One Night in Bangkok

A friend advised me the other day that due to the issues and problems with finding home for short stories about queer characters, that I should consider putting them up as Kindle Shorts, ebooks for sale for a low price. Ah, technology. Is there another word that strikes more terror in my heart than technology? No, I don’t think so.

So, last night I played around with making my story “Quiet Desperation” into an e-single. It was ridiculously easy, of course..I just used a stock image from Amazon, used their converter program and voila! An ebook of “Quiet Desperation” was all loaded into Amazon, for sale for ninety-nine cents, and I would get an email from them as soon as it was live–which could take up to seventy-two hours, depending on the complexity of the file itself. As it wasn’t particularly complex, I didn’t think it would take long; and sure enough, when I woke up this morning there was the congratulatory email from Amazon, letting me know that it was live.

Of course, since I had simply been playing around with the file to see hey, is this something a moron like me can actually pull off, I didn’t go over the document before submitting it, and there were some errors in it I discovered last night after hitting the publish button. Ah, well, I thought to myself, this is another learning experience for you. Once the file is live, you can then walk yourself through the steps of correcting it and republishing it.

Which I did this morning. So as soon as I get the notification that the file is live again, I’ll start sharing it so I can start raking in those quarters, dimes, and nickels.

Again, it was ridiculously easy. Frighteningly so. Let’s face it, I am not the most technologically proficient person in the world, and the fact that I was able to do this so easily–and granted, it was simply a short story; a novel or collection of stories would undoubtedly be a lot more complex and would require a much greater attention to detail.

I am curious to see if this will actually help drive sales of my other books; will giving away a short story or doing promotions for it on Amazon actually do anything? I cannot control the cost of the ebook editions of my novels that are already up; that is the publisher’s call. But when I put up Bourbon Street Blues and Jackson Square Jazz at some point, I can control the price points on those. Will that start driving my sales? Or has the world of the ebook boom come to an end after being flooded?

I am curious about this, as I am curious about so many other things. And now I have a lot to get done today before the opening parties tonight.

I did read some short stories for the Short Story Project. First up was  “Film at Eleven,” by S. J. Rozan, from her limited edition collection of short stories, A Tale about a Tiger.

I had followed the case long before I became a part of it because the dead woman was Chinese. Not Chinatown Chinese, like me: Patricia Lin had been uptown Chinese, a doctor’s daughter raised on ballet lessons and music classes, summer camps and private schools. When she’d enrolled in The College of Communication Arts, where she’d met the man alleged to have murdered her, Patricia Lin had been slumming.

I hadn’t known Patricia Lin. I wasn’t tied to her by blood or marriage, home province or village, but she was Chinese, so I followed the case.

It seemed over, of course, before I ever got involved. There was the finding of the body, the arrest, the trial. There was Mitch Ellman, with his gloating, victorious grin, his short blond hair lifting in the wind outside the courthouse as reporters crowded near him. When we’d seen his arrest on the eleven o’clock news his hair had been shoulder-length, tied in a pony tail. I wondered if he would grow it again, now that he’d been found not guilty of murder.

I am a huge fan of S J. Rozan, and I got a copy of this collection from a promotion she did raising money for the Boston Marathon bombing victims. I love her Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series; some of my favorite private eye novels are from this series, particularly the brilliant, Edgar Award winning  Winter and Night. This is a Bill and Lydia story; primarily told from Lydia’s point of view, and it is a master class in writing a private eye story–particularly when it comes to character. Rozan’s major strength is her ability to create characters, and Lydia Chin is one of the best out there.

I also read “Magic” by Katherine Anne Porter, from The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.

And Madame Blanchard, believe that I am happy to be here with you and your family becaise it is so serene, everything, and before this I worked for a long time in a fancy house–maybe you don’t know what is a fancy house? Naturally…everyone must have heard sometime or other. Well, Madame, I work always where there is work to be had, and so in this place I worked very hard all hours, and saw too many things, things you wouldn’t believe, and I wouldn’t think of telling you, only maybe it will rest you while I brush your hair. You’ll excuse me too but I could not help hearing you say to the laundress maybe some had bewitched your linens, they fall away so fast in the wash.

After rereading, and appreciating, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” I thought I should give Katherine Anne Porter another go. But this story, which is about  something that happened in a whorehouse when the character telling the story worked there–the premise is the maid is telling her mistress the story while she brushes her hair–and there is literally no point. None. If someone worked for me and was telling me this story while brushing my hair and it got to the end and there was no point, I would fire the person on the fucking spot for wasting my time. Are there good things here? Sure, the voice of the maid is pretty well done and compelling, but the story she is telling has no point, and there is absolutely no reason to tell the story. I’ll  try Porter again, but color me unimpressed here.