My First Web Radio Live Interview Wednesday

Well, this may be cool. I'm to be interviewed live on a web-based radio show Wednesday (5/2) noon, KC time here. The session will focus on Crazy About You.

It's made me go back and look at Crazy and try to understand why I like it, really a lot. Personally, for me, there is the memory that when I wrote the ending scene and how, subconsciously, I must have named a character what I did, it blew me across the room.

But, looking at it technically now, I realized that although it's in first person, it's in a method I discovered (not new I'm sure, but new to me) I call the looking-back first person. The story starts in clear first person from Brad's point of view, the high school student living on the grounds of a mental hospital because his father is a dentist there and the state provides free housing. But at times in the story, Brad is presented in the future and reflecting back upon what he is relating.

Finding that technique for Crazy opened up a whole new range of possibilities for other stories I was struggling with. It made me realize I could tell The Saltness of Time from TWO first person points of view. The opening first-person POV is the narrator telling what the second first-person POV (Brad again) is saying. I think this sets up a wonderful dynamic. It gives the story both a sense of distance and immediacy. And, quite frankly, I haven't thought about that until just now.

But I digress. I'm really looking forward to discussing Crazy About You. I've always been scared of radio. Very nervous. I think it will help that I will be in my den on my phone. Tune in and see what a fool I can make of myself. I'm giving myself 50-50 odds on this one.

Couple of freebie announcements

Free download for Kindle users of A Match Made in Heaven ends midnight PDT April 28.

Starting that same time will be a free download for three days of By Pain Possessed.

A reminder that if you don't have a Kindle, you can go to Amazon and download, free of charge, software that will put an app on your desktop for either PC or Mac that will let you read these Kindle files.

The Back Story on The 41st Sermon

Decided to get on a marketing push for The 41st Sermon after an avid reader I know really well and very much trust called it the best of my works he's read. And another reader I trust chimed in his approval, too.

It's one of my most undersold works and that puzzles me. More on that later, but first a little of the back story.

I was managing editor at The Olathe (KS) Daily News when I wrote this book. It was a good stretch in my life then. I had been able to assemble a great newsroom and we were doing really good news reporting. As a suburb to Kansas City, we beat the KC Star 2-1 in circulation and whipping them daily on local news coverage. It embarrassed them greatly when my court house reporter, Andy Hoffman, was able to find out and break the Royals cocaine story before the KC Star. (At that time, they had a morning and afternoon edition and their afternoon edition could only quote our morning story; that, folks, is called a sweet clean scoop in the newspaper world).

But what I really wanted to do was write novels. I would get up at 5 a.m., two hours before I headed to work. My son, who not yet in his teens would also wake himself up to practice the piano (Koji Attwood, google him, he went on to get a doctorate from Julliard and has a performing career). I was in the basement pecking at an early computer, an Atari 1040, if I remember correctly, and he was a floor above practicing.

On Saturdays, we drove from Olathe to Lawrence where he had an hour lesson with a KU piano professor. My wife shopped downtown Lawrence; I sat in the "Casbah" coffee shop and edited and rewrote.

I didn't keep any writing diaries, so I don't remember how long it took me to complete it. I never start with any sort of outline. The only thing I knew about The 41st Sermon was than a middle-aged Episcopal priest was headed on his yearly, weeklong work-vacation at a fishing resort to rest and write the outlines of his sermons for the coming year.

I didn't know what was going to happen to him when he got there. When his parishioner's wife showed up alone, things started to get interesting. You create characters and start to live with them in your head and they come to life for you and you hope you can bring them to life for the reader.

I've written another blog about the connection to that great Southern writer Walker Percy and won't repeat that here because this is the link.

I thought I might use the scan of that note to create some curiosity among Percy fans about The 41st Sermon. And, it's odd, the link above is one of my most visited blog posts. But it hasn't seem to have translated into downloads. It could be the Percy fan base, which has quite a few academics, look down their noses as self-published works and this whole ebook phenomenon and have refused to go digital. I've made it a free download a couple of times through Kindle Select program and usually free downloads will be followed with buys. But not this time.

It could be there are too many points of views, but I thought they were handled well and all those points of view provide the reader with information the individual characters don't have about each other. I think it makes the reader a sort of an omniscient viewer, but one who will encounter some surprises along the way.

I liked Father Talley and his struggles with his faith and his sexuality and himself. I liked Molly, the very sexy and independent siren. I liked Fr. Talley's wife, Kathryn, and her own road of self-discovery with the help of the psychiatrist, Richard, who is Molly's wife and has his own secrets to keep. I think the interactions of these people have an Updike sort of feel to it.

I think the novel deserves more readers and I hope this might encourage more people to get the book.

Sci-fi short story, By Pain Possessed, now live on Kindle Direct

I once took a creative writing course at the University of Kansas from that master writer of classical science fiction, James Gunn. By Pain Possessed was one of my efforts for that class and he was favorable to it, and actually suggested the last paragraph. Gunn was really a very good teacher. He explained point of view in a way that suddenly made it come alive for me. He was stern with his criticism, but fair. I remember him criticizing one young man's story: "A drunk bemoaning his fate is really boring." According to the Wikipedia, he is still living and in Kansas City. I wonder what he thinks of this whole epublishing phenomena. He was very business-like when it came to writing: you wrote to get published and you got published to make some money. I remember when I took his class I was one of the older students. He was then working on, and would read to us, segments from a novel about the changing of the millennium. 2001 was not far off. After he read one segment, I raised my hand, and noted that it seemed he had forgotten that the new year does not come to the entire world at the same time, but according to time segments. His face blanched, I mean white. He was, I believe, aghast that such a simple scientific fact had escaped him. That novel, which I believe was called "The Millennium Blues" factors in that time-change reality.

James Gunn's Wikipedia reference is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn_(author)

He was a master of the craft and I was lucky to have had the opportunity to learn from him. If you are interested in classical science fiction, I encourage you to encounter him as well.

Excerpt from One More Victim

One More Victim is still my most downloaded work. I like this 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 our expectations for ourselves in that world. She opened her eyes and leaned her forehead to rest against my lips. I whispered her name as though it were magic. We were in another world.

One More Victim

Excerpt from The Saltness of Time

I do one blog post and let it sit for too long and then I do too many over a short period of time.
I'm sure most writers fall in love with certain of their passages. This is one of my favorites:

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.

The Saltness of Time

For the grammarians out there: should that be sharks' teeth?

"Downswing:" a Story for Golfers

Golf once was an addiction for me. Good thing I wasn't better at it or I'd still be in rehab. I loved playing the game, (though play here seems really the wrong word). But I couldn't get any better at it. Became increasingly frustrated. And it cost too much money and took too much time. I gave it up. I still love it. It's the one sport I watch on television without caring who is playing or winning. I'm in KC and I watch the Royals on the rare stints when they are doing well. I watch the Chiefs. Of course I watch KU basketball. But the truth is. I don't watch much baseball, football or basketball unless my local team is involved. I think that means I'm not a true fan of those sports. Not so golf. The Masters is my Christmas. I'll watch any tournament. I love the game. To hit a golf ball well is an extraordinary feeling.

I have never been a person jealous of other people. I don't care if someone has a bigger, nicer home car etc. than I have. But one time I was invited to play at Kansas City Country Club (when it was the home course of Tom Watson). Being a public course player I was used to keeping up with the group before me and looking back to see that I wasn't holding up the group behind me. But at this country club we would actually stop our carts in the middle of a hole and just sit and chat. I was jealous.

Downswing is a short story I'm rather surprised I'm publishing. I can't imagine it will appeal to many people. Golfers, yes, who are also of a certain sensitivity. Downswing was written out of a desire to see if I could capture in words so many feelings I had on the golf course: The beauty of the setting, the frustrations, the glories, and the inner soul of a golfer.

It's a story of only 2,500 words, so I'm pricing it as low as I can on Kindle at 99 cents. Kindle edition

Other readers can find it at Smashwords. Other ereaders

It may be an attractive length for those who are now reading on smartphones.

Comments and reviews always welcome. Be interesting to know if Downswing resonates with anybody.