by john | Apr 10, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the 9th chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE. Wednesday I’ll have a post about some changes to the book that I’ve found need to happen through this process, and the evolution of a novel, so if you’re enjoying these posts, come back
9
Walking amongst the dead always brings me peace somehow. I know it’s the opposite for a lot of people, but I find the company of the resting dead awful relaxing. As much time as I spend with the restless dead, it’s exceedingly peaceful to walk among those that have gone on from here.
So that’s what I did. I walked along the front row of the cemetery, right there on Front Street, with my truck parked all cattywumpus like I’d been drunk as Cooter Brown when I pulled into the parking lot. I lingered for a second in front of the three-sided monument that Cousin Bowman had collected money from everybody in the family to put up back in the 1964. My daddy gave him twenty dollars and bought three four copies of the book he wrote about our family’s travels across the ocean from England to the South Carolina upstate, and told Bowman to get the hell out of his face and not to never ask him for another dollar while he was trying to eat.
In defense of Daddy’s manners, he said he was trying to eat some of Aunt Eller’s coconut cake, and her coconut cake always was everybody’s favorite. She’d make this three-layer white cake so moist if you squeezed it you could get water for days. Ellen always made Cool-Whip icing with a bunch of shaved coconut all through it, so you got some coconut in the icing between the layers of the cake, too. It wasn’t like some of them store-bought coconut cakes, which is basically a white sheer cake with some coconut sprinkled on top. I tried for years to learn how to make cake like Aunt Eller, but I never could figure it out. Then she passed, and then Daddy passed, and I never married, so I didn’t have anybody to teach me, nor anybody to eat it, so I just quite trying. It’s probably been a month of Sundays since that old Tupperware cake carrier has seen any use.
I looked at that monument, tracing the Carters, and the Thomases and the Feemsters all the way back to whatever little piece of English soil they sprang up from. The original Johnny Thomas in this part of the world was from Wales. He was about old Sheriff Johnny’s grandpappy with about a dozen greats in front of it. Me and Johnny always knew we were some kind of kin, but being Southern, we just called it “cousins” and let it go at that. My mama always could rattle off what number cousin you were to somebody and how many times removed, but I never got the hang of it.
I walked a little further, and took a seat on a headstone in front of my Granny’s stone. I was sitting on Mr. Bo Mickle’s stone, and I usually made it a point to apologize to Mr. Bo for disrespecting him that way, but I’ve been doing it so long by this point that I reckon Mr. Bo would have found some way to let me know if it bothered him.
“Hey, Granny,” I said. She wasn’t there, of course. Granny died when I was about thirteen, and she didn’t linger but a couple of days. I met her right here the morning after her funeral and watched her walk into the light. It wasn’t like she walked up into the clouds like the end of Highway to Heaven episode, but there was a bright white light, and she told me she loved me, and told me to be good, and then she turned around and went away. So I knew she wasn’t listening in, but somehow that made it easier to talk.
“Granny, I’m having a terrible time with this one. The poor little girl wants my help so bad, but her mama and daddy won’t have any of it. Her mama won’t, anyhow. That preacher Turner has got his hooks into her so deep you’d think she was going to make a big donation or something. I’m sorry, that wasn’t very Christian of me. But he just makes me so mad sometimes. It’s like he knows I want to help people, and he keeps trying to get in my way anyhow.”
I got down off the top of Mr. Bo’s rock and moved over to sit cross-legged on the grass right in front of Granny’s stone. I’d done this forever, but the older I got, the harder it was to get up off the grass when I was done. I reckoned it wouldn’t be too many more years before I was going to have to have a cane or some kind of walking stick if I was going to go traipsing around in cemeteries. This one wasn’t too bad, but some weren’t maintained as good, like the one where Pap was buried.
Yeah, Granny and Pap didn’t lay to rest together. They weren’t even in the same town. Granny was right here in Lockhart, but Pap was way over in Chester. He remarried after Granny went, and that was about the last we saw of him. It was like he wanted nothing more than to forget our family and go be with a new one. I didn’t like it, and I could tell it hurt Mama something awful, but we respected the old man’s wishes and left him alone. He lived a long time after Granny passed, ’til he was well into his nineties. I only heard about it when he died because I read the obituary. There was no mention of our family in the listing of relatives. Since I wasn’t family anymore, I didn’t go to the visitation.
I did go to the funeral, though. I stood back away from everybody and watched them lay the old man to rest. When all the rest of the mourners got back in their cars, I walked up to the graveside and stood there for a minute watching the men lower the casket into the dirt. I was just about to walk back to my truck when he stepped up beside me.
“You still see ghosts, Lila Grace?” my dead grandfather asked me.
I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I didn’t know what to say. This was the man who had made me a rocking horse for Christmas when I was three years old. A rocking horse I had until I was a grown woman and gave it to a young couple at the church who had a little boy who loved to play cowboy. This was also the man who abandoned my mother when she needed a parent most, when she was burying her own mother in that ugliest cycle of life. The man that turned his back on my family for over two decades, and now stood next to me while I watched his body being lowered into the ground and tried to decipher my feelings.
“I expect you got some questions. If you’d see fit to come with me for a minute, I’d like to answer ‘em.”
Well, the old man knew he had me then. I was so curious when I was little that he used to call me “Cat.” “Get on out of here, Little Cat,” he’d say when he caught me snooping in his or Granny’s closets, trying to find Christmas presents or birthday presents, or just old pictures of him from the War or of Granny when she was young woman.
None of that curiosity faded as I grew up, and getting older did nothing to tame that curious Little Cat, so I followed the old man. He walked around to the back of my truck and motioned at the tailgate. I opened the tailgate and sat down on it. He sat next to me, and this let us sit together without being forced to look at one another. I liked that arrangement.
“Best thing about driving a truck, Little Cat,” he said. “You carry your car, and a table, and a seat with you all in one.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, my voice suddenly that of a seven-year-old girl again.
“Why not? It’s what I’ve called you for years.”
“No,” I corrected. “It’s what you used to call me. You ain’t called me nothing in years.”
“Well,” he said, looking at the laces on his boots. He was dressed like I always used to see him, in a checked flannel shirt, blue jean overalls, and brown work boots. Most ghosts present wearing what they died in, but some wear what they’re most comfortable in. Sometimes they’ll get a look at their funeral, and all of a sudden it will switch to what they were buried in. Dickey Newton showed up one day wearing nothing at all, dead as a doornail and naked as the day he was born. I sent Dickey away and told him not to show his face, or any other part of himself, around me until he learned to manifest himself at least a pair of britches.
“What are you still doing here, Pap?”
“I stayed to see you. I’m glad you came to the funeral.”
“I felt like it was the right thing to do.”
“For me or for you?”
“For me. What you thought hasn’t been on my mind much since you wrote us out of your new life.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice, but I didn’t care. He hurt my feelings when he just up and abandoned us like that, and I reckoned he could know it.
“I am sorry about that, Lila Grace.”
“If you hadn’t done it, I reckon you wouldn’t have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Well, you’re right about that. It was wrong, and it was selfish.”
“So why’d you do it?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he finally spoke, his words were slow, like he was picking them carefully. “After your Granny died, I was a mess. We had twenty-seven good years together. I guess that ain’t really true. We had twenty-four good years, with enough bad days throughout to make up a year or two, and the last year was pretty rough. When your Granny got sick, I didn’t do nothing but take care of her for a year. It was hard on me, but that’s what a husband is supposed to do.”
“Well, when she was gone, I didn’t have that purpose any more. I couldn’t remember what it was like to be anything more than the man with the sick wife, and every time I saw your Daddy, or any of my family, all I saw was her face. It didn’t take long until I couldn’t stand that anymore, so I left.”
“You always told me that a man faces up to what’s hard.”
“That’s true. I just wasn’t much of a man right then. So I went away, and I made myself a new family, and I loved them. I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but I did. It was a different love than what I had for y’all, but it was a true thing just the same. But I never forgot you. I never forgot any of you.”
“I never forgot you, neither, Pap. I tried real hard, but I didn’t.”
“Thank you for that.” I saw a bright light start to form out of the corner of my eye, and Pap turned to see it. “Looks like my train’s ‘bout to pull out of the station,” he said.
“You stayed here just to tell me all that? What if I hadn’t come?”
“You would eventually.” He smiled at me, got off the back of my truck, and walked into the light. It flashed brighter than the sun, then popped out, leaving me blinking and rubbing my eyes. I was alone in the cemetery, and I went back over to where the men had been running the backhoe and I shed a tear over my Pap’s grave. Not for his death, but for the life we never shared.
I sat there for about an hour, just talking to Granny about Jenny, and Shelly, and the idiot Baptist preacher, and her soaps that I still watched every day so I could keep track of who’s alive and dead for her. After a while, though, my knees started really giving me fits, and my spine started to knot up down in my lower back, so I got up and moseyed on back to the truck. I ran my fingers across the stones as I walked, liking the feeling of the different granites used. Some were buffed to a high polish, but plenty were either too old for that, or just never cared to pay for it.
I got to my truck and looked at myself in the mirror. I was born lucky – I have a complexion that lets me cry without turning into a red, blotchy mess. I fixed my makeup and put the truck in gear, pointing the old girl down the street toward the sheriff’s office.
by john | Mar 27, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest chapter of a new novel that I’m serializing here. I release a new chapter every Monday. If you need to catch up, you can CLICK HERE.
Chapter 7
I walked over to the ghost and tried to speak to her without it being obvious to the dozen people standing behind the police cordon a dozen yards away that I was talking to empty air. It’s not an easy task, but it’s one that I have somewhat mastered over the years.
“What’s wrong, sweetie? You look like somebody just ran over your dog.” I realized as soon as the words crossed my lips that it wasn’t the most polite way of talking to a dead child who just found out that her best friend is dead, too. But there aren’t any instruction manuals for my kind of life, and I couldn’t take it back, so I just had to roll with it.
“Where’s Shelly?” Jenny asked, glowing tears rolling down her face. This was a new one on me. I’d seen ghosts angry, and sad, and even seen a couple of them scared of what was coming next, but I’d never seen one cry before. But here she was, sobbing just like you’d expect a girl whose best friend’s car just got pulled out of a lake to do. Her tears weren’t solid, of course, but they were part of her, a little tiny piece of Jenny’s soul cascading down her cheeks, cutting little trails of faintly glowing light across her shimmering visage.
“What do you mean, where’s Shelly?” I asked. I didn’t want to come off as crass and say that she was on the stretcher being loaded into the back of the ambulance, where do you think she is, you idiot, but that’s kinda what I was thinking.
“I don’t see her. I could see Sheriff Johnny, and I’ve seen a couple of other ghosts as I’ve been walking through town since I…since we first met. But I don’t see Shelly. Where is she?”
I looked around. The child had a good point. I didn’t see Shelly, either. Far as I could tell, Jenny was the only ghost at John D. Long Lake, and I was powerful glad of that. I didn’t relish the idea of telling Shelly that she was dead, especially if it had happened as recently as I expected it had. And worse than that, I sure didn’t want to run into the poor Smith children if they happened to be lingering all these years. I didn’t expect them to, not after all this time, but you never know. Some people have powerful attachments to places, and some people have powerful reasons for wanting to see justice done. None of that is normal for little kids, but there’s no hard and fast rules about the afterlife.
“I don’t see her, sweetie. Maybe she’s not here.”
“Why wouldn’t she be here? Where would she be?” Jenny was starting to get more upset, and her sadness was turning to anger, which was starting to stir up the rocks and dust around her feet. I stepped back and took a look around. We hadn’t drawn much attention yet, everybody was still focused on the macabre ceremony of loading poor Sherry’s body into the ambulance, but that ritual was almost complete, and we would be the most interesting thing by far in a minute or so.
“Jenny, I need you to calm down,” I said in my reassuring teacher voice. It’s different from the steely tone I used on Cracker earlier, but it still got through to the distraught child. A couple of pebbles dropped to the ground as she stopped rocking back and forth and focused on me.
“That’s good,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. “Not everybody stays around after their bodies die, not even people who are killed or have a good reason to stay. It may be that Shelly didn’t have any great desire to see justice done for herself, or maybe she was just okay with moving on.”
“But…then why am I still here?” She looked up at me, more tears flowing down her face. She was calmer now, but the pain in her voice was heartbreaking.
“I don’t know, darlin’,” I said. “I have no idea what makes one person linger and one person pass on to the other side. If I did, I’d be able to help people move on a lot faster, I think.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do with me? Help me move on?”
“That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?” I asked. “You don’t want to stick around Lockhart dead forever, do you? I want to find out who killed you, so he or she doesn’t hurt anybody else, but I also want you to be able to go to your rest.”
“You mean Heaven,” the girl said with the firm conviction of a Protestant teenager that’s never questioned her faith for even one second.
I had no such convictions anymore, unfortunately. “I mean whatever you think I mean, honey. I think it’s probably a little different for everybody, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a lot of harps involved, but I know that whatever’s on the other side waiting for you, it’s a damn sight better than walking around talking to an old woman who’s going to get locked up in a room with padded walls if she keeps standing on the boat landing talking to thin air.”
Jenny smiled and sniffed. She was a cute little thing, even dead and weepy. “Thank you, Ms. Lila. I still don’t know why Shelly wouldn’t want to stick around and find her killer, but I reckon we can take care of that for her.”
“I expect we can,” I agreed. “Now let’s go see if the sheriff has any ideas on how we can do that.”
I walked back over to the car, where Sheriff Dunleavy had just raised the hood. I stuck my head under there beside him and said, “I think that’s the engine, Sheriff.”
“Thank you, Lila Grace. I’m no mechanic, but I think you’re right.”
“Is there anything in the engine that will tell us who killed this child?” I asked.
“Not that I can see,” he replied.
“Has anything been tampered with, like on the TV shows? Brake line cut, anything like that?”
He pointed to a square thing sitting on top of another thing. “That’s the master cylinder. It looks fine. I can’t see where anything was tampered with there.”
“Does that have anything to do with the brake lines?” I asked.
“You don’t know anything about cars, do you, Lila Grace?”
“I know where the gas goes in, I know to change the oil in my truck every five thousand miles, and I know to change my tires every three years. Anything past that, I ask Clyde. His nephew Brownie runs a service station and takes care of all my automotive needs.”
“Then why do you keep asking me about the brake lines?” the sheriff asked.
“On the TV shows, whenever two people poke their heads under the hood of a car that somebody died in, they always come out and say that the brake lines were cut. I just wanted to see if that happens in real life, too.”
“You watch too much NCIS, Lila Grace.”
“That may be, Sheriff, but I can’t help it. That Mark Harmon is just adorable. I like the New Orleans one, too. The LA show is okay, but I don’t like those actors as much. They’re too pretty.”
“Well, nobody cut any brake lines on this car,” the sheriff said, straightening up. I followed suit, and he slammed the hood down, motioning for Clyde to load the car onto his wrecker. “In fact, as far as I can see here, the car was in perfect working order before it went into the lake.”
“So why did it go into the lake?” I asked.
“Well, somebody wanted it to go into the lake. That’s why they drove it in there.”
“I reckon what we have to do next is find out who.”
“Yeah, that’s not the worst thing we have to do next.” I looked at the sheriff, and his face was grim.
“Oh,” I said, my voice soft. “Do you want me to go with you?”
“Do you have any particular connection with the family?”
“No,” I said. “I know them, but only to speak in the grocery store. We don’t go to church together, so I never had Shelly in any of my Sunday School or Vacation Bible School classes.”
“Then you’d better leave this to me. I don’t suppose she’s…” he waved a hand around in the air.
“No, she’s nowhere to be seen, Sheriff. I think she has already moved on.”
“Pity,” he said. “Maybe she could tell us something about the bastard that did this. Pardon my French.”
“Bastard isn’t French, Sheriff. Merde is French, and I won’t bruise if you cuss around me.”
“Just the same, I’ll try to keep it clean. Feels like cussing in front of my mama. Just ain’t natural.”
“I’m pretty sure your mama knows those words, too, Sheriff.”
“Oh, I can guarantee you she does. My daddy was a Marine. She’s heard them all.”
“Was a Marine? It was my understanding that you’re always a Marine.”
“He passed two years ago. That’s the only way you stop being a Marine, Ms. Carter. You stop being.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Sheriff. The loss of a parent is a hard thing to get over, no matter when it comes.”
“I reckon the loss of a child is, too,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make this the worst day of a couple parents’ life.”
“I’ll meet you at the station in the morning and we can talk about the fingerprints on that flashlight in Jenny’s basement and look for connections between these girls’ deaths.” I watched him walk to his car and throw his hat on passenger seat. I did not envy the big man his duties this afternoon.
“Do you think the same person that killed me killed Shelly?” Jenny asked. I didn’t hear her come up, but she only made noise if she tried to, or spoke.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two best friends in a town of less than ten thousand people wound up dead within five days of each other. Do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Then let’s go back to your house. I need to talk to your mama and daddy. Without that son of a bitch preacher of yours looming over us.”
by john | Mar 20, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is chapter 6 of a serialized novel that I’m working on. I post a new chapter each Monday. To catch up on previous chapters, you can click HERE.
Chapter 6
I followed the sheriff in my truck, but the closer we got to the scene, the more my heart just sank further down toward my toes. I wasn’t sure when we turned off onto Highway 9 out of town exactly where we were going, but the second we turned left onto Black Bottom Road, I felt sick to my stomach.
“This is where she did it, ain’t it?” Jenny asked.
“Yes, honey, this is where she did it.” I replied, thinking back to that summer when Union County got famous for the ugliest of reasons. A few minutes later, we pulled up to the boat landing at John D. Long Lake, where Susan Smith rolled her car into the lake with her two children strapped in, drowning them both. I hadn’t been to the lake since the day they pulled the car out, for fear of what I would see when I did, but here I was now.
“That’s just awful,” Jenny said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Are the little boys here?” she asked.
“I hope not,” I said. “I hope they went to Heaven to play and be little boys forever and have all the ice cream they want and never get skinned knees or stung by yellowjackets.”
“That would be nice,” Jenny said. “I hope that too.” I could feel her look at me. “You ain’t been out here, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. I don’t know if I can do anything for those boys if they are here, and I don’t know if I can stand it if I can’t.”
“You want me to look around and see if they’re here?”
“You’re sweet,” I said, putting the truck in park and unfastening my seatbelt. “But I’ll be fine. If there’s a couple little boys out there, I reckon I’ll try to help them move on. If not, then that’ll be better, I think. But they aren’t why we’re here.”
“I wonder who it is?” She asked, passing through the door to walk beside me.
There was a wrecker and an ambulance parked at the landing, and Sheriff Dunleavy was talking to Clyde, the county wrecker driver. A pontoon boat floated out in the lake, and I saw bubbles popping up to the surface around the boat. My best guess was they had Allan West down there looking around, since he was the only person in this part of the world with SCUBA gear that used it more than once a year.
I walked up to the sheriff’s side. Clyde tipped his hat to me. “Lila Grace,” he said.
“How are you, Clyde?”
“Oh, I been better, I been worse. Ain’t looking forward to this mess.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cars get heavier than hell when you fill ‘em up with water,” Clyde said. “I ain’t got but a five-ton winch on this old girl. Too much water in whatever’s under there, I might not be able to pull it out. I can handle most cars, but we get something like one of them big stupid SUVs and we better be sure to break out all the windows before it comes up. That’ll let the water run out easier and give me less problem winching it up onto the landing.”
“What happened here, Sheriff?” I asked.
“You need to go on back outside the yellow tape, Ms. Carter,” Jeff came up to me and took hold of my arm. I shook him off and gave Dunleavy a look.
“It’s okay, Jeff. She’s helping us on the Miller case. She can stay.”
“But she’s not a deputy. It’s only supposed to be emergency personnel behind the tape, Sheriff,” Jeff protested.
“Jeff, I get to let anybody on this side of that yellow piece of string that I want to,” the sheriff said. “If it’ll make you feel better, when we get back to the stations, I’ll deputize Ms. Carter. But for now, leave her alone and go make sure that Cracker fellow stays the hell back.”
The “Cracker” in question was Gene “Cracker” Graham, the owner of the local newspaper, lead reporter, and chief photographer. Life in a small town meant he wore a lot of hats. I recognized his car pulling up to park next to my truck, and Jeff hurried off to intercept him.
“You were telling me what happened?” I asked.
“Shorty Horton was fishing out here when he hooked his line on something. Snapped it clean, so of course he decided that he’d finally found the one big catfish in Long Lake, and starts circling.”
“Don’t know why,” I said. “Catfish that old and big wouldn’t be fit to eat.”
“Anyway,” the sheriff continued. “He hit something with his outboard motor, and when he dove under to see what it was, he saw the car, with long blonde hair floating out the driver’s side window. He called it in, and you know the rest. Jeff was already on the scene when I got here, and he’d called Clyde. I got Allan out here, and once he gets the winch hooked up, we’re going to pull it up out of there and see who the poor woman was.”
“I thought Ethel said it was a girl?” I asked.
“Lila Grace, have you seen Ethel lately? Anybody who ain’t drawing Social Security is a boy or a girl, including you and me.”
I laughed. “Well, I think I’m a fair bit closer to getting my government check than you are, but it’s still a ways off. I can’t even get free sweet tea at Hardee’s yet.”
“I got it!” Allan shouted from across the lake.
“Get your boat out of the way and we’ll pull her up,” Clyde hollered back. Allan heaved himself out of the water, looking like the Michelin Man in his wetsuit. He waddled to the captain’s chair, leaving a trail of fins, tanks and mask as he went. Seconds later, the pontoon boat putt-putted off to the far side of the lake and Clyde put the winch in gear.
It whined with the load, but the old rollback wrecker had more than enough power to pull the black Honda Civic up out of the water. As soon as the back bumper crested the lake’s surface, I heard Jenny gasp.
I turned to her, my eyebrows up. “What is it, sweetie?” I asked, trying not to let on to Clyde that I was talking to a ghost. He didn’t believe in what I did, and didn’t look too fondly on my talking to dead people around him.
“That’s Shelly’s car. Oh my god, it’s Shelly!” The dead girl collapsed weeping to the ground, more upset about her friend’s death than I’d seen her about her own.
“Sheriff,” I said quietly. “We have a problem.”
“What’s wrong, Ms. Carter?”
“That car belongs to Jenny Miller’s best friend Shelly. She was the last person to see Jenny alive, and now she’s probably drowned child in the driver’s seat of that car.
“Son of a bitch,” the sheriff said under his breath. “Pardon my language, Ms. Carter.”
“Hell, I was just thinking the same thing myself, Sheriff.” I said, splitting my focus between the car slowly rolling backwards up the boat landing and the sobbing teenage ghost at my feet.
Sheriff Dunleavy motioned his deputies to push the lookie-loos further back, and went over himself to break up an argument between Deputy Jeff and the newspaperman Gene Graham, who had indeed shown up with a big old Nikon camera slung around his neck like a hillbilly Jimmy Olsen. Cracker was waving his arms and starting to wind himself up into a whole tirade about the First Amendment and freedom of the press when I walked up.
“Gene,” I said, my voice cracking through the muggy air like a whip. Gene’s head whipped around like he was back in my Sunday School class and I caught him trying to get a reflection up Renee Hardin’s skirt in his patent leather dress shoes again. That boy never would believe me when I told him patent leather didn’t reflect, no matter how much you polished it. He was a little scamp, but it did mean he always had polished shoes for church, so I let it go.
“Ms. Lila, what are you doing here, and on the other side of the tape, too?” Gene asked.
“The sheriff has done told you he can’t answer no questions, Gene. Now you need to put that camera back in your car and go interview Arthur Black about how his peaches are coming in after the cold snap we had in April. As soon as the sheriff has something he can tell you, he’ll call you and give you an exclusive.” I didn’t bother to point out that since he owned the only newspaper in town, he always had an exclusive. Ever since that mess with the Smith woman happened, Cracker liked to think he was a big-time newspaperman. He had one story picked up by the Associated Press and it went straight to his head, I swear.
“Now, Ms. Lila, I can’t do that. This is the biggest news to happen in Lockhart this week, and I have to cover it. I need to report on it, and I can’t do that without taking some pictures.”
“That is not going to happen, Mr. Graham, and if you point that camera anywhere near that vehicle without my permission, I swear on my mother’s grave you’ll find it at the bottom of the lake,” Sheriff Dunleavy growled.
Gene bowed up again, and I could just about see these too men getting ready to whip things out and start measuring, so I leaned into Gene and whispered, “We think it’s Shelly Thomas’ car, but we can’t have nothing getting out about it until we see if she’s in there and then notify the next of kin. You wouldn’t want that child’s mama reading about it in the newspaper before we get a chance to break the news to her, would you?”
Gene’s face went ghost-white and he took a step back from the yellow police tape. He stood there for a minute, then took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. “No, Ms. Lila, that would be awful. I see what you mean. I can go…cover some other stories and wait for word from the sheriff that he has information. Y’all know where to find me.” He turned and waddled off back to his truck and peeled out of the parking lot. I started walking back to the car, and Sheriff Dunleavy followed close behind.
“What was that all about, Ms. Carter?” he asked.
“Gene played baseball with Shelly’s daddy in high school. They fell out when Shelly’s daddy stole Gene’s girlfriend.”
“Why would that make Graham back off the story?”
“Gene’s girlfriend married Shelly’s daddy and had three little girls. The oldest one is about sixteen and I’m afraid we’re about to find her in the driver’s seat of that car.”
“So Gene doesn’t want to upset his old girlfriend, I get it.”
“Gene doesn’t want to break the heart of the only girl he ever fell in love with, Sheriff. He never got married, never had kids. He and the Thomas’ became real close after they got married, and Gene is godfather to all three girls. He would no more hurt that family than he would sell his newspaper.”
The car was all the way up on dry land now, and Clyde was lowering the end of the rollback to pull the car up onto the wrecker. Sheriff Dunleavy waved him to a stop, and walked around the car. I followed close behind, looking where he looked, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“What do you see, Sheriff?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said, his eyes scanning the car as we did a slow lap around the outside. “There’s nothing to indicate that she wasn’t driving or operating the car under her own power when it went into the lake. We won’t know more until we get it back to the garage, but all the window are intact, and I can’t see any scratch marks around the keyholes to indicate forced entry.”
He paused at the driver’s door, peering inside. “Is that Shelly?”
I looked in the window and nodded. Shelly Thomas was sitting up behind the wheel, pretty as you please in a cute pink top and blue jeans. Her seatbelt held her upright, and there was no air bag deployed, so it didn’t look like she’d been in a wreck. I couldn’t see too much through the windows, all streaked with silt and lake muck, but I couldn’t see any injuries on her. She just looked like a pretty teenaged girl out for a drive.
The sheriff motioned the EMTs over to the car, and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. I stepped back out of the way as they rolled a stretcher over to the side of the car and opened the door. Water poured out onto the ground, and everybody stepped back.
Clyde walked up to me with a sheet in his hands. “Take a corner, Lila Grace,” he said, holding out the white fabric to me.
“What are we doing, Clyde,” I asked, then a lightbulb went off as I watched him walk away from me as far as he could while we each had one corner of the sheet, and he lifted his hand above his head. I did the same, and we held that old ragged sheet up like a curtain as the EMTs and Sheriff Dunleavy got the girl out of the car and onto the stretcher. They zipped her up in a body bag and covered her with another sheet before one of them nodded to Clyde and we let the makeshift privacy screen down.
I walked over to Clyde and helped him fold the sheet. “That was sweet of you, Clyde,” I said.
“People deserve not to have everybody in the world gawking at them when they’re laying there dead, Lila Grace,” he said. “I started carrying this in my car some fifteen years ago, when that kid ran his car into the bridge railing down on Old Pinkney Road.”
“I remember that wreck,” I said. I didn’t bother telling Clyde that I had talked with that poor boy several times before he got satisfied enough that his mama would be fine without him and he was able to move on.
“There was a bunch of people at that one, like there is today, and that boy was all tore up. His head was about split plum in two, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair to him that all them people that didn’t even know him were looking at him like that. So now I try to give people a little dignity in death. It’s the least I can do.”
“It matters more than you think, Clyde,” I said.
“I reckon if anybody would know, it’d be you,” he said, then turned and put the sheet in the cab of his truck. I stood there flabbergasted. I’d had a lot of people say a lot of things about my gifts before, but never had anybody just accepted them for what they were like Clyde. I swear, that little old man was a true onion. He had more layers than anybody would ever suspect.
I looked to Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what our next move was, but caught sight of Jenny as I turned my head, and the look on her face stopped me in my tracks.
by john | Mar 6, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
4
It ain’t easy knocking on the door of a house that’s grieving, especially when you know it’s a child that’s passed. The Miller house looked like about any other house in one of them new planned neighborhoods, called Evergreen Acres, with all the streets named after trees. Of course, not a one of the trees they named a street after is an evergreen, so the Millers lived on Maple Lane. I shook my head at how dumb some developers can be as I pulled up on the street outside their house.
There were a few cars in the driveway and on the side of the road, but not too many. It was the day after the funeral, and most of the family from out of town had already gone, leaving the poor child’s mama and daddy to start trying to put their lives back together. And here I was to tear it apart again.
Reverend Aaron Turner answered the door, a scowl making his face look even more sour than usual. The Baptist preacher always looked like somebody shoved a lemon in his mouth and clamped his jaw shut, or maybe stuck that lemon someplace a little further south. But whenever he saw me, his face scrunched up like he just took a bite of something rotten and didn’t have nowhere to spit it out. I was not going to be able to talk to the parents with him in the house. I’d be surprised if I got into the house at all, given the good reverend’s dim view of me and my gifts. The kindest thing he’d ever called me was a fraud, and it went decidedly downhill from there.
“Reverend,” I said, so polite that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I held out the white Pyrex dish with blue flowers on it. “I brought a chicken pot pie. Figured these folks might be tired of broccoli and green bean casseroles by now.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, Ms. Carter. I’ll be sure to pass it along, with your condolences of course.” He stepped back and made to close to the door on me, but he had to hold the dish with both hands on account of the bottom being too hot for him to manage it one-handed. That made him slow getting the door closed in my face, and I pushed my way just across the threshold and held the door open with my foot.
“I don’t mind coming in for a minute to pay my respects. My circle wanted me to say something to Mrs. Miller on our behalf.” I wondered if it was a worse sin lying to a preacher than just lying in general, because the women in my church circle group didn’t have a damn thing to do with me being there, and had no idea I was using their names in vain. They wouldn’t have cared about that, but the lying to a preacher thing would have given Tot Good a little pause, at least.
“That won’t be necessary,” Reverend Turner insisted through gritted teeth. The man did not want me in that house, particularly right then. I started to wonder if there was more to his insistence than just his general dislike for me and his completely unfounded opinion that I sold my soul to the devil.
“Who’s at the door, Aaron?” The voice coming from within the house was familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it. That was odd, since I’d known most everybody in town for years.
The little bit of light coming from within the house was blotted out by the big frame of Sheriff Dunleavy stepping into the doorway between the parlor and the foyer. “Ms. Carter? How are you doing?” the sheriff asked, walking over to me, a grin splitting his face. I trusted his intentions about like I trusted a crying crocodile. A smiling lawman is never honest about his intentions. I liked my police like I liked my undertakers – solemn and grim.
“I’m fine, Sheriff. I just brought this chicken pot pie and my respects to the Millers. I heard about Jenny and just felt awful about it.” I pushed past Reverend Turner and shook the sheriff’s hand. “Are you here officially, or just being a sympathetic ear?”
“I’m here in an official capacity, I hate to say,” Dunleavy said. “There were a couple of strange things that came up in the autopsy that I need to go over with Mr. And Mrs. Miller.”
“What kind of strange things, Sheriff?” I asked. I knew it wasn’t my business, and a big-city cop would never tell me squat, but I had a little hope that my hokey charm would soften Dunleavy up a touch.
No such luck. “I’m sorry, Ms. Carter. I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. I’ve said too much already. If you’ll excuse me,” he stepped past me toward the door and nodded to Turner. “Reverend.”
“Sheriff,” the preacher nodded back in that silent acknowledgment men do. Sheriff Dunleavy continued out the door and down the steps. I didn’t see what car he got into, but it must have been his personal one. I would have noticed a police cruiser in the driveway, even if I missed Reverend Turner’s big old black Lincoln Town Car with the Clergy sticker on his bumper. The man was just a little ostentatious for my tastes, with his perfectly creased pants and his big shiny car. I could tolerate fancy or judgmental, but I didn’t do good when one package wrapped up both irritating traits. And Turner was fit to bursting at the seams with both.
“You need to leave, Ms. Carter. This family has been through enough without your interference and crazy stories,” the preacher said in a low voice. He practically hissed at me, the bald-headed little snot. I thought, not for the first time, that Reverend Turner probably got beat up a lot in school. Not because the other children were terribly cruel, which they could be, but because he was such a little bastard.
“You’re right, Reverend.” I said, sugar practically dripping off my tongue. “These fine folks have lost everything that matters to them right now. I should leave them alone to their grief. My name is on the bottom of the Pyrex, so they can return it whenever they’re done. But don’t you go putting that dish in the refrigerator while it’s still hot. It’ll cool down too fast and explode.”
“I know that, Lila Grace. What do you take me for, a moron?”
I didn’t answer that, I just turned and left the house. After all, my mama always said if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say nothing at all.
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked as I walked down the steps on the front porch. “Why are you leaving? Talk to me, dammit!”
I tried very hard to keep my voice low and not move my lips much as I walked to the car. There was a steady trickle of people walking up to the front door, most of them carrying Pyrex, but a few with KFC buckets and one or two even carrying grocery bags with paper plates and the like.
“I am leaving because it will not do us any good to get in a fight with a preacher on your front porch. I can come back this evening when he is leading his choir practice, and have a much better chance of talking to your mama and daddy without causing a scene.”
“Well, where are we going now?” She asked, fading through the passenger door of my truck and settling into the seat. She turned half around, reaching for the seatbelt, then laughed a little. “I guess I don’t have to worry about seatlbelts now, do I?”
“No, honey, I think you’re beyond those problems. And since the only lawman in town who can see you is Sheriff Johnny, you’re probably safe from getting a ticket, too. Speaking of lawmen, we’re going to see Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what was squirelly in your autopsy. Could be he has some information that might be useful to us, and we certainly have some that he should find interesting.”
I pulled the pickup out onto the street and drove around the block, then headed toward the sheriff’s office. There was a familiar white Prius sitting in the Sheriff’s parking lot, and now I knew what Dunleavy’s car looked like. I could count the number of hybrids in Unionville on one hand and have a thumb to spare, so it wouldn’t be any trouble seeing the Sheriff coming from a mile away, even if he wasn’t in his official vehicle.
I walked through the front door, wincing at the loud electronic beeeeeep that accompanied me. Sheriff Johnny had a bell on a metal arm over the door, like in an old hardware store, and it was still unnerving to me the new technological sound that came with the new high-tech lawman.
“Come on in, Ms. Carter,” Sheriff Dunleavy called from his office. “I didn’t expect it would take you very long to get here.”
“Well, then you might just be sheriff enough to take care of this county,” I said. I walked into his office and paused at the door. The “lawyer chair” had been replaced, and a new chair with arms sat in its place. I sat down in the new chair, testing the soft leather. There was no wobble, and it sat just a little high, putting the occupant almost at eye level with the person sitting behind a desk. Obviously this new sheriff didn’t think he needed any help intimidating people. That in itself was a little bit intimidating.
“The old chair had one leg shorter than the other. Imagine that,” the sheriff said, sitting down behind his desk. He motioned to a Styrofoam cup on the front edge of his desk. “I fixed you an ice water.”
I picked up the cup and took a sip. It was very cold. “Thank you, Sheriff. You have been expecting me.”
“You seem like somebody who takes an interest in things that aren’t quite ordinary,” he said with a mild smile.
“That sounds an awful lot like a polite way of calling me a busybody, Sheriff,” I replied, fixing my own smile firmly on my face. It seemed like we were going to sit here and play the “bless your heart” game for a little while, where we made snide little comments hidden in well-mannered sentences before finally abandoning our pretenses and getting down to business.
But the Sheriff had a surprise in store for me. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his desk, and stared right at me. “I’ve asked around about you. Seems like most everybody here believes you can do what you say you can do. Even Reverend Turner, who thinks you’re in league with the devil, believes you can talk to the dead. Your own pastor, Dr. Reese, speaks very highly of your gifts and your willingness to help people. So either you’ve managed to fool an entire town, or you really do have some power to talk to dead folks.”
“Like I said when we first met, Sheriff, everybody around here talks to dead people. The only difference with me is that they talk back.” I leaned forward in my chair and looked him in the eye as I spoke.
“Well, exactly what are the dead telling you today?” he asked.
“They’re telling me that Jenny Miller didn’t fall down those stairs,” I replied.
“Do they know who killed her?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Then what good are they?”
“They’re dead, Sheriff, they aren’t Batman.”
He let out a deep echoing laugh and leaned back. “I like you, Lila Grace. Can I call you Lila Grace?”
“I wish you would, Sheriff.”
“You know why I like you?”
“Because I can help you solve murders?”
“No, because you ain’t scared of nothing! You have got bigger juevos than any man I’ve ever met. I respect that.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Sheriff,” I said. “There’s plenty of things I’m scared of. I’m scared of spiders, they give me the willies. I’m scared that the life I lead isn’t good enough to get me to Heaven, and when I walk up to the pearly gates, Saint Peter is going to laugh in my face and send me down to the other place. I’m scared that I really am crazy and just hallucinating all these dead people, and you, and driving around town, and I’m really down in Columbia on Bull Street tied to bed in a pair of Depends that ain’t been changed in two days with everybody ignoring my screaming because they’re tired of listening to this old woman’s mouth. I’m scared of sunspots, because I watch too much PBS. I’m scared of the government, because I watch too much C-Span. I’m scared of getting cancer from watching too much TV, and I’m scared that I won’t be smart enough, or strong enough, or good enough to find who murdered the beautiful little girl that’s sitting in your other chair right now unable to be seen or heard by anybody in the world but me, and that she will wander this earth forever instead of going to Heaven to see her Granny again like she deserves.”
I leaned back and took a drink of water. “So there are plenty of things that scare me, Sheriff. Just none of them scare me as much as letting this little girl down.”
by john | Feb 27, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
The reception to this reading at Mysticon last weekend was great, so I guess I’ll keep on scribbling on it. Y’all know we love comments, right? And remember, this is strictly first-draft stuff, so there will probably be spelling errors and plenty of proof that I don’t really know where the commas go.
Chapter 3
I wasn’t too surprised to see Sheriff Johnny sitting in my living room when I walked in with Jenny in tow. The girl stopped, though, and when I sat down in my favorite chair, I noticed that she was still standing in the open french door frame between my dining room and den.
“Well, come on in, sweetie. He ain’t gonna arrest you. Not now, anyhow.” I smiled at her to let her know I was only joking, and waved her into the room.
She came into the room and sat on the couch. I’ve never understood how ghosts can sit on furniture, but they can’t turn a doorknob or handle other objects. Most of ‘em can’t, anyway. But for some reason, they can all sit on a chair or couch just like they still walked around breathing.
“Now, honey, let’s start with what Sheriff Johnny here likes to call the real police work.” I nodded to Johnny, and he smiled at me. He looked like he was only half paying attention to what we were talking about, but I knew he was listening a lot more to what me and that child said than he was listening to another In the Heat of the Night rerun. I mean, I like Carroll O’Conner as much as the next woman, but back to back episodes five days a week is a little much. But Sheriff Johnny has got hooked on it since he showed up at my door the morning after his funeral, all mute and confused and lost.
Some ghosts can talk, some can’t. I’ve never known what makes one of them able to communicate over another one, and it ain’t like I’ve been dead to ask anybody. But Sheriff Johnny was one of them that couldn’t speak, so he had to resort to bad sign language and gestures to get his point across. The two of us spent many an afternoon in recent months watching YouTube videos on sign language, and we got to a place where we could communicate with one another pretty good.
I reached over to the antique chest of drawers I got out of Miss Ellen Ferguson’s house when she passed, and I dug around in the top drawer until I found an ink pen and a little yellow notepad. I leaned forward to Jenny and asked, “Now who do you think would want to hurt you, sweetheart?”
“I can’t think of nobody, ma’am. And I mean it, too. Carla Combs was mad at me for getting Homecoming Queen, but she got over it when she beat me for class President. Matt Ridinger was mad at me for being named Salutatorian, but then his scholarship to Duke came through and he stopped caring about stuff around here. So I can’t think of anybody that would want to kill me.”
I looked over at Johnny, who wiggled his fingers in the air for a few seconds. I nodded, and turned back to Jenny. “What about any of the other girls on the cheerleading squad? I asked. “Did any of the girls on the bottom of the pyramid want to be on the top? Or vice versa, or whatever girls get made at each other about nowadays.”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I was captain of the squad, but I didn’t make up any of the routines or decide anything about who got featured or anything like that. And I was on the bottom of the pyramid, because I had strong enough legs to hold up some of those little heifers.” The corner of one lip turned up a little sneer, and that was the thing I’d been waiting for – the hint of mean girl to come out.
It took me back, and not to somewhere I liked going. I went right back to seventh grade gym class and playing dodge ball. All the teams were picked except me and little Mikey Miller, who had braces on both legs and a lisp. Karen Taylor and Laura Anne Mays were arguing over who got “the gimp,” and who got stuck with “Crazy Gracie,” as I was called until my junior year of high school.
But Jenny’s sneer was gone as soon as it came over her, and she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate to call them names, that’s what Miss Hope called us all. We were her little heifers, and she was our Mama Moo-Cow. I think she got picked on in school because she was a big girl.” Well, I’ll be. Maybe this child really was as nice as she was acting. That was going to make it even harder to figure out who wanted to kill her.
Sheriff Johnny caught my eye, and I turned to see him wiggling his fingers to beat the band. “Slow down, Johnny. You know I ain’t watched them videos as many times as you have.” It was true, too. Sometimes I left the sign language videos running on a loop so Johnny could practice while I went to church, or the grocery store, or just out to piddle around in my garden. He’d gotten downright good at that stuff, and when he got excited, like he was now, sometimes he was too much for me to keep up with.
He stopped, then started again. I watched his wispy hands closely, glad he wasn’t too pale today for me to see all the details. Sometimes Johnny would get wispy in the middle of the day, only to grow sharper and more distinct as night fell.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny was wondering if there was anybody that had a disagreement with your parents? Anybody that they argued with a bunch?”
“No, ma’am,” the girl said. “I mean, they got in little squabbles with Todd Ferguson about stuff at the church, and Mama didn’t shop at the Farmer’s Market no more since she caught that Riley girl putting her thumb on the scale when she was weighing her cucumbers, but nothing to come to no fights, or nothing like that. Daddy didn’t even owe nobody money, except the bank. And they ain’t usually the ones to go around pushing people down steps, are they?”
‘No, honey, I reckon they ain’t. Bankers are usually more sneaky than that.” Johnny was wiggling his fingers at me again, but I turned my head and ignored him. He hates that. Makes him madder than a frog on a frying pan to be ignored, but sometimes I had to use it like a mute button. Johnny had a bad habit of forgetting that he wasn’t Sheriff mo more. On account of being dead and all.
I stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You want something to drink, honey? I got sweet tea, and ice water. Oh, shoot, I’m sorry.” Sometimes I forget they ain’t ever gonna drink nothing again, especially the ones that can talk. I fixed myself some sweet tea in an old Tupperware tumbler and walked back into the den.
“I’m sorry about that, honey,” I said.
“It’s okay,” the girl said. “I ain’t quite used to it myself, yet. Being dead, I mean.” She got a pensive look on her face. “Do you know…why I’m still here? Does this mean I can’t go to Heaven?” She looked like she was going to cry, the poor thing. I knew better, cause ghosts can’t cry, but it’s still a good idea to keep the supernatural visitors on as even a keel as you can manage, emotionally speaking. When a ghost loses control of their emotions, things have a bad habit of flying around the room, and I had some nice Depression Glass piece in my china cabinet that I didn’t want to see get broken.
“I don’t know why you’re here, honey, but I’ve got an idea,” I said. “It seems like the people who don’t move on are either scared of what they’re going to find when they pass from this world, or there’s something unfinished keeping them here. Sheriff Johnny hangs around this old town because he ain’t convinced that the new Sheriff can take care of his people, so he tries to keep an eye on things. Miss Leila Dover doesn’t think her husband JR can take care of himself without her, not realizing that he took care of himself and her the last five years when her Alzheimer’s got so bad. And you got murdered, only nobody knows it, so ain’t nobody looking for your killer. So you want justice. I reckon when y’all get your outstanding issues resolved, so to speak, y’all will all move on to the land of harp music and fluffy clouds.”
“Are you sure?” The child looked scared to death, which I reckon was not a real good turn of phrase for her anymore.
“I ain’t sure of much, sweetie. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty-seven years on this earth, it’s that we don’t know half of what we think we know, and we understand less than half of that. But I know this – if you were a good person, then you’ll end up Heaven. It don’t matter if you toilet papered an old lady’s house on Halloween, or skipped Sunday School more times than you went. It matters how you acted towards others, and whether or not you are really sorry for any harm you might have caused. I am not your preacher, and I am not here to cast judgement. But if I had to guess, I would think that once we figure out who pushed you down them stairs, you can move on to the next world and see anybody that’s waiting for you on the other side.”
“Like my Granny?” She said, smiling.
I remembered that child’s grandmother the second she said it. Vera Prustley was a foot-washing Baptist, as we called them. She was as devout a woman as any I’d ever known. Didn’t truck with playing cards or music on Sunday, but wasn’t rude about her religion, either. I didn’t know her too well, but she always had a friendly nod for me when we would pass in the grocery store, even when I was on the outs with my own church family. She had passed about six years ago, right about the time this child would have been in middle school. That’s about the time when children really start to understand death and grieving, so her Granny’s death was something she would have carried with her.
“Yes, darling,” I replied. “I think your Granny is almost certainly waiting to see you again. So let’s try to figure out where to go from here so you can go see Miss Vera again, and your killer can go straight to jail.”
Sheriff Johnny waved his arms so wildly I turned back to him. “Yes, Johnny?”
He wiggled his fingers at me, and I gave him a little smile. “I agree, Sheriff,” I said.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny says your killer don’t need to go to jail, we need to send his sorry behind right to Hell.”
by john | Dec 24, 2014 | Business of publishing, Fiction, Writing
So I’ve been on the fence about KDP Select, the tool Amazon offers by which authors make their titles exclusive to Amazon for a period of 90 days and in exchange they get a few perks like being offered for free in the Kindle Unlimited program (think Netflix for books, or a library with a $10 membership fee), the ability to offer your book for free for a promotional time period (you get 5 days that ou can make your book free in each 90-day period) and the ability for Amazon Prime Members to borrow your book from the Kindle Online Lending Library (authors are paid a fee per borrow, and are paid a fee for every time the book is read past 10% in the Kindle Unlimited program).
I’ve had books in KDP Select before Kindle Unlimited (KU) came along, but nothing since the new program happened. When I was in KDP Select, I made one Bubba story free each week through the 90-day cycle, then repeated. So if you wanted to read every Bubba story for free, you could do that. My hope was that people would read the free story, then immediately run out and buy all the rest of them. I don’t know how often either of those things happened, but my sales were pretty steady while I was in the program. But after a while, and with everything that went on in 2014 (well-documented on other posts here and on Facebook), keeping up with the free days just became more than I could managed, and since I hadn’t seen any significant increase in sales I withdrew.
Now the tinfoil hat crowd would tell you that my sales immediately tanked, and I was being punished for leaving the program and Amazon’s mysterious algorithms were skewed to help authors in the program, etc. etc. While all that may be true, my sales didn’t immediately tank – they held steady at about the same level they were when I was in KDP Select. For several months. Then sales did indeed start to taper off, but I don’t think lack of participation in KDP Select had anything to do with it.
I wasn’t writing and publishing new material. Let’s take a look, shall we?
2010 – 2 Publications
2011 – 11 Publications
2012 – 17 Publications
2013 – 2 Publications (there were other things, but I wasn’t necessarily the one publishing them)
2014 – 5 Publications (not counting the 2 this week)
Notice anything about that? Yeah, when I was selling a bunch of books, I was writing a bunch of books. I published more than a book a month in 2012, and not even a book a quarter in the two years following. No wonder my sales declined – my productivity declined. Can’t blame Amazon’s math for that!
So now that I’m writing again, and writing a lot again, why did I enroll the two newest books (Elf Off the Shelf and Raising Hell) in KDP Select? There were a couple of reasons.
1) The Kindle Lending thing and Kindle Unlimited thing suck for novels, but they’re pretty good for short stories. You see, you get paid based on how many things are borrowed, and how much money is in the pool. Lately it’s been a little over a buck. That’s half what I would get from a $2.99 novel if it were sold normally, but it’s TRIPLE what I get from a $.99 short story over it selling normally.
Here’s the math, which most folks already know. If I price a book at $.99-$2.98, I get 35% royalty. If I price it at $2.99-9.99, I get 70%. If I go over $10, it drops back down to 35%. So whenever you buy a Bubba short story, I get $.34. If I get a little over a dollar on the borrows, then I get three times the normal money, and people can read my story for free.
So that’s one reason. The other reason is that I hadn’t tried the program since KU started, and I wanted to see what it was like.
I also wanted to offer Raising Hell for pre-order, and was under the mistaken impression that I had to be in KDP Select to do so. That appears to not be the case, so I was wrong. Oh well, the book is up and available for pre-order and will be released on January 20. I’m pretty excited about this new series, it takes me to a darker place, lets me write in a harder tone, and lets me play with uglier villains. I hope you like it. I was really trying to channel the old Garth Ennis run on Hellblazer, so I hope I did it justice.
Also, if you want more bloggy type things, let me know. I have a bajillion comments to moderate in the queue, but once I get through those I’ll start replying. Until then, you can always find me on Facebook or Twitter. Peace out.
