SleuthSayers: Where's a Grammar Cop When You Need One? by John M. Floyd

SleuthSayers: Where's a Grammar Cop When You Need One?: by John M. Floyd I doubt the Grammar Police are always pleased with me. I make a lot of mistakes, stylewise, in my fiction writing. Som...

SMFS Short Story Saturdays: Kevin Eagan

SMFS Short Story Saturdays was born out of the very successful International Short Story Month this year. Each Saturday we feature a SMFS list member whose work can be read online for free. These short stories are at least a year old and were not previously linked to during the May 2018 Short Story Month event.

Today for SMFS Short Story Saturdays we have something a little different. Instead of the normal online story to read, Kevin Eagan shares “The Heist” by way of a podcast archived at Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It comes from the July/August 2016 issue.

If you would like to be included and are a member of the SMFS list at yahoo groups, email the link to your story to KevinRTipple at Verizon dot net. If you are not a member, this would be a good time to check us out at Yahoo Groups.

Little Big Crimes Review: There's an Alligator in my Purse by Paul D. Marks...

Little Big Crimes: There's an Alligator in my Purse, by Paul D. Marks...: "There's an Alligator in my Purse," by Paul D. Marks, in Florida Happens , edited by Greg Herren, Three Rooms Press, 2018. ...

Catherine Dilts Reviews: Short Story Reviews - stand alone and series

Catherine Dilts Reviews:  Short Story Reviews - stand alone and series

SMFS Member Interviewed: Jacqueline Seewald

As posted by Jacqueline Seewald to our list... 

Hi,

Steve Moore writes an excellent blog. I'm pleased to say he has interviewed me and that interview is now posted on: 

http://stevenmmoore.com/interviewing-author-jacqueline-seewald/

I hope you will join us and leave a comment if you so choose.

Best,

Jacqueline Seewald

SMFS Member Publication News: James Blakey

SMFS list member James Blakey has informed the list that his short story, “The Bicycle Thief” has been published at The Norwegian American. The story can be read in is entirety for free here.

A Short Walk Down A Dark Street: Issue 19

Per Peter DiChellis' message to our list... 

As usual, this week’s blog climbs onto to the rooftop and yowls at the moon for short mystery and crime fiction: links to free stories by Patti Abbott and Reed Farrel Coleman, reviews, releases, and more.

A short walk down a dark street (#19)

https://shortwalkdarkstreet.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/short-walk-19/

Best wishes,

Peter

Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers: MYSTERY AUTHOR SUSAN OLEKSIW ON THE SETTING FOR HE...

Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers: MYSTERY AUTHOR SUSAN OLEKSIW ON THE SETTING FOR HE...: Susan Oleksiw is the author of twelve mysteries in three series. Below the Tree Line is the first in the Pioneer Valley series. Her shor...

SMFS Members Published in FLORIDA HAPPENS anthology

A number of SMFS members are published in the just released Florida Happens: Tales of Mystery, Mayhem, and Suspense from the Sunshine State anthology.  Published by Three Rooms Press in conjunction with Bouchercon 2018, the book is available in paperback and digital formats from Amazon and elsewhere. The SMFS list members that have reported their publication in the book are:

Patricia Abbott with “When Agnes Left The House.”

John Floyd with “Frontier Justice.”

Barb Goffman with “The Case of the Missing Pot Roast.”

Eleanor Cawood Jones with “All Accounted For at the Hooray for Hollywood Motel.”

Paul D. Marks with “There’s An Alligator in my Purse.”

Amazon Synopsis:

When it comes to Florida, no crime is too unusual and no criminal too peculiar to be impossible. Florida is the one state where fiction has to catch up to the headlines, and the contributors to FLORIDA HAPPENS: Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Suspense from The Sunshine State do not hold back!

Edited by award-winning author/editor Greg Herren, with an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Tim Dorsey, FLORIDA HAPPENS is a riveting anthology featuring some of the brightest stars of mystery writing. Published in conjunction with Bouchercon, the world's biggest mystery convention, this new anthology offers stories of pristine white sands and palm trees, snowbirds and theme parks, mangroves and manatees, pirates and policemen―from the redneck Riviera to the southernmost point of the United States. 

Jam-packed with stories from top authors, FLORIDA HAPPENS promises to surprise and thrill lovers of mystery and suspense. Included are classic tales from the legendary John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block, plus fresh new fiction from bestselling mystery authors Susanna Calkins, Alex Segura, Brendan DuBois, Hilary Davidson, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Craig Pittman. The collection also includes thrilling new stories by top mystery writers Holly West, 
Paul D. Marks , Greg Herren, Debra Lattanzi Shutika, 
Jack Bates, Barb Goffman, Angel Luis Colon, 
J. D. Allan, Eleanor Cawood Jones, 
Neil Plakcy, Michael Wiley, 
John M. Floyd, and Patricia Abbott. 

A portion of the proceeds from the anthology will go to support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that provides free books to children from birth to school age regardless of family income. A personal mission of Dolly Parton’s, the Imagination Library fosters literacy, a love of reading, and is meant to inspire children to succeed.

SMFS Member Publication News: Bob Petyo

Based in Sydney, Australia, Gypsum Sound Tales has published their second book in the Colp anthology line. As he was with the first book where his short story, “Past Mistakes” appeared, SMFS list member Bob Peyto has a short story in the new book. His short story, “Heaven’s Bar” appears in the just released, COLP: Sky’s The Limit. The book is available in print and eBook Formats.

Amazon Synopsis:

The sky has always fascinated me. The more I learn, the more questions I seem to have. Free radicals, refracting light, the knowledge that, if you travel high enough, everything will eventually give way to the blackness of space - each fact makes me more and more curious about what might be going on up there. There are stories wrapped up in this knowledge, plenty of stories… Colp's latest collection, Sky's The Limit, contains twelve of these tales. Each story presents a unique perspective on our atmosphere and the effect that it may have on the people living, day by day, on the land down below.

Under Cover of Midnight: A Midnight Ink Blog: Finding the Story for BELOW THE TREE LINE: A Guest...

Under Cover of Midnight: A Midnight Ink Blog: Finding the Story for BELOW THE TREE LINE: A Guest...: We welcome Susan Oleksiw, author of the new Below the Tree Line , the first book in the new Pioneer Valley Mystery Series, to Midnig...

Writers Who Kill: Is your butt-crack showing? by Warren Bull

Writers Who Kill: Is your butt-crack showing? by Warren Bull: Is your butt-crack showing? Image by rawpixel on Upsplash In the world of popular fashion, like most of us, I admire the saggy pa...

Jacqueline Seewald: How to Create Characters Readers Care About

Jacqueline Seewald: How to Create Characters Readers Care About: Readers need both an emotional and intellectual connection to fiction or they won’t continue reading. If this connection isn’t creat...

SleuthSayers: Put Some Feeling Into It by Barb Goffman

SleuthSayers: Put Some Feeling Into It: by Barb Goffman Authors often hear the advice to write what you know. The advice is usually offered to make sure the author gets plot de...

Mysteristas Guest Post: Eleanor Cawood Jones

Mysteristas Guest Post: Eleanor Cawood Jones

A Short Walk Down A Dark Street: Issue 18

Per Peter DiChellis' message to our list... 

This week’s blog delivers a medley of deadly choices in short mystery and crime fiction, including links to free stories at Over My Dead Body! and a review of three mystery shorts penned by the ingenious storyteller Roald Dahl. Plus lots, lots more.

A short walk down a dark street (#18)

https://shortwalkdarkstreet.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/short-walk-18/

Best wishes,

Peter

Little Big Crimes Review: Problems Aren't Stop Signs by Robert Mangeot

 Little Big Crimes: Problems Aren't Stop Signs, by Robert Mangeot: "Problems Aren't Stop Signs," by Robert Mangeot, in  Mystery Weekly Magazine, September 2018. This is Mangeot's fourt...

SleuthSayers: Spies and Secret Agents by O'Neil De Noux

SleuthSayers: Spies and Secret Agents: by O'Neil De Noux The subject of the latest  MYSTERY READER'S JOURNAL , the Journal of Mystery Readers International (Vol 34, No ...

Guest Post: Carbon (Copy) Dating Your Work by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Please welcome SMFS list member Andrew Welsh-Huggins to our SMFS blog today….. 

Carbon (Copy) Dating Your Work

          Rare and envied is the writer who can sit down, compose, stand up and declare her creation complete, no editing necessary. Lee Child is said to do it with his Jack Reacher novels, beginning without fail on Sept. 1, the date he started writing his first novel in the series. “This is not the first draft,” he told biographer Andy Martin, who sat with Child as he wrote, Make Me, published in 2015. “It’s the ONLY draft.” Kurt Vonnegut was similarly known as a day-by-day polisher who didn’t do rewrites. For most of us—and especially me—we’re probably more in tune with the practice, if not the talent, of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who in the pre-computer era noted he needed a 500-sheet ream of paper to write a fifteen-page short story.

          When I first tried my hand at mystery writing, I revised the same draft over and over, always working off the same document. Although it was pleasing to reach the point where I was satisfied with the result, the journey was more discouraging than I thought necessary. More recently, I’ve developed a process that improves how I edit my work and allows me to track my draft-by-draft progress in a glass half-full fashion. Here’s how it works.

          The first thing I do when starting a piece of fiction is to name and date my work in progress, a la “WIP-Jan. 3, 2018.” The name might be the actual title once I’m finished, but more often than not is a place holder. (For several months, the most recent novel in my Andy Hayes private eye series carried the catchy title No. 6: it finally became Fatal Judgment the third or fourth draft along.)

          From there, I write from beginning to end without stopping to edit. Some dub this the vomit or rocket draft, but whatever you call it, it’s an approach I recommend. Just get the story down on paper, flaws, plot holes and inconsistencies be damned. For short fiction, it usually takes me anywhere from a week to ten days to complete a first draft. During that time, I work off the same document. First draft done, it’s time to follow the example of James Michener, who said, “I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.”

          I open the original document, create a new one with a new date—“WIP-Jan. 13, 2018—and edit it from beginning to end. Finished, I close that draft and move onto something else until returning to the draft the next day. There’s no formula for how many edits you’ll end up with, though for me, perpetually anxious that my prose could be better, it’s usually a minimum of five. Long Drive Home, a story I published in July in Tough, took nine drafts—the first dated Dec. 15, 2017 (under a different title, The Tourists), the last May 18, 2018. This essay required six individually dated drafts over two weeks.

          I like this system because all those edits provide a point-in-time sense of accomplishment as I work my way through a story or novel. As I said, I find it disheartening to open the same document again and again during the editing process. For me, it’s hard to measure success except by the somewhat amorphous feeling that a draft seems to be getting better. By contrast, I’m bolstered each time I create a new document with a new date, since I have visual evidence of my progress—the literary equivalent of taking pictures of a home improvement project from beginning to end. And just as it’s rewarding to page through the photo album of that project, it’s satisfying to look back at my computer folder of work to see what happened, and got better, along the way.

          Could this system get out of hand? It’s possible. By my count, Garcia Marquez produced thirty-three drafts of a story under his approach. That’s a lot of individually dated files. These days, the ease of editing on a computer makes that many e-copies unlikely, but even if it doesn’t, there’s still an upside. Think what a goldmine you’re leaving behind for your own biographer.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins ©2018

Writer, reader, owner of too many pets. Recently asked for pancakes at Waffle House. Author of the Andy Hayes private eye mystery series, including The Third Brother. Winner, 2017 Al Blanchard Award for The Murderous Type, available in Snowbound anthology from Level Best Books.

Online: https://andrewwelshhuggins.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AndyHayesMysteries/

Twitter: @awhcolumbus

Catherine Dilts Reviews: Short Story Reviews: Not Fall Yet

Catherine Dilts Reviews: Short Story Reviews: Not Fall Yet