Fiction Works Priced at 99 Cents

I've got nine (18 really, see below) shorter fiction titles available on Amazon and priced each at 99 cents. They fall into two categories: literary and science fiction.

LITERARY

The Saltness of Time

Reviewer: "We have a modern day slice of Chaucer here, with four traveling friends marooned in a small hotel because of a blinding blizzard in the plains of Kansas.  In the main room by a comforting fire, they meet an elderly gentleman who offers to tell them a story from his youth, when he, too, was becalmed in the home of an elderly woman, also due to a raging snow storm. From his geriatric host, he learns the story and secrets of her life. The whole thing is like a matryoska doll … a story within a tale within a narrative."

Excerpt: "Emotional truths? Emotional truths are the deepest levels of reality inside of us. They're not rational. That doesn't mean they are irrational, it just means they don't comply to rational thinking. For example, you can't argue yourself in love or out of love. Feelings just are or they are not, whether you should have them or not. And people who were important to you who die, but you dream about them for the rest of your life. These people aren't dead to you at all; they are part of your emotional truth. I wonder what kind of dreams Gabrielle had."

Hospital Days

(Ten stories)

These are some of the first stories I ever wrote. No plot really. Flash fiction slice of life things. I recently learned there is a Japanese literary term for these things: kishōtenketsu

Reviewer: "This is a different type of read. It takes the reader into the life behind the scenes of a hospital. It is not like a TV show with heroics and handsome doctors getting all the attention. This is the grittier side of life with a true feel to the happenings as the reader is shown the life of a candy striper at first would like to be a doctor, but after what he sees in the real raw world a change of occupation might be in order."

Innocent Passage

Reviewer: "When two young men (boys) try their luck at digging through old houses looking for ghosts they find a lot more including the loss of innocence and maybe a little guilt they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. I wish the story was longer but the writing and the idea was really interesting."

Excerpt: Haunted house hunting we called it. The legal term was breaking and entering. The county sheriff had warned us that he knew we were responsible for the summer rash, but couldn’t prove it. If he caught us, he’d “throw your asses in jail,” as he so quaintly put it. We hunted anyway.

Bless Me Father for I am Sinning 

What if you could hack the confessional? Two teens take on the Catholic church.

Reviewer: This is a great story that gives you something to think about and has a nice twist to the end. I enjoyed it.

Drive, Chip, Putt, and Kill

Ned's a mediocre professional golfer, but an excellent serial killer. Nora's a mediocre golfer, but an excellent detective. It's takes a golfer to catch a golfer.

Downswing

Reviewer: This is the latest short story from Randy Attwood and will bring me up to date again with his works. I like to stay abreast of Randy's writings, because he has such a terrific and interesting style, each book unique, but containing a familiar voice. Now, I had to wonder exactly how he would make golf interesting, especially in just eight pages, but I shouldn't have worried. Listen to this description of placing a ball on a tee:

And eighteen times this easy gesture, this stooping over with the tee between the fingers, the ball hidden, protected in the perspiring palm, the insertion into ground the wooden link to earth the ball would soon be contacting - all this, for me, had given the gesture a quality of sacredness.

Isn't that gorgeous? The story is full of beautiful prose like that. Who thought that a short story about golf could be so intense, so vivid and so engaging - I literally walked out to the mailbox with my Kindle in my hand, reading. You don't want to miss this latest from Randy Attwood - go get it, and his other works while you're at it. You really won't regret it.

SCIENCE FICTION

A Match Made in Heaven

(Mormonism explored in a sci-fi sort of way)

Reviewer: "I have never met a Randy Attwood book that I haven't loved; he has a real talent for bringing his characters to life and creating an environment that is realistic and detailed without going overboard. This is the first science-fiction story he has published, so I was quite interested to see how he did in this story environment. And it was... brilliant!

"This is a short story, maybe it could be considered a novella - it took me about an hour to read it through. I am not sure where, exactly, Randy came up with some of the ideas he used in this story (I'll have to ask), but I found the ideas presented evocative and thought-provoking. There are questions of consciousness, how to truly access God (in whatever form that power takes for you), the humane treatment of others, etc. Like all of his books, I highly recommend this terrific story."

By Pain Possessed

Reviewer: "I enjoyed this dark little story very much. Nowadays, we don't see much traditional science fiction as used to be the case, and Attwood takes to the genre like a natural with a beautifully drawn portrayal of aliens. Aliens are hard to write - it's not easy to make them really alien. Attwood has done a great job; his aliens are believable and consistent without being in the least human, and he avoids the trap of trying to put in too much background. A very successful venture into traditional SF by a seasoned and professional writer."

The Richard Dary Weight Loss Institute

Reviewer: "This book freaked me the hell out. There, I said it. I can't tell you much about it without giving you spoilers, but the ideas that Randy expressed in this book scared the living daylights out of me. The sort of things that were done to the narrator of this story, Peggy, were inhuman. All in her attempts to fit in with modern societal standards of being thin. This made me think a little bit of the book I read earlier today, Saga of a Middle-Aged Vampire. What is it about modern society? Why are all the women expected to be anorexic-thin? It infuriates me. Healthy is one thing, but the modern goal is outright emaciation, and often extremely unhealthy methods are employed in the search for this. It actually frightens me that little girls are starving themselves to try to look like supermodels, who are (in my opinion), mostly freaks of nature."

Like Novels That Creep You Out?

From time to time I pick one of my novels to promote. Decided I'd spend some time on Blow Up the Roses. I have to admit I was surprised when the small press Curiosity Quills accepted it for publication. I believe it was one of their first choices. It's a very dark work, but the CQ founder thought it also the kind of gem a small press could discover.

Here's what one reviewer had to say:

Blow Up the Roses is a very dark story about murder, kidnapping, rape, pedophilias, and a variety of other human conditions of the most debase, debauch, perverted and deplorable nature. While this story is very, very disturbing . . . it is no more so than many movies that touch on the same themes. So, a reader should be aware of what you are getting into before you take up this book. Yet, Mr. Attwood is a master storyteller and his characters are genuine and authentic, even when they are monstrous. But, within this hellish, perhaps even demonic cast of characters, love literally blooms, and a story of hope, comfort, renewal and healing emerges in the midst of a nightmare. The story takes the reader to places you cannot begin to imagine and leads to an outcome that is terrifying, yet satisfying, too.

I have never known the end of a book when I start it. I always felt knowing the end was a fraud upon the reader. The characters should discover their own ends. In Blow Up the Roses, I didn't know why Mr. Keene deserted Mrs. Keene. I didn't know the horrible truth about Mr. Brown, who rented the other side of the duplex from the Keenes. I didn't know why Mr. Califano had this recurring nightmare of a rose garden blowing up around him. I didn't know why I didn't trust Mr. Griswald and his Amway sales program.

When I found out, I almost stopped writing the book. But sometimes characters demand their lives be put on paper. And sometimes it is far easier to create characters than destroy them -- until they destroy themselves.

Nice Peek at "Blow Up the Roses"

Nice to have horror/suspense novel "Blow Up the Roses" featured on Sneak Peak

Gives the potential reader a really good look at what it publisher Curiosity Quills called "brilliantly disturbing."

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