Tag: Kindle Singles

Everything About You

Saturday morning. A good night’s sleep had me up earlier than I would have thought this morning, but I feel rested and good; I was exhausted last night for some reason; Friday, perhaps? I don’t know. But I feel good this morning, I only have one errand to run–which is the grocery store, and I’ll try to get that out of the way momentarily–and some cleaning and organizing needs to be done. I also need to do some writing and editing today; yesterday I was too tired to work on the Scotty revision when I got home, so I need to get caught up on that today.

GEAUX TIGERS!

LSU plays their fifth ranked opponent today, Mississippi State. The Bulldogs roll into Tiger Stadium tonight ranked 22nd in the country. They have some nice wins under their belt, and some losses to quality teams–last week they surprised Auburn–and so this is by no means going to be an easy game for LSU. There could be a let down after last week’s huge, physical win over Georgia; Mississippi State is going to come in hungry; and LSU has to be careful not to be over-confident, must stay focused, and try not to look ahead to the big Alabama game in two weeks–which won’t be as important should LSU lose to Mississippi State. I will undoubtedly be extremely tense during the game, but am going to try my best not to get overwrought and overly involved in the game. It’s supposed to be fun to watch for Christ’s sake.

I also have some reading to do, and some editing that needs to get done, and an author interview I need to get started. My intent is to clean out my email inbox before leaving for the grocery store, as well as get some morning cleaning done here in the kitchen/office. My day job is moving at the end of this month, and I will no longer, in the new building, have my own office; I shall be in a cubicle like everyone else–and so have had to empty the bookcases in my office as well as take down all the pictures from my walls. I do not have the wall-space here in the Lost Apartment to adorn my walls with these pictures–mostly of our trip to Italy–and I’ve been trying to squeeze the books in wherever I can, which for obvious reasons has not been easy to do.

I’m still reading Empire of Sin, and am hoping to get further along in that this weekend as well; it may be in my lap during the game tonight. My reading has slowed down dramatically; and I still haven’t done a blog entry about Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls. Maybe later today.

I finished watching season three of The Man in the High Castle last night, and by far and away, this third season is the best of the show so far. It is interesting to me how well they’ve done with the character of John Smith, an American who fought against the Axis during the lost war and has switched sides, climbing the ladder in the American nazi hierarchy and also being groomed for leadership by Himmler himself. Underplayed beautifully by Rufus Sewell, the personal journey of this monster has sort of humanized him–which is, in and of itself, terrifying; this man is a monster and the antithesis of a patriotic American; everything a true American patriot would despise–and yet, those personal problems and tragedies and little heartbreaks in his family life make him almost win the audience’s sympathies…then he does something monstrous and you remember, there are no good Nazis. This show, and its message, are particularly real and powerful and important, given these times in which we live.

In the early 1990’s, I has an idea for a dystopian series of novels, built around the collapse of the American republic and the rise of a totalitarian state in its place; which I was going to call There Comes a Tide. I have all my notes and ideas in a folder somewhere, which means I might take a look at them sometime soon and see if it’s something I want to write in the next year or so. I have a y/a on deck to write after I finish the Scotty revision, and I am also going to be working on the WIP in the meantime as well; I kind of wanted to try writing a cozy after the first of the year and I also have a noir I want to write, in addition to a paranormal suspense thriller I’ve been toying with the last few months. There’s simply never enough time to write everything I want to write, and all the procrastination doesn’t help.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I’ve also decided to pull a long story from my collection and replace it with two shorter stories; the longer story will probably go up as a Kindle single at some point, and I also am in the midst of another long story that will probably turn into a Kindle single as well: “Never Kiss a Stranger.” I’ve recognized that story needs to be longer but it’s not enough of a story to be a novel…and there’s always Kindle single.

And now, back to the spice mines. I need to wash the bed linens, put some dishes away, get these floors cleaned, organize and file….and stop procrastinating.

Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader!

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We Don’t Need Another Hero

Monday morning; the typical post-Festival weekend exhaustion. I am so tired this morning, but what a lovely weekend of talking to people and reconnecting with friends and listening to smart people talk. It’s so wonderful to get to listen to smart people talk about books, especially, and politics and being queer and writing. The weekend was a whirlwind, and not being as young as I used to be, I am more tired and drained than I used to be afterwards. But it was a glorious experience, as always, I have some new books to read and new writers to read and my mind is all a-whirl this morning; too many thoughts to really put into words this morning. I definitely am inspired to write again, which, having rediscovered how much I actually love to do it, is wonderful.

I am still waiting for all the Amazon updating to take place on my new story, “Quiet Desperation”, my first-ever ebook single, or Kindle Short, or whatever the hell it’s called; I am very excited about this as a way to get my short stories out there from now on. Will anyone buy or read them? Maybe not, but at least I know that if people want to, they can. I know there are a lot of issues–and legitimate ones–that people have with Amazon, but if Amazon is making it possible for writers to make even a little bit of money for short stories, maybe it’s possible for Amazon to revive the form and more people will write them. My appreciation for the short story has obviously grown exponentially with the Short Story Project this year, and all the short story writing I’ve actually been doing. I really am pleased with “Quiet Desperation” and how it turned out; as I said yesterday, I read a piece of it on Saturday to the audience and everyone seemed to like it, and formatter extraordinaire Erin Mitchell also seemed to like it. It’s not for everyone, of course; nothing is, and of course I am not thinking oh I am going to sell thousands of copies of this. I’m not crazy, even if I am a dreamer; I’m a little too pragmatic to think that way. But…it’s always fun to try something new, and now that I am writing again, it’s also time to think about the business side of things as well.

But today is about getting over the weekend, and recovering, and getting mu equilibrium back. I don’t remember what I was working on before the weekend started–I know I revised some short stories last week; not really sure which ones, and I think I am going to start finalizing that short story collection and get back to working on Scotty again. I am going to have to go over what’s already written and done on it because I can’t remember where I was and what was happening and where it was going because I’ve been away from it for so long, but I want to get this all under control and harness all this writing energy I have again and put it to good use.

And on that note I am going back to the spice mines.

 

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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.

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