All right, who's in charge here?

This afternoon I've been trying to visit blogs, but my Internet connection has slowed to a crawl. What the heck is going on here? Where is the Complaint Department? Am I going to be reduced to doing something away from the computer, like lifting weights or reading a book?

This is an outrage. I am officially peeved.

Critique group bounced!

Today our fiction critique group was kicked out of our meeting place at El Comedor, a small Mexican restaurant. The restaurant staff was apologetic and said they didn't even know why, but someone told them to close immediately and get everyone out. It wasn't a fire or any obvious emergency--no gunshots, screams, fire engine sirens, nothing like that. We never found out the problem, but the six of us moved down the street to a coffee house.

It's nice little hole in the wall. I hope there's nothing serious going on.

Comic relief

It's been a long, slow slog through Bloodlands, a book I've promised myself to read and review. Hitler has decided to exterminate every last living Jew, while Stalin has been slaughtering his own countrymen for years. When the two evil forces clash, millions of innocents are caught in the middle. The book itself is fine, the product of considerable research, but it seems every other page mentions a body count from some mass execution, with the victims numbered with four, five, or six digits. I've picked the book up several times and put it back down to get a rest. Certainly the book deserves a complete reading before I write the review.

So last night I needed a complete change of pace. I popped the Pixar move Up into my DVD player and thought I'd give it five minutes. If it was too stupid or childish, I'd pop it right back out again.

What a pleasure. Up had me within two minutes and held me for an hour and a half. The animation, the characters, and the voices were charming, and much to my surprise, there was a strong plot. The whole idea that you could escape the encroachment of "progress" by lifting your house with helium balloons and sailing away is original, and it's just the beginning of a good story.

When my brother died some years ago, a good friend suggested after a while that I needed a distraction. Go see Men in Black, she suggested. I took her advice and had some great laughs, exactly what I needed.

Everyone needs comic relief now and then--even Shakespeare's plays have it. What do you do when you need to lift your mood?

Self-Publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace

Yesterday, CreateSpace emailed me to say that they've shipped the proof copy of my new murder mystery, Little Mountain. The uploading process wasn't too difficult, although it's nitpicky work. Of course you can hire them to do all or part of the job, but that just seemed like an unnecessary expense. They don't have layout guidelines per se, but they do provide templates. Each size layout has its own set of templates--my book, for example, will be 6" x 9", so I first downloaded the appropriate text template. All the margins and font styles and sizes are preset, so you can copy your contents and past it into the template.

Easy, huh? Well, yes and no. Be sure to copy only your text, not your document formatting (don't copy the very last spot in your document, and you should be okay). Then your margins will be fine, but you may have to tweak your font as well as headers and footers to make sure everything is consistent. You may want to justify your text, too. There is a table of contents section that you can simply delete if you don't need it. As with any templates, you can adjust it to suit yourself. Just leave the margins alone.

The cover upload is a separate task. I uploaded the text and then went to work on the cover. Their template is set up for Photoshop users, but if you use something different, you should have no problem. For example, I use Paint Shop Pro X. If you get something wrong, which happened to me on my first two tries, CreateSpace simply rejects your submission with an explanation of the problem. For example, your images must be at least 300 dpi and must fit properly. If there is text too close to the edge, you'll be told to fix it, and there are other details to watch for.

The exact cover template they give you depends on your page count, because that determines the spine width. Then it all has to fit within the specified borders. It's a little tricky, but not difficult. Just be patient, and don't panic if you don't get it right the first time.

I've skipped over a lot of details, but you'll see them for yourself on the CreateSpace website. One last detail you'll need, though. The files you upload have to be in PDF format, and they don't tell you how to do it. Luckily, it's really easy. The PDF Converter website is one of several that will convert your files for free. It's what I used, and it works perfectly.

If you have any questions, please post a comment, and I will do my best to answer helpfully.

Camp Furlong Days in New Mexico

Last weekend we visited Columbus, New Mexico with friends to see the Camp Furlong Days festivities. In 1916, forces controlled by Pancho Villa attacked the town, which is about four miles from the Mexican border. They killed 18 Americans and lost about 100 of their own before retreating to Mexico. The raid prompted President Wilson to send General Pershing to lead a punitive expedition that turned out to be of dubious value. Pershing never caught Pancho Villa, and the general eventually went on to lead U. S. troops in World War I.

So what were the raid and the response all about? A lecturer at the festival mentioned two theories: first, that "Wall Street" wanted to provoke  a war so that the U. S. could capture more of Mexico and seize its substantial oil assets; second, that Germany wanted the U. S. and Mexico embroiled in a war so the U. S. would be weakened in the event it ever decided to enter the European war against the Kaiser.


Today, little is left of Camp Furlong except for a few protected adobe remnants. Every year, two groups ride to tiny Columbus (pop. about 1800)--one from Mexico and one from northern New Mexico--basically, to have a party and celebrate the two countries' friendship. Snowbirds from the U. S. park their RVs in Pancho Villa State Park, a few minutes' walk from the festivities. The horses arrive more or less on time, carrying riders who wear colorful costumes and fly the American and Mexican flags at the head of their column.

An interesting sidelight: the mayor and police chief were unable to attend the event this year, as they were among ten people arrested in a firearms-trafficking bust by Customs and Homeland Security.

Not everyone is happy about the annual event. A descendant of one of the people killed in the Villa raid understandably fails to see what there is to celebrate.

History, bloody history

Schlepping my way through Bloodlands, a thick history of the slaughter that took place in Eastern Europe. Poles, communists, prisoners of war, Jews, Ukrainians--name a group that lived in that region, and it was probably targeted either by Stalin, Hitler, or both. On virtually every page someone like the SS is trying to exterminate large numbers of people, and it's depressing. Of course, I knew about all of this grim history on a macro level.

The writing is fine, but this is a slow read that I had to put down for a couple of weeks because it's such disturbing material. When I'm finished, I'll write a review for the Internet Review of Books. It should have been done weeks ago.

By the way, the Internet Review of Books is always on the lookout for talented reviewers. If you're interested, or just want to suggest a recent title, let me know. We're light on fiction lately, so leads on promising novels will be especially welcome.

Ebook survey: What would you pay?

I've read lots of opinions about how to price self-published ebooks. Some have said pricing at $9.99 suggests that it's a quality product and that charging only $0.99 suggests the opposite--that in fact the author doesn't value his or her own product very much. Try 4.99 or 2.99 or ... Yet others have said they think most people will risk a buck on anything.

So let's phrase the question differently, because I am about to publish a book and make it available on Kindle. Assuming you don't know my work but you are at least mildly intrigued by my book, a full-length murder mystery, what would you pay for a self-published ebook by an unknown author?

I'd appreciate your comments on this post. Again, tell me what you personally would do.

And thank you. This will help me a lot in pricing correctly.

Fortune cookie writing advice

My wife got this fortune at a Chinese restaurant and gave it to me:

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

That sums it up well, doesn't it?

Bisbee, Arizona Peace Wall

Haven't written with any consistency of late. This coming week my novel gets one final read-through before going to CreateSpace. If all looks well, I'll heave a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, we've done some traveling. Here's something I saw in Bisbee, Arizona, a city built on hills.

Peace, everyone.

Out of the freeze and writing about the heart

We're thawing out from our recent deep freeze, with temperatures back into the 60s after several days of rolling blackouts for many of us. Yesterday a friend said this was the coldest he'd ever experienced around here since the late 1940s. We had a half-dozen blackouts lasting up to two hours each, while at today's writers' group one person reported a three-hour stoppage and another person reported no outages at all. Above is a view of the Organ Mountains from partway up "A" Mountain on the outskirts of Las Cruces.

Our writers' group meeting went well on a couple of levels. A relatively new member, Connie, moderated the meeting and conducted a 15-minute exercise on writing about the heart. What does the word mean to us? Some wrote about the heart as a pump that keeps us alive, and others wrote about the human spirit. Connie expected that some of us would write about Valentine's Day, but apparently no one did. My own effort tried waxing poetic about the faithlessness of my heart where it comes to writing projects, to not being able to keep a commitment to one project. It was hardly the stuff of poetic anthologies, but it was fun anyway.

Next month, another member will conduct a program about self-publishing.

Coming soon...

I'm polishing up an old novel. A generous friend just read the manuscript and pointed out inconsistencies and a few out-of-order scenes that I'm in the process of fixing. The story has been essentially complete since the 1990s and once had an agent but not a publisher. One small publisher did say he wanted it, then went out of business instead. After that, one thing led to another--you know how it goes--and for a long time I'd largely forgotten about the project. So I'm going to self-publish it soon. You could call it an ethnic murder mystery, since the protagonist is a Cambodian homicide cop. So whatever else readers might say about it, they're not likely to call it trite.

An uncommon sight

Temps dropped into the high teens last night and didn't climb out of the 20s until well into today. Meanwhile, an automatic sprinkler went on down the street from us. I hurried on down with my camera and found two other folks with the same idea.

My Dad used to take his camera everywhere and made pocket change selling photos to the local newspaper in Massachusetts, so that inspired me to do the same with this one. Who knows if the Las Cruces Sun-News will use it, but ice is something of a phenomenon in these parts.

A photo can spark memories and inspire a writer to record them. Dad chased many a fire in his day, and I recall seeing old black and white photos of burnt-out houses coated in ice, or firefighters with icicles hanging from their hats and fire hoses. He'd spend hours in his dark room, developing prints that smelled of acetate and placing them between soft towels to dry. When he died, his prints and color slides stayed with Mom in dusty closets, drawers, and cabinets. When she died, they all wound up with me. Unfortunately, Dad didn't label many of them, and I can only guess at the ages and locations. He left behind a glossy 8 x 10 portrait of four young men who were members of a band. They were all dressed up in plaid jackets and skinny ties, smiling at the camera. I can picture Dad with the camera on his tripod, barking instructions on how to pose. He was quite a curmudgeon, and many people found him hard to like. Anyway, in this particular print,  one of the young gents has his hands by his side and is giving my Dad the finger.

Good goals and bad beans

We're in our RV, traveling back from a Christmastime visit with our son in San Francisco. The California coast is lovely, but Lord, did we have rain. Driving the freeways proved scary in the Pasadena area, but all in all was not bad. I had the good fortune to visit with fellow writer and book reviewer Jack Shakely in California yesterday, and we spent almost four hours talking about the Internet Review of Books and lots of other subjects. Jack is a fine writer and, I discovered, an equally good conversationalist.

Last night after we parked the RV, it rocked in the wind as a front blew through and brought cold air with it. We're in Tonopah, Arizona, tonight. The local truck stop served up an awful "Mexican combo" that included unappetizing rice and refried beans, Keebler crackers that smelled like an industrial chemical, and chips without salsa. They were out of salsa. But the tacos were passable, and the Miller Light was cold and good.

Now we're both at our computers, with blankets wrapped around our shoulders. I've been working on my review of the Kindle version of Mark Twain's Autobiography tonight, but the venue isn't ideal. My writing goals for 2011 are all set, spurred in part by other bloggers' posts. Publishing a new novel is high on the list, as is learning how to create and market a Kindle version.

Do you set specific goals for the new year? Most effective for me has been setting measurable goals. Last year I decided to lose 35 pounds but lost only 25. That's okay, though. It gives me a new goal.

Five Stories

Now and then, an incident in my life tickles people’s funny bones. It knocks around in my brain for a while or hides quietly in an unused synapse. When it comes back to mind, the question always arises: Can the humor survive the retelling, or did you have to be there? What follow are five such incidents.

The Flag

At a writers’ group in the early ’90s, ten of us sat in the home of a man who was attempting his first short story. He admitted he had no idea where the story was going, but he knew for sure that a murder had occurred in the lobby of an office building not unlike his place of employment. Witnesses found the victim stark naked, lying face-down, “with an American flag sticking out of his ass.”

That certainly caught our attention, but the author didn’t know what to do with the absurd calamity he’d created. Over several meetings, he re-read versions of his story, each including the flag in the butt. Finally, as he droned on, I leaned over and whispered in a woman’s ear, “Americans have landed on the Moon.”

The Guard

My brother Larry had been a guard at the county jail, and he liked working shifts no one else wanted, such as holidays and midnights. Often he had little to do but sit at a desk and read novels. He always told me he had a sweet gig. Then one day he died suddenly, leaving all who knew him in a state of shock. At his wake a tall uniformed deputy sheriff introduced himself to me, offered his condolences, and began telling stories about how Larry could make people laugh. One night the deputy walked in on Larry, who had fallen asleep face-first on his desk.

“Larry! What do you think you’re doing?” the deputy yelled.

Larry woke suddenly and sat up straight. “Oh, I was just praying,” he said.

The Moose

Shortly after my stint in the Air Force, I accompanied a group of Jaycees to visit inmates in the county jail. Several of us spoke to an audience of about 30 inmates. When my turn came to speak, my story went something like this:

Guys, I can relate to being in jail. I just got out of the Air Force, where my last assignment was a year on Fire Island Air Force Station up in Alaska. Fire Island is this godforsaken little island about three miles long and a half mile wide in Cook Inlet, within sight of Anchorage. The inlet has the second highest tides in the world, and at low tide the inlet turns into a mud flat that moose supposedly cross over. There were about two hundred guys on the island manning a radar squadron that was on the lookout for Russian bombers. Wives weren’t allowed, so my wife stayed home in Massachusetts. We spoke on a radio phone once every couple of weeks. All my letters to her were the same: I love you, I miss you, nothing’s happening. Once I was so bored that I slept 17 hours straight.

One day an earthquake shook the windows and briefly woke me up.  Another time there was a small plane crash on the island, and that was terrible. But that was all the excitement for the year. Outside in the winter you could feel ice crystals forming in your throat. Summer days were so long we played softball until almost midnight.

Anyway, I must have hiked every part of that island, down the dirt road to the shore line, hiking through the trees and bushes and around a little pond. So one day when I’d been there about six months I was walking alone back up the dirt road toward my barracks, and out from behind a small shack walked this moose. He—she—I don’t know—moseyed right up to me. It stared down at me with this bored look. Down, yeah. I’m six feet tall, and I only came up to its shoulders. I was a little scared of pissing it off, because it could stomp me to death or drown me in its drool. So I didn’t move, and eventually it just trotted off into the woods, and I was okay.

So that’s kind of why it felt like I’d been in jail too. I’ve gotta tell you, though, after six months without a woman, that moose looked pretty damned good to me.

The Wake

My brother Roy was married for twenty long years to an abusive, alcoholic woman. A meek soul, he took whatever trouble she gave him. Any time he displeased her, which was often, she screamed or threw things at him and threatened him with divorce.

In time, she developed terminal cancer, but her rants continued all through her illness. Even on her deathbed she was threatening to divorce poor Roy.

She died friendless. At her wake she lay in an open casket, for once at peace. The room contained a half dozen rows of chairs, nearly all empty. Roy stood alone until our mother arrived and gave him a hug. Then he said to her with complete seriousness, “Well, I guess this settles the divorce issue.”

The Goddess Diana

Years ago, I took part in a writing workshop in which each member read a person’s story in advance and came to the next meeting with a detailed critique. One person wrote a lengthy story about a woman named Alice who had difficulty getting pregnant. She tried everything she could think of, but without success. She even purchased a replica of the Greek goddess Diana, described in the story as the goddess of love. Even that tactic was to no avail.

I always tried to critique thoroughly, so when it was my turn to comment on the story I went through the usual set of nits and suggestions. At the end I said, “Oh, and one more thing. I looked up Diana in the dictionary. She’s the goddess of the hunt, not the goddess of love—so that’s why Alice couldn’t get pregnant.”

Writing goals for 2011

Tomorrow we're heading off in our RV to California for the rest of December to visit with our son in San Francisco. This may give me time to reflect and perhaps refocus my scattered energies.

Already one of my promises to myself and others was not to continue as president of Mesilla Valley Writers for a fourth year. Unfortunately, the person who volunteered to take over had a tantrum and decided to renege. You'd think someone about 70 years old would act like an adult, but no. No one else will take the job except one lady who has no experience running anything and never speaks up in meetings.  So we agreed she'll get tasks to help her prepare to become president eventually, like chairing some of the meetings. The job remains mine in the meantime. So that's one resolution already broken, and the new year hasn't even started.

The other writing group I'm active in is 40 miles down the road, in El Paso, Texas. They are a larger and more vibrant group, but El Paso is also five times larger than my home town of Las Cruces. The El Paso Writers' League held its annual awards luncheon and installment of officers yesterday. They awarded prizes in their writing contest, which is highly anticipated all year. I won a few prizes for fiction and poetry, though my non-fiction did less well.

One commitment for 2011 is to co-edit and produce Border Tapestry, an annual book for the League showcasing the contest's first-place winners. It will be the third year on this great project, and it's a lot of work. One of the stories in the book will be the first and so far only chapter in a novel I began about 5 or 6 years ago. The judges' comments were encouraging enough that I'd like to start working on it again.

As for Mesilla Valley Writers, our January program will focus on members' writing goals for 2011 and how to achieve them. My own focus will be to pay more attention to my own writing and less on these peripheral writing-related activities.

How about you? Do you use this time of year to plan realistic writing goals? What do you hope to do differently, or better?

Foolish words

Words can cut in ways we don’t always intend. While stationed in the deep South in the ’60s, I decided to look up some relatives who lived on Kuhn Street in Biloxi, Mississippi. While my wife and I were trying to find our way, I thought to ask for directions. A young black woman walked down the sidewalk, so I pulled alongside and asked her where Kuhn Street was. She never slowed, never opened her mouth, never looked in my direction.  Had she looked at me, she’d have seen not a malicious person, just a foolish innocent. How many times had that woman been mocked?

We found Kuhn Street on our own, just a couple of blocks away. We had a pleasant evening playing cards with my relatives, who were cordial to us Yankees.  I sensed that the friendliness would last as long as we didn’t discuss race or politics.  When one of them made a passing reference to “darkies,” we ignored it in part because we were their guests and in part because we felt like foreigners. Also, I felt quietly embarrassed over my thoughtless request for directions.

A writin’ pen

Beth Morgan spoke at Mesilla Valley Writers about oral histories the other day and mentioned capturing colloquialisms. That brought to mind Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1960s. My wife and I were newly married kids from Massachusetts, and Gunter Air Force Base outside of Montgomery was my first duty station. We lived off-base for a while, and one day I walked to a local mom and pop store looking for a loaf of bread. Not finding any, I asked a clerk, who couldn’t understand me. Then I explained somehow, maybe saying it was for sandwiches, and she said, “Oh, you want BRAYud!”

Another time I came home from that same store, and my landlady asked me what I bought.

“I just bought a pen,” I said.

“What kinda pen, Bob? A fryin’ pen?”

“No, something to write letters with.”

“Oh,” she said, “a writin’ pen!”

What a difference a word makes

We have a good group of people in Mesilla Valley Writers, where I'm president until the end of this year. At age 67, I am one of the younger members. Most of us live in our own homes, but we gather once monthly at an assisted living facility where Pat, one of our members, lives just a few feet away from our meeting room. Before each meeting, a couple of us arrange comfortable chairs in a cozy oval so that the 16 or 17 who typically attend can see and interact with each other.

Yesterday, we had a guest speaker talk to us about researching and writing oral histories. She talked about interviewing primary sources, listening to and studying but not transcribing what people have to say, and looking for useful anecdotes while paying attention to regional speech patterns. She had members briefly interview each other, so I questioned 80-something-year-old Helen about her trip to America from England when she was a young teenager in 1940. Hitler was in the process of trying to demolish Britain, and the British wanted to protect their children by sending them to the countryside or out of the country altogether. Though British, Helen had been born in the U.S. and was allowed to sail back to the States, accompanied only by her teenage sister. She hadn't gotten much past talking about the threat of U-boats when our interviewing exercise had to end.

Then we noticed the tea in the back of the room. One of our few refreshments in the meeting is the iced tea we purchase from the assisted living facility and which a staff person rolls in on a cart.  This time it arrived after the meeting started, and hardly anyone noticed. After our speaker finished her program, Helen good-naturedly chastised me for not announcing earlier that the tea had arrived. So I then announced it to all, saying "Helen is mad at me because I didn't tell you about the tea earlier."  After a minute, an elderly gentleman sitting next to Helen pointed to the door and said to me, "You know, Pat's door is open. You can use her bathroom."

Helen and I looked at him. "I'm sorry," I said. "What are you talking about?"

"You said Helen is mad at you because you didn't pee earlier," he said.

Helen and I had a great laugh, but the poor man was simply trying to be helpful.

Cover art for One Must Die

Here's my novel's new cover, designed by the talented El Paso artist Maritza Neely. I asked her to combine three basic elements: death, Cambodia, and America to suggest the novel's tone and subject matter. The temple is Angkor Wat, which readers won't have to recognize to know that it's Asian.

The manuscript is complete and has been so for years. Once it had a willing small publisher who--alas!--decided to get out of the business. Now with low-cost publishing options like CreateSpace, I'm publishing it myself, with my greatest expense being a reasonably priced cover design. My goal is to publish on both CreateSpace and Kindle by the end of the year--easy enough if I shift around a couple of priorities.

I think people will like One Must Die, not that I'm objective. There is culture conflict, a likable protagonist, and a slant on a cop story that you probably haven't seen before.

If you'd like to work with Maritza yourself, you can contact her at http://www.maritzajauregui.com/studio.

Check out the new IRB

Today the Internet Review of Books relaunched as a daily blog instead of as a monthly website. Our dear friends and founders Carter Jefferson and Ruth Douillette needed time and space to do other things in their lives, so they've moved on. Now Julie McGuire, Gary Presley, and I are pleased to issue the IRB daily, generally publishing a single review every day. We'll tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction that have been published within the last six months, with occasional interviews for variety.

Julie McGuire is a dedicated reader and reviewer of novels, and she'll continue as our intrepid Fiction Editor. Gary will manage the blog, doing lots of essential work to keep us rolling. I used to manage the website but now am the new Non-Fiction Editor.

So please stop by our blog, and be sure to follow it. You'll be eligible to win a $25 Amazon gift certificate that we'll be giving out on November 15.