Bit of Back Story for "One More Victim"

In many ways, One More Victim is one of the oddest works I've done.

I'm not sure it's wise to write about the genesis of a story. Joseph Conrad did so in a series of fascinating introductions for a collection of his stories. And I think of One More Victim as my own sort of Heart of Darkness, not that I would ever try to compare myself to the great master of fiction.

I remember circa 1975 looking out the back door of our house in Hutchinson, KS, in February, and seeing a group of crows pecking holes in our black garbage sacks. It started a poem in my head. The poem stated the essence of a story that took me almost 30 years to finish as I found the tale that expressed the poem and then finally wrote the last stanza of the poem that ends the story.

The Holocaust is critical to the plot and the atmosphere. Deep love -- not betrayed, but deep love not fully realized -- is an emotion most people don't want to explore. This writer did.

What genre is this novella? I have no idea.You tell me.

Katy Soezeva was an indefatigable reader, prolific reviewer, and an excellent editor. She deserved much thanks from me for her careful and sensitive editing and suggestions about this story. She was an ambassador of my works. She passed away several years ago but I, and her friends, still mourn her passing. At one time, she was a top 500 Amazon reviewer. Here is what she had to say about One More Victim:

"One More Victim is an amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful story (it says so on the cover) - but then, those are my words, the words I said right after I finished editing it - I cried while I was editing it, and I'm not the sort to easily become overly sentimental about a story. It is a coming-of-age story, a story of realizations, a story about beginnings and endings - it is a story I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys a well-spun tale."