by john | Jul 10, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest 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.
22
I was sitting at my dining room table, going over the pictures of Shelly’s car for what felt like the twentieth time, when I heard a car pull up in front of my house. Heavy footsteps pounded up my steps, and there was a sharp knock on my door.
I walked to the front door, careful to keep an eye on the shotgun leaning against the wall, but relaxed when I recognized Willis’ form through the curtains. I pulled open the door to find him standing there on my front stoop holding a brown paper bag and wearing a goofy grin.
“I brought lunch,” he said, breezing right past me like he owned the place. “I figure if this morning pissed you off anything like it did me you’ve been up to your eyeballs in case files all morning and didn’t even realize it was two o’clock.”
My stomach answered for me, letting out a noisy rumble at the smells coming from the sack he carried. “I’ll get some tea. Come wash your hands and get some paper plates. The dining room table is covered up, so we’ll eat in the kitchen.”
He followed me through the dining room into the kitchen and set his bag down on the stove. I looked at my worn brown Tupperware tumblers and decided to use the good glasses, the ones made out of actual glass, for a change. Admittedly, they were old Smurfs glasses I got at the Hardee’s drive-thru twenty years ago, but I thought they were at least a little upgrade from the Tupperware. Mama taught me to put my best foot forward, and I’m sure she was rolling over in her grave at the fact that my idea of putting my best foot forward was choosing the Smurf glasses over the Tupperware. My mama and I never were on the same page as far as my feminine wiles went.
Willis laughed as I walked to the table holding out the cartoon glasses. “I see we’re using the good china.”
“I don’t scrimp when company comes,” I replied. “Now don’t give me no crap, or I’ll make you drink out of a Solo cup.”
“I don’t mind a solo cup. Now, I don’t know what you like, so I just got a couple of sandwiches, and if there’s one you don’t like, I’ll eat it.”
“What did you bring?” I asked.
“I stopped by the Grill and got a couple of cheeseburgers, a BLT, and a barbecue sandwich, with two orders of french fries.”
“That sounds great,” I said, turning back to the fridge. I pulled out a couple of squeeze bottles of condiments, a jar of homemade sweet pickles, and some Duke’s mayonnaise. Willis passed me a plate and we spread out the sandwiches between us. We each took a burger and some fries, and I cut the barbecue sandwich in half and put one piece on my plate.
“I’ll take the other piece,” Willis said, holding out his hand. Our fingers brushed as I passed it to him, and I looked up to see his ears blushing. I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see the flush on my own cheeks, silently kicking myself for acting like a nervous schoolgirl.
“Well, you’re right,” I said after I’d taken the edge off my hunger with half a cheeseburger and some fries. “I’ve been up to my eyeballs in case files all morning, and I don’t have any more of a clue than I did when we walked out of the school.”
“Me neither,” he admitted. “I hoped we could talk through some things after lunch and maybe come up with something. Is Jenny around?”
“No, and I haven’t seen Sheriff Johnny in a while, either. Jenny went over to the graveyard to talk to the Triplets, but I don’t know where Johnny is.”
“The Triplets?”
I explained about Helen, Faye, and Frances, and he laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “They sound like three peas in a pod.”
“Oh Lord, you ain’t wrong. They were thick as thieves in life, and death hasn’t made them like each other any less.”
“That’s kinda sweet, ain’t it?” He asked, a thoughtful expression crossing his face.
I swallowed a mouthful of barbecue and asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, here you’ve got three women who were such good friends in life that they’re still spending all their time together even after they’ve passed. And you’ve got somebody like Sheriff Johnny, who loved his town so much that he wouldn’t leave even after death. He still wants to keep an eye on things, even though he can’t really do a whole lot about it now. It’s nice, you know? Says a lot of good things about a place, that people care that much about it.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” I admitted. “I reckon when you spend your whole life seeing dead people and trying to help them move on, you don’t stop to think too much about what would make somebody want to stay.” I chewed my sandwich for a minute or two more in silence, then picked up my napkin from my lap and laid it across the plate.
“I surrender,” I said. “If I eat another bite I won’t be good for nothing the rest of the day. Do you want to take that BLT back to the office? Eat it later?”
“I’ll see if Jeff wants it, but he probably won’t touch it. He’s real particular about his food.”
“Always has been,” I said. “Even when he was little, he had to have the crusts cut off his bread, and the sandwiches cut into little triangles. He always wanted plates with dividers, so his food didn’t touch. He’s real particular about most everything.”
Willis laughed. “God knows that’s the truth. I borrowed a pen from his desk one day and you would have thought the world was gonna end. I even walked over to the cabinet and handed him two to replace it, but it wasn’t the right pen. I haven’t touched his desk since. Just ain’t worth upsetting the apple cart.”
“His mama was like that, too. She was in charge of the bulletins at church for the longest time, and they were always beautiful, but heaven help you if they didn’t get folded just right. I watched her rip a deacon up on side and down the other one morning because he told her it wasn’t a big deal.”
“I bet he didn’t make that mistake again,” Willis said, chuckling. He stood up and put the spare sandwich in the paper bag, and looked at me. “Where’s the trash can? I’ll throw away the plates if you’ll fix us a couple more glasses of tea.”
I pointed to the sink. “Under there. Drop the plates in there and let’s go to the dining room. Maybe together we can see something in all this mess.” I opened the freezer and dropped a few more ice cubes in each glass, then topped off the tea and followed him into the dining room. I passed him his Papa Smurf glass and set my Smurfette glass down on a coaster.
“You got another one of those?”
“Smurfette glass? No, I just got the one set. I got Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Brainy Smurf, and Gargamel and that cat of his.”
“Aural,” he said. “But I meant a coaster.”
“Oh!” I grabbed him a coaster and sat down behind the stack of folders. “Where should we start?”
“Let’s look at your suspect list compared to mine, and see who I have an alibi for already,” he said. He leaned over and picked up a slim black briefcase I never even noticed him set down on the floor. An iPad and a portable keyboard appeared, and he looked up at me.
“Aren’t we Mr. Technology?” I teased.
“I’m old. Lila Grace, but I ain’t dumb. This thing is the best thing that’s happened to law enforcement since the bulletproof vest. Camera, communication device, and all my case files right in one place. I don’t know how I caught any bad guys without it.”
“Might have involved more running, old man,” I said with a grin and a poke to his belly.
“Hey!” he protested. “I’m a Sheriff now, I don’t have to run. I have people for that.”
“You have Jeff for that,” I corrected. “I’ve seen Jeff run. It looks like a cross between a very slow ostrich and a demented hippopotamus. That boy is a lot of things, but coordinated and athletic are not any of them.”
He laughed and nodded. “Jeff is an invaluable asset to the department, but he ain’t gonna win any 40-yard dashes, that’s for sure. Now, who do you have on your list that still looks good to you?”
“Well, there are the girls that didn’t make the cheerleading squad, but double homicide seems a bridge too far even for a heartbroken teenage girl, and I’ve seen some things in that regard.”
Willis looked like he was about to say something, but shook his head like he was changing the topic and said, “We talked to all the girls who tried out the past two years and didn’t make the squad. All but one of them had an alibi, and she was so tore up I can’t imagine it was her. Turns out Jenny was actually working with her some weekends to get better so she could audition again next year.”
“That definitely doesn’t sound like anybody with enough of an axe to grind to murder someone,” I said. “What about the kids from the church beach trip last year? Reverend Turner seems to think there may have been some alcohol involved, and possibly even…” I lowered my voice. “Sex.”
The sheriff grinned, but shook his head. “There were only half a dozen people on the trip in addition to Jenny and Shelly, and three of them were girls we’d already cleared. The three boys all have solid alibis. Turns out in a town this size, it’s pretty easy to account for most everybody’s whereabouts on a Friday night after a home football game.”
“Most of the underage population is either in the parking lot of McDonald’s, the parking lot of the high school, or over at the dam parking,” I said.
“Some of them have started going out to the landfill now,” he added.
“That’s a new one on me, making out at the trash dump.”
“The older section of the landfill is pretty nice. They’ve put down sod and landscaped it. I think the county is talking about building a golf course out there once they get one or two more sections filled up,” Willis said.
“I think I’ll stick to making out in the comfort of my own home, thank you.”
“Is that an invitation, Ms. Carter?” He asked. “Because I have to remind you, I’m still on duty.”
I smiled at him, enjoying the flirting. “Why Sheriff, I thought you were on your lunch break.” I batted my eyes at him, then laughed out loud at the flush that crept up his cheeks.
“Lila Grace, you might be the single most infuriating woman I have ever met, and I was married. Twice!” He spluttered, laughing a little.
“Twice, huh.” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “Three times, if you count being married to The Job, which both of my wives accused me of on more than one occasion.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He sighed, then looked at me for a second, like he was making up his mind. “Well, I reckon we oughta go ahead and get this all out in the open. The first time I got married, I was twenty-three years old, full of piss and vinegar and raring to arrest every bad guy in the world. Gina, that was my wife’s name, was a great gal, good-looking, good cook, good job as a CPA for some high-rise accounting firm downtown.”
“What happened?” I repeated.
He gave me one of those “I’m getting to that” looks that men get when you’re trying to get them to talk about something they don’t want to talk about, usually their feelings on something deeper than football.
“She got pregnant and wanted me to leave the force. Said she couldn’t see herself raising a kid not knowing if I was going to walk through the door at the end of my shift or not. I didn’t want to quit, but she was dead set on it, so I filled out the paperwork. I was going to work security in the building where she worked, getting fat and watching security cameras.”
“But that didn’t happen,” I said.
“No, that didn’t happen. She lost the baby, and there were complications from the miscarriage that made her unable to get pregnant again. I stayed home with her for a week, then she practically pushed me out the front door to go back to work.” He looked at me with a sheepish grin. “I’m not real good at sitting still now, and this was thirty years ago. You can imagine what I was like then.”
“I’d rather not,” I said with a smile so he knew I was just teasing.
“So I went back to work, and after another week or so she went back to work, and we settled back into our everyday lives, then one day I come home and she’s standing in the kitchen with my paperwork to leave the force in her hand. She starts screaming at me about why I haven’t put in my notice yet, and how I don’t care about her if I’m going to keep putting my life in danger, and all this stuff about how me being a cop is selfish, and I’m just standing there with my mouth hanging open like a trout laying on a dock.”
He took a deep breath, then dove back in. “When she lost the baby, all the thoughts of leaving police work went out of my head. To me, that was the only reason I was quitting, and now that we weren’t going to have a kid, I figured I’d just be a cop the rest of my life. But to her, me leaving the force was more about her feelings and a lot less about the kid thing.”
“I see both sides,” I said, not wanting to step on his fragile ego and tell him that he was an idiot. He probably already had that much figured out.
“Yeah, and I was a kid, too. I’d see things a lot differently now, but back then, I could barely see past the end of my own nose. So we had a huge fight, and she threw me out. Told me I had to choose being a cop or being married, that I couldn’t be both. And, being stupid, and stubborn, and twenty-four, I became another statistic about cop marriages.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But at least you had her for a little while.” I didn’t mean to throw that out there. Didn’t mean to make it about me, but the look of pity that flashed across his face for just a second told me that’s exactly what I’d done.
“Yeah, I had a couple of good years with her, and a few really bad months, but all in all it turned out for the best in the end. She married a guy who moved up to become the CFO of that company she worked for, and she quit working at thirty-five to take care of three adopted kids and do charity work. We haven’t spoken in years, but I get a Christmas card every year.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “At least it ended up good. What about your second wife?”
His face darkened, and I knew that we’d crossed into a topic he wasn’t very comfortable with. “That’s a much uglier story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
His words were telling me to say no, but his eyes told the story of a man who really needed to talk. I leaned forward, put my hand over his, and said, “Talk to me, Willis.”
by john | Jul 4, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Travel
Hey there! If you’re one of the new people who found me through Chris Fox linking to me, welcome. If you’re looking for more contentious debate, I think this week may disappoint. But if you’re looking to sell more books, particularly by hand at conventions, then hopefully this will help out.
If you’ve been around here any length of time, you’ve probably seen me say that you usually won’t make your money back in the short term doing conventions. They’re part of the long game, rather than a quick ROI project. Conventions are about marketing, brand-building, and networking. Selling books is a side part of the gig. Most of the time. Some cons, like comic cons and the big media cons, are way more about selling stuff, because in a crowd of a couple hundred vendors and 50,000 people, it’s going to be hard to get noticed enough to be “sticky” in someone’s head unless they buy your shit and love it.
So for the purposes of this article, let’s use the term “con” to refer to the small to mid-sized Sci-Fi and Fantasy cons like the one I did last weekend (LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN) and the one I’m doing next weekend (ConGregate in High Point, NC). These events can have anywhere from a couple hundred people to several thousand, and running a table at one of these cons takes a few more things than you would initially expect. So here are a few tips and “con hacks” that I’ve come up with through the past seven years of doing this.
1) Have some flat swag – Have something to put into people’s hands. Bookmarks, postcards, even a xeroxed one-sheet about your book if you don’t have the money or wherewithal to make anything better. But a lot of people are not going to buy your book at the con, realistically you’ll talk to far more people who won’t buy the book than people who will. So you need to have something to put in their hand so they can remember you when they leave.
2) Have a Sharpie – Especially at bigger cons, you’ll have folks who say “I’ll come back.” If you give them a piece of flat swag, they still might not be able to find you amidst all the chaos. Write your booth number on the back of the bookmark. Look, I didn’t say these tips were rocket science. I just said they were helpful.
3) Carry plastic bags to the con – You intend to sell shit to people. People need a way to carry shit. Plastic bags are cheap if you buy the crappy ones you get at all the dollar stores, or free if you just recycle plastic grocery bags. But I have made more than one sale by beckoning over some poor soul who is barely able to carry the stack of books and crap they’ve bought, and they’re so grateful to have a bag that they listen to my pitch. Admittedly, I’m way more likely to help out somebody with an armload of books than an armload of Funko Pops, but I don’t sell Pops. I sell books, and someone who has already shown a predisposition to buy books that day is my target audience.
4) Flat stock is the devil – Don’t lay your books down so that the shopper has to stand completely over them to see the cover. Invest in some cheap wire folding book stands (sometimes also called plate racks) and stand your shit up! You spent money on the cover to that books, or someone did, so show it off. Standing up your books helps draw in the long-distance browsers, the folks that don’t want to get too close to the table, lest they buy something. Until they see something awesome, and can’t help themselves. if they can’t see your book, you aren’t giving yourself the option to be that something awesome.
5) Witty bookmarks are the absolute jam – I have one piece of marketing material that i can trace to direct sales. For The Black Knight Chronicles, I made a run of bookmarks that say “Suck It, Edward” in big letters at the top. So when I put those in my vampire books, and stand them up, people from across the aisle can see me making fun of Twilight. Frequently they’ll chuckle, then walk all the way over and either pick up the book or ask me what it’s about. Worst case, they want the bookmark. But more than once I’ve had people buy either the Omnibus ($23) or the entire set of Black Knight books ($50) just off seeing the bookmark. H.P. Holo makes bookmarks with a big circle at the top that says stuff like “SPACE PIRATES” or “WIZARDS & MONKEYS” (it doesn’t really say wizards & monkeys) on them. This lets people see what the book is about from a distance, and draw them in. That kind of dual-purpose swag is awesome for drawing people in.
6) Take Credit Cards – I did a comic con this year, in 2017, with a comic artist who didn’t take credit cards. He proclaimed his disdain for a smartphone, why he wouldn’t need one, why he does fine without a Square reader, and why all this newfangled technology was silly and useless. At the end of the one-day con, after he watched me ring up over $200 in credit card sales, compared with his $20 in cash sales, he said to me, “Maybe I need to look into getting one of those.” I understand that it used to be hard to accept credit cards. There was expensive equipment, monthly fees, and all that BS. Square is free. Paypal is free. Yes, they take about 3% of the sale. Last weekend I processed almost $300 in credit card sales, and I only had a sales table for Saturday. Square can have their $9, because I guarantee you that I picked up at least $100 in additional sales by being able to process cards. Added Bonus – money that is spent with you on credit cards usually doesn’t hit your bank until after the con, so it’s not burning a hole in your pocket whenever you walk through the deal room!
7) Make friends with your neighbors – I try really hard to help out the people next to me at cons, whether I know them or not. Selling books is not a competition, and a rising tide really does lift all boats. Getting a book in someone’s hands is awesome, no matter if it’s your book or the book from the guy next to you. Because once people are predisposed to buy books, they will buy a variety of books. So it’s good for everyone when everyone is selling. Being nice to your neighbors also means that you’ll have someone to keep an eye on your shit when you have to go pee. So don’t erect huge displays that fuck the sightlines of people getting to your neighbor. Don’t blare sound music all day through the con (no matter how cool it is), unless of course you’re a band or a musician, then at least try to mix it up so your neighbors don’t have to hear the same song for three days. Bring extra bottled water and share it with your neighbor. Be happy to break a twenty for them if you have more change. Just be nice and friendly, and it’ll work out well for you in the long run.
8) Get a bigger hand truck than you think you need – I had a decent little $50 hand truck from Lowe’s that I used for a couple years. Before that I had a nice little fold-flat hand truck that did me well until I had too many title to carry on that in one trip. At RavenCon, I had the Lowe’s hand truck, which theoretically had a flatbed load rating of 400 lbs, loaded down pretty damn heavily. We hit a pothole in the hotel parking lot, and one of the wheels shattered. A few feet further along, and the overburdened other wheel gave up the ghost. We struggled that shit into the room, set things up, and did the show, but that hand truck was toast. For the next con, Suzy bought me one like this. Mine is a little different, but it can do vertical or horizontal, has 1,000 pounds capacity, and is big enough to carry everything for two authors (at least) in one trip. It’s friggin’ awesome and I wish I’d just spent the $150 on that one the first time.
There’s a million other things, but I’ll leave with just a quick inventory of my “con box,” the big blue tub that I carry around that has no books in it, just the stuff that I feel like I should have with me to do a booth or a table.
- (2) 8′ Black Tablecloths – I use them either to cover the table if one is not provided, or to cover up my crap at the end of the night.
- Falstaff Books Table Runner – this is new, but it’s just a nice little banner that drapes over the table with our logo on it.
- (12) folding wire book stands – I almost always need less than this, but it leaves me one or two to loan out. See point #7
- Package of big zip ties – I have a sign that ties to the back of my book rack. Also useful for hanging my bags and a trash bag.
- plastic bags – I got a box of “t-shirt bags” years ago and they haven’t run out yet.
- Bookmarks – I have a Falstaff Books bookmark, plus one for Bubba, Harker, and Black Knight. On the back of the Falstaff Books bookmark is a link to a free ebook download of a sampler that gives people a taste of everything we publish.
- Stickers – I have stickers for each property that I have bookmarks for. Buy a book, get a sticker.
- deodorant – I forgot it once on a trip. Never again.
- Drugs – I keep a stash of ibuprofen, immodium, and claritin-d in my con box. These treat the three main things that can ruin a con for me, so I try to stay prepared.
- post-it notes & a small legal pad
- pens and a sharpie
- SC Business License – not all states require a state business license to vend at a con. SC does. I just never take the license out of the box, so I always know where it is.
- Business cards and holder
- spare phone battery – it’s one of those little things by Anker that can recharge a phone, iPad, or more importantly, a Square chip reader.
- Square reader, iPhone 7 adaptor, and Chip reader – I know the chip reader is more secure, but more importantly to me, it’s more efficient. The swipe reader takes multiple swipes at least 50% of the time, but the chip reader almost never takes additional time and effort. I hate the fact that the iPhone no longer has a headphone jack, but I didn’t get to design it, so I bought an extra adaptor and put it in the con box.
- (2) Snap light stick – shit happens. Some con spaces have very few windows, or are even underground, like the Charlotte Convention Center. I don’t ever expect to need to have a small chemical light source, but the day I want it will be the day I REALLY want it.
- pocketknife – I don’t leave home without it.
- Leatherman – some jobs are too much for even a pocketknife
That’s what’s in my con box. It goes to every con, and is the most important thing that goes into the truck.
by john | Jul 3, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest 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.
21
We sat down at a table in the far corner of The Grill, the only restaurant in Maple Grove, and Willis nodded to most of the patrons. Everybody in the place recognized us, and there was more than one whispered conversation that started up as soon as we sat down.
“Do you want me to go listen to what they’re saying?” Jenny asked, a gleam in her translucent eye. I had the distinct impression that child was enjoying this whole undead detective thing more than just about anything she’d enjoyed while she was alive.
I shook my head, looking at Willis, but talking to Jenny. “No, sweetie, there ain’t no point. I can just about tell you what they’re saying. Beth Shillington over there is telling her husband Harold that she heard I danced around nekkid in my back yard under the full moon to get my power to talk to dead people. Harold is gonna nod and tell her that he saw the two of us at Shorty’s together yesterday. Then Beth is gonna get on him for going to Shorty’s after she has done told him not to drink during the week on account of how much it cost them to get out of his last DUI.”
I jerked my head at a table with half a dozen elderly women sitting by the window. “That over there is Helen’s Sunday School class. They’ll be talking about how sinful it is for us to be dining together, an unmarried woman and man breaking bread being nothing but temptation to fornication and all.” I very studiously did not look at Willis when I said “fornication,” but I felt the tips of my ears get red anyway. “This despite the fact that three of those women are carrying on with unmarried men themselves, and two of them are sleeping, unbeknownst to the other, with the same man!”
Jenny burst out laughing so hard she almost fell through her chair, and Willis looked at me with his eyebrows up. “And how exactly did you come by this knowledge, Lila Grace?”
I just smiled at him. “Willis, darling, I’m the only living person those three old dead busybodies have to gossip to. Where in the world do you think I got the information?”
“I don’t know, but can we revisit the idea of you dancing around nude under the full moon?” He smiled, and his grin only grew as I felt my cheeks flame.
“No, we cannot,” I said, unrolling my napkin from around my silverware and placing it in my lap. “Unless you’ve got a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle stashed somewhere in your office. You come up with some top-shelf bourbon, Sheriff, and we can certainly have a conversation.” I gave him what I hoped was a flirtatious smile, but it had been so long since I flirted I couldn’t promise any level of proficiency with it.
Just then I was saved my Renee Walkin coming up to the table, her little notepad in hand. Renee was married to Phillip Walkin, who owned The Grill, and she was the chief waitress, hostess, silverware roller, floor sweeper, and doer of everything else that didn’t involve the kitchen. Phillip ran the kitchen like he was a redneck Gordon Ramsey, and their son Phil Jr. was the dishwasher. I knew Renee and Phillip had high hopes for Junior taking over the place when they retired, but I’d never seen Phil Jr. aspire to anything more than catching enough fish to keep his belly full.
“Morning, Lila Grace, Sheriff,” Renee said with a smile. She always had a kind word for me, ever since we were kids. She was a couple years behind me in school, and we were never real close, but she was one of the few people in town who never made fun of me or looked at me funny. I asked her about that one time, and she just said “I was told to treat people like I wanted to be treated. I don’t like it when people are mean to me, so I try not to be mean to other people.” The world could use a few more Renees.
“Morning, Renee,” I said. “Anything special today?”
“We got blueberry pancakes, but they ain’t real good. I think the blueberries ain’t quite ready yet. But I’ve got a few chocolate chip pancakes left if you want something sweet.”
“I think I’ll just do two eggs over medium, with bacon, grits, and one of them big old cat-head biscuits you got back there.”
“I can do that,” she said with a smile. “What about you, Sheriff?”
Willis looked at me like I was speaking French, then asked, “What in the world is a cat-head biscuit?”
Renee and I both laughed, drawing more nasty looks from the Sunday School biddies, and Jenny looked confused too. “It just means it’s a great big ol’ biscuit, Sheriff. I don’t use no biscuit cutter, so my biscuits alway turn out too big, and not real round, so they look about the size and shape of a cat’s head,” Renee said.
“I assure you, Fluffy was not harmed in the making of Renee’s biscuits,” I added.
Willis smiled and said, “Then I’ll have two eggs, scrambled, with double bacon, hash browns, and a biscuit. It can be the size of whatever animal you see fit.” He gave Renee a warm smile to let her know he wasn’t picking on her for talking country, and she walked off with a grin.
“I like her,” he said. “She’s funny.”
“She’s a good woman,” I said. “She’s done a good job raising her kids, and keeping Phillip in line. I swear, to know him growing up you never would have thought that boy would turn out to amount to nothing.”
“Why’s that?” Jenny asked. Her face was a little glum, and I wasn’t sure if it was because she wasn’t going to grow up, or just because she had to sit there smelling all that good food and couldn’t eat any of it.
“Well,” I said. “He raised plenty of hell back in his day, wildcattin’ around with the boys. He once wrecked two identical cars in the same curve on the same road, a year apart, driving like a bat out of hell on these back country roads. I reckon if you would have asked me when I was twenty who I knew that was least likely to see thirty, it would have been Phillip Walkin. But here he is, a respected businessman, father, and I think he’s a deacon over at the ARP church. Just goes to show you can’t never tell.”
“Yeah, I reckon not,” Jenny said. She stood up, and drifted off. “I’m going to go talk to the ladies at the cemetery and see if we can come up with anything else. I’ll meet you back at the house later.”
“Okay, honey. I’ll see you in a little while,” I said, still trying to look at Willis while I talked to her spirit.
“She okay?” Willis asked.
“I don’t know. I know she was real disappointed when Ian turned out to be innocent. He was a good suspect, and if he turned out to be guilty, she could move on. I think she might be starting to feel the permanence of the whole thing.”
“Death?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Some spirits don’t really get that it’s forever at first. It takes some time, and when they do, they have to adjust to that. It’s hard, especially if they were real active in life and had a lot going on, like Jenny did.”
“She was real young, too,” he added.
“Yeah, that can have something to do with it. I’m not sure it always does, but it can.”
We finished our breakfast and left, Willis nodding to even more people on the way out. He dropped me by my truck back at the high school and headed to the police station to review crime scene photos and forensics from Shelly’s car.
I went home and found Jenny and Sheriff Johnny sitting on my porch swing. I sat on the rocker beside them. “Hey, Jenny,” I said.
“Hey.” She didn’t look at me.
“I reckon you’re disappointed with how this morning turned out.”
“Yeah.” Monosyllabic answers is one of the reasons I was glad I never had teenagers, and why I stuck to teaching elementary school kids in Sunday School. I’ve never known how young’uns that will mouth off at the drop of a hat can become almost mute whenever you try to ask them a question.
“Well, we ain’t giving up, sweetie. Ian was a good suspect, he had all the reasons in the world to hate y’all, he just didn’t do it. But we’ll figure out who did, I promise.”
Sheriff Johnny’s head snapped around to me, and he wiggled his fingers in the air. “I know, Johnny. I ain’t supposed to make promises I don’t know if I can keep. But I’m going to do everything I can to keep this one. This child has done made herself important to me, and I don’t like the idea of disappointing her.”
He nodded, and stood up, walking through the front door into my house. I sat there for a few seconds before he stuck his head and torso through the wall and waved at me to follow him.
“I swear, child, if I live to be a hundred, I will never get used to that.”
Johnny wiggled his fingers at me, and I feigned anger at him. “No, Johnny, I am not already a hundred! Dammit, old man, if you don’t quit wiggling them smartass fingers at me, I’ll wiggle one back at you!” I got up and mock-stomped into the house, but I noticed Jenny cover her mouth to hide a giggle as I did.
Johnny was standing by the back door when I got to the kitchen, kinda looking around everything. “What do you see, Johnny?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t see anything, either,” I said.
He wiggled his fingers at me. “That is a little strange. You’re right, there’s nothing here. It ain’t just like the guy who broke in wore gloves, it’s like he didn’t leave any mud or anything behind. That’s pretty good for a high school kid, ain’t it?”
Johnny nodded, then made a sweeping arm motion around the kitchen. “Yeah, there ain’t a speck of mud or nothing. And it ain’t like I stayed up late to mop the kitchen, neither. Just swept up the broken glass in put if in Sheriff Dunleavy’s evidence bags. But there wasn’t a single scrap of dirt or fabric left behind. Whoever did this knew what they were about. This wasn’t their first rodeo. I reckon I oughta go see if I can figure out what I’ve got in the dining room that was worth them breaking in here.”
I went into the dining room and sat down in front of a stack of folders. These files were copies of all the crime scene photos and police reports from Jenny’s basement, both visits, and from Shelly’s car. I spent a solid three hours digging through those files, and didn’t find much.
Both girls died of broken necks, which made sense for Jenny, since she got pushed down the stairs, but not as much for Shelly. Jenny’s house showed no signs of forced entry, and so far the police had no idea where Shelly was killed. The time in the water pretty much destroyed any trace evidence that might have been in Shelly’s car, and the time that passed between her death and it being ruled a homicide meant that there was no real evidence available in Jenny’s basement either. Whoever killed these girls was the worst kind of person – ruthless and smart.
by john | Jun 28, 2017 | How to Sell Books, Writing
So yeah, that’s a total clickbait headline. It’s also not true. But it kinda is. Like so many things, the concept of Write to Market has diverged from its original core values into a set of weird “truths” and market and career advice ideas that it has turned into a whole messianic movement.
Let’s start with a basic question – What is “Write to Market?” Chris Fox, a successful midlist genre fiction author, wrote a series of books about how to be a successful author, focusing on many of the things that I tell new and aspiring writers to focus on – writing speed, production speed, don’t get caught up in revising forever, produce the work, you’ll sell more in a popular genre than in a niche genre – all very level-headed, common sense advice. These books caught on, and some people managed to take the tips and tricks that Chris write in these books and turn them into some very successful series, almost overnight.
EDIT – So Chris came on to comment and clear up some of my inaccuracies. According to Chris, and I have no reason to doubt him, he sold enough copies of his book written with the Write to Market theory to hit the NY Times list. I believe him, and congratulate him on that success. I think it’s awesome. My guess that his non-fiction stuff outsold his fiction stuff came from five minute of looking over his ranks on one series. I apparently missed the stuff that sold the best. My bad. He says he outsells me, which puts him in good company. Rock on. I am sincerely happy whenever anyone sells books. Chris obviously sells a lot of fiction, which does lend more credence to the words that he preaches. It does not, however, change the fact that most of the people advocating write to market are not saying the same things he’s saying, and are saying that you can write crap and make money. I still think that’s a load of shit.
Good for them. That’s awesome.
Then a lot of other people looked at it, decided that it was a great way to make a lot of money in the easy life of a writer, and it all went to shit.
Let me clarify something before I go much further. One, when I call Chris Fox a successful midlist genre fiction author, please don’t consider that any type of insult. I briefly looked at the rankings of his fiction books on Amazon, and it looks like he sells some books. Probably a decent number. Rock on. To me, that puts him in the same category as me and most of my peers who haven’t made it onto a major bestseller list.
But just like a couple years ago people were holding Hugh Howey up as the messiah of all things self-pub, nowadays Write to Market is the Hot New Thing. It’s the Guaranteed Way to Quit Your Day Job and Live the Easy Life of a Novelist! But here’s the thing – that’s a load of shit.
No, I don’t work a day job. No, I am not wearing pants write now, at 3PM. No, I didn’t have to call in to anyone all week the I felt like refried ass and didn’t want to work because I had a stomach bug.
I also don’t know how much money I’m going to make from month to month, I work as many weekends as I do weekdays, and I put in as many hours at work now as I did when I was a middle manager with a dozen people reporting to me. So I don’t have a day job, but unlike some folks, I’m not cruising around on my boat butt-nekkid waiting for my movie to come out.
Don’t visualize. There is no Visine for the mind’s eye.
Please understand – a lot of Chris Fox’s principles are things I agree with. Yes, you need to write fast. Yes, you should probably start your career working in a genre that people will actually read. Yes, you should do some market research before you launch a book. I’ve said many times, in many places, that the idea of writing a book and just letting it float out there on its own is one that should have died when Salinger did. But really, it should have died with Dickinson.
The problem is, nowadays you have a lot of people jumping in the “write to market” pool, looking to make a quick buck. So there’s a lot of folks on lots of internet sites focusing on analyzing market trends, looking for hot genres to capitalize on, talking about forgoing editing in favor of computerized proofreading tools (It’s a TRAP!), and how a good cover and solid story will make up for all the weaknesses in your craft.
Those people are full of shit and will either change their tune or will be out of this industry in a very short time.
While it’s possible to look at a popular genre without a ton of competition in it, dissect the tropes of the successful books in the genre and write a formulaic book to hit all the buttons and sell a bunch of copies, is that really any way to build a career?
Let’s say I want to make a pile of money selling books. I hear that shifter romance is hot, so I decide to write a shifter romance. I buy twenty or so of the bestselling books in that genre, read them, understand the story beats, figure out how they’re put together, and plot out a six-book shifter romance of my own. I write them as fast as I can, pay nominal attention to the editing and the craft, get a decent cover, put the books up on Amazon, and watch the money roll in.
I can probably make a decent chunk of change over the next six months doing that. Then the winds change, the genre cools, and I have to chase the next trend. Again and again and again. How often can you stand to do that? At what point are you no longer doing the thing that made it fun to write in the first place – creating? How long can you stand to follow that mechanical process before it becomes as mind-numbing as the day job you were dying to leave in the first place?
That’s kinda my point, and why I say that despite the fact that Chris’s original principles are things that I think people can apply to successful career creation, the bandwagon-jumpers who are looking to make a quick buck are missing the whole point of writing to market – writing.
You can go online and find a lot of people telling you that editing doesn’t matter, that a good story is all that matters. They’ll point you to a dozen big-selling indie authors whose books are really mediocre as far as the craft, and those folks are moving huge numbers.
Today.
Come back to me in ten years and let me know how those folks are doing. Because I’m seven years into this journey, and I’ve figured a few things out. One of them is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and most of the “overnight successes” that I’ve known haven’t been that overnight at all. So if I’d rather listen to advice from folks like Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch and Kevin J. Anderson and Faith Hunter and Chuck Gannon and Ed Schubert, who have been in the business for decades by now, then maybe I’ll just stick with those folks.
The thing is – you can jump on a bandwagon and make a pile of money. But you won’t make millions. You won’t make the kind of money that lets you jump on a boat and sail naked around the world (unless you catch lightning in a bottle). You can make enough money to make a living by dissecting a trend and writing to a trend, then jumping to the next trend and doing it all over again, ad nauseum.
But you can also make a living by writing the books you want to write, as well as you can possibly write them, about whatever the hell you want to write about. I wrote a book about Sasquatch’s dick. Robert Bevan has a whole series about poop jokes and killing horses. Rick Gualtieri, Drew Hayes, and I have ALL written very different books about nerdy vampires. Joe Brassey has a book coming out about sky pirates. These are all successful authors. These are all people writing whatever the fuck they want to write, working hard on their craft, putting out the best product they know how to produce, and putting food on the table while they do it. And I would lay a lot more money on these guy being around in five years than on any of the latest get rich quick schemers that want to write shifter porn just because it’s the hot thing right now.
So to close – Chris Fox had some good ideas, and did a great job of branding himself as an expert on selling books. So much so that his books on how to sell books outsell all of his fiction, so good job. But then a bunch of people who want to shortcut the learning of craft have taken his ideas and turned them into bullet points and now are waving flags for WRITE TO MARKET IS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE TEH MONEYZ OMG U CAN MAKE TEH MILLIONZ 2MORROW!. So read Chris’s books. There are some good ideas there. You probably do need to write faster, and you probably do need to focus your efforts on a more popular genre rather than writing that antebellum retelling of the Mahabharata set in a far-future Venutian colony.
But you don’t need to cut out your editing. You don’t need to not learn the craft. And you sure as balls don’t need to turn your dream of being a writer into another soulless day job where all you do is dissect someone else’s creativity and regurgitate it for money. That kind of assembly-line shit will get old real fast.
And if you’re looking for advice on how to sell books – make sure the person giving the advice sells more books of fiction than books on HOW TO SELL fiction. Because the folks that have walked the walk, can talk the talk.
by john | Jun 26, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest 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.
20
Nine forty-five saw us sitting in the Principal’s office with Mr. Robert Mitchell behind his desk and Ian Vernon slumped into a chair facing us. We were crammed into the little office like sardines, since the office was dominated by Mr. Mitchell’s huge oak desk. I swear, you could have just about landed a helicopter on the thing, and it made me wonder what in the world he was trying to compensate for.
Robbie Mitchell had been the biggest hell raiser in my Sunday School class for two years until his parents up and decided to switch to the ARP church and my life calmed down considerably. He never liked me much, since I didn’t let him run wild like some other folks did, and I made him recite bible verses every time he misbehaved. He had about memorized every word of Song of Solomon and Psalms before he changed churches. I reckoned if he’d stayed much longer, he probably would have gone to the seminary, and the world would have been deprived of a man with absolutely zero skill in education or administration, so naturally he went into exactly that field.
“Now Ian, you know that you can request your parents be here for this conversation,” Mr. Mitchell said, but Sheriff Dunleavy held up a hand.
“Actually, Ian, according to these records,” he held up a file that I knew contained nothing but blank sheets of paper, since I had watched him pull them out of the copy machine in the main office and stick them into the folder. “According to these records, you’re eighteen. That means you’re legally an adult, and no, you cannot ask your mommy and daddy to be here when we’re talking to you.” Willis made it a point to make “mommy and daddy” sound as ridiculous and babyish as possible, to keep the boy from asking for his parents.
“You can, however, ask for an attorney. Although, if you can’t pay for one, you’ll probably get a court-appointed lawyer from the ambulance chasers that hang out down by the emergency room,” Willis added.
I knew this was a lie, since there wasn’t an emergency room for fifty miles, and there were’t any court-appointed lawyers in Lockhart. If the boy needed an attorney, they’d have to come from Union, or probably Spartanburg. That would take several hours to round one up and get her over to the school.
“I ain’t done nothing, so I don’t need no lawyer,” Ian said, his tone sullen and his words slurred. He looked everywhere around the room except at me, and I wondered why that would be. I didn’t remember ever having any interaction with the boy, unless he maybe was with his father when he delivered my liquor once or twice. But his daddy delivered liquor to half to houses in town, so it’s not like anybody cared.
“Then you won’t mind if we ask you some questions?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked. He pulled out a small digital recorder and clicked it on.
“Nah, y’all go ahead. Ask whatever you want.” Ian stayed slumped in his chair, working very hard to maintain his disaffected appearance. It wasn’t working, at least not with me. His eyes kept sweeping the room, taking in every detail. He was paying very close attention to everything, he just wanted us to think he wasn’t. I didn’t know if that was the demeanor of a guilty person, or just a boy who doesn’t want the adults to know he’s scared.
“You understand that anything you say to the sheriff can land you in jail, don’t you, Ian?” Mr. Mitchell asked, and I shot him a look that would have burned a hole right through his chest if I had anything like that super-hot vision that Superman throws around.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ian said. “Like I said, I ain’t done nothing, so won’t be nothing.”
I wasn’t sure what that sentence mean, or even if it was really a sentence, but I ignored it and focused my attention on the boy’s feet. Sure enough, they were clad in a pair of heavy black combat boots with thick rubber soles. I couldn’t see enough of them to see if the treads looked anything like the boot print we found in my yard, but they were definitely a military style boot.
“Where were you last night?” Willis asked, setting the recorder on Mr. Mitchell’s desk.
“Home.”
“When did you get home?”
“After school.”
“Did you go anywhere between leaving school and home?”
“No.”
I could tell the brusque answers were annoying Mr. Mitchell, and they were having a similar effect on me, but Willis seemed unfazed by them. I assumed that in his time working in the big city he’d found ways to get information from recalcitrant suspects.
“What if I said I don’t believe you?” He leaned forward, dominating the skinny boy with his uniformed presence. Ian looked younger now, with the sheriff looming over him. His black jeans, black boots, and black t-shirt just made him look pale and nervous, not tall and intimidating like he certainly wanted. His spiky bright blonde hair wavered a little as he shrank back from Willis’ sudden invasion of his personal space.
“I’d say I don’t give a shit what you believe, because it’s the truth,” Ian jerked forward in the chair, almost nose to nose with the glowering sheriff.
Willis leaned back, a little smile tweaking the corner of his mouth. He got a rise out of the boy, got a full sentence out of him, which was some sort of progress. I enjoyed watching him work. He was good at this, working the push and pull of the boy’s resistance.
“Have you ever been to Ms. Carter’s home?” He asked.
Ian’s eyes went wide, then his brow furrowed as he looked at me. “Her? Why would I go over to her house?”
“I don’t know, Ian. Why don’t you tell me why you went to her house?” Willis asked. I pushed down a smile as I saw what he was doing, getting the boy to admit to going to my house, then spinning that around to him being there last night.
“I didn’t, man. I told you,” Ian insisted. “Or if I did, I went there with my old man, to drop off some liquor.” He glared at Willis, all his hatred of authority restored in a blink. “Is that what this shit is about? You trying to use me to put the old man in jail? Shit, all you gotta do for that is ask. Yeah, he makes moonshine. Sells the shit out of it, too. Sells this old biddy a case whenever she calls, sells it to just about everybody in town. Except that asshole BAR NAME? Shorty, he says Pop’s liquor ain’t good enough for his little pissant joint. Man, you want to get that old bastard on bootlegging, I’ll tell you anything you want. You want to know about them half a dozen scraggly-ass weed plants he’s got growing in the tool shed, too?” Ian leaned back, all smug viciousness at having turned coat on his father.
“We’ll come back to all that,” Willis said. I could see him mentally putting a pin in this point of the conversation. I knew from drinking with him at Gene’s that he could care less about a little moonshining, but growing marijuana might be a whole different operation in his mind.
“I want to know why you were at Ms. Carter’s place last night, poking around in her house. Why were you there, Ian?” Willis asked, his voice and eyes hard as flint.
“I wasn’t, man! I done told you, I ain’t never been there but to drop off liquor with Pops. What would I want in her house anyway? It ain’t like she’s rich or nothing.” He got a crafty look on his face. “You ain’t, are you?”
I almost laughed out loud at the clumsy boy, but managed to hold it in. “No, Ian,” I replied. “I’m not rich. I have some antiques, but most of them are too big to move easily. You’d need a truck and help to get them out of the house. That’s what makes this all the more confusing. Why would you break into my home?” I knew why, of course, I just wanted to keep him off-balance, to show him as few of my cards as possible.
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I ain’t a thief. I ain’t no kind of crook. I ain’t no pervert, neither, no matter what them two dead bitches did to my phone. That’s what this is about, ain’t it? Y’all think since I hated them snotty bitches that I killed them. Well I didn’t. I didn’t break into nobody’s house and I didn’t kill nobody. I’m a good person! I just…I just don’t know how totally to people sometimes, and sometimes people want to make out like I’m shit because my family’s shit, and that pisses me off, ‘cause I ain’t nothing like them assholes, and then I get mad, and then they say that proves they was right all along, and…and…and…shit, I don’t know. I just know I didn’t break into nobody’s house and I didn’t kill nobody.”
He leaned back with his arms across his chest and a scowl on his face that only an aggrieved teenager can manage. I looked at Willis, but he didn’t return my glance. He was studying the boy, all his attention focused on Ian’s face, the set of his jaw, how he held his shoulders, whether his hands shook. He stared intently at the teen for several long moments, then leaned back abruptly, startling us both.
“Well, Ian, I reckon we can sort this all out real fast, if you’ll agree to it,” Willis said.
Ian cocked his head to one side, his distrust of Willis, all law enforcement, and everybody who could possibly be considered an adult evident in his face. “What you got in mind, Sheriff?”
“We took a photo and a mold of the boot print that the burglar at Ms. Carter’s house wore. It was fresh, so we were able to get a very detailed impression. I’d like to compare that with your boots. If it’s not a match, and those are the only boots you own, then you obviously didn’t break into Ms. Carter’s home.” I noticed that he very carefully did not mention Jenny and Shelly’s murders. It was one thing for him to throw away a burglary conviction, but if he mentioned anything about the boots in conjunction with the murders, and the shoes didn’t match, we could have ourselves a regular O.J. Trial down here.
“Well, shit, Sheriff, why didn’t you just ask?” Ian said, leaning back in his chair and propping both feet up onto the table in front of him. My mouth fell open as I stared at the bottom of the boy’s feet. He had apparently carved all the tread from the center section of his boots, then epoxied or glued somehow letters down the center of each foot. They looked like the brightly colored letter magnets that children play with, except on his right foot it spelled out “P-I-S-S” and on the left foot is read “O-F-F.”
This was not the boot print of the person who walked through my backyard the night before. The boot print we had was normal, nondescript, and almost pristine. Ian’s shoes were anything but. He was innocent, and he was our best lead.
“Are those the only boots you own, Ian?” Willis asked. I could read the disappointment in his every motion. His eyes were downcast, looking at his papers while the boy’s grin burned a hole in the top of his head.
“Nah, I got another pair,” Ian said with a smirk. Sheriff Dunleavy’s head snapped up, then his shoulders sagged at Ian’s next words. “I carved ‘Suck It’ on the bottom of them. Those are for the days when I’m feeling real bright and sunny. They don’t get much wear.”
Ian stood up and pushed his chair back under the table. “I guess I can go now, right? I’ve got lunch this period, and I’d really hate to miss it. It’s fish stick day, and I can’t wait to see what they’re calling fish this week.” He walked out of the office and slammed the door behind him.
Mr. Mitchell looked at Sheriff Dunleavy and I, his ears a little red from embarrassment. “Well, I suppose that didn’t go quite as planned,” he said, standing. He gestured to the door, and we walked out into the main office.
Mr. Mitchell walked us to the door of the main office, then said, in a voice pitched particularly for the student office monitors to hear, “I told you that Ian wasn’t your burglar, Sheriff. You need to focus on catching real criminals instead of coming here and harassing my students. If you come back, you’d better have a warrant!”
Willis looked at him sideways for a minute, then nodded and walked out into the morning sun. I followed, and held up my palm to Jenny as she drifted over. “Not now, honey, I need to go over to the Grill and get some pancakes with enough syrup to wash the taste of teenage jerk out of my mouth.”
“I’ll drive,” Willis said. “I’m gonna need a whole lot of bacon to mask the taste of the crow I’ll have to eat the next time I need anything from Mitchell.” A disappointed sheriff, an embarrassed psychic, and a dead cheerleader headed off to breakfast. If that sounds like the beginning of a terrible joke, then you are beginning to understand how I felt. Like the beginning of a joke.
by john | Jun 20, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Writing
Sorry for the clickbaity headline, but I’d like to get some more traffic. 🙂 So yeah, really not a bit sorry.
When I talk to writers nowadays, sometimes I’ll have the conversation with people about audiobooks that goes something like this –
Writer – “Do you really make any money off audiobooks?”
John – “It’s almost 20% of my annual income, so yeah, I make some money off audio.”
Writer – “I don’t know anything about how to do it.”
John – “I have the technical skills of a tree frog and the patience of a hummingbird on meth. You think I edit any of that stuff? I hire people to do it.”
Writer – “But it’s expensive!”
John – “I usually work with my narrators on a royalty share. That way I don’t lay out anything up front. It’s not as lucrative for me in the long run, but I don’t have to pay a couple grand to get a novel narrated, and I don’t have to do it.”
Writer – “It sounds hard!”
John – “Now you’re just being lazy. I tell you that you can make a grand a month with no upfront cost, and all you have to be able to do is the equivalent of listing something for sale on eBay, and you still don’t want to do it? What the hell? You’re totally paying for lunch, just for being a buttmonkey.”
Disclaimer – I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a buttmonkey, but I will almost certainly start.
That’s a brief example of the way I feed my family – I have multiple buckets out to catch the rain. If you have one bucket out in your yard, and you need ten gallons of water, then it needs to rain for a long time for you to get all that water. But if you put twenty buckets out in the yard, then you can get ten gallons pretty quickly.
In case you missed it, the rain is money, and the buckets are revenue streams. Just in case you missed it.
It’s increasingly important to have as many revenue streams as possible, especially for someone trying to make a living as a writer. You can’t just depend on one check twice a year from a major New York publisher. That’s crazy, unless the check is ginormous!
Here are the ways I get paid –
Monthly –
Amazon – This is the biggest bucket. I have books for sale on amazon in print and ebook. This makes up about 2/3 of my income. Amazon pays monthly. That’s kinda what I budget my life around. Most of my monthly living expenses are covered through Amazon.
Other sites – While I have a lot of titles listed in Kindle Unlimited, I do still have a few things floating around out there across other sites. I use Draft2Digital as the aggregator for those sites, and they also pay monthly.
Patreon – My patrons are wonderful, and they provide about enough money each month to cover the cost of the conventions I attend. This is quite helpful, especially when I have four cons in eight weeks, like I do right now.
Audible – Audible also pays monthly, which is very helpful. Most of this money goes into a savings account for emergencies or taxes, but if there are lean ebook months, I’ll dip into this.
Autographed books – negligible, although I do hope that since I’ve redone that page on the website, that will start to be a reasonable little dribble of money.
Convention sales – let’s face it, if I break even at a convention after I’ve paid all my expenses, it’s a really good con. I’ve been very fortunate this year that sales are going better than normal, but I still mostly pour all the money back into inventory, so on a good month, it’s a wash.
Quarterly –
Other publishers – I still have a little work out there with other small presses that pay me quarterly. It’s not a lot, but about enough to buy dinner for me and Suzy, or maybe a trip to the movies.
Semi-Annually –
Bell Bridge, the folks that publish The Black Knight Chronicles, pay me twice a year. This is like clockwork, and it also mostly goes into savings for taxes, but also helps defray the costs of cons like Dragon Con, which are way more expensive than normal conventions, and I don’t sell there.
Intermittent Income –
Sometimes I’ll do a story for an anthology that has a one-time payment associated with it, or have a small royalty check from some random work I did a while back, or pick up work that has an advance tied to it. Those are pretty much gravy, and they either go towards erasing credit card debt, or go into savings for taxes.
So I have a bunch of buckets out there trying to catch the rain. Not as many as some people, but a good half dozen revenue streams working. That’s how I can afford to make a living writing, and maybe not write much of anything in June, because I can count on another strong month out of the last Harker novella, and the latest two Harker audiobooks to carry me through any lulls in productivity or sales.
The point of this is not to say “Look at how awesome I am for having a bunch of diverse ways to make money!” I mean, let’s face it, you’re here reading this – you already know I’m awesome. 🙂 It’s more to say that you need to explore all the different ways that you can monetize your work. If you are with a small press that doesn’t do audio – do it yourself. If you are self-published, and haven’t done audio – get on it! It’s a huge market, a growing market, and one that needs to be tapped.
I don’t know what the next thing will be that’s like audio, but you’d better believe that I’m looking for it. So get out there and make some more buckets!
by john | Jun 19, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest 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.
19
I woke up a little before the sun the next morning feeling almost more tired than when I went to bed. Just as I feared, good-smelling law enforcement officers dominated my dreams, and I tossed and turned all night. I stretched, listening the my spine and hips crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies, and shuffled off to the bathroom in my nightgown to take care of business.
A how shower later, I dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans and a worn Mast General Store sweatshirt that I picked up at the Goodwill in Spartanburg a couple of years back, and I meandered into the kitchen to fix up some breakfast.
“Well, it’s about time you got up, lazybones,” said the ghost sitting at my kitchen table. I stopped dead in the doorway and looked around. My kitchen could have been host of a busybody ghost convention, with Sheriff Johnny, Jenny, Helen, Frances, and Faye all crowded into one small room. It was a good thing they were incorporeal, because otherwise it would have been awful crowded in there.
“Well, ain’t you going to ask what we’re all doing here?” continued Miss Faye, who was the sharpest-tongued sweet old lady I’d ever known, alive or dead.
“I ain’t gonna do a damn thing until I’ve at least had a sip of coffee,” I said, walking over to the counter. “Move, Johnny. You know I can only kinda see through you, and you’re between me and my favorite mug.”
He got out of the way, and I poured myself a cup of coffee into my favorite World’s Best Grandma mug. I wasn’t anybody’s grandma, but it was an oversized mug and held almost two cups of coffee. I had a feeling I was going to need it with the damn United Nations of redneck ghosts floating around my house. I took a sip of the hot brown liquid, and between the shower, the coffee, and the adrenaline of being extra haunted at seven in the morning, my mind was almost clear by the time I took a seat at the table.
“Okay, folks, why are y’all here?” I asked.
“We did some looking around town last night after you went to bed,” Miss Helen said.
“I helped,” Jenny said, her face covered in a big grin.
“Yes, you did, darling. Now hush for a minute,” Helen said, patting the girl’s arm. I always found it interesting that ghosts could touch one another easily, but had to expend a lot of energy to physically interact with anything in our world. Just another one of those “mysterious ways,” I reckon.
“So we did a little digging, with Jenny’s help, and we think we know who broke in your house yesterday,” Helen said.
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Because that might be the killer.”
“That’s what we thought, too,” Miss Faye interjected.
I sat there, waiting, but no one spoke. “Well?” I asked. “Are y’all gonna tell me who it was, or should I just sit and wait for them to murder me, too?”
“You remember that freak Ian that Shelly hacked his phone? My dad told you about him,” Jenny said.
I didn’t, but it was early. I got up and went into the dining room. I got my little notebook and flipped it open to the pages where I wrote stuff down while I was talking to Mr. Miller. “Ian Vernon,” I said. “He was the school newspaper’s photographer. Shelly made it look like he sent dirty pictures to all his female classmates.”
“That’s the one,” Jenny said, her face contorted in an ugly snarl. “He used to always take pictures of us at the football games, and he made sure to get the shots when we tossed a girl up in the air, or somebody was jumping around and her skirt would flip up. We all wore trunks, but it was still kinda skeevy.”
“What makes you think he was the one who broke into my house?” I asked.
“I remembered that he always dressed like one of those freaks you see on the news that turns out to have a bomb in his locker or something, with long black coats and black boots and stuff. So I went and got Miss Frances, and she called the other women—“
“The Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency,” Miss Helen corrected.
“She got the Agency together,” Jenny said, then went on after a nod from Helen. “And we all went over to his house to look around.”
“Jenny!” I said. “That’s illegal. You can’t just go into somebody’s house without them asking you.”
“What are they gonna do?” Jenny asked. “Arrest me? I’m dead, I think I’ve got other things to worry about other than getting arrested for breaking and entering.”
“Besides, we didn’t break,” Miss Frances said. “We walked right through the walls into his bedroom. Nobody knew we were even there.”
“Except that cat,” Miss Faye said.
“Yeah, that cat didn’t like us very much,” Miss Helen agreed. “Just sat out on the hall meowing and hissing the whole time we were there.”
“Are y’all going to tell me what you found, or just sit there congratulating one another?” I asked. I’m usually far more respectful of the dead, and of my elders, and certainly of anyone happens to be both, which account for four of the five people in my kitchen. But it was early. I blame my poor manners on lack of caffeine.
“The boots match,” Miss Faye said. Her voice was typically matter-of-fact, like she was saying the sky was blue, or that grass was green. I whipped my head around to her so quick my brain had to take a second to catch up.
“The print we saw in Sheriff Dunleavy’s camera matched the boots we found in Ian’s closet perfectly,” Jenny said. “That perv is definitely the one that killed me and Shelly.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me, simultaneously proud of herself for finding the culprit and pissed off about being dead. I couldn’t blame her. I kinda felt both those emotions right then, too.
“Well, I guess the next thing to do would be to call Sheriff Dunleavy and get him to interview Ian. Maybe we can find some reason to talk to him at school,” I said.
“Isn’t me telling you reason enough?” Jenny asked, her voice rising. I noticed the coffee cup rattling on the saucer before me, and I reached out to still the shaking porcelain.
“It is for me, honey, but I don’t think your testimony is a whole lot of good in a court of law,” I pointed out. Jenny scowled at me, but had no response. One benefit to being an old woman talking to young’uns is that sometimes they just shut up when they realize they’re wrong. This does not happen nearly often enough with grownups.
I walked into the kitchen and picked up the cordless phone sitting on the antique icebox I used as a catch-all flat surface to hold the phone, phonebooks, notepads, ink pens, and bills that come in the mail until I get around to paying them. I walked over to my purse and dug out my cell phone, then shook my head and hung the cordless back up in its cradle.
“I reckon if I’ve got his number in my cell phone, I could just use that to call him, couldn’t I?” I asked the air. Or I reckon I might have been asking the passel of dead people sitting in my dining room, but they ignored me, talking amongst themselves about all the “proof” they had that Ian was our murderer.
I pulled up Willis’ number in my contacts list and pressed the button to call him, putting the phone on speaker so everyone could hear the conversation. It rang three times before he answered, and his voice was thick with sleep when he did. “Hello?”
“Willis? Sheriff?” I corrected myself, but not quite fast enough.
“Lila Grace?” he sounded like he was starting to come awake. “What time is it?”
I looked at the clock on the stove. “Six-thirty,” I replied. “I’m sorry, I should have waited to call. I didn’t even think that you might not be up yet. I just tend to get up early. I’m sorry, we can talk later. Give me a—“
“Lila Grace,” his voice cracked over the lines. I stopped talking. “I’m awake now. What do you need? Did something else happen in the night?”
It took me a minute to figure out what he was asking. Of course nothing else happened, he went home. Then I blushed a little at the direction my mind went, and I said, “No, no, nothing like that. But I think we might have caught a break in the case.”
“What do you mean?” His voice had not a single trace of sleep-fuzzy in it now. I had his complete attention.
“The ladies went over to Ian Vernon’s house last night, and they seem to think his boots match the print in my yard.”
“The ladies? Lila Grace, you can’t just go breaking into somebody’s house on a hunch. Not only is that against the law, it’s dangerous as hell. You know just about everybody around here has a shotgun. What if he’d shot you?”
“I think I’d be more worried about his daddy, than Ian,” I said. “From what I’m hearing, if Ian shoots anybody, it’s with a camera. And I didn’t go into his house. I didn’t even know what they were doing until these crazy old biddies showed up in my kitchen this morning.”
That got a glare from the assembled self-appointed detectives, and a confused grunt from the man on the other end of the phone. “Lila Grace, what in the hell are you talking about?”
“Miss Helen, Miss Frances, and Miss Faye went over to Ian’s house last night with Jenny. They walked through his bedroom walls and peeked at the bottom of his boots. Jenny says it’s a perfect match for the boot print in the mud in my back yard.”
“I say that because it is,” Jenny said. “Tell him to arrest that little panty-snatcher!”
“Jenny also says that the boy is a little bit of peeping tom, trying to catch pictures up the cheerleaders’ skirts,” I added.
“Lila Grace, every body from twelve to twenty spends half his life trying to get one glimpse of cheerleader drawers. I ain’t arresting this boy on account of him being heterosexual. But I will go talk to Mr. Mitchell and see about getting an impression of the boy’s shoes. If he wears those boots to school today, and his parents agree to it, and the school lets us, maybe we can get him to step in ink and walk on a sheet of paper for us.”
“You don’t have to talk to his parents,” Jenny said. “He turned eighteen back in the summer. He got held back in seventh grade because he got the mumps and missed too many days.” I relayed her words to the sheriff, and got a sigh of relief.
“Well, that’s one less bunch of asshats we have to deal with. I’ve already run into Ricky Vernon a time or two since I started. He’s a real piece of work,” Willis said.
“For somebody from out of town, you’r catching on to life in the Upstate real quick, Sheriff,” I said with a laugh. “You think Ricky’s something, you should have met his Granddaddy.” Ulysses Vernon died when I was a little girl, but he made one serious impression the few times I met him. He was a huge man, with a long white beard that cascaded down over his overalls, completely covering up the t-shirt he wore. I never saw him wear shoes, even when he drove his old truck up to the house a dropped off a peach crate full of white liquor to my daddy.
Daddy would put cherries in that jar of liquor and let it sit on a shelf for about three weeks while he finished off Old Ulysses’ last delivery, and about the time Daddy was out of liquor, the cherries had soaked into the moonshine and cut the taste just enough to make it drinkable. Daddy got a case of ‘shine every two months from Ulysses until he drove his truck off the side of the road and wrapped it around a tree. Ricky took up the family business after his Granddaddy died, his own daddy having got killed in Vietnam, but the younger Vernon never had the nose for making liquor like his father did. I still got a case from Ricky every now and then, but half a dozen quart jars would last me almost a year, and I stuck cinnamon sticks in mine and let them dissolve all the way down before I drank the firewater.
“I’ll meet you at the schoolhouse at nine-thirty. That oughta give me enough time to get some breakfast and get a shower. Then we can talk to young Mr. Vernon about his fascination with cheerleaders.” Sheriff Dunleavy’s voice jerked me out of my trip down memory lane, and I took a sip of coffee.
“I’ll be there, Sheriff. Let’s get this boy behind bars and find some justice for those girls.” It all sounded so simple. But my life has never been simple.
by john | Jun 16, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
Why A Spy Thriller Romance?
By Alexandra Christian
I never liked romance novels. My mother was crazy for them, though. As long as I can remember, my mother had hundreds of them piled on the nightstand that she went through like candy. Historicals, contemporaries, cowboys, ghost stories– you name it, she probably read it. Even more hilarious was that some of them were quite scandalous. Or so I thought as a young teenager. I loved the romantic parts. The love story between the main characters was always something that I sought in every book I read, but my mother’s bodice rippers were lacking the adventure that I craved from things like my beloved Stephen King and Anne Rice novels.
When I was in college, I started writing the kinds of stories that I wanted to read. While I loved horror novels and paranormal thrillers, I was missing the love story. Not sicky sweet love stories or anything, but the connection between the characters.
Remember that movie from the 80s, Romancing the Stone? Yeah, that to me is the perfect romance. Two people thrown together to defeat some dangerous foe and falling in love in the process. The hero and heroine get equal time to be badass. They work as a partnership rather than the girl always being saved by the swashbuckling guy with the codpiece. So when I got ready to write NAKED, I plotted out the adventure first and let the romance develop naturally. I want my readers to get pulled into this grand adventure with them instead of just reading from one hot steamy scene to the next. I’ve always described myself as an author who writes romance novels for people who hate romance novels.
I’m also a huge fan of James Bond and spy movies and/or books. Even the “realistic” ones like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (or any John LeCarre for that matter). Gadgets, super-technology, double-crossing, betrayal, secrets– how can you NOT love a good spy thriller? So I knew that I wanted to incorporate that world into my series. As the series goes on, you’ll learn more about Cage St. John and B.E.A.S.T., the spy organization that he works for. And at the center of it all, I promise you’ll find a smoldering love story.
BLURB:
NAKED (Phoenix Rising #1) by Alexandra Christian
Following a brutal act of vengeance, MI:6 agent Macijah St. John is left grieving for his slaughtered family and agrees to participate in a secret government experiment that gives him a magnificent and terrible power.? Now he’s a mercenary spy that solves problems for the right price.? His latest job puts him in the path of the greatest catastrophe yet—a librarian.
Phoebe Addison’s life is a disaster. Crippling debt, a non-existent social life, and being the town librarian is hardly the glamorous existence she’d always dreamed of. But when her sister Jessica, an interplanetary archeologist, gets herself involved with a psychotic billionaire bent on world domination, Phoe is about to get more excitement than she bargained for.
BUY LINKS:
Boroughs Publishing: http://boroughspublishinggroup.com/books/naked
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071CRSKV2
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/naked-alexandra-christian/1126242975?ean=2940154124833
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/naked-65
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/718364
Print: https://www.createspace.com/7094497
by john | Jun 13, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
I’m going to do something a little different on this week’s blog about selling books, and give y’all a cautionary tale (and maybe some links to more) and some tips on how to avoid getting ripped off by a crooked publisher, or some signs on how to tell that your publisher is in over their head and you might be in for some problems.
This is spawned by the current arrest and charges filed against the owner of JK Publishing in Colorado. According to this article and others I’ve seen, she is accused of defrauding authors of over $125,000 over two years. She ran a small erotica and romance press, and apparently fudged royalty reports to pocket a greater share of the money, leaving her authors screwed. She’s also accused of lying on her taxes to a degree significantly greater than just the garden-variety lying on taxes.
This gives all of us, authors and publishers, a black eye. It makes the whole business look shady. Just like when an NBA ref got caught shaving points it made all referees for all sports look bad. Anything that touches a situation like this comes away dirty. I hope there is a way that the authors can get what was rightfully theirs, but let’s face it, they’re probably screwed.
So what can you do to keep from getting screwed? After all, it’s not like there’s any licensure required to open a small press. All I had to do was file the LLC paperwork, pay the state a couple hundred bucks to incorporate, and away we went.I didn’t take a class. I didn’t get certified as anyone who was qualified to publish books. I just decided to expand my personal publishing efforts to help other people get published, and hopefully make enough to cover costs along the way.
So you can’t examine someone’s license, but you can examine the person. You can examine the contract they are offering. You can examine their website (which you didn’t want to do for the first several months that Falstaff Books existed, because it was hot garbage. Pure 100% dumpster fire. But now we have a wonderful web guru Erin, and she makes us look good.). You can examine the covers on the books they produce. You can look at their sales ranking on Amazon and see if they’re moving any books. You can read reviews of books they publish to see if they are full of typos.
You can also check places like Preditors & Editors and Absolute Write. These are peer-review sites of the most grass-roots. They’re message boards, and places for people to air grievances, but in the case of a very small press, they might not be very useful. So you need to contact a human.
Here’s a case in point. When I signed Michael G. Williams to a couple of contracts, he sent them out to be reviewed by third parties. Michael and I are friends, and have been for several years, and that has nothing to do with the fact that he was 100% right to get the contracts looked at. Darin Kennedy is one of my best friends, and we revised his contract several times before we were both happy with it. It’s not personal, it’s business.
That doesn’t mean be an asshole to your friends because you don’t like the contract, but it also doesn’t mean you should sign a bad contract just because your friend is offering it to you. Or because it’s a friend of a friend. Or whatever. Every contract is a negotiation. Both parties want different things, and the whole point of the contract is to outline everyone’s expectations and get them down on paper, so you can still be friends after you’re finished doing business. So be pleasant, but be firm.
What are some warning signs in contracts?
Well – the contract needs to be very specific about what rights it is asking for. Our contract at Falstaff is for ebook, print, and audio rights. We don’t ask for graphic novel rights, because I don’t have a way to sell them. We only ask for English language rights, but we do ask for worldwide English language rights. I can’t get stuff translated, but we can sell all over the world through the distribution channels we use. We don’t do film or TV rights, because I can’t sell them. If an author sells them, good on them. Hopefully it will sell a lot more books, and we’ll both get paid that way. Other publishers may have better ways to sell those things, so they may ask for those rights. If you don’t want to give them up, negotiate. But it needs to be clear.
When you get paid needs to be very clear. And the first time a publisher is late with a payment, you need to be concerned. We pay quarterly, but I give myself 60 days after the end of the quarter to pay. That means that I’ve paid First Quarter royalties, and we’ll pay Second Quarter royalties sometime in August. I definitely want to get those sent out before Dragon Con, so they money will likely go out mid-month instead of taking the full 60 days to pay people. That also gives me a buffer in case anything gets goofy with the mail or PayPal.
Rights reversion is a big thing, and you want a contract to define what is “out of print.” Technically, ebooks don’t ever go out of print, so you want a rights reversion clause based on sales built into the contract. We didn’t have this in the first Falstaff contract, but our newest version does. We’re learning. As more authors negotiated with us, we realized that it should just go in the contract.
But vetting a small press can be tough, A lot of it eventually is going to come down to trust. Meet people. Talk to people. I prefer to do business with people I know, because I’m old-fashioned and would rather operate on a handshake. I won’t, because I don’t live in that world, but I still like to know the people I work with. You should too. If you want to publish with someone, ask around about them. Dig a little. Somebody knows these people. And it’s entirely possible that the publisher has been great, but shit fell apart and they stole from the business to get themselves by. When that happens, you can’t predict it. But you can be vigilant about it. If you have two years of royalties at one level, then there’s a significant dip the next, ask why. If you’ve released a book that appears to be doing well, but your royalties haven’t increased, ask why.
And if your publisher doesn’t respond, that’s when it’s time to get pushy. I don’t mean respond within an hour, because people do have lives, and there are times you just don’t have reception (like most of last Sunday for me). But within a couple days, certainly. If you ask a money question, and haven’t gotten an answer in a timely fashion, there might be something wrong. People don’t like to talk about money, and they certainly don’t want to talk about bad things having to do with money, but you must keep a handle on your money, because it is your livelihood.
So get your work out there, but don’t get screwed. And it’s a lot harder to screw over somebody once you’ve looked them in the eye than it is someone that you’ve never met or even spoken with before. So meet people, Skype with people, talk to them on the phone. Humanize them, and become a human to them. It’s a strong negotiating method.
Good luck!
by john | Jun 12, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest 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.
18
The three of us descended my back steps out into the small fenced in yard. Johnny floated straight off toward the back of the yard, past my four lone tomato plants, which still produced more of the red fruit than any three people could ever eat. He walked through the laundry I hung out that morning before I started my investigation, and went straight to the back fence.
We followed, and Willis drew his pistol in his right hand and a small flashlight in his left. He didn’t do that funny cross grip like the police on TV, he just kept his gun pointed at the ground with his finger off the trigger, and aimed the flashlight at the ground in front of us.
I held up my hand when Johnny stopped and floated over one specific spot in my yard. I directed Willis’ flashlight to the spot, and it illuminated an almost perfect men’s boot print in one of the few spots devoid of grass in my yard. Maybe we had caught a break after all.
“This is good, Lila,” Willis said, pulling out his phone and wallet. He took a dollar bill from his wallet and laid it on the ground next to the footprint.
“You know Johnny’s dead, right?” I asked. “You don’t have to give him a tip.”
“The dollar is for scale,” he said. “It’s an old trick to get a photo with a size locked in when you don’t have your crime scene kit with you.” He took a few shots with his phone, with and without flash, then picked up the dollar and put it back in his wallet.
“Stay here, but don’t touch anything, including the fence right there,” he said, all cop. “I’ll be back in a minute with the good camera and my kit. Maybe we can catch another break and he left a print on the fence.”
I cast a dubious look at the split rail fence along my back yard, thinking it was going to be a cold day in hell before we got a fingerprint off the rough wooden surface, but I kept my doubts to myself. I watched the new sheriff walk around the side of my house, admiring the view as he went. The man definitely filled out a pair of blue jeans.
I turned to the former sheriff, who still stood beside me at the fence. “Thank you, Johnny. This could be just what we need to catch whoever hurt those girls.”
He nodded. He knew exactly what a clue like this could mean, of course, as long as he’d been in law enforcement. We waited by the print for Sheriff Dunleavy to return, and he came around the side of the house moments later carrying a bit toolbox in one hand with a camera bag slung across the opposite shoulder.
He set the toolbox on the ground, and the camera bag beside it. First, he opened the toolbox and pulled out a small LED light on a stand, which he aimed at the print. Next, he pulled a big, professional-looking camera out and started snapping pictures of the footprint and the surrounding area. He pulled a ruler out of the toolbox and laid it on the ground next to the print, getting a more precise measurement than his dollar bill trick. Next he pulled out two jars and a small Dixie paper cup, poured something from each jar into the Dixie cup and stirred it with a tongue depressor, then poured a white mixture into the print.
“What is that, some kind of plater?” I asked.
“Kinda,” he said, not looking up from his pouring. “It makes a malleable rubber cast of the print, and will also pick up any loose dirt from the impression, along with any trace evidence that was left behind from our visitor’s shoe.” When the footprint was filled with a thin layer of the white substance, he stood up and pulled out his flashlight again.
“While that dries, I’ll see if there is any other evidence our friend left for us to find,” he said, all business now that he was back on the job.
“Can I do anything to help?” I asked.
“You can hold the light while I take pictures,” he said, passing me the big Maglite. I took it, and he put the camera around his neck. I followed as he walked toward the fence, careful not to take the most direct line to the print from the low point of the fence, but to walk beside the natural path. I pointed the light where he told me, and he snapped photos as we walked.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. “But in the low light it’s easy to miss something. I’ll put the pictures on the big monitor when I get back to the office, and if there’s something that will point us in the direction of a suspect, I’ll find it.”
“You’re going back to the office tonight?” I asked. I felt a little disappointed at that. It’s not like I was planning on him staying over at my house, not at all. I just thought we were nice and relaxed, maybe our evening didn’t need to end quite so soon.
“Yeah, as soon as that cast dries. I’ll scan the boot print and run it through a database of manufacturers. We don’t have everything catalogued, but if it’s a boot by a major shoe company in the US, I bet we’ll have it.”
“You have a computer program with every shoe print made in the United States?” I felt a little like Big Brother was watching, and he had a foot fetish.
“Distributed in the US,” he corrected. “Most shoes sold in America aren’t made here. But yeah, the FBI created a shoe print database a few years ago, and local law enforcement can access it. It’s not free, but there’s grant money available. Besides, I didn’t spend all our budget on that tank the National Guard wanted me to take off their hands, so we can afford to look up a couple of footprints.”
“I will never understand how law enforcement works,” I said.
“Be glad of that, Lila Grace. Aim that flashlight over here.” He pointed at the fence, then frowned. “Yeah, I can’t pull any prints off that. The surface is way too rough and uneven. Our guy probably wore gloves climbing over it, anyway. Wouldn’t make sense to carry gloves through your back yard just to put them on at the door.”
He crouched by the fence, going over every inch of it closely. I got down on one knee beside him, feeling the dew soak through the knee of my pants. My crouching days were over long ago, arthritis in my knees making it painful and a little middle-aged spread across the hips making my balance treacherous. The last thing I needed was to sprawl on my behind in the middle of a crime scene.
“Do you see anything?” I asked, keeping my voice low. I don’t know why I felt the need to whisper, my lot was sizable and unless someone felt the need to be standing on the other side of the fence, they couldn’t hear me if I spoke in my full voice. I guess it was the suspense of it all.
He turned to me, and as he did I caught a whiff of the smell of him. Laundry detergent, spicy aftershave, Jim Beam and just a hint of sweat blended together to make me swoon just a little. It had been a long time since I swooned, and I was out of practice, but I remembered what it felt like. I liked it. I was also very glad I wasn’t trying to maintain my balance, because I would certainly have plopped down on my butt in the wet grass, a mood-killer if there ever was one.
“No, there’s nothing here,” he said, his voice low like mine.
I didn’t feel like I needed to argue with him right then, but he was wrong. There was very definitely something there. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was very interested in finding out.
He stood up, and I followed suit. He packed up his tool kit and held out his hand. I stared at it, not knowing exactly what he wanted, then put my own hand in his. It felt good, the rough calluses of his palm against my own far-from-smooth hands. I work in my little garden too much to have very girly hands.
“While that’s nice, Lila Grace, and I’m certainly not complaining about holding your hand, I need my flashlight back.”
I was very glad it was too dark for him to see me blush. I let go of his hand and passed him the light, then turned and walked back into the house. We got to the living room and I turned to the couch. “Are you…gonna stay a little while?” I felt tentative now, like we needed to figure out how to start all over again. He shuffled his feet, like a schoolboy trying to figure out whether to kiss the girl on the playground, pull her pigtails, or both.
“I better go ahead to the office and get these photos logged. Can’t mess up the chain of evidence, you know.”
I did. I knew he had an excuse to leave, so he would. Damn you, Sheriff Johnny, for finding clues! “I reckon I’ll talk to you in the morning,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Come on by the station around ten or eleven. I might have heard something about the shoe prints by then. We can figure out anything else we need to do then.”
I stepped in to him, pressed my lips briefly to his, and then slipped back. His hands were full, and he was making his escape, so there wasn’t going to be any kind of real goodnight kiss. “Good night, Sheriff.”
“Good night, Lila Grace,” he replied. “I’ll call Jeff. He’s on patrol tonight. I’ll get him to make sure he gives your place a drive by every couple of hours to keep an eye on the place. If you need anything, you can call me direct. I’ll be over here in a heartbeat.”
I didn’t bother exploring all the things I might call him in need of, not right at that moment, I just smiled and said “Thank you.”
We did that awkward dance of good nights and see you laters that people do when they aren’t real sure where they stand with one another, then he was gone. I heard the trunk of his car close, then the big engine roared to life and disappeared down the street toward the police station.
I sat down on the couch, leaned my head back against my grandmother’s throw pillows lined up across the back of the sofa, and let out of frustrated sigh. “Sweet Jesus, Lila Grace, why didn’t you just jump the man? You are nothing but a horny old woman, there is no way that fine piece of man is going to be interested in you.” I said to the empty room.
As happens so often in my completely bizarre and slightly dysfunctional life, the empty room spoke back to me. This time in the voice of a dead teenager. “I don’t know about that, Lila Grace, he seemed pretty damn interested to me.”
“What would you know, child?” I asked. “You died a virgin.” I clapped my hand over my mouth the second the words escaped, and looked at Jenny, my eyes big as saucers. “Oh shit honey, I am so sorry.”
The ghost child in my armchair gawked at me for a second, then laughed, throwing her head back and letting out a peal of pure joy and amusement. “Oh, good lord, Lila Grace, that’s the funniest damn thing I’ve heard since I died!” She had another long laugh at my expense, then looked me in the eye. “First off, I was a cheerleader. Understanding what men want, both in high school and after, was kinda my thing. Second, I did not die a virgin, and thank to me, neither will Alexander Zane.”
“Alex Zane?” I asked. “Isn’t he a sophomore at the University of South Carolina?”
“He is,” Jenny confirmed. “But he wasn’t two summers ago when he gave me a sob story about not wanting to go off to college a virgin when all his friends had lost their v-cards in high school. So we did it in the back of his daddy’s old Suburban. He got pretty good at it before he went away to school, too.” She gave a little smile at the memory.
“Do you think he could have…” I didn’t quite ask the question, but I made it real clear what the question was.
Jenn thought for a few seconds, then shook her head. “Nah, we split up on good terms. Even got together a few times last summer when he was home. But we were never anything serious, and when he got a girlfriend this year, he called to tell me he couldn’t see me over Christmas break. I think he expected me to be a lot more upset about than I was. Which is to say, I wasn’t upset at all. He was a nice guy, but I knew we were never going to be anything more than friends with benefits.”
“Was there anybody else that might not have been so happy about breaking up with you as Alex?” I asked.
She looked a little offended, but she was the one that brought it up. “Well, I wasn’t a slut, if that’s what you’re saying. I only ever slept with three boys. There was Alex, and Keith, my boyfriend right up until the end.”
“That’s two,” I prodded.
“The other one was this boy I met at the beach last summer. I…kinda don’t remember his name.” This was a night full of firsts for me. I’d had my house broken into, made out with an officer of the law, and now I had a blushing ghost in my living room.
“That’s okay, honey. We all have our wild oats to sow,” I said.
“Did you?” She asked.
“Baby girl, I sowed entire fields when I was in college. But that was a long time ago. Now I’m going to go to bed and try real hard not to dream about sheriffs that smell good enough to slather in syrup and eat up like a stack of flapjacks.”
