My Second Short Story

I write novels. Seven and counting. (Plus six nonfiction books, if I include my ghost writing assignments.) I’ve previously written only one short story, for which I received an Honorable Mention as a finalist. Maybe that didn’t count. It was a newspaper contest for a one hundred word novel. In the beginning, I thought anyone could string together one hundred words, but it took me a week to create a draft fit for submittal. Short is hard.

All of this is preface to telling you that I have written my first real short story. “Snake in The Grass” is a Steve Dancy Tale with a twist. I won’t tell you the twist. You have to read it for yourself. Where? First, you’ll need to wait a few months. The book is an anthology written by seven top selling Western authors.

Wanted, A Western Story Collection includes stories by Brad Dennison, Lou Bradshaw, Tell Cotten, Robert J. Thomas, WL Cox, James D. Best, and Duane Boehm.

I’ll let you know when it becomes available. In the meantime, I’ll leave with a few of my favorite quotes about short stories.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. Edgar Allan Poe

A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. Stephen King

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side. Emma Donoghue

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way. Stephen Colbert

Interview with Author’s Academy

The Author’s Academy is a subscription website dedicated to teaching “authors how to write, produce, and market their books successfully.” On Wednesday, Grael Norton interviewed me in a teleconference titled "How to Sell 1,000Books this Holiday Season." The title of the talk comes from a few seasons ago when I sold over 1,000 print copies in December. Today, this is not a large number for me, but my holiday sales are now heavily weighted toward e-books.

You can also read a summary of the interview at Writ3r Addiction.

Despite the popularity of e-books, print books still make outstanding gifts. You can choose a fiction or nonfiction book that precisely targets the interests of the recipient. A book in their favorite genre or about their hobby can make them happy, plus it shows you cared enough to pick a gift just for them. For a reasonable price, a book gives hours upon hours of enjoyment and can even be revisited in years to come, and unlike a Christmas card that gets discarded or thrown in a box, a personal inscription on the flyleaf of your gift book lasts forever.

This holiday season, give a book to someone you love … preferably one of these, of course.

Apropos of Nothing

Five actors and a ham.

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend

When I attended the Tucson Festival of Books as a panelist, I also joined the audience in a number of other sessions. One of the best sessions was a panel discussion of the book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. This is a fantastic book that every Western enthusiast should read.  It’s really three stories, perfectly interweaved. A factual description of the abduction of Cynthia Parker; A historical critique of the novel, The Searchers by LeMay Alan; and an intimate look at the John Ford classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne. The theme used to unite the stories is how history turns into legend until myth is stronger than facts. A fascinating read on many levels.   

"This is the West,sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Book Titles that Grab Attention

Coming up with a good book title is difficult, at least for me. Ideally, you want the title that will grab a buyer’s attention in three or so words. The title is actually only half of a selling partnership. The cover and title work together to entice a purchase. People do judge a book by its cover and the cover entails an image with a few words. If either appears incongruent, buyers move on to the next offering.

My favorite is Tempest at Dawn. Since the book is a dramatization of the Constitutional Convention, I wanted the title to sound like a novel, not a nonfiction history book. The cover design put the title in context: a stormy sky over the Pennsylvania State House flying a thirteen star flag. For me, the title evokes a troubled nation at its founding, but some, who otherwise raved about the book, criticized the title as unrelated to the story. I still like it.

In my Western series, I wanted the sub-title prominent to remind readers there were more Steve Dancy Tales, so I chose simple titles that include: The Shopkeeper, Leadville, Murder at Thumb Butte, The Return, and Jenny's Revenge. I’m currently working on Crossing the Animas. 

The covers are black and white because I wanted a design that indicated that these were a different type of Western: different from books with loud and colorful cover illustrations showing action or looming violence. The series has been very successful, so hopefully this is partly due to the covers and titles because I intend to continue the pattern for the remaining books in the series.

My approach will not work for everyone, but viewing the cover design and title together as a selling unit will garner sales. For a confirming case study, read about my blunder with The Shut Mouth Society.

By the way, The Meta Picture has a fun article titled “These Books Actually Exist,” which lists 20 outrageous titles and covers. Wonder how some of these sold.

Raymond Chandler's 10 Rules for Murder Mysteries

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I even wanted to buy a house he owned in La Jolla. I wanted to buy it, but I couldn’t afford it. In fact, I couldn’t afford the property tax on the house, which was over sixty thousand a year. I need to sell a lot more books before I get there. 

Beyond great novels and screenplays, Chandler wrote about Hollywood and writing. It would be an understatement to say he disliked English murder mysteries. Chandler liked realism, not puzzles. Here are his 10 rules of mystery writing. I tried to follow them in Murder at Thumb Butte, a murder mystery that just happens to occur in the Old West.

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law…. If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

Honest Westerns filled with dishonest characters.

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