Ebook anyone?

A surprising number of readers have never tried an Ebook. Even if you don’t have a Kindle reader, you can enjoy the growing number of books available in this new medium. During the week of March 7th through the 13th you can obtain two of my Ebooks from Smashwords at half price. Innocent is a full length suspense novel, and Stories for a Quiet Evening is a collection of short stories. Innocent is available for 99 cents and Innocent for $2.50. You can purchase both of them by following these links.

Innocent

Stories For a Quiet Evening

What Makes Fiction Seem Real

The human brain is somewhat like a garbage dump. Not a very flattering analogy, perhaps, but I like that description because it accurately reflects our experiences and our perception of the world. Whenever siblings gather during the holiday seasons and discuss their childhood experiences, the stories often diverge in ways that defy logic. “Oh, yes you did,” and “Oh, no I did not!” becomes part of the discussion, with each party convinced that their memories are correct.

If we have trouble remembering events that happened in our mutual lives, then it shouldn’t surprise us when we have problems with ‘facts’ that we did not directly experience. Most fiction is composed of things that happened— or should have happened, or perhaps might have happened— or at least we hope the reader will think so. There is a writer’s term that covers this situation. We call it suspending disbelief. You might think that stories that are similar to current events are easier to make believable, but this is not necessarily correct. I think there are three elements that make a story resonate with the reader and make them come back for more.

First: Do I believe in what I am writing? In one writer’s group where I am a member, someone asked a rather complicated question about obtaining DNA from a werewolf that had drowned and remained immersed in water for several days. Initially, I was startled by the question and wondered if the author did not know that werewolves were fictional creatures. But as I thought about the question, I realized that this author was doing something that all of us should strive harder to accomplish. In the world she had created, werewolves were real and she believed it with the necessary conviction to bring her plot to life on the written page.

Second: Do I understand the facts I have woven so carefully into my plot? I still cringe over a major mistake I once made in a story. I had carefully researched my plot and was convinced that all of my research was accurate. I checked three different sources for the details on this particular situation and they were all in agreement. The story was already in print before I realized I had missed this particular ‘fact’ by a country mile. Writers are notoriously bad at harvesting details from other books on a similar subject. How many times have you read about the smell of cordite lingering in the air after a shootout, even though cordite hasn’t been used in small arms ammunition for many years? There is nothing like talking to someone who has been there and done that.

Third: Do the ‘facts’ in my story run contrary to popular belief? There are a surprising number of things in this world that everyone believes to be true when they simply aren’t accurate. Some of the popular crime shows on television are notoriously inaccurate in pushing the envelope concerning technology. DNA evidence gets compared almost overnight, when in the real world, the backlog in crime labs make anything faster than two weeks very unlikely. On a recent crime show, a male agent turned to his companion and said, “I am an FBI agent. I get shot at every day!” In the literary world, writers attempt to whip every situation into a major event and people have come to accept these over-hyped situations as reality. I know a police officer who retired after thirty years on a large police force. He told me that he had never fired his gun while on duty, a fact of which he was rather proud. Try dropping that little gem into a story and see how much fan mail it will generate. Life is interesting and we must strike a balance between reality and what people believe about the world. It is an interesting situation, but that is what makes the world of fiction so interesting whether we are reading or writing the next bestseller.

Julia Dales Revisited

I was a little surprised when I wrote an article about a seventeen-year-old student from Canada named Julia Dales who wanted to win the beatboxing championship. I loved the video on YouTube because it was offbeat and was one of the amusing things teens have been doing since the first family left the garden of Eden. I have been amazed that the short article, published on May 30th of 2009, is still generating so many emails. There seems to be little middle ground. People are either amused by the video, or they tell me . . . “Our teens are irresponsible enough without you encouraging this kind of behavior” or “You usually write about serious things. I can’t believe that you are laughing over something so ridiculous.”

There are two reasons I liked the video. When my daughter was in high school, her best friend spent a lot of time at our house. Beatboxing had not been invented then, but if it had, Kim would have done it in some pricy restaurant (she has done worse) between the time the appetizers were served and the main course, and the other customers would have loved it.

The second reason has to do with who we are and how we look at life. One of my favorite passages of scripture is Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8. It is the one you have heard read aloud at countless funeral services. The forth verse says, ‘there is a time to cry and a time to laugh . . .’ I don’t believe the world has seen enough laughter, especially the kind that rises spontaneously from deep inside, with no purpose except to celebrate life. I think we should address the serious problems of the world, and God knows there are plenty of them. We are now fighting two wars with another looming on the horizon. We still haven’t solved all of the problems with Katrina. Now there is Haiti, the drug problem, crime, illness – just to name a few. All of them are worthy causes, but sadly, it is like playing whack-a-mole, you don’t get one solved until another crops up. There aren’t enough comedians like Bill Murray who appeared in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ nor well we ever get enough of those two zany characters in ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ We can’t turn our attention away from them because we see a little of ourselves in each act of insanity. Sadly, too many comedians dredge the bottom of obscenity to get laughs today.

Why do people object to the ridiculous things in society? I have a theory on this: We all have things we think we have hidden from the world, and too much attention on laughter might bring them to everyone’s attention.

I don’t think there are enough people like Julia Dales appears to be on her videos. Anyone with a whole orchestra in her head is to be admired and praised. Maybe she will grow up to be a musician or a surgeon who can carry her sunny outlook into the operating theatre, or perhaps she will aspire to the highest calling in the western world. Maybe she will strive to be a Mom and raise four or five little kids, each of them prepared to roll on the bed and laugh with unrestrained joy at the funny things of the world.

Here is a link to Julia Dales latest video: Julia Dales on YouTube.

Sniper Locater

If you write spy fiction, your hero won’t be complete without the latest gadgets to battle his country’s enemies. There are a lot of things out there that most of us never heard of, and a surprising amount of it is on the market. One of the newest offerings is a small device developed for military applications. This electronic sniper locater is called Ears Gunshot Localization System and is now available to the U.S. Army. This lightweight device is no bigger than a deck of cards, weighs 6.4 ounces, and can pinpoint the source of a gunshot in a fraction of a second. The technology works by triangulating the direction of the gunshot by analyzing the shape of the sound wave. The price is rather steep at $8,000, but the agency your secret agent works for has unlimited amounts of money, so what the heck.

Available at http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-ears.htm

Location, location, location.

Fine tuning your fiction.

An friend of mine who runs a small and successful business has told me there are three secrets of success. You must have the right location before you can succeed. I did not stop to think of the ways location could play an important part in literature until I entered a short story contest. The contest promised a short critique on each story, which seemed to be more than worth the effort. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the editor’s evaluation of my short piece of flash fiction, but was puzzled over one comment at the end of the paragraph. He said, “Wouldn’t this story have been better if you had set it in Seattle?”

I read and reread the story and still couldn’t get the point. Like all flash fiction, the story was rather lean, the scene happening on a street corner that could have been anywhere, USA. I have never been to Seattle. The longer I thought about the editor’s suggestion, the more I realized that even in short fiction, location can be extremely important. Here is a place where we can bring vibrant reality to a scene—even a short one—with a sentence or less. Take the following situations:

[A man senses danger as he pulls to the side of the road to examine a flat tire.] He closed the car door with a soft click that was barely audible above the faint sighing of the wind from the bayou.

Or: The thin sliver of the moon slid behind the clouds, but in the brief instant, he could see the barren landscape stretching toward the horizon.

We experience the world through our five senses. It is astonishing how seldom we employ smells, texture, and taste to our stories. You can, in fact, read through an entire book and find little except what the characters see and hear. The rich odor of food in a Chinatown restaurant, the taste of fresh artic snow on our lips, or the texture of an expensive fabric can awaken emotions and set a scene more than an entire chapter of dry dialogue or dull narrative.

Short Story, Anyone?

Tags: John Grisham, Ford County, short stories.

There are many websites on the Internet where you can read short stories for free, and a lot of us take advantage of the opportunity. Some of these sites have a comment section where the readers can give their opinion. For any given story, the comments will run from snarky to the sublime—some of the comments are actually better than the stories. The comments that heap ridicule on the author’s head aren’t necessarily bad, because all of them reflect the opinion of the individual readers. One often stated opinion is the ending of the stories. One recent comment was, “. . . too long a buildup for a one-liner ending.” Another writer said, “Your last sentence would have been appropriate for a joke, but not for a serious story.”

I have started reading John Grisham’s collection of short stories called Ford County. From the very first story, it became obvious to me that Mr. Grisham did not make this mistake, and it should cause some of us to rethink the way we have been taught to end a short story. Most essays end with some sentence that is like double punctuation, intended to nail down and give meaning to everything that went before. When Grisham gets to the end he just stops. He has already said everything on the subject clearly and concisely and there is no need to put a backstop to the story. If you are tired of reading stories about Presidents, earth shattering events, and a world gone wild, you might like the change of pace Ford County offers. The stories are earthy, and they make us remember that over thirty million people in this country live a hardscrabble existence. Grisham shows us a better way to end a good story without too much burble or slush.

Logic 101

All writing, on some level or another, must make sense. Even if we are writing science fiction or fantasy, we must maintain a level of logic that doesn’t jar the mind too much, or the reader is likely to reject what we say. That is not to say that everything has to be proven in a scientific laboratory, but it must hold to the ‘rules’ that apply to the world we have created. One of my early encounters with reality was an exercise I wrote in a short story course which was supposed to show a simple incident where two people were doing something—it didn’t matter what—that gave the reader a glimpse of who they were, what they were doing, and where the story might go from there. I was going to play it safe and write something very simple. My writing coach gave me a ‘C-’ and said he did not believe it. The scene involved two men sitting at a small table in the outdoor section of a restaurant, drinking coffee. They sipped, enjoyed the fresh spring air, and heard the muted sounds of early morning traffic. How could you not believe that this could happen? Believability involves at least two things. It must flow from the characters in a way that is logical, and it must be what we (the reader) would expect them to do. This is not to say that we can’t have strange twist, but the reader needs to have an Aha! moment where he/she thinks, I should have seen that coming. Mark Twain made an interesting observation when he said, “It’s not what you don’t know that can come back to haunt your, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”

What are they thinking?

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

Obscenity, vulgarity, and bad taste — do we really need it in our literature?

There is an astonishing amount of good literature available on the Internet, and a lot of it is free. I like to browse websites and blogs for some of the best of it. Recently, I found a well written story. The suspense and plotting was just about perfect, and I was anticipating a great ending—which came in the last line. I was not pleased, however, with some of the language in the story. Many of the sentences were augmented with four letter words, such as in ‘what the ****.’ I could have lived with one or two, but this occurred in almost every short paragraph. When I suggested that this did not add to the story, most of the other readers disagreed. Words like honest, descriptive, and true to life, popped up in their responses. My question to you is this: Are our readers intelligent enough they can get by without giving them a detailed description of all of our character’s body functions? If you are expecting a moral lesson in any of this, you are going to be disappointed. Morals, or the lack of them, is not the issue I am addressing here. It is simply a matter of looking at ‘honesty’ in a different way. Many blacksmiths, sailors, and construction workers have an ‘honest’ way of expressing themselves, and the rest of us know to move back a few feet when they become unspooled. From having read tens of thousands of books and stories, I have come to believe that the very mention of some human condition can convey all of the emotional flags we need to raise in a particular dramatic situation. As any editor can tell you, the correct word is what triggers human emotion or perception. The sprinkling of four letter words is the literary equivalent of using triple explanation marks at the end of a sentence — and you don’t want me to do that!!! Now do you!!!

Writing Interesting Things

Writers need to write about interesting things. I hope you spend some of your time in research that might be useful in your next writing project. Writers should be inquisitive and this inquisitiveness should lead us to discover the unusual things around us. There are many books that are anything but interesting. Some of them contain well thought out plots that keep us turning the pages well into the night, yet we are unable to remember the story the next day. Dull stories have a way of falling out of our head as soon as we finish the last page. I love writing suspense stories, and in each of my books you are likely to learn something you didn’t know before. I try to incorporate interesting details into a story in such a way that it will make the reader anxious for more, but do so without detracting from the plot. Who would want to read The Great Gatsby if it didn’t contain the many thousands of details of what life was like among the super rich during Fitzgerald’s era? Tom Clancy pushed his novels to the top of the best seller list by letting us know where all of the buttons and switches are located on the latest super weapons. Here is one of the little items of information I ran across today in my endless quest for just one more item to place in my storehouse of trivia. I am surprised that someone hasn’t already used this in a movie. The young woman in this article is called a ‘wine angel.’ She is pulled up and down the side of a wine tower dressed in a catsuit, while suspended from a cable with a rock climbers harness. She locates the proper bottle of wine and carries it down to the customer. You can’t see the floor at the bottom of the tower, but the hero of your next novel might be seated there just waiting for you to motivate him.

Follow this link.

Cartoons - Literature at its best!

I ran across an article a few days ago where the author was attempting to define literature and classify what he considered to be the best things ever written. I wasn’t surprised to see a large number of classic novels, a number of modern works from the New York Times Best Seller List, and some obscure novels like The Store. The Store never made any list, but did capture the Pulitzer Prize and break ground for things to come in the world of literature. I was a little shocked that the writer left out one of the best forms of literature around, or it used to be around, until cost-cutting did away with many of the daily newspapers. I’m referring to the comic section of the newspaper that was a part of our daily lives since the early part of the 20th century. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t read the comics, laugh over the funny ones, and wait anxiously to see what Luann, Nancy, or Dick Tracy might do next. Unless you live in or near a large metropolitan area, you no longer received a daily newspaper. You are, no doubt, suffering along with the rest of us, wondering what the gang in Peanuts is doing today. I was delighted when I discovered a website where all of my favorite comics are available on a daily basis. There are about one hundred comic strips on the site and it is free. You might want to add this website to your favorites. Click on the link below.

Daily Comics

Great Children's Author

I read a wide variety of books, although my favorite type of literature is suspense. It is always a treat to pick up a book in another genre and find something stimulating and interesting. Sevetlana Kovalkova-McKenna is the author of several books for children. Her stories are the type of books you want to buy for your own kids. She studied Journalism and Broadcasting at Moscow State University in Russia, and has a liberal arts degree from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. She is not only a writer with great talent, she is also an artist who illustrates her own books. After reading my review of Kaitlyn and the Secrets of the Sea, I hope you will add it to your Christmas list for your own children to enjoy.


Reading Kaitlyn and the Secrets of the Sea, carries me back to a magical time when my daughter was young and we spent time reading to each other. The story of Kaitlyn’s adventure under the sea is suited for preteen children, but those who are much younger will enjoy a parent or an older family member reading it to them. Sevetlana Kovalkova-McKenna weaves a magical spell for those who enjoy a modern fairytale. It is reminiscent of the classic stories of yesteryear, but suited for our modern world. The story elements are strong, the characters intriguing, and the lessons worth remembering. There are many of us who believe in magic, but you will wonder as you read this wonderful story, if the author knows something that has escaped the rest of us. I highly recommend this book.

This book is available at Amazon.com

Child Abuse

Tags: child abuse, crime, thriller, mystery.

Statistical evidence reveals a shocking truth about America. Child abuse is at epidemic proportions and society seems unable, or unwilling, to do anything about it. Studies have suggested that one in four girls are sexually abused while they are growing up. Divorce, problems with our school systems, and absentee parents, makes the situation more difficult. There are far too many authority figures who prey upon our youth, while children find themselves powerless to resist. Child abuse is not a subject any of us are comfortable with, but it accomplishes nothing to bury our head in the sand and pretend it will go away. My latest novel, ‘Innocent’ is not the kind of book I would ordinarily read, and it is unlike anything I have written before. Some people might be disturbed by the content, while others will realize that the hard, cold wind of reality, will sometimes drive the smog away and clear the air.