All posts by David Todd

critique group, Danny Tompkins Short Stories

A Teenager Watches His Father Grieve

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I’ve read “Mom’s Letter” to three different critique groups. Well, I actually read it to two; I sent it by e-mail to the third one and let them critique it in the next meeting. Actually, in the two groups where I read it, I broke down crying mid way through, and someone else had to finish it for me. Oh, I also shared it with an on-line critique group when I first wrote it, back around 2004.

One reaction I received from each of these four groups is the lack of feeling from the father—my father. While not all parts of the short story are true, the ride home from scout camp is, as close to word for word as I can make it. One item of fiction at that point: I didn’t do the mile swim at camp that year. I matured late as a swimmer, and think I was 18 before I could swim a mile.

Back to Dad. People don’t like how he broke the news to me that Mom was on her death-bed in the hospital. They things like, “I want to smack him in the head.” “Oh, what a cruel, unfeeling man!” Funny, though, I didn’t intend to portray him that way, nor did he seem that way to me at the time. I asked when Mom was getting out of the hospital, and he said, “You don’t understand. She’ not getting out this time.”

The on-line crit group said I simply had to make a change, to give the dad some greater degree of feeling. I wasn’t sure why I had to do this. As a thirteen year old, I didn’t find dad unfeeling. He spoke to me directly, expressing surprise that I hadn’t noticed all summer that Mom was dying. I felt that the fault was mine. Possibly I was self-absorbed. Possibly I was subconsciously ignoring the obvious. Whatever the reason, I hadn’t seen it, and Dad was surprised at that.

I suppose readers fault him for not having told his son before that what was happening. Why he didn’t I don’t know, but no such conversation took place before that ride in the car.

Looking back on that, close to 47 years later, I think I must have understood that Dad was grieving too, but that he had to stay strong for the sake of his three children. One scene from the short story that’s true is Dad laying on the couch in the living room that Mom used to lie on, and pound the wall in anguish, the wall Mom used to pound in pain, and say, “Why did you have to die, Dotty? Why?” That went on for a couple of weeks.

Yet, he never broke down, never showed any weakness. Grief, yes; but weakness, no. Of course, he had known what was happening. For years he knew her days were numbered, then for months he knew the end was near. I think he did a lot of grieving before she died.

As I said in my last post, maybe this short story will help someone else out in their grieving process. Maybe they will understand what their surviving parent is going through. If so, “Mom’s Letter” will have accomplished something.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories

A Teenager Experiences the Death of a Parent

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Not too many teenagers these days experience the death of a parent. Medical advances mean life expectancy is greater. Workplace safety rules mean fewer industrial accidents. There is war, and military deaths, but even these are fewer than during the Vietnam years.

So I wonder if much of a market exists for my two short stories. These tell the story, fictionalized, of my own experience with my mother’s death when I was 13. In “Mom’s Letter” I tell about the sharpest memory at all, when Dad told me while we were driving home from scout camp that Mom’s death was imminent. I had no idea. Just like in the short story, he asked me how I could possibly not have known, that it was obvious from looking at her and how much more difficult it was for her to move around. Somehow I had missed it.

The second short story, “Too Old To Play“, recounts the after the funeral gathering at our house. At the time it seemed inappropriate. All I wanted to do was grieve. Yet here were all these people: neighbors, cousins, neighbors of my grandparents, and who knows who, at our house, yucking it up. I didn’t understand the power of diversion to assist with the early part of grieving. So I fumed a bit, hid in my room as best I could, and weathered the storm.

My adult perspective is different, of course. I understand the grieving process much better. Death has come ever closer, and I now know the people who die around me. Years ago they were vaguely familiar names. Now they are friends and relatives. If I don’t understand grieving now, I’m in trouble.

Why did I write these two short stories? I suppose just to tell a story. But in my subconscious, maybe it was with the intent of helping some teenager somewhere through the grieving process, to help them see that someone else went through it at a vulnerable age, and “graduated” to adulthood without too much trouble. If I could do it, they can too.

I have a couple of more memories I could share in short stories, and possibly I will. Having completed and published two, I only want to write more if I can do it in a way to help someone with their grief. A teenager perhaps, or an adult who experienced what I did, and still needs help with it. I’m thinking about it.

Writing

Too Much Dialog?

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One of the comments made by an agent who considered In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was that the book has too much dialog, not enough narrative. She had (and presumably read all of) a partial manuscript, about the first 80 pages plus three pages containing two disconnected scenes that I had written ahead. Too much dialog? I certainly want to consider her comments, as she is a publishing industry professional who sees many books and many manuscripts.

I re-read the book in November-December-January for editing purposes. My goals were: fix the many typos I knew it had, take care of a few items identified by beta readers as unclear or not the best, and add/fix a few plot items I realized were weak. A couple of these plot items I discovered only while reading. I said something late in the book that conflicted with something early in the book. A change was needed either late or early.

To fix all these things, in consideration of the agent’s comment, I used narrative. I considered reducing the dialog in a few places, but found I liked the dialog and didn’t reduce any.

This dialog vs. narrative, or maybe scenes vs. exposition, is the subject of a recent blog post by editor Victoria Mixon. Her example author is Dashiell Hammatt, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I haven’t read either of those, so I’m a bit hampered in understanding her arguments. She compares the two books, written many years apart, and mentions how Hammatt adapted to reader preferences changing around him.

Mixon says that exposition has become big in the last twenty or thirty years, at the expense of dialog. But, she says, dialog isn’t dead. I suppose I’m not quite sure what she means by “exposition” and “scenes”. Are these the same things I’m calling “dialog” and “narrative”? It seems to me that my novels are all scenes. No where do I have the type of intercalary chapters that Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath. Everything in both my novels involves the characters of the story doing something or having something happen to them. How is that not scenes, even if there is no dialog?

Sigh, I have much to learn about this business of writing. And much to figure out on how to write the best books possible. Hopefully I’m not over-analyzing here.

self-publishing, Writing

One Year of Self-Publishing

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Yesterday was the one year anniversary of my first self-publishing piece. My short story “Mom’s Letter” first went live on Amazon as a Kindle book. Since it’s just a short story, I don’t have a print version available. As follow-ups to this, Documenting America went live on May 2, 2011, and “Too Old To Play” went live on January 26, 2012. Documenting America is also available as a print book.

So what have I learned in a year?

I learned that I can’t produce new works and format them as e-books as quickly as others seem to be able to do. Dean Wesley Smith says the self-published author should try to have something new published every couple of weeks. I don’t have enough hours in the day to do that.

I learned that I have to personally sell just about every book sold. I sold a Documenting America yesterday and mailed it today. Personally sold a couple of copies in January. General marketing has so far resulted in a few sales at best. Targeted group marketing has resulted in a few sales at best. I don’t know how long this will go on and when, if ever, these catch a buzz and take off. Maybe when I hit some number or titles that result in critical mass for sales.

Requests for people to review the books have resulted in zero reviews. I gave a few copies of DA away to people who said they would read it and write reviews. So far that has resulted in no reviews and, I assume, no reads. Any reviews that now appear on Amazon are unsolicited. The few contacts I made to web sites to review DA have gone unanswered. 100% unanswered. Ah, well, no one said this business was easy. At times I think I should just stick with engineering.

I learned that I’m not hitting the best seller list any time soon. Here’s where my books currently stand on the Amazon sales list (I won’t call it the “best seller” list).

  • Documenting America – Kindle: 411,488
  • Documenting America – Print: 4,107,954
  • Mom’s Letter – Kindle: 549,047
  • Too Old to Play – Kindle: 427,066

But I do have some sales. So far, here’s what I’ve sold, electronic and print.

  • Mom’s Letter – 12
  • Documenting America – 30
  • Too Old To Play – 3
  • for a total of 45

So, I’m not giving up. I have a work-in-progress that, if I finish, I self publish. I have my first completed novel waiting only on formatting and a cover. I have my second completed novel now on its 36th day with an agent. If it’s a pass, I self publish. And the ideas still flow.

The Candy Store Generation, Writing

What writing style for “The Candy Store Generation”?

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It’s a snow day in northwest Arkansas. Only about 2 inches fell, with some sleet coming down now. But I decided not to go to work today. In any of the three directions I could go to work, I have hills and curves to negotiate. My pick-up doesn’t handle well in snow, and handles even worse in ice. One route isn’t too bad. If I park up the hill, I can get about eight miles before I have the hills and curves. And if others have gone before me and cleared the road, I can get through it okay. But I decided to stay home. If the office doesn’t count it as a legitimate snow day for salaried employees, I’ll just take it as a day of vacation.

So I’m in The Dungeon, writing away on The Candy Store Generation. I spent some time each of the last few days on it. I think it was Wednesday and Thursday that I wrote out three pages of manuscript. I typed them Friday, and on Saturday and Sunday tried to add more to it. I wasn’t able to add much, perhaps 1,000 words. That’s not a good production amount on weekend days. I was at just short of 7,000 words on a book that I want to be somewhere around 40,000.

The problem wasn’t writers block, per se. I knew what I wanted to say. I had chapters outlined and eight or nine out of fourteen chapters started. Chapter 1 was done, and chapter 2 well along but not finished. For each of the chapters, I know what I want to say. Yet, the writing is lagging.

Yesterday I think I finally figured out what the problem is. I’m not sure what tone I want to write in. I’m doing research, but certainly not enough to make this a scholarly work. No, it’s a “popular” work. If I have any footnotes they will be few. This is mainly about my opinions on how the Baby Boomers have screwed up America. I’ve thought about it a lot, and can easily write my opinions.

But what language to use? My first non-fiction book, Documenting America, is written with quite casual language. It reads more like a series of blog posts than a book. That was my original plan for TCSG: to write casually. These are my opinions, so if I use “I” a lot, so what?

But I started questioning that decision. I began to think that I should write it as a semi-scholarly work. It would still be opinion, but written more like a factual survey of the subject matter.

I struggled with this for a while. I added a few sentences and then reread to see how it sounded. I rewrote and reread to see how it now sounded. I made a little progress, sentence by sentence. But to make any kind of publication schedule, I need to be producing a minimum of 500 words a day, more on the weekend.

Thinking about the book and my target audience, and what type of language they would like to read, I finally decided last night that they won’t be offended by “blog language”. The professors won’t like it. And the professional political workers might laugh at it. But I think many people will like it. Blog language is common speech, relaxed speech.

I decided to just go with relaxed language, for better or for worse, and not try to make it semi-scholarly. So today I’ve been writing away. So far I’ve written about 1850 words, in three different chapters. I’m at a total of 8850 words, and feeling much better about the project. On to 2000 or 2500 today, and 11,000 by the end of the week.

Writing

Writing Wisdom on the Blogosphere

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I read writing blogs a lot. Agent blogs. Some editor or publisher blogs. Fellow writers blogs. Every day I read an average of five blogs, but not the same blogs each day. Over the course of any week I probably read 20 blogs.

Now, some of these I just skim. Sometimes one just refers to another. Some of them make frequent use of guest bloggers. A few of them, the ones I’ve read for a few years, are now recycling topics without giving much new information. So the time required to read these blogs really isn’t increasing even though the number of blogs I look at is slowly increasing.

Today Rachelle Gardner had a guest blogger, who talked about character flaws, something I’ve blogged about before. Our heroes must have faults. And it’s good if their faults are what cause them to get into hot water. The guest blogger used the example of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. She had her faults. Readers (and viewers) want to hate her for her flaws, but usually wind up sympathetic to her in spite of it.

This is something I struggle with. I wonder how much the general book-reading public really want the hero to have flaws. Do they want to see the mild-mannered become angry? The virtuous succumb to lust? The timid become obnoxiously bold? I wonder.

I’m out of words for right now. Maybe I’ll come back and edit more in, or just do a follow-up post.

Writing

More on loss of marketing mojo

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My last post was kind of short. It was prompted by something silly. On Jan. 26 I accepted a friend request on Facebook. It was someone I didn’t know, who is a member of a certain political page I’m also a member of. No problem, I thought. He must have seen a post I made and decided to friend me. I accepted his request.

Days later, on February 1, I responded to a message on Facebook from another friend. In the process, I noticed that, when you click on the word “Messages”, not on the button, underneath “Messages” is the word “Other”. Next to “Other” was the number 1. Strange, I thought. Why didn’t that 1 show up on my news feed? I clicked on “Other”, and saw the message was from January 26, from that man who friended me. He is involved with a couple of political groups, in the real world and on FB, with many followers. He wanted to review my book Documenting America and hopefully recommend it to his followers.

Now, I was happy for the interest, but terribly upset over the fact that this request for a book and offer to review had been sitting there for six days, and Facebook never notified me. That’s what we all want: a champion for our books. Someone who will supplement whatever marketing we are doing. Someone who knows people and can expand your circle of contacts. I had it, and it almost slipped away. Maybe has, for all I know. I contacted him, he was still interested in reading and reviewing it, so I shot him an e-copy of the book. It’s only been four days since I did that, so no feedback yet.

Writing is hard enough, and marketing is harder yet, that a flub such as this, minor as it was, is disheartening at best and demotivating at worst. I did a promo post that brought at least one result that came close to dying. If promotional successes are so hard, I thought, why bother?

On his influential blog, Joe Konrath wrote about how most writers way over-promote. It’s something that is drilled into wannabe authors when they first start chasing publication, especially the e-self-publishing route. You’ve gotta get out there and promote yourself. No one else is gonna, so you’d better. Be creative. Be active. Do it regularly and often.

But it’s something I have to psyche myself up to do. And right now I’m not psyched to do it. I suppose I’ll get over it, but not yet. Plus, after Mom’s Letter being featured on the short story blog, and having no sales result, I’m questioning whether any promotion will work. I guess I won’t bother looking up phone numbers for the local Kiwanis and Lions clubs and see if they need another speaker.

Writing

Loss of mojo

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Life has conspired to keep me from writing much the last few days. I think it was Sunday that I last wrote more than a paragraph. Tonight I got to look a little at In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, mainly just to check it for what pages I need to reprint after my last round of edits.

Too much is going on in life to worry about writing and promoting what I’ve already written. With all that’s going on my mind is kind of just mush. Tonight I remembered something I need to do before February 15th. It involves several days of off-hour research. That’s besides a lot of family finances stuff, which seems to pile up faster and faster these days.

Plus, given how poorly recent promotional efforts have impacted sales, I’ve lost interest in promotion. For now, if the books sell, fine. If they don’t, fine.

The Candy Store Generation

The Beginnings of “The Candy Store Generation”

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As I’ve posted before, my next work-in-progress, after completion of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is The Candy Store Generation. This is a political book, telling my opinions of how the Baby Boomer generation has screwed up America. The title came from my impressions of the first of three presidential debates in 2000, Bush vs. Gore. I described the origin of the term in my friend’s political blog. I did three follow-up posts on the topic, but they aren’t all properly tagged. If you want to read them, follow the link, then go to newer posts till you get all four. And the most recent post on the blog (as of 1/30/2012) is another of my thoughts about the subject.

After letting the concept sit a couple of years, I decided it would be a good topic for a short book, maybe 30,000 to 40,000 words. Since I’m firmly within the Baby Boomer generation, I figured I could write about it. Research would be minimal; my opinions would be foremost. I decided I wanted to do research into average birth years of the House and Senate over time, to see when they flipped from one generation to the next. That’s fairly time consuming, but I’m close to half way through that.

I copied the four blog posts into one file, and discovered they only came to a little over 2,000 words. Yikes! I thought sure I had written more than that. I took a few days to think through the contents of the book. I came up with ten chapters I thought were needed. That meant 3,000 to 4,000 words per chapter. Given that the words already written were spread out over five of those chapters, I clearly had some work to do.

The first chapter came first. I took the 500 words already written and began expanding them. This chapter serves as an introduction, without much commentary, describing the genesis and purpose of the book. It explains my shock at how, during that debate, the two candidates treated a budget surplus that hadn’t happened. Over several days I added a paragraph here, corrected a sentence there, clarified something in another place. I think it was last Thursday that I counted chapter 1 complete, though of course subject to edits. The word count in the chapter: 1,200.

Well, the Introduction needs to be shorter, I thought. So I plowed into the second chapter, the one that defines what the different recent generations are in popular terms and what the most common characteristics are. I found it slow going. Thinking you can describe the dominant attributes of a generation is easy when you say in your head you are going to do it, harder to actually put the words on paper. I allowed myself to become distracted with many outside things.

On Saturday, rather than write in the book, I brainstormed what the book would contain. A couple of news stories gave me ideas, and I reworked my table of contents. It’s now up to 14 chapters, so the word count per chapter is down to something like 2200-2900. I realize that an artificial word count per chapter is not smart. Each chapter must tell its story in whatever words the story demands. But average chapter length is a good indication. If after a few chapters I’m way under or way over the range I’m looking for, that says either 1) the project is not viable in the length I’m protecting for it, or 2) it’s going to be a more significant work than I expected, and I may need to adjust some expectations and publishing schedule.

Finally, yesterday afternoon I was able to knuckle down. I drew some simple information from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and from a couple of websites—nothing I can link to as a reference, but they gave me some ideas and refreshed my memory as to what I already knew. I was still distracted, and still struggling for words, but I was able to work at it for a few, interrupted hours.

My writing goal for Sunday was 1,000 words. When my writing day was done, I had 1,250 words, all of them in Chapter 2. That’s not a complete chapter by any means, and I’ve barely begun discussing other generations. So it seems I ought to be able to make my word quota for the chapter with no problem. It looks like the chapter will be at least 2,500 words to contain everything I want it to, and maybe over 3,000. So far so good.

That makes me feel a lot better about the project. This is a political season, and I’d like to have to book available well before the election. I have no illusions it will be a best seller or that it would influence the political debate. But having a political book come out several months before an election can’t hurt.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, self-publishing

One Book at a Time

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Today I attended a meeting at the City of Centerton, Arkansas—a simple preconstruction conference for a small project at First Baptist Church in Centerton, to add a baseball/softball field on vacant land next to the church. The contractor is a man who used to work for us; the engineer is one I’ve worked with for a long time.

As I drove to the meeting, I saw that I had two copies of Documenting America in the pick-up. When I got to City Hall I took a copy of the book. Upon seeing my contractor friend, I asked him, “You got a spare $10.90? I think you’ll like this,” and I handed him a copy of the book. He said he would take a copy, but that he didn’t have any money on him at the moment. His coworker also looked interested.

It was during the meeting that he said he didn’t have the money right then. So I took the book from him and gave it to the engineer, saying, “Maybe you’d like this.” She seemed impressed that I’d published a book, and said she wanted to buy one for her husband. When I told her it was available as an e-book for 1/5th the price, she said that’s how she’d buy it. I hope she follows through.

So I gave the book back to my contractor friend, and said he could pay me later. I kiddingly reminded him that I have to sign off on the project, and that he needed to pay me before I did the final inspection.

That’s the way book sales seem to go these days: one sale at a time, mostly at my efforts. Writing is a hard business, the sale of one’s writings harder yet. Yesterday “Too Old To Play” went live at the Kindle store. So far I have two e-sales of it, and it stands about 58,500 in the Kindle store, but will sink fast unless there are more sales. I’m okay with the start. The two sales probably came from people I know, somewhere, who bought it in response to my notices on my blogs, on Facebook, at Ozark Writers League, or at Christian Authors Book Marketing Strategies. I’d be shocked if they were bought by strangers who stumbled upon the title at Amazon.

So my sales and revenue for January 2012 stand at 7 and $6.36 respectively, with 3.5 days left in the month. I’m okay with that. I might get a boost on Monday Jan 30, when “Mom’s Letter” will be the featured short story at the Short Story Symposium. That may generate some sales, and if any of those buyers go to my Amazon page and see I have another short story in the series…who knows? I reached out to TSSS in late December, and am pleased it worked out.

One book at a time. That appears to be the rule in these early days in the brave new world of eSP—e-self-publishing. Will it ever move beyond that? I hope so.