Real Readers Giving Real Reactions

Here's the best thing about this whole self-publishing business: Over the internet, promoting your work, you encounter real readers you don't know from Adam who have real reactions. Thought I'd list a couple here.

I don't remember how Katy Sozaeva found my work. But find my work early she did and even devoted a weekend to reading it and reviewing it on her blog. She's become an ambassador. (In the interest of full disclosure, I use her editing and proofreading services to do the final polish on my works before I put them into print. I learned the painful way what a poor editor and proof reader I am of my own works. But all the reviews Katy wrote were before I ever hired her.)

Rabbletown resonated with her and she has called it THE (caps here justified) BEST BOOK SHE HAS EVER READ. She provided audio and I put together this Youtube video.

Preston McConkie I met through eFiction, a wonderful effort to create eMagazines for this internet age. It reminds me of the sort of magazine I understand HP Lovecraft wrote for, and without pay. You find kindred souls who write kindred stories and you share. Preston and I, despite our canyon gaps in politics, are kindred souls. Imagine that! Much of my work has resonated with him. Here's a look at Preston. You want to disagree with this guy? You can follow him on Facebook.

Here's what he's had to say about some of my work.

The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley

"...Attwood manages to out-Lovecraft the original Lovecraft."

That is high praise, indeed. Link to the entire review can be found at the bottom of this post.

When Preston sent me this note after reading Crazy About You, it bowled me over:

"Having finished Crazy About You, I realized you are a prodigy, and that you may soon join my top ten favorite writers, a group including Mark Twain, Neal A. Stephenson and Robert Heinlein. You've got it, bro. Have you shopped Crazy around? If so, it boggles the mind that it hasn't been accepted by a major publisher."

Would that Preston worked for a major publisher.

Publicly, on Facebook, Preston wrote this:

"To my literary friends: The best value I can recommend in books today is "Crazy About You" by Randy Attwood. It's $4.99 for the Kindle at Amazon, also available through Smashwords and, I think, Nook (for you losers who have a Nook). I honestly can't think of a better novel in its size--full novel, but not a very long one--and price range, and NOTHING better from the self-published world. It's a coming-of-age tale about a young man living on the grounds of a state asylum and driven by motives both admirable and animal. I couldn't set it down, and that's perhaps the second book in two years I could say that of. Attwood has ascended into a tiny group of living authors whose prose I consistently love."

Recently, Preston called Tell Us Everything, the opening tale in 3 Very Quirky Tales here as an ebook and in Very Quirky Tales here as a paperback, "One of the greatest SF shorts ever written."

Okay, and now one funny phony endorsement. This one for Blow Up the Roses.

Hail Mary Pitch for Kickstarter Project

Seems appropriate to talk about the history of The Saltness of Time, the novella I want to turn into a print book using a letterpress and funded through Kickstarter. That campaign ends Dec. 3 and I'm nowhere near my goal. Very much appreciate those who have donated. If the goal isn't reached, Kickstarter will refund your donation. I even received $100 donation from this person: Алексей Ухловский.  Anyone translate that for me?

But if you're interested in reading this work, even without donating, no problem. The Saltness of Time, is available as an ebook and it is also included in the paperback collection of stories, One More Victim. I consider them literary works and worry: does that label turn off many readers? Does it you?

 

Here's the back story on Saltnesss. In my 20s (in Lawrence, KS, and in Florence, Italy, and in Oiso, Japan) I was writing. Trying to write. Probably the Hemingway Nick stories influenced me. But I had a vision of creating a series of linked stories featuring myself in high school and my best friend I called Fred. Some Fred stories worked out (those are in the One More Victim collection, too). Some stories you learn to give up on; some you go back to. The Saltness of Time was one that kept pulling me back. But it wasn't until my 40s that I reentered it in a serious and productive way.

***

An aside here: young writers, be patient; let things fester inside you. Don't think you've failed before you have. Don't think you've succeeded before you have. Many stories are like wine: they need time in the cask. Don't get drunk too soon on them; don't give up on them either. Or, don't listen to me at all. Seems plenty of young writers are doing much better than am I in this epublishing business. Maybe the best route is to ignore geezers like me.

***

Writing the novel Crazy About You, I discovered a technique that seemed to work for me. It was in first person, but allowed a kind of leaping forward for the character so he could look back upon himself. Just because you are in first person doesn't mean you have to stay in the present.

An example from Crazy:

At the drive-in, Gwendolyn and I both had chocolate malts with our cheeseburgers. Was beef better then? Was milk sweeter? Why is it that a chocolate malt and a cheeseburger is never as good as it was in high school? As we get older do our tastes become jaded, too, the way our ideals do?

The main character in The Saltness of Time is relating his story to a captive group of listeners in the present. But he's talking about the past.

That made Saltness complicated to write. The reader learns the story through the narrator who is one of the listeners, but 90 percent of the story is listening to what the main character says. And then the story teller tells a story that was told to him, so there is a story within a story. This technique created interesting tensions. It also provided the listening narrator in the present with opportunities to comment on the speaker of the tale.

Maybe this taste will clarify the above mush:

He was a little spooky. But I figured he was harmless. And there were myself and Ted to protect the girls, snuggling against us as we sat on the divan. We both had our arms around our respective women, sharing the commingled warmth of our young bodies in front of the fire, the only source of heat in the hotel. Sleeping arrangements had yet to be worked out. We had taken two rooms and, by looking at Ted, I could tell he was sharing the same hope I had: that we would take our girlfriends to our own beds, as we each certainly had done in the past, but neither of us knowing if the sisters would acknowledge that fact to each other through the act of allowing it to occur again in the presence of the other. The alternative was unappealing: sharing the narrow, double bed with Ted.

The stranger sat in an overstuffed chair near the fire, getting up as needed to feed it new logs.

"I haven't told many people this story. Perhaps you'd rather not hear it. I know how hard it is for young people to listen about what rocked the hearts and flamed the passions of old people when they were young. It seems so long ago it's hard to believe lives back then were blood and bone real. And what happened to me that night reached back into the last century. I mean, Gabrielle was born in the 1880s. No, wait, might as well get it right. She was eighty-nine when we ran across her and that was in 1963, so she would have been born in..." He stopped briefly to calculate in his head and Stephie, the little math whiz, spoke up with the answer, "1874."

This approach, too, gifted to me the best ending sentence I've written for any of my works. (Shame on any of you who get The Saltness of Time and skip to the ending!)

The phrase "saltness of time" comes from Shakespeare ("Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time," Henry IV, part II). I was thinking more of the salt beds of the dried-up, inland sea below the rich soil of the Kansas prairie. And, of course, the salt beds, too, within each of us that we develop with time.

But back to the whole Kickstarter business. Don't you think this would be a wonderful read in a print book from a letterpress book, hardbound by an old fashioned bindery? Hope you do. $100 donation would get you that book.

Blow Up the Roses 99 Cents Until Sunday

Curiosity Quills, the publisher of my dangerous suspense/thriller Blow Up the Roses that's been called brilliantly disturbing, is doing their Black Friday thing putting their ebooks at 99 cents until Thursday.

Check out this endorsement for Blow Up The Roses!

Here is a list of CQ books that are on sale.

DC Small Press Releases Blow Up the Roses with label Dangerous Suspense/Thriller

A small press in D.C. has published this novel, what they call a "dangerous suspense/thriller." Blow Up the Roses is indeed that. Publisher Eugene Teplitsky at CQ described the book as "disturbingly brilliant."  Doing an interview about the novel, Sharon Bayliss at the publishing house asked me to send to her some of my favorite lines from the book. I was stumped. And it was strange. In any other story I could have found easily sentences I considered lyrical or interesting or funny. But the writing style for Roses has a different feel, almost as if I didn't want to get too close to what was going on. I was keeping it at arms length. I don't outline or plan out books. A scene comes to my mind, a character, a quote and I create those scenes and characters and see what they do. When I realized what one of them was doing I almost abandoned the book. But characters, once created, have a way of demanding they live out their lives. So many secrets to be revealed by the characters in this book. Why did the husband of the protagonist, Mrs. Keene, just abandon her and disappear? What is her renter in the other half of the duplex doing in his basement? Why does neighbor Mr. Califano have a recurring nightmare that he is in a rose garden and it is blowing up all around him?

The language of flowers can be terribly blunt.

Blow Up the Roses

Read Free Excerpt Here