Category Archives: Short Stories

Headshots, Short Stories, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

And the Words Keep Coming

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As explained in other posts, I’m working on several writing projects at once. I recently completed a short story, which is now simmering as I figure out what to do about it. I’m working on Headshots, a sequel to my baseball novel. And I’m working on volume 2 of The Gutter Chronicles. I’m doing this last one in off moments at work.

Tuesday I finished the first chapter of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. I proofed it Wednesday and added one small item. It’s 2850 words, which is about right for a chapter in this book. This is meant to be a humorous book, taking workplace situations in an engineering company and turning them into funny stories. Yes, things that have happened to me over the years are finding their way into the book.

Humor may not be my writing strength. In fact I’d say almost assuredly it isn’t. Yet everyone who’s read volume 1 of TGC say it’s very funny. So maybe I’m  not too bad at that. But how can that be? I’m a serious novelist.

So as I was writing this first chapter, beginning a month or more ago, I came to realize it was more dramatic than funny. I needed to “funny-it-up” somehow. I put it aside for almost a month, trying to think of how I could do that. It wasn’t devoid of funny moments, but it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. As I walked on noon hours, or as I commuted, it was on my mind.

So Tuesday I was at my computer at noon, not being able to take a walk due to the weather, and decided to pull the story up and work on it. I re-read what I had in the chapter, and an idea of what to do came to me. What if I had Norman Gutter, the main character, hallucinate. He was very sick from a tick bite, though he didn’t know that’s what caused it. I had him go to the hospital and, in his painful and energy-less state, I had him begin hallucinating about the people and things he saw. I had him see the different people he worked with in not very flattering ways. Finally, as the doctor begins to examine him at the hospital, he has a hallucination about her just before he passes out.

Is it funny enough? That, of course, is the question. I proofread it quickly, saved the chapter out as a PDF, and e-mailed it to our HR assistant in the office. She read all of the first volume and enjoyed it. I figured if she saw this chapter as good, and funny, then it was okay. She e-mailed me back that afternoon: “Laughing out loud. Definitely a good read.” So I think I nailed it.

Now this morning, in the time I had before work, I decided to work on Chapter 2. I knew exactly where to start, because of where I left Norman at the end of chapter 1. So I began typing and soon found it was 8:00 a.m., time to begin work, and that I had 650 words typed in just a little more than half an hour. Wow, that’s more than I usually get in that little time. I’m not into humorous parts right now. That will have to come later in the chapter, maybe on my noon hour today. Or, if that doesn’t work, then next week. It would be nice to have two chapters finished by the end of next week. I’d feel good about the book at that point.

How interesting I find it that the words just come when I need them. I suppose it’s not really the words, but the ideas. I’ve found this to be true for quite a while now. In Headshots I’m at the sagging middle, that point in the book where a writer struggles to keep the action going as the hero works toward the climax. As I reported in another post, last weekend I added 3,800 words to the sagging middle. Things I hadn’t much thought about gelled into ideas, those ideas found expression in words, and I was writing, pushing the story forward.

I don’t know that it will always be this way. I might find myself at times where I have absolutely no idea what to write next, so I re-read where I am in the story, and the ideas just come and the words quickly follow. So I suppose this mean, I am a writer.

Short Stories

An Unplanned Story

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If you check out the progress portion of my website, you’ll see that I have a writing plan, sort of. I think through what I want to write, and begin writing those. When I have no definite idea on what to write next, I fall back on the plan, or perhaps adjust the plan so that I can move ahead and keep making progress.

So, I don’t like it when those plans go awry. That happened on Friday, and continued through the weekend. My current work-in-progress is Headshots, the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I’m 20,000 words into that, with most of my words being added on weekends.

But for a long time now a story has been rolling around in my mind. This first passed through my gray cells a year ago, or maybe even longer than that. I don’t know if it was in a dream or a daydream. But a few scenes went through my mind. I pushed them aside because I have lots of other things to do.

This story persisted, however. It consumed valuable mental power. I started thinking about how I could flesh out these scenes to be a full story. How would I begin it? Would it be a Christian story or general market? How long would it be? What would the ending be? Everything started to gel, except perhaps the exact way to end it.

Friday, December 20, when I got home from work, I decided I’d better get to work on it, or it would continue to divert me from my main work. I started around 7:00 p.m. Friday evening. I soon had 300 or so words, and what I felt was a passable beginning. Took a break for supper at that point, then went back to it, off and on during the evening as we watched a DVD movie. My computer was never off my lap. By the time I went to bed I was surprised to see I had 3,300 words, and was done except for the ending, which eluded me.

I put it away until the next day. By this time the ending had come to me, but it covered another 1,000 words. I put it away for a day, then polished it on Sunday and sent it to two beta readers. I’ve heard back from one; she found a few typos, and suggested a couple of structural changes. Otherwise she says it’s good to go. Perhaps I’ll hear back from the other beta reader in time.

So, now the question is: What do I do with this unplanned story? [bugging out for a while; IE at work is very slow on this site; I’ll try from home soon. Or, I’ll try typing in html rather than visual; that seems to be faster.] I have no idea for a cover; it is a stand-alone story not related to anything else I’ve done. So I need to think about this for a while. Maybe I’ll publish it, or maybe I won’t.

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.

 

 

Sharon Williams short stories, Short Stories

Next Publication: “Charley Delta Delta”

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I am one evening away from completing a short story and have it ready for publication. The actual story has been done for a month. While I was in my state of rebellion against responsibility I decided to let it sit. Then I submitted it to my critique group and received a few comments back.

The title is “Charley Delta Delta”, and it’s the second short story featuring Sharon Williams as the heroine. Sharon is a girl I went to school with, who I reconnected with on Facebook just before our class’ 40th reunion. The first story in the series, “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”, was published in September 2012 and has sold 11 copies. I actually think it sold one more copy that somehow Amazon didn’t register, but that’s another story. I use Sharon’s name with her permission, and she gets to read the stories before publication.

Sunday evening I agglomerated those comments and edited the story. The next day I made some edits that Sharon asked me to. In the stories her married name is Fonseca, and I had been spelling the name incorrectly (that’s not her married name in real life). I made those changes, and the story is sitting for a few days before I give it one last read and, if it’s indeed okay, publish it, probably on Saturday. I also have to do one more tweak on the cover based on Sharon’s request.

The basis for these stories is that Sharon Fonseca is an unconventional CIA agent. A married woman with children, her husband has various overseas postings that put Sharon somewhere in the world where her skills are needed. In the first story she was in America, living back in her home town. Accused of helping a suspected terrorist escape from the police, she was extricated from that accusation when Federal agents arrived and took her away.

In this book she and her family are tourists in Athens, Greece. An agent who is assigned to Vienna, Austria, is sent to Greece to keep an eye on her. He assumes she is a rogue agent. Taking his assignment seriously, he follows Fonseca in Athens tourist areas and to a topless beach in nearby Pireaus. He doesn’t know that higher-ups in the agency have an agenda outside of what they told him.

So where am I going with this series? At first I just wrote a story, the first one. Then I realized I could make a series of short stories out of it, putting Sharon in various places I visited in my overseas years and thus taking advantage of “the grand tour” I went on before I knew I would become a writer. So I’ve now written the second in the series. Will it be a series? I’ll have to think about that. Short stories have been fun to write so far. I have them in two series. The other one may have run out after three, but this one I can see becoming a series of between 50 and 100. I have that many places to write about.

So, as I often say on this blog, stay tuned if you want to see where this is going to go.

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.

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.

Church History Novels, Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Short Stories, Writing

Stewardship of Writing Time

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Thanksgiving week was not expected to be a time to get much writing done, and I didn’t for the first part. Our daughter and son-in-law came in with the two grandsons (3 and 1) on Sunday evening, then left the kids with us as they went on to Eureka Springs for a couple of days at a resort, courtesy of their church for pastor appreciation. Watching these two little boys didn’t lend itself to writing.

And actually, for the week before they came I didn’t write much, as the house needed a good release from clutter and dust and accumulation of months of having no visitors.

But the kids left Friday after Thanksgiving, my mother-in-law left on Saturday, so the house turned quiet real fast. With leftovers galore, even food preparation time was greatly reduced. So I did find some things to write, and ways to futher my writing “business”. Here’s my status right now.

  1. Last night I finished reading Doctor Luke’s Assistant, and have marked 60 or so typos and that many other places to make a few improvements. My goal is to e-self-publish this as soon as I can get the edits done, format it for e-books, and have a cover made. I suspect it will be ready in January some time.
  2. The print books of Documenting America arrived! Yesterday I found them at the office. They probably came in on Monday, but I never went to the mail area. I took some to Centerton yesterday when I went there and sold two. Sold one at the office also. I only ordered 20 copies to start with.
  3. I began writing my next short story, “Too Old To Play”. This is the next one in the Danny Tompkins short story series. The first one, “Mom’s Letter,” is available as an e-book. I hope to get this one available as an e-book as well. Again, having a cover made will be the hold-up.
  4. I’m reading a book titled Creating Unforgettable Characters, part of my continuing study of the writing craft. This is a little older, from the 1990s. It makes frequent references to characters in TV shows I never watched, such as Murphy Brown, and movies I never saw such as The Rain Man. But it’s pretty good. I’m gaining some new insights into fictional character development, even if I don’t fully understand the illustrations given.
  5. This morning (I’m home sick, the last stages of recovering from a stomach bug that hit me yesterday morning) I set up my writing business accounting spreadsheet. I entered the print book sales, entered the Suite101 income, and set up the expense tab of the spreadsheet. Maybe I’ll be ready to prepare my Schedule C when tax time comes.
  6. I wrote an article for Buildipedia.com and submitted it on the deadline, Nov 28. This is the first of a Q&A column on construction administration. It’s experimental for the on-line magazine. I have contracts for two columns, and I guess they’ll decide on more and the frequency when they see how these first ones are received. Let’s hope it works. I’ll be paid about 40 cents per word, which isn’t chicken feed.
  7. I completed an article for Decoded Science, another on-line source of potential writing income. I have not yet uploaded the article, as I have to first write short and long writer bios and upload a photo. Maybe I can do that today, and upload the article tomorrow.
  8. Attended a meeting of BNC Writers. We were a small group, but did some good critiquing and planning. We may have one more meeting on Dec 5, then wait till 2012 to resume.

That’s about it. I have much to do with writing over the next two weeks. Our Christmas letter, edits on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, the second Buildipedia column, finishing the new short story, planning for marketing Documenting America. Enough to keep me busy.