Category Archives: Danny Tompkins Short Stories

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, self-publishing, Short Stories, Writing

Writing Time Hard to Come By

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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.

 

 

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Short Stories

Started a New Work

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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.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, Operation Lotus Sunday, Sharon Williams short stories

What to write next?

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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.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories

Sales of “Mom’s Letter”

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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.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories

The Gatherings for a Death: How is a Teenager to Understand?

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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.

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.

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.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

And So We Watch, Again: “Too Old To Play”

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The second in the series.

Yesterday evening I finally pulled all the elements together to make “Too Old To Play” live at the Kindle store. After I did so, I realized I forgot to put the word count in the description. I like to do that so a potential buyer knows how many words they get for their money, and so there’s no charges of it being a really, really short story for the money. I’ll correct the description tonight. The Kindle instructions say it takes 12 hours for something to go live after submission. That’s down from the 48 hours it used to say. Sure enough, when I looked it up at 7 AM this morning, it was already live, about 11 hours after uploading.

Today I put a notice on my Facebook author page, as well as on my personal Facebook page. I added a promotional post to An Arrow Through the Air. I modified my books available page on this site to list it. With this post I will have completed my internal promotion—that is, those things I can do without going to an outside site. I also added it to my Kindle/Amazon author’s page and to my Author Central page, but have not yet added it to Goodreads. Maybe tonight. I also made announcements at the Ozark Writer’s League and the Christian Authors’ Book Marketing Strategies pages on Facebook. Beyond that, I’m not sure I’ll do a lot for this. In a day or two I’ll mention something that I did a month ago that will give it some publicity.

So now I watch. As of two hours ago I had one sale. Let me check now…still one. I just talked with someone about it at work, and she says she’ll buy it when she gets home and has her Kindle in hands. I’ve had a total of 12 sales of “Mom’s Letter” in the eleven months it’s been out. The “theory of multiple titles” says that the two short stories will feed sales to each other, and that together each one will have better sales than they would have apart. We’ll see if that proves true. Nothing to do but wait and watch, and try not to check the sales board every hour.

Soon, perhaps even tonight, I’ll format it for Smashwords and upload it there. Since it’s a short story that shouldn’t take too much time, and it will then be available in all major e-reader formats. So I do have that small amount of work to do before I will just be waiting and watching.

I’ll still in the waiting period for my query to an agent for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. On the agency website it says if we don’t contact you within 30 days assume it’s a No, but the individual agent’s web site says to assume that after 60 days. Today is day 16, so there’s still quite a lot of waiting to do on that. Meanwhile, the first round of edits is complete, the mss re-printed, and waiting for one more read-through and perhaps a few more edits.

So I’m waiting and watching on two fronts. That doesn’t mean I’m idle though. My next work, The Candy Store Generation, beckons me. I did an hour of research last night, and hope to do two hours of writing tonight. I hope to present it at the next writers group meeting, which will  be either Jan 30 or Feb 6. I would love to have this done in three months, though I may be over-stating my writing capacity. We’ll see.

Church History Novels, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Doctor Luke's Assistant, fiction, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Short Stories, Writing

2012 Writing Plan: Fiction

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Now, on Jan 4, 2012, looking ahead to what I plan to accomplish this year with my fiction, here’s what the year will look like.

  1. Publish my second short story, titled “Too Old To Play”. The story is written. I’ve  edited it for typos, plot, language usage, etc. It’s ready to publish, in my view. I e-mailed it to my critique group mailing list and to another trusted reviewer, so far with no response. I’m not really worried about  receiving critiques. If I get some, I’ll see what I need to do. If I don’t get any, I’ll publish as is. My schedule is to eSP this in January. Since it’s a sequel to my previously published short story, “Mom’s Letter”, I hope they will feed sales to each other. I’ve already “commissioned” creation of the cover.
  2. Publish my novel Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I finished what I consider the last round of edits a month or so ago. Publishers have told me it’s a good idea, but they won’t publish such a long work in a difficult genre from an unknown author. I figure it won’t have great sales, but what’s the downside in self-publishing it? Only the cost of a cover (already commissioned). If it doesn’t sell much, then the editors will be proved right in their judgment of it. If I make anything on it, that’s more than my prospects through commercial publishers. Right now I’m planning for an e-book. It’s so long I’m afraid a POD print book will be too expensive. I’m targeting this for February, which is very do-able
  3. Publish my novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The book is written, and partially edited. I sent it out to about twelve beta readers in October, and have heard back from three. The copy they read had many typos, as I had not proof-read it. I have a few plot issues to address, and must make a judgment on the amount of dialog vs. narrative. I think I can have all this done by the end of February, making production of an e-book in March fairly firm.
  4. Publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series. I hadn’t thought of adding another story to this series until recently. Heck, the second one didn’t even come to me until three months ago. I haven’t seen myself as a short story writer. So I’m still testing the waters. A plot for another one (actually two) has run through my mind, so I might as well schedule it to be written and published. I’m guessing this will be somewhere around June, but I’m still in the early stages of this.
  5. Begin work on my third novel. I could go several ways with this. I could work on a sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I hadn’t planned on that, but my friend Gary pointed out to me how the things I left hanging at the end of the book could segue very well into a sequel. I’m thinking my espionage book, China Tour, is most likely to be next, since it has had the longest gestation period. But a series of cozy mysteries has been brewing, and the first of those might be next. Given the uncertainty of what I’ll be working on, I’d say completion of the next novel in 2012 is unlikely, and I’m not putting completion in my plan.

So, there are my fiction writing plans for 2012. In a vacuum (i.e. with no non-fiction), it would be an easy schedule. Covers may be the hold up for maintaining my publication schedule.