry collections...but then, I've never written a single poem.

New Life for Old Books

In the early 1990s, I wanted to break my fiction out into a "big" book, rather than the short fiction I'd been doing for Doubleday's western fiction series. I told then-edtor Greg Tobin I wanted to write a fictional biography of Libbie Custer's years with General George Armstrong Custer. After all, theirs was the "Great Romance of the Western Frontier." Greg coughed, hemmed, hawed and said he'd have to see a hundred pages before he offered a contract. Long story short, it was published and did better than any other book I've published. Not the big breakout book, but nice respectable sales. Of course it went out of print, and in those days who knew to save digital files? Even if I had done so they'd be on a diskette and difficult to access today. So I have paid a company to scan all 300+ pages. Just finished proofing the galleys, and it should be available for e-readers soon.
I suspect I'm as proud of this book as any I've done. I wrote it with Libbie's journals spread out before me, and yet I tried to give her a voice that was real to me, not the public voice she assumed in her zeal to make sure Autie went down in history as a hero. Read an except here http://www.judyalter.com/e-books.
In proofing this book, I was surprised at how much of me there is in Libbie and how much of my attitude toward my marriage, then some ten years in the past. And I was also surprised at the change in my writing style. Libbie is not clumsy, don't get me wrong, and when I began to read it, I thought, "Darn, this is better than I thought." But I also noticed some slight changes in style--I've learned not to repeat similar words too close together; I've learned to avoid what I now think is that awkward construction, "It was then that ...." I've learned to omit unnecessary words to a greater extent.
Don't let me discourage you from reading this. I got some nice comments on Facebook about it, and I still think it's the most human approach to what I see as Libbie's dilemma--marriage to Custer was not al happy romps across the prairie, and I tried to capture that realistically. This is BSP--blatant self-promotion: I think you'll like Libbie if you haven't read it before. I'll post on Facebook when it's live and available to order.
Watch next for Sundance, Butch and Me, my take on Etta Place's life with the Hole In The Wall Gang and her romance with The Sundance Kid. It's no accident that in the title, Butch Cassidy comes between Sundance and Etta. Fiction after all can suppose, imagine, and take liberties. Want a preview of my approach? Read the short story, "Reunion," in Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories, available as an e-book for 99 cents. http://www.amazon.com/Ellen-Learns-Dance-Other-Stories/dp/0977179737/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331599197&sr=1-2
Enough bragging, but I'm excited to see these older works available to readers once again. Hmmm, twenty years is older? My, how time flies.

Scotland the Brave

Today I got two small booklets in the mail from James McBain, the chief of the clan and the McBain of MacBean. In case anyone missed it, my maiden name is MacBain, and I'm going to Scotland this spring. I had written the clan headquarters for directions to the MacBain memorial park outside Inverness, and they referred me to the chief. He sent cordial emails and said he would send me a booklet he'd written on the story of the clan from prehistory until the present. I can't wait to dig into it. He also sent me a booklet by his father, titled An American Scottish Chief. His father, Hughston (being a Texan I misspelled it as Houston) was Chief of the Clan when I was growing up in Chicago, and he used to talk on the phone to my dad about how they were related. I have a file of correspondence between the two after Dad retired to North Carolina. From a brief glimpse at that booklet, I see that the clan was without a chief and without land for about 200 years, not recognized among the clans of the Highlands. I gather Hughston brought it back to life, so I'm most excited to read these two books.
Spent some of the afternoon hyperlinking the short stories in Sue Ellen Learns to Dance back to the Contents page for the Smashwords edition--something they require for their "premium" catalog. It took me a bit to go back and figure out how to do that, although I'd already mastered linking the chapters to the content page. But it makes me proud when I can do it, so I'm gloating a bit tonight. We'll see if they accept it. I spend a lot of time revising my electronic books.  But in some ways Smashwords offers a much better product than Kindle. Just now I got word from Smashwords that the short story I've posted, free, The Art of Candle Dipping, has too many consecutive paragraph returns. Scarlet-like, I'm going to worry about that another day.
Tonight Betty and I had tapas at Sapristi, one of our favorite restaurants, and then I blew it--ordered chocolate mousse which I can rarely resist. Betty just watched me eat it, the wretch. Tapas were good--smoked salmon on toast, a skewer of chicken and mushrooms, Spanish torta (an egg and potato baked thing), dates baked in bacon, and endive filled with blue cheese, diced apple, and walnuts. A really good and healthy dinner if I hadn't had the mousse. But everyone's entitled to a splurge.

Writing is art; publishing is business

A couple of years ago I joined Sisters in Crime, on the advice of author Susan Wittig Albert, and then the AgentQuest listserv--postings by authors who were trying to find agents. It's a pretty difficult thing to get an agent,  yet this group is uniformly supportive and there's not a trace of competition--okay, a few admit to occasional twinges of jealousy but they rally. News of rejection after rejection is met with condolences and advice to get out there and submit again. Some of these writers  have submitted twenty queries, some a hundred or more, and still they keep going. Agents have a variety of canned reasons for rejection: I just didn't love it enough; I don't know where I could sell it; your writing is excellent but it's just not for me. Bottom line: this is a tough market, both for writers to place with an agent and agents to place a work with a publisher. It's partly the crowded mystery field and it's partly the economy--at least that's my take on things.
As I posted not long ago, I had an agent for a  year. He sent my manuscript to eleven publishers and announced he couldn't sell it. I'll give him credit--he sent it to all the "big" names and then a few. There are actually six "big" publishers these days who can make your fame and fortune. I guess I never really thought of achieving fame or fortune, and after that rejection, I got honest with myself. I am not a "breakout" writer (at my age I probably don't have enough writing years to establish a Sandra Brown-like career and maybe I don't have the talent or the chutzpah--take your choice). But I do believe in my writing and want to publish it.
My manuscript, "Skeleton in a Dead Space," has now been shopped; no other agent is going to look at it when it's been rejected by all the major mystery pubishers. Like a lot of others, I'm weighing the pros and cons of small presses vs. self-publishing, probably with Amazon, which offers an attractive package of print-on-demand paper copies and e-book publication. Self-publishing has lost the stigma that it once had, and I am truly tempted by this route. Fred Erisman, my mentor, has re-read the manuscript (for the umpteenth time, poor man) and declares he still thinks it's publishable, has no corrections or changes to suggest but a few ideas. I hope to get with him in the next week to hear those ideas. And to talk over with him the merits of various means of publication. One thought that keeps coming back to me is that it can take a small publisher a year to consider a manuscript--at 72, I'm not that patient. I want to see that manusript published and move on to others, lke the one I've almost finished.
The point I've been workikng around to is that someone posted on the Guppy (Going to be Published) Small Press Quest list how free she felt once she had given up the idea of an agent. She was enjoying writing again and not dreading the next ding of her e-mail, which might well be a rejection. The Guppies also have a wonderfukl role model in Susan Schreyer who has just posted her first novel on Kindle, Death by a Dark Horse. She's done a terrific job of marketing, and her book is selling--it's next on my reading list.
I have one e-book available from Smashwords and Kindle (the short story collection, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance http://www.amazon.com/Ellen-Learns-Dance-Stories-ebook/dp/B00466HT7Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1290048693&sr=1-1) and plan to post my 1988 Spur Award-winning novel, Mattie, soon (see, it's a business. You learn to overcome modesty and go for blatant self promotion). The trick is to build up readers, and the more titles you have the better. I have also created an Amazon author's page (http://www.amazon.com/Judy-Alter/e/B001H6KPU6/ref=sr_tc_img_2_0?qid=1290048839&sr=1-2-ent). The trouble is, I'm posting western Americana titles when I want to build a mystery readers' base. Maybe that will come next.
Wow, I have gone on too long about this. But, yes, publishing is a business. And figuring out marketing e-books or choosing a small press takes as much research as getting an agent. It just doesn't bring the rejection, and that's good.

Funky Day

No other word for it--it's been a funky day. Spent the morning making meatballs with brown gravy, sort of a complicated process. You mix meat, egg, parsley, summer savory, salt, pepper, and so forth, then put it into the blender until it's paste-like. Then you bake the meatballs for 30 minutes; then brown in butter and olive oil; remove from pan and make brown gravy with red wine, beef broth, and tomato paste. Took me parts of most of the morning, and I find these days a morning of cooking tires me--hate that!
It's rained all day, some of it with thunder and some of it quite a hard downpour. At some points it was almost dark as night. Scooby thought it was a good day to be in, but he stayed close to me--thunderstorms terrify him. I thought it was a great afternoon for  reading and napping--finished Air Time, by Hank Phillipp Ryan, another great read in her series about Charlotte McNally, a Boston TV investigative reporter. Since that's what Ryan does in her daytime job in Boston, so she really knows whereof she writes. But better than that, she creates credible characters that you like and identify with. There's the requisite tension, and though you know it will all come out all right (or mostly so), Ryan still keeps you reading. I think characters are so much more important than plot in mysteries. I don't want to read about people I don't like or care about.
Spent some time exploring promotion options on Amazon (haven't had many sales of my e-book, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance) but the options thoroughly confused me. Brandon sent me directions for downloading a friend's book from Smashwords to my Kindle--they made sense on paper but confused me in practice. Both failures sent me further into a funk, but I'll recover. I did manage to write some updates for my web page and send them to the designer, so that's one thing accomplished. But I really want to be able to update my own page--others do it, so surely I can. Brandon's opinion about that was that I really don't want to learn HTML and he surely doesn't want to teach me.
Jacob was supposed to come tonight but his mom doesn't feel well and decided to stay home. When she first mentioned this, I saw a light--I wouldn't have to keep Jacob away from an already nervous dog, I could do the writing I didn't do this afternoon, and I could finish my cooking without distraction tomorrow. But of course, when she confirmed that she was keeping him home, I was disappointed. I will write--try for 2000 words.