Are You a Kindle Unlimited Subscriber?

Kindle offers for $9.99 free access to hundreds of thousands of books. Thought I would list the works I have enrolled in that program:

Novel: Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All Set in Lawrence, KS and The University of Kansas during that turbulent spring of 1970

Novel: The 41st Sermon Episcopal priest at mid-life and mid-faith crisis gets involved with beautiful blonde parishioner and her phony kidnap plot

Sci-fi short story By Pain Possessed Can the weakest human save us all?

Short story about a solo round of golf: Downswing



Sci fi novella: A Match Made in Heaven The Mormons leave Earth to populate the Planet Moroni and discover their destiny among the stars and themselves

Literary novella: One More Victim Because the Holocaust is a critical element in this three-part story, it has broken through the top 100 in world literature>Jewish

Collection of shorts: Hospital Days 14-year-old boy learns some life lessons working as a candy striper in a small town hospital

Short story. The Richard Dary Weight Loss Institute The best weight loss program is the one you can't remember

"One More Victim" Took Thirty Years to Write; It was Worth the Wait. Hope You'll Agree.

In the early 1970s I looked out the window of the back door of our small house in Hutchinson, Kansas, where I was working at the newspaper, to see crows ripping into our black plastic trash bag to peck out its contents. The scene started in me a poem and an idea for a story.

The poem got started:

"In February the crows come,

"To pick though my garbage,

"Make holes in the black plastic sack

"And scatter its entrails over the snow.

The story did too:

"The most important summer of my life began with a house-shaking thunder-boomer that woke me up on a Thursday night in 1958 near the end of my fifth-grade school year."

The story stalled. So did the poem.

Years later the story picked up again and I finished the section from 1958. Years later, I finished the section from 1968. Thirty years later, I finally finished the section set in 1992; found the last verse of the poem that started the whole thing and would now end the novella. It's a boy-finds-girl; boy-loses-girl story. And then again. And then one final time.

One More Victim is a literary novella in which the Holocaust is a critical element, so gets sub-categorized as "world literature, Jewish." When offered free (and I'm not going to do that anymore) went twice to #1 free Amazon ranking As a paid ranking, it twice hit #92. I think that gave me the right to call it a best seller, but that is term much abused these days. It has a strong romance element, too. And it can be considered a coming-of-age, young adult work, as well. My writing touches many genres.

Here's what some reviewers had to say:

Anthea Carson

I could not put this book down. It was absolutely mesmerizing. First of all, I have a thing for books about loves that start in childhood, so it had me hooked right there. But also, this writer is just amazing. The way the language flows makes you want to keep reading. There is something very erotic in the story too, even though it was not cheap eroticism. I like that, when a book is sexy without overdoing it

Nicola Lawson

This short story packs so much into a short length it's hard to believe. It's very well written. I wish there was more of it, not because the story doesn't satisfy because it definitely does. I guess I'll just have to get some more of the authors work.

CJ

I'm an older gentleman living out in the boonies, so sometimes I forget that the world has seemingly sped up, even as I've slowed down. Having said that, this book felt like a dust storm packed in a tornado and wrapped in a hurricane. And I say that in the most flattering way. Attwood (this is my first experience with this author, and I'm pleased to say a surprisingly delightful one) manages to include so much back story in such a short space that I couldn't help but feel a bit rushed...and yet it didn't feel rushed. It was just the right back story and it was well constructed. The story itself was such a delight to discover. It left me breathless.

An excerpt:

Her face at that moment is still the sweetest vision I have ever seen. It was full of yearning, yet already satisfied. Her complexion mirrored the innocence of her heart, untouched yet by the cruelty of the world and the far greater cruelty of the expectations we have for ourselves in that world.

Paperback 

Kindle 

Nook 

iTunes 

kobo 

Almost all formats here 

Three Books Now Available as POD Paperback

It feels quite wonderful to have physical books in hand. I now have three works in paperback, which are available for POD download. Two novels: the coming-of-age, Young Adult, mystery-thriller, Crazy About You; the dystopian work, Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America; and a collection of two novellas containing the title work, One More Victim, and The Saltness of Time and three shorts stories. All can be found here.

A Business, a Hobby or a Calling?

From time to time, seems wise to publicly assess where I am with all this Getting Attwood Published stuff. This musing was prompted by the remark of a good and long-time friend and fellow author:

"I can tell you what is wrong with your book. It is too truthful. People want fantasy disguised as reality."

Early on, someone would point to a nearby writer who was successful writing romance novels and suggest anyone could do that, so why didn't I? I used to turn my nose up at such suggestions. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that it was wrong for me to deprecate such work. You have to create characters. You have to move them from point A to point B. Something has to happen to them. The reader must be engaged. None of this is easy.

But it can fall into a formula and I just could never do that style of writing.

My writing projects had to fully engage me. When I was working as a journalist, writing a news story was as easy as sitting in a chair. It didn't really engage me. You got the facts assembled, found a good first sentence. Maybe gave it little, cute tweak here or there; and it was done -- published and forgotten.

Not so when I wrote fiction. I had many sides of myself I showed to my family, my friends, my work colleagues, my bar acquaintances. I felt only truly integrated when I was working on a piece of fiction.

There is a metaphysical aspect to much of my fiction. And there is realism. I used to be offended when a reader would ask how much of a story was real. Then I came to realize it was the highest sort of praise: the words I had written had created a reality for that person.

And now, after publishing through ebooks (slowly turning them into paperbacks), I'm getting the following truly gratifying type of comment. It's in reference to the paperback version of One More Victim, which also contains the novella The Saltness of Time and three short stories:

"One More Victim" is an amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful story (says so right 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.

This whole venture with epublishing has not made me much money. I think I'm just about even. But it's not a business for me and it's not a hobby. It's more like a calling. And the rewards for a calling aren't measured in dollars, but in knowing you've communicated deeply with another human being.