Exploring New Ways to Promote My Fiction

I've been exploring more ways to promote my fiction using visuals and thought I'd share some here:

 Kristen Garlow Piper is a wonderful photographer in Hutchinson, KS and has made an extraordinary collection of photos featuring the same location in various sunset and storm situation. The beginning of the novella One More Victim begins with a thunderstorm so I couldn't resist using this recent photo of thunderstorms.

 Rabbletown has been getting some sales in Canada and Great Britain lately. Hope it continues to find readers in areas outside the United States. More US readers would be nice, too. The GOP nomination process makes this dystopia seem closer and closer. I set it in the year 2084. Perhaps too far into the future.

Foodies got their pairings and I created a series of photos showing mine. Good idea to have a few stiff drinks while reading the dark suspense novel Blow Up the Roses.

No reader yet has foretold the ending to this thriller novella The Notebook. Fellow Larnedite Jared Wingate took this photo of his wife and did the manipulation for the image.

Here's another "pairing" using Then and Now. It's set in the spring of 1970 and is a fiction retelling of that turbulent era at The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Ks.

 Lot about Taoism going on in Then and Now.

First in the Phillip McGuire mystery/suspense series. Tortured Truths originally had a working title of Heal My Heart So I May Cry. I still rather like that title. Publisher didn't. Thought it sounded like a romance title.

Excerpt from Novella: "The Saltness of Time"

I've always liked this part from The Saltness of Time:

"The quiet was remarkable. I had never known quiet could have such intensity. The wind had stopped. No tree limbs creaked. The highway was shut down, so no rumble of distant semi-trucks existed. I started thinking how I had never heard such a silence before when I realized I was feeling vibrations. Sensory deprivation will cause hallucinations. Maybe it was the lack of sound that made me believe the acres of snow had become a vast sounding board stretching over the prairie and bringing to me the vibrations of its past. But there was no doubt to me then, nor is there now, that I heard Indian ponies passing in the night, and I could feel the heart throbs of a terror-struck pioneer family, huddled, praying for God to protect their lives in a dismal soddie. I heard, then, too, the shouts of children in an ancient Pawnee settlement, ignorant of what would follow a Spaniard's search for gold. I heard a shovel scoop out earth to make room for a tiny coffin, and sobs tore at my heart. My body was rocked by the thuds of buffalo bodies, one after another, hitting the prairie as a hunter decimated a herd. And then I actually felt the vibrations as the first plow ripped the sod and make the entire prairie sigh. It sighed the word 'land.' Land, it's a word as magic as the sea, isn't it? There even reached to me the sounds of monster fish from when Kansas was, for thousands of years, a great inland sea, only to dry up, like dreams, and leave beds of salt and shark's teeth for a Kansas boy to wonder at."

And look at that. A sentence ending with a no-no: "at."

My Three Minutes of Fame on NPR's KCUR

Well, my three minutes of local NPR radio fame have come and gone here in Kansas City on KCUR. If you missed it, here's what it sounded like.

I think later it may lead the list of authors at this main link.

And at this URL you can find some additional material that was recorded, but not aired. I'm rather partial to "Sipping Gin." 

If you're curious about the story from which I read, "One More Victim," it can be found as a stand alone ebook.

Or as the first story in a paperback collection of shorter works by the same name. Memo to self: Don't let your picture be taken ever again

Thanks to a Hutchinson Photographer I Have a New Image for Cover of "One More Victim"

I think one of my favorite things about the internet is Facebook. Yes, I spend too much time on it. I got on because it seemed an avenue to promote books. It became a lot more. It became a place to meet really neat and nice and interesting people, so many of them with different talents.

One of those persons is a photographer from Hutchinson, Kansas, where I started my adult career as reporter and later an editor at The Hutchinson News.

I don't remember how I first met Kristen Garlow Piper on FB, but meet her I did and enjoyed her photos of the remodeling of a Hutch downtown building into apartments. Appreciated, too, her many other photos. She seems to specialize in weather shots. I got her permission to use one of her rural photos for the cover of the short story Innocent Passage.

The other day she posted an image that just blew me away. I have fun taking a photo to see how it might work as a book cover. Here's the original image.

Here's the fun cover I did for a non-existent book.

Then I thought: hey, I do have a story that would be perfect for this cover. So I changed the cover for One More Victim to use this cover.

Curious why the story One More Victim works for this image? You're just going to have to get that ebook.

Photo details: Kristen used a standard night shot/tripod with cable release - ISO 100 - Shutter open 30 sec - 1/100 shutter speed. She said storms had been building all evening with the lightning starting around 10 p.m. She shot it with a Nikon D7000 and a Nikon 24-70 lens.

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 

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.