My most recent publications include a flash fiction story and a novella. The flash story is a touch over 1400 words (I’m not sure I’d consider it flash fiction at that length, but that’s what the publisher calls it, so I won’t quibble). The story is called “Tupilaq,” and it’s based on a longer story I originally wrote in 2013 for a themed anthology. It didn’t make the cut for that project, so the story has been sitting idle on my hard drive for the past eight years. I could never figure out quite what to do with it.
Then Cemetery Gates Media launched the Cemetery Gates Society, a monthly online publication with columns, reviews and a themed flash fiction contest. The theme for January was Arctic/Antarctic, which summoned to mind “Tupilaq,” much of which takes place in Greenland. The original story was nearly 4000 words, which meant that a lot of stuff had to go to get it within the 500-1500 word limit for the contest.
I started slashing. The opening section, set in Basra, went completely, and a lot of the ending sections in New Orleans and Galveston were trimmed with a machete. I wrote and rewrote. I converted it from past to present tense. I got it within the word count limit and I was very happy with the final result. This was the core of the story, with nothing extraneous. I entered the contest…and I won! I co-won, that is, as they decided to publish five stories. So, if you want to check out “Tupilaq,” you can read it at Cemetery Gates Society.
I’ve had another story kicking around on my hard drive since I wrote the first draft in 2000. It was originally called “Black and White,” and its gimmick was that a private detective is hired to go to a small town in Texas. En route, he passes through some kind of time portal that takes him into the past. His world goes from color to black and white, and he turns into a noir detective in the process. There were other writing gimmicks involved, and I was pleased with the outcome, but I was never able to sell it. It was on the long side (7000 words) and a touch unwieldy.
I revised it a number of times over the years and, at some point, I decided to strip out all the “time travel” stuff and make it a straight hardboiled story. There are places in Texas that feel like you’re traveling into the past without any kind of dimensional portal. I expanded the tale and turned it into a novella (21,000 words), which I submitted to a couple of contests over the years, without success. Contests are like that–you either win or you don’t!
I’ve toyed with the idea of self-publishing it for a while, but I finally took the bull by the horns and figured out how to do it a few weeks ago. Turns out it’s really quite easy. I can see why people might be tempted to go straight to self-publishing without attempting the traditional route. My only expense was a couple of stock photos for the cover (one for the eBook and a different one for the paperback edition). I downloaded the layout software for the eBook from Amazon (free) and converted the Word document into that format. Lots of proofreading passes, design the cover and away it went.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a paperback edition as well, but I finally decided to make that available, too. That meant another design pass, since the eBook version doesn’t have things like page numbers and headers. My story has a couple of warning notes created by cutting letters from newspapers, and I found a great font that reproduces that. I was very pleased by how it turned out. I ordered a proof copy for a couple of bucks to make sure everything looked right in the print version and then I published that edition last week.
It’s now called “The Ogilvy Affair” (I’m smugly proud of that title and, if you read the story, you’ll see why). It’s available on Amazon globally as an eBook and in paperback. I hope you’ll check it out if you like hardboiled detectives who have to solve whodunits. Here’s my cover copy:
First came the warning note.
Then someone took a shot at Clifford Ogilvy, publisher of the Harrisville Dispatch. The would-be killer missed, but he or she will likely try again.
Enter Quentin Sawyer, a private detective from Houston who responds to Ogilvy’s request for an investigator to find out who’s trying to kill him. Sawyer is a fish out of water at the luxurious Ogilvy mansion and in small town Harrisville. He soon discovers that his problem isn’t finding someone who has a motive to murder his powerful client. Just about everyone in town has a reason to dislike Ogilvy.
Sawyer needs to narrow down the long list of suspects before the killer tries again.
