Six Sentences More on the Ill-Fated Wedding

THANK YOU to those of you who enjoyed my clippings the previous two weeks. Your comments are tremendously flattering, and it's nice to know I'm reaching readers, which is my greatest hope. I do my very best to comment on all of your wonderful sentences, too. I hope you'll enjoy this snippet, which comes right after last week's. Here I'm trying to achieve a balance between specificity and speed...

* * *

Ruy Blásquez took Lambra's shaking hands in his and looked into her wild eyes. She wrenched her hands away from him and shouted, pointing at Gonzalo, "Do something! Are you my husband by these nuptials or not?"

Doña Sancha shouted, "Brother! He's your nephew!"

While Gonzalo was looking at his mother, Ruy Blásquez struck him across the face with the sharp end of the lance. He fell onto his seat and blood streamed from a single streak that started on his cheek and went diagonally up the bridge of his nose to the opposite eyebrow.

* * *

More from The Seven Noble Knights of Lara next Sunday, but only if the comments demand it. I've been distracted from it lately, so I'm starting to run out of story!

Check out the other participants here! And have fun!

If you like my writing, and you like stories about women, please consider checking out my new short story collection Threads Woven. Thanks!

Sweet Saturday Samples First Week!

What better way to end the month than with two -- count 'em, two! -- days of excerpts. Today is the first time around for Sweet Saturday Samples, a concept I truly appreciate. See the other non-violent, non-sexual excerpts here. As I wind down my promotions for Sail To Italy and Sail From Italy, I can think of no sweeter book ever written. :)

This silly scene is from the beginning of the first book, when Princess Noreena needs Pirate Pierre to find the fugitive Giovanni Redicci.

Pierre had come with an offer. “I know where your Giovanni Redicci is. I can get him for you, but it’s going to cost you dearly.”

“How much?” was all Noreena said, though she was taken aback. It was all she could do to keep herself from jumping up and down.

“How much are you willing to pay?” he asked.

“How much are you asking?” she insisted. Though she was willing to hock her new silverware, she was a bargainer at heart.

“Sixty five. French francs, please.”

“Oh? I suppose that means I have to go to France, then.”

“Correct.”

“And that will cost me a fortune in itself.”

“Correct.”

“Monsieur Pierre, I’m afraid you’ll have to take down your offer. I do not have adequate funds at the present.” Noreena was annoyed.

Does he think I’ve got French money growing on my courtyard trees?she thought.

Pierre was silent a moment, then said, “I’ll make another offer, but you may turn this down, too. If you sail to Ireland with me, I will detour to France where you can get fifty five, and I will then get this Redicci for you, then you give me the money and do whatever you wish with him.”

“Fifty five, hmm?”

“I won’t go any lower, so accept or find someone else who can find him. Your search parties weren’t doing so well, and only I know where he is. Weigh all this carefully, your highness.”

“Oh, but I do know where he is. You told me yourself just now. He’s in Ireland.”

“Drat!”

See this and other excerpts here. I'll keep future excerpts shorter.

In Kindle, Nook, or paperback, this saga is not expensive, long, or serious. Enjoy!

New Release: Threads Woven (Stories)

Now available by popular demand! Readers have been asking for a collection of my short stories, and I've responded by coming out with Threads Woven, a collection that includes only my most woman-centered tales. This is not because I don't think men are worth writing about or that men shouldn't read my writing. It just seemed like the most solid theme upon which to base a collection.

Included stories (click on live links to read the whole story -- the best preview ever!):

1. "Threads Woven" (never previously published). In this charming longer story, Miriam seeks artistic inspiration in a writing class. Feeling ever more alone, with her husband busy in a career and with a beautiful new running partner, her daughter unavailable and her classmates thirty years younger than she is, Miriam finds communion and inspiration in another drifting soul, in Chinese food, and in an old quilt.

2. "Justine"

3. "Job Fair"

4. "Calcium-Rich"

5. "Slippers"

6. "Club Love"(not previously published). Meredith works at a club where she must cater to her male clients' every whim, so her best friend thinks it's a good idea to take her to a club where the roles are reversed. It seems like a very good idea, for a while...

7. "Green Hot" (never published before). Sheila knows she deserves the promotion that her coworker gets. Her strong conviction literally burns her up from the inside out.

The cover is very blue. It was my husband's favorite of the ones I could get artwork rights for. We both really loved one painting, but I've had trouble contacting the artist. I'll show you the other possibilities and maybe ask you to vote on them in Monday's post!

Here's the buy link to get a free sample of the title story. Also available in Nook! For now, these stories are only in e-book, but one day a paperback will exist that somehow combines all the amazing stories I want to share with my readers.

Treasure Quest: Discovery Lies Between The Covers: Mega Author Blog Hop Tour WINNERS

The winners have been chosen!

Grand Prize Winner of a signed paperback: Barbara (Babs) Hightower

First Prize Winners of digital copies: Avid book reviewer Saph of saphsbookblog and voracious reader Robin D

Congratulations! Enjoy your copies of Sail To Italy and Sail From Italy!

These are my two favorites out of all the wonderful suggestions I got for the coming year of my blog. (Thanks for the compliments! They make me feel like I have some idea what I'm doing!)

1. "I want to continue following your writing adventures!" Kay Springsteen. iluvkimi220 and Krystal Larson expressed similar (flattering!) desires.

2. "It's cool to put up stuff you like... what makes you you... whether it's hot guys or chocolate fantasy painting" Nikki. Robin D made a similar comment. Sorry to say, my interests outside of writing aren't that inherently exciting! But we'll see what we can do.

I'll address all the ideas I received either in an individual post in the coming weeks, or as a general modus operandi in the coming year. Thanks for the suggestions. I'm so glad I asked!

Happy blogoversary to me....

Six Sentence Sunday: Death at the Wedding and Its Consequences

These six come directly after the six from last week. Doña Lambra's about to hold forth at her nephew Gonzalo:

*  *  *

Through her tears, she exclaimed, “He was my cousin. He won the prize. Never before has a bride been so dishonored at her own wedding! Ruy Blásquez will repay this betrayal!”

Doña Sancha let go of Gonzalo’s arm to wipe at the tears coming down her own cheeks and plead with Lambra. “Oh, dear sister-in-law, he didn’t mean to do it.”

*  *  *

Thanks so much for stopping by and for whatever insight you wish to share here. I really appreciated the encouragement last week! What an amazing boost that was! The other six sentences for this amazing Sunday jaunt are here.

You Know You Want To

He's really upset about leaving the cabinet because he was in the middle of a great book: Tree/House! 

Go ahead, read it. Some strange urge deep within your psyche is telling you... you know you want to.

You are feeling sleepy, very sleepy...
Wake up with a good read! Really inexpensive, too.


Photos from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

Expectations in Flash Fiction

I've been shopping around a piece that is dear to my heart because it's an ode to my marriage, both its misfortunes and its strength. At less than one thousand words, it's officially considered a flash fiction piece. I want so much to share it with the world! I think it's a funny little glimmer of joy in a sad world. But it seems not enough people "get" it. It's admittedly pretty unusual to want to celebrate marriage and love in an exaggerated, absurdist style, but if I'm not striving to write things no one's written before, am I not wasting everyone's time? (It's not a rhetorical question. Feel free to weigh in.)

I sent it for consideration for publication to Everyday Fiction, and wonderfully, helpfully, and unusually, they included the evaluations with the rejection letter. There were no less than four different reviewers (showing the quality of the venue!) Two readers seemed to really get it, which was heartening. A third called it "unique" (hooray!) but seemed overwhelmed by the tightly-woven sequence of action -- s/he used the word "packed," which I would have thought meant the reader gets a lot for their money/time investment. I always think flash fiction is short enough that the reader can look it over many times instead of just the once, so it's okay to really jam it full because they'll pick up on more details the second and third time, but I respect a differing opinion.

The fourth reviewer, in my humble opinion, was completely misguided. I think I made the exaggerated, absurdist style apparent in the first sentence: "It rained so hard, the wicker baskets were overflowing." How much would it have to rain to fill a wicker basket, much less to make it overflow? Pretty exaggerated and expressed in an absurd manner. Yet the reviewer seemed to think I was trying to be true-to-life when I talked about 200-mile-per-hour winds in Nebraska. Sorry, I was trying to exaggerate, which is not easy when you're talking about wind in Nebraska. So that was utterly puzzling, but perhaps his attitude can be explained by another comment, in which he worried about a flash flood coming through the ceiling. That's not what happens in the story, so I can only assume he wasn't paying attention. Totally misapprehended the entire plot at a basic level because he was expecting something else. It grieves my heart when that happens, but there's nothing to be done about it.

The other major flaw in his critique seems to be widespread among critiquers, so I'd like to take this opportunity to explain why I think it doesn't work for flash fiction. He wanted more of a "basis/description of the actual love between them." I just don't see how I could ever do that with the word count limitations of flash fiction. If I were to start really getting into what holds this couple together, it would become a novel, and I already have too many big projects on my plate. For me, flash fiction is all about small details to suggest a whole, so it relies on the reader to activate his/her imagination. If anyone can clue me in on how to achieve a balance between suggestion and explanation within one thousand words, please do so.

I've come up with this mental framework for flash fiction after years of reading the best of it and years of crafting some of my own, so it's not like I'm whinging like a baby over my first attempt here. And I want to express my sincere gratitude to Everyday Fiction for providing the readers' comments. It's the most basically useful thing a writer can see, yet we hardly ever get to see it.

In the end, the story is a love letter I wrote for my husband as we were packing up to move to Arizona with most of our belongings in storage, to show him we could make it though anything. I may not ever find a magazine that's willing to celebrate perfect love between imperfect humans in a vastly imperfect world. But I'll keep looking.