Sales haven’t been “robust”. Not even steady. But it’s already at #10 on my list of books as to total sales.
I finished writing Documenting America: Civil War Edition in June, published it as an e-book in July, and as a print book in August. Sales haven’t been great, but better than lots of what I’ve published. Then, in August, I began work on another novel. It’s a prequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant, tentatively titled Adam Of Jerusalem. I wrote two nights in manuscript. Later, when I typed it, I was surprised I had over 1,300 words.
Meanwhile, I have several other books that I’ve started. Here’s the full list and approximate degree of completion, without explanation of what each one is. It includes one I’ve not mentioned previously on this blog
The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2: about 20% done
Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism Through The Ages: about 50% done
Thomas Carlyle: A Chronological Composition Bibliography: about 60% done
Stephen Cross of Ipswich (a family history): about 75% done
Adam Of Jerusalem: <5% done
Any of these will make a fine place to direct my efforts. At the same time, two as of yet unstarted items are on my radar, and are consuming brain power, coming into focus.
the next short story in the “Sharon Williams Fonseca: Unconventional CIA agent” series
the next book in the Documenting America series, most likely on the Constitution
Either of those would be good also.
The cover theme has been black and white. A graveyard featured in this one, and will on the combined volume.
However, I believe, instead of any of these, that my next writing/publishing project will be to collect the six Danny Tompkins short stories into one volume and publish it, both as an e-book and print book. The stories aren’t selling on their own (the six having had 39, 9, 10, 4, 4, and 1 sale respectively from first to last). Perhaps they’ll sell better as a volume. This has been on my radar for a while. A problem was what to call it. The Danny Tompkins Stories was not a good title. I’ve been thinking about this, and finally came up with what I think is a good one:
When Death Changes Life
That matches the theme of the stories, which is teenage grief at the loss of a parent, and adult dealing with the old grief. I’ve even thought about a cover for it, a cover that will fit the theme of the individual covers but will be different, no just re-using one of the others. On Wednesday I did a quick check of how large a print book of these will be. With title, copyright page, and author’s works, if should run around 70 pages. True, that’s small, but large enough for a print book. I suppose the e-book will sell for $2.99 and the print book for $5 or $6. Maybe, at those prices, I’ll be able to get a little traction with it.
Perhaps I should have spent time cleaning my work area, which is en-route to non-functional.
Weekends are almost busier for me than weekdays. Sure, on weekdays I have to drive 15.5 miles to the office, work a 40 hour week (plus some), fight evening traffic, and come home mentally exhausted. But somehow that seems more organized, more manageable, than do my weekends.
It started with ducking out of the office a little early Friday afternoon. I thought we needed milk, so I stopped by Braum’s on the way. When I pulled into their parking lot my phone rang. It was the wife, saying she was ordering pizza for supper from Papa John’s, and hoping I hadn’t left the office yet. I had, but Braum’s was less than a mile past Papa John’s, so I said I could easily backtrack a little. She placed the order on-line, something she’s tried a number of times before without success, as her computer always locked up at the last step. This time it worked, so I drove back south, and waited the 25 minutes for the pizza. Thus, I arrived home at my usual time.
Friday night I went to The Dungeon after supper. I had numerous tasks I could work on, from filing, budgeting, book research and publishing, and income taxes. I decided to use my time to fix the cover for the Smashwords edition of Preserve The Revelation. It was only 1340 pixels wide, and the minimum width is 1400 for inclusion in their premium catalog. That was graphics work I could do, so I did it. It’s now awaiting Smashwords’ manual check to see that it’s okay. I hope to get that on Monday. The premium catalog is important, because through that the book is pushed out to Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and other vendors. Without that, it just sits at Smashwords, where nobody buys anything these days.
The Dungeon can be depressing, at times. I really, really, really need to spend time cleaning it.
I was in The Dungeon only an hour. Went upstairs, and for the rest of the evening I divided my time between vegging out, a few minor tasks, and research/organization in Documenting America: Civil War Edition. I had printed the book that week, and so had a good copy of what I’ve done so far. I saw that I was farther along than I thought. I made a table of where each of the thirty chapters stand. That will help me to plan what to work on next.
Saturday, I slept in (till 8:00 a.m.). By 9 I was outside, doing yardwork; specifically, continuing to rake leaves in the back yard. It’s a gravel yard, and getting leaves off it is more difficult than off a lawn. I don’t want to rake the gravel off, so I have to be careful how I rake. I had only the lower, rear portion still to go, a strip about 20 feet wide by the width of the lot, which is 120 to 150 feet. I was able to do only a little more than half. The remainder will be an easy task for next Saturday.
Inside, my next task was helping my wife get on the road to Oklahoma City, where she’s to spend a week plus helping our daughter with the grandchildren during an especially busy time. But first I had to make the weekly Wal-Mart run, for groceries and prescriptions she needed for the trip. This included bringing some boxes of children’s clothes up from the basement and loading them into the van. We store quite a few boxes of those clothes. She got on the road around 4:00 p.m.
At that point I went to The Dungeon, and decided that the income taxes were the next thing I needed to do. I had made a good start a couple of weeks ago, so the work I had left was to fill in a few items from the tax forms we received, finish my writing business profit/loss, and hence Schedule C, and plug that into form 1040. I then moved on to our stock trading business taxes. Surprisingly, that went fast. I had those done by around 6:30 p.m. Well, not exactly done, because I’m not sure about one item. Figuring out whether what I plugged into the spreadsheet is correct or not will take a couple of hours, something I’ll probably do tonight. Then all that’s left are the State taxes, and I’m done for another year. Oh, yeah, and the mother-in-law’s taxes as well.
Saturday night I did some more reading and research for DA-CW Ed, profitable research into source documents, and went to bed at a decent time. It helped that I didn’t have to teach Life Group this Sunday.
Today was Life Group and church. I knew I needed to get some walking in, so after lunch walked about 1.5 miles. I didn’t push it. Although I walk a fair amount, I’m out of shape due to having not walked while I had a cold recently. But I got it in, and wasn’t too worn out afterwards. No more, that is, than a 45 minute nap wouldn’t cure.
So I was finally at my computer, in The Dungeon, for my prime couple of hours of writing work. I spent the time copying source documents into my Word file for DA-CW Ed. That might not sound like much, but I had to look for them on-line, to hopefully save typing them. I was able to do that, as well as find a couple of source documents for the Battle of Gettysburg, documents that had previously eluded me. I also modified the file for my most recent short story, “Growing Up Too Fast”, for Smashwords, and uploaded that. Smashwords accepted it, and it’s now awaiting the manual check for inclusion in the premium catalog.
That brings me to Sunday evening. After some light cleaning that’s been nagging at me, and leftovers for supper, I read in the source documents. The first step is deciding what to excerpt from them to keep in the book. Several of them are long, over 3,000 or even 4,000 words. I’d like the excerpt to be between 700-1200 words, but will go more words when I need to. I made good progress in that. I’m not ready to give a new estimate of how close I am to completion, but definitely got closer to that goal.
So, a busy weekend. With progress. With a fulfilling feeling. Now on to the workweek so I can rest a bit.
The cover tries to keep the theme for the series that my son started for me on the first story.
As I’ve mentioned on these posts, my main work-in-progress these last several months has been my novel Preserve The Revelation. However, while writing it (since last September), other things have come to mind. One of them was a new short story, an unplanned one in the Danny Tompkins series. That had been bubbling up in my mind since around last October. I wrote a few notes about it, to preserve them. I even started the story in manuscript, lost it, and started it again on another sheet of paper.
I found the first paper, merged the two beginnings, and wrote maybe 500 words. All of this, mind you, in odd moments after finishing my work daily on PTR. It was February 14th that I sat and typed what I had, then kept going. In early March I finished the story, took a week or so to read and tweak it. All of this was on days I was letting PTR simmer, to give me time to get a fresh perspective on it. At some point that included starting work on the cover. It all came together this past week. I uploaded it to Amazon on Thursday, March 16. By Friday everything had synced up on all of Amazon’s systems, so I announced it on Facebook. So far, no sales. I haven’t yet put it up on Smashwords and other sites.
“Mom’s Letter” was the first in the series. This is the cover my son did for it.
The story is this: Daniel Tompkins, now in his sixties, comes to a better understanding that, due to life circumstances, he missed much of his teen years. This affected his adult ability to relax and have fun. He ponders how to break free from this baggage of youth.
This series started in 2010 when I wrote “Mom’s Letter“. It was the story of the day Danny learned his mother had entered the hospital to die, something that happened while he was at scout camp, something he hadn’t seen progressing as the summer wore on. Later in life he found a letter his mom wrote to him at camp that week. That started a flood of memories, and inspired Daniel to write a poem about it.
The second in the series.
I first wrote that story for a contest, one that a lady in church told me about. I submitted it (didn’t win), and later expanded it beyond the word count allowed by the contest. The best part of the story was in those extra words added. I ran the story through an on-line critique group, and two real life critique groups. When I made the decision to self-publish, I didn’t want to start with a book, so I decided to use this to learn how to do it. It first went live for sale on Amazon Feb 15, 2011.
The third in the series, and the first I did the cover for.
I never thought of making that into a series. It was a story I wanted to tell. But then I thought, perhaps Daniel had other memories of when he was young Danny who had just lost his mother. Could these memories help some other teenager who faced similar circumstances? The story of the wake and actual funeral seemed the logical thing to do next, so I wrote “Too Old To Play“, the title taken from the poem that’s included in the story, a poem that pre-dates the story. Then came “Kicking Stones“, featuring Danny’s memories of returning to school after his mom’s death, told with the metaphor of kicking stones on the walk to and from junior high. This had a lot of Daniel’s inner thoughts and reflections.
#4, a cover I also did.
Then came “Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral“, which featured Danny’s father, how he coped with his wife’s death, and raising three teens on his own. Then, since I’d focused on the dad in a couple of stories, I decided I’d better do one on the mom. So I wrote “What Kept Her Alive?”, which showed the struggles Danny’s mom went through and how her life was perhaps prolonged because of the activities she took part it, activities she could do from her invalid’s couch.
This cover, of a stamp collection box and a few stamps in front of it, isn’t doing what I’d hoped it would do. I may re-do this one.
So now, the series is complete. No, really. I know I said that after the last one, but I feel a sense of completion with publication of “Growing Up Too Fast”. I do plan on republishing each of the earlier ones, to tweak the covers to be more alike, and to add links to all stories in the series in each book, now that they are all published. I’m also thinking of combining them into a “boxed set.” We’ll see; maybe later this year when I have a lull in writing and publishing activities. I will, of course, keep you all informed should that happen.
February 13, 2011, my first self-published item went up for sale. It’s a short story, “Mom’s Letter”, a fictional piece which has autobiographical elements to it. It was a practice piece. When I made the decision to self-publish, I figured my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, would be first. But it wasn’t quite ready, I wanted to get something published, I had the short story ready from work-shopping and a contest submittal, so I self-published it to practice the mechanics of the self-publishing platforms at Amazon and Smashwords. It went live on Amazon four years ago today.
Then I thought it would be good to do a book-length item, but I still wasn’t quite ready to put up my novel. What else to do? I decided I could put together fairly quickly my historical-political book, Documenting America: Lessons from the United States’ Historical Documents. So I did that, and it went live for sale in May 2011. Later in the year I managed to get out a paperback version of it.
Eventually I published that novel. Then another. Then another. Then a novella. Then another novel. Along the way I added more short stories, and an essay, and three more non-fiction books. By the middle of 2014 I had 17 items published, six of which were print and e-books, the rest e-books only.
I won’t say it’s been a wild ride, but it has resembled a roller coaster at times. Get a day with a sale and my spirits rise. A week with two sales and I’m really high. The come the months with one or two sales, or none, and I’m in the dumps. Just when sales seem to be increasing, Amazon changes something, and what few sales I have dry up like a tumbleweed.
Several things I’ve learned through this. I discovered I really don’t feel comfortable tooting my own horn and promoting myself. This is a disaster for a self-published author. Then, I really hate the process of making covers, doing the graphic arts work. I have no talent in the graphic arts. I’ve done some of my covers. They probably aren’t very good and should be replaced with ones professionally done. But then, I really enjoy the formatting process, both of e-books and print books. Except for the cover, I think I do okay with formatting. And, I enjoy editing my own work, something that most writers say they don’t enjoy.
Last, I have no idea what the future holds, but I know the busyness of life can sure sap what little writing time a person has. I have one completed project—a poetry book from years ago. An artist is working on a cover for it now. If she finishes it, I’ll publish the book within a month. It was done in 2006 and has been sitting, waiting for the right time. I have four other works started, all temporarily abandoned, waiting to see if life will turn in my favor any time soon. I’m purposely suppressing ideas as they come to be. No point in aggregating ideas for works that most likely will never be written.
Hopefully, this will all turn around in a year. Life will grant me time to write again, and I’ll get those four works done and many more. Meanwhile, I seem to be stuck on 345 sales of 17 items over 48 months.
As you might be able to tell, based on the fact that it’s been 20 days since my last post, I haven’t done all that much writing in October. The reasons are many, and some of them I don’t want to get into publicly.
But I haven’t stopped writing, and I haven’t abandoned this blog or my other blog, An Arrow Through The Air. I have been in a very busy time at work. It began back in June and hasn’t stopped. Training events have come one after the other. I was event planner for two multi-day events. I went to a training convention in St. Louis in September. Just last week I went to a state engineering society convention in Little Rock where I taught a class and sat in on many others. Today I teach a noon hour class, and that’s the end of the special events. From then on it’s business as usual.
Things at home have required my attention as well. Some of those are completed, some on-going. It shouldn’t be too long, however, till I can get back to having an hour or two in the evenings to write.
Meanwhile, with serious writing out of the question, I’ve been editing. Yesterday I updated the “Works In Progress” section of this web site, and mentioned that I’m slowly working on aggregating Thomas Carlyle’s encyclopedia articles into a book with the intent of publishing this public domain material. That’s an easy thing to do. All the articles are now in one Word file. I’m down to 63 pages left to proofread, to get rid of the optical scanning errors.
I’m not in any hurry with the Carlyle book. I wouldn’t even be working on it except it’s easy to proofread a page in odd moments between major tasks, or while waiting on the doctor or a meeting, or in that half hour before going to bed when you don’t really want to start something new. So this is progressing slowly. I don’t anticipate completing and publishing that until sometime in 2014, perhaps February or March.
In other odd moments I began work on a new short story in the Danny Tompkins/teenage grief series. I really hadn’t planned on any more stories in this series after finishing “Kicking Stones”. However, a couple of reviewers indicated they would like more. That set my mind to thinking about what else I could write that would follow from the three already written and published. Some things came to mind. While waiting for the doctor a couple of weeks ago I began writing it in manuscript. I have the story in mind, but not all the details or the length.
Headshots, my sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, has languished in the last month. I’ve been pulling chapters out of it and submitting them to the writers critique group. I’ll receive critiques tonight on the third chapter, and from one person who forgot to bring the second chapter with them to the last meeting. I’m very close to restarting work on Headshots.
I probably should have on Sunday last, but instead decided to work on reformatting the print version of Doctor Luke’s Assistant with a smaller font so that I can reduce the size of the book and hence the price. However, I had lots of problems with the headers and with the section breaks. I spent two hours on it. With 37 chapters there’s a lot of running heads to get correct, and MS Word decided it didn’t want them correct.
I started from the back, then from the front. I’d fix one header and chapter pagination and another one decided not to work. It was maddening, and by the end of that time, though I wasn’t finished, I had made progress. I suspect I’ll be ready by next weekend with all things corrected and will be able to give the cover designer the new thickness. She can turn a book cover around quickly, and by this time next week I should be ready to submit to CreateSpace and send off for a proof copy. I have at least one buyer for this.
So I’m completing some writing and publishing work. Thanksgiving is coming, when the family will gather in to our place for a joyous time. We have much preparation to do for it. Writing will suffer, but it will continue.
I did it today. I started a new work. After church, after lunch, after reading ten pages in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life In Letters, after my weekend long walk, I sat in a tired state at my writing station in The Dungeon. I played a few mindless computer games, then knew I needed to be about my second career.
As I reported what might be first in my last post, I started work on “Kicking Stones”, a short story dealing with teenage grief. Last night I wrote an outline on this, as well as a second short story that’s on my mind. Both of these seemed fairly well developed, more so than I expected when I sat down to do the outline.
So this afternoon I began work on “Kicking Stones”. I wrote one or two sentences and immediately began playing another game. I went back and wrote a paragraph, then played another game. This went on for half an hour, until my mind was truly engaged in the new work. I spent an hour and a half of good writing on it, and wrote over 1,200 words. I’m not sure how long it will be. At least 2,500 words, which is Amazon’s new lower limit for items published. The poem that I plan to include in it is already written. I ran it through one critique site some time ago, and will post it at another site tonight for a second set of critiques.
People who posted reviews of the other two in this series said they weren’t exactly short stories, but rather memoir-type pieces. I suppose that’s true, though I don’t know what else I could call them. But for this one, I think I figured out a way to work a major metaphor into it. I didn’t quite get there today, but should tomorrow.
Based on the progress I made today, I think I can finish it in three days. Of course, then there will be editing, cover, etc. So, while this will be published a whole lot faster than a novel, it still won’t be instantaneous.
Readers of this blog will perhaps remember a time last year when I mused about what I was going to write next. You can see the first of those posts here. I had several follow-up posts over the next weeks.
Well, I’m about there now. Operation Lotus Sunday (previously titled China Tour) is very close to completion. Last night I began what I hope is and expect to be a final read-through. In 30 some-odd pages I found only two minor things to change, which is a good sign that this truly will be the last read. Of course, once the text is complete I’ll be at the work of formatting it for two different e-book sites, and also for a print book. I’m still working with the cover designer, who gave me the first draft but who also had a couple of physical setbacks in the last few days. And, once the book actually launches, I’ll have some promotional activities to do.
But, believing that the best marketing for your published books is to write and publish more books, it’s time for me to plan what will be next. I’m actually pretty sure what the next novel will be: Headshots, the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Last October, when I wrote the first chapters of four different books to gauge my interest and energy level, this was definitely in second place. I will be writing some outlines for this soon.
But I’m thinking I may write a couple of short stories first. I have always planned to write a third story in my teenage grief series that began with “Mom’s Letter” and continued with “Too Old To Play“. Once again it will be based on my own experience with that, and will include teenage memories relived in adult years and a poem. I’m thinking this will be next, and it will be titled “Kicking Stones”. The story line has been running through my head for a while. I’m also thinking of another short story in the Sharon Williams series, taking “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango” and turning it into an unconventional CIA agent series. This one will be harder, as a story line is only now coming to me, and I don’t know for sure that I can pull it off. It seems like I have a good character and a good basis for writing a series of stories, but great inspiration hasn’t come yet.
I should probably work on a book to follow-up on Documenting America, on the Civil War, while we are in the Civil War sesquicentennial years. But when I wrote first chapters last October I found this one the most difficult. So maybe that’s to happen in the future, but I think not now.
So, will I soon dive in to Headshots, or are a couple of short stories coming? Stay tuned.
Part of what Amazon gives authors, at least those who publish through Kindle Direct Publishing (the self-publishing arm) is a site called Author Central. It’s a place for you to manage your listed books, add or change various descriptions, both for books and author profile. One of the nice features is…
…sales statistics! For a guy who earned his worst college grade in Statistics class, I kind of like them. Of course, I don’t worry about standard deviations and deltas and sigmas—wait, the sigma might have been the standard deviation. I like to see the number, however.
On March 5 I had a sale of my short story “Mom’s Letter”. That brings me up to 13 sales of it in the almost 13 months it’s been available, earning me a whopping $4.96 in royalties. One of those sales was at Smashwords, the others at Kindle. If sales continue at the pace of about one a month, in three years I’ll have earned about $14-15 dollars on the story. Does that justify my efforts? I think so.
One other feature at Author Central is a graph of sales rank. It probably isn’t meaningful when your book isn’t selling (and a short story is the same as a book in terms of statistics). When “Mom’s Letter” was first released, I had two sales on the first day and it soared to rank about 42,000 in the overall Kindle Store rankings. Since then it has slid. At Author Central you can access this graph, and expand it to “all available data”. The problem is this data goes back only about eight months, so I don’t have the data from the earliest days. I didn’t discover Author Central until that earliest data passed into cyber-oblivion.
Here’s the graph as of 8:30 AM this morning, Central Time.
“Mom’s Letter” Sales Rank as of March 6, 2012
The interesting item to notice on the graph is that, when your rank is way, way down there, a single sale makes a difference. That one sale on March 5 resulted in a jump in the rankings of over 480,000. That tells me that approximately 115,000 titles in the Kindle Store have a sale on any given day. Then each sale of another title will lower your rank. If I ran the same graph right now, the sales rank would be 134,036. That tells me that 20,000 different titles have had a sale since 8:30 this morning.
Actually, since the ranking number is updated hourly, and since I don’t know when on March 5 I had that sale, my rank might have been higher than this. A single sale on Jan 1, 2012 pushed the ranking up to 86,835. Although, I don’t know if that’s really correct, since I don’t know how hourly rankings are turned into daily rankings once the data passes into ancient times.
Sales rank is interesting, but not terribly important. I usually check my sales once a day, but don’t check sales rank unless I’ve had a sale since my previous check. Sure, it would be nice to make a top 100 list (I just checked: it’s not on the top 100 short story list), but I’m not going to obsess over it. Much better to be writing and publishing than obsessing over sales and sales rank.
In “Too Old To Play“, young Danny Tompkins dealt with the after-funeral party at his house. Then years later, as an adult, he remembered and re-thought what was going on. No doubt this was a difficult memory for me, and the short story echoes much of what I felt at the time.
In the church we attended, victory over death wasn’t something that was preached. Death was final, and a person didn’t actually go to heaven or hell upon death, but to that in-between place, waiting on the “bus” to one place or the other, based upon the ticket vouchers being sent along by those left behind. Death was final. There was no assurance of heaven, no good news.
So a funeral was not a celebration of a person’s life, but rather a mourning of the death. First came the wake. It was different back in the 1960s. We spent two nights at the funeral home, with people viewing the casket, then passing by to express condolences. My grandparents, mom’s mom and step-dad, were at one end of the row, then us children, then Dad. Or maybe he was between some of us teens. Two night of a solid stream of “I’m so sorry for you.” Back then people didn’t bring pictures and mementos of the person’s life. We didn’t celebrate a passing; we mourned a death. We had no hope.
Today it’s different. If I was a teenager in 2012 with a mom who died a slow and painful death, when the end came we would celebrate her passing with pictures and doilies she’d crocheted and other things to remind us of her. We would say things about her being free of her suffering, and looking down from us in heaven.
But back in 1965 we had no hope. The wake reinforced that, and the gathering after the funeral gave the adults a couple of hours release, delaying the eventual grieving. Did it help? Was Dad able to recover more quickly because those friends, neighbors, and relatives came to talk, drink, smoke, and laugh with him? I suppose he did.
So “Too Old To Play” tells an honest memory of that day, as much as I remember of it. The adult memories are mostly fictional, but not completely. Again, I wrote it to tell a story, but if some teen, or even an adult, is helped through their grieving by it, then it will be a good thing.
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.
