It's Time to Burn the House Down

Now that my first two short stories, "Once Was Lost..." and "Nothing There" are finished and available for sale, I'm returning to a project that I wrote about a while back.  It was actually going to be the project right after "Once Was Lost..." but, well, stuff happens.

I've just finished the outline for "Burned."  I originally intended for this to be another short story, but after outlining the story, it struck me as being potentially longer than the previous two shorts.  Much longer.  I could see a lot more going on, a lot more that needed to be in the story to tell it properly.

So, I started thinking this might be novella length, twenty to forty thousand words.  I'm now waffling on that length as well.  As I think about the characters, the plot, setting, this may turn out to be far longer than I'd originally intended.  I'll let the story be the guide and see where it takes me.  If you have input as you follow along, I'd be glad to hear it as well.

Here is the outline as first written.  It may get added to and if it does, I'll put that up here as well:

1. The Fire
"A fire burns a home in the Park Hill neighborhood.  As the firefighters put the fire out, they discover a man in the home who has second and third degree burns all over his body.  He is alive, but in critical condition."

2.  The Investigators
"The fire department’s arson investigator discovers that the fire was started by dumping gasoline on the man, lighting him on fire, and then trying to set the house on fire to cover it up.  They call in police detectives to investigate an attempted murder."

3.  The Dog Walker
"The detectives first approach the man who called 911.  They wonder what he was doing out at 1:00 in the morning walking his dog.  He has insomnia and often walks his dog and acts as the unofficial neighborhood watch.  He is ultimately on record as having called the police a number of times about suspicious activities in the neighborhood.  It’s him that tips off the police to some of the anger in the neighborhood directed towards this man due to the way he has treated the neighborhood’s children.  He directs them to the first parent who had a problem with the man."

4.  The Lawn Mowing Business
"An older teenager (17) ran a lawn mowing business.  The burned man approached him about mowing his lawn that summer.  The boy told him he charged $25/week.  The burned man said he would pay him $5 and the boy refused the job.  Later that summer when the burned man was out of town on business, his wife, who was supposed to mow the lawn, hired the boy to do the job before her husband got back to town.  She said she’d pay him the $25.  He told her he would get to it in the afternoon, behind some other jobs and she agreed.  The burned man came home, found a note about the lawn being mowed by the boy, but the lawn hadn’t been mowed yet.  He called and left a message on the answering machine for the boy, but his mother got it.  She went down the street and screamed and yelled at him for what he’d said.  She told the detectives that this wasn’t the only threatening behavior that had been witnessed.  She sent them to the Scout’s parents."

5.  The Angry Mother
"On a tip from the dog walker, the detectives approach the angry mother.  Her twin teenage sons (14 at the time) had worked for the burned man a couple of years ago as part of a business that he was setting up.  They worked hard for months, under the promise of being paid when the business got going, but they finally quit, the business was successful, and they never got paid.  She had confronted him loudly in the neighborhood market about his ripping her sons off.  She claims not to have had any contact with him since then (which the detectives find out is not true) and she tips them off to a mother and father who are angry about the way they treated their young child and a friend over shoveling snow at the burned man’s house."

6.  The Snow Shoveler's Parents
"The detectives meet with some parents whose child shoveled snow for the neighbors during the winter- including the burned man.  Last winter, during a big snowstorm, their daughter and a friend where shoveling sidewalks, walkways and porches for $5.  The burned man had hired them, but when they finished, he told them there was more.  He wanted them to shovel his driveway (connected to the garage from the alley) as well as his back walkway, and his patio.  When they told him it would be another $5, he told them they wouldn’t get paid the original $5 unless they did it all.  They left and were later paid a $1 coin when the burned man ran into them and their parents together.  These parents then told them about the lawn mowing incident."

7.  The Scout's Parents
"Two young scouts had been selling fundraiser tickets throughout the neighborhood, when they came to the burned man’s house.  One of the scouts had worked for him previously and not gotten paid, even after he asked repeatedly.  He had told his father, and his father had had a heart to heart talk with the burned man just a week previous to the fundraising visit.  When the burned man opened the door, he saw the one scout who’d worked for him and pulled him inside by the arm and shut the door.  He then yelled at for him for telling his father on him.  But, said the scout’s parents, you might want to talk to the man who stopped the burned man from beating his own daughter."

8.  The Good Samaritan
"He’d been walking through the neighborhood one summer day after visiting a member of his church who was elderly.  As he walked back to his house, he heard some yelling and it got louder as he approached the burned man’s house.  The burned man was standing in his front yard, yelling at his own daughter, calling her a whore, threatening to give her a whooping or throw her out of the house.  The good samaritan stopped, took the burned man by the arm and proceeded to quietly chew him out for treating his own daughter that way."

9.  Questions
"Something in the stories didn’t add up.  The detectives had a neighborhood full of angry parents, yet the man had his supporters too.  Several neighbors told them that the burned man was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.  Other people were just jealous of his success."

10.  Motives
"There were a lot of parents who had the motive to burn the man.  Everyone seemed to be blaming everyone else, pointing the police to the next person with motive.  And yet, the police couldn’t seem to pin anything down.  Was there anyone angrier than the others?  As they looked over everything, something keeps pointing them back to the mother of the boy with the lawn mowing business.  And, there was the gasoline can."

11.  Arrest
"The detectives decide to arrest the lawn mower’s mother and take her to the station to be questioned further, even though the evidence was very circumstantial.  They go to the house to find the mother home and proceed to arrest her.  She breaks down crying, sobbing, bawling.  She’d never been in trouble before."

12.  Answers
"As they are arresting her and trying to calm her down before taking her out, her 17 year old son gets involved, trying to defend his mother, fighting to keep the detectives from arresting her.  As they take her to the car, he screams that it wasn’t her.  That it was him.  He did it."

13.  Confession
"He had carried out the actual attack on the burned man- getting into the house, with the key the man’s daughter had given him.  When asked why he did it, he said that the kids in the neighborhood were tired of this man ripping them all off.  They had all been burned by him, so they decided to burn him."

This is the preliminary outline, so it may change a bit as the story begins to flow.  I've already had a few thoughts about how I might alter the some of the storyline, but basically, it still follows this general outline.  Keep checking back.  As I write the rough draft, you'll get to read it first.

Why Ebooks Will Win

Let me start by defining the word "win" as I'm using it in the title of this post. There is a saying in politics: "To win, you need 50% + 1."

Ebooks are going to win, NOT because they are the visual, tactile, or sentimental choice. Like many readers, I love physical books for more than just the experience of reading the words on the page. I love the heft of a hardcover volume, the design of the jacket, the feel of a book between my hands. I love the crack of the spine as you open it, the wafting smell of paper, printer's ink, and binder's glue. I love the feel of the edges of the paper flexing beneath my thumb as I leaf through a book, the feel of a single page between my finger and thumb as I turn a page. I love holding a book in my hands as I'm reading in a bookstore, on a train, in line at the movie theater, declaring to the world that I'm reading a book and proudly displaying the title and author.

Ebooks have none of those advantages. But, ebooks will win. They will eventually reach 50% + 1. Why? It's ease of use and cost effectiveness.

To buy an ebook I don't need to get dressed and drive to a bookstore. I don't have to pick up a phone and talk to someone. I don't even have to turn on my computer and type in a web address. I can browse, choose and purchase right from many devices that be used to read an ebook.

An ebook costs much less than its hardcover equivalent and in a number of cases, less than the paperback as well.

I can carry around multiple books (don't you hate it when you finish reading one book and didn't bring another with you).

As humans we follow our instincts by looking for things that make our lives easier and cost less, in terms of time, money and effort). That doesn't mean that we necessarily prefer something the less costly solution.  It's why people shop at Walmart again and again. Their customer service is terrible, their stores are huge and often messy, but you can find most anything you use on a daily basis under one roof for a cheap price. We sacrifice experience for ease and cost.

That's why I wrote what I did in my earlier blog post, "The Irony of It All."

Now I'm not saying that physical books or bookstores will completely disappear within my lifetime. Myself and others like me will still continue to buy physical books because we love them for all the reasons I previously stated.  But, I'll buy ebooks too.

And ebooks will win. They will reach 50% + 1 of sales, simply because human beings follow their instincts.

Celebrating Groundhog Day With A Story

It's Groundhog Day, one of the High Holidays (along with Halloween and National Cheesecake Day) and to celebrate I'm giving away copies of "Nothing There," my brand new short story for ONE day only, February 2, 2012.

"Nothing There" is currently available for the Amazon Kindle and free Kindle apps for computers and mobile devices.

Click here to go to Amazon and download a copy of "Nothing There."

Enjoy!  Punxsutawney Phil and I will be kicking back and enjoying the day.

Read a Little From "Nothing There"

Here are the first few paragraphs of my new short story, "Nothing There."

"When I was thirteen our family moved into a house I knew was inhabited by ghosts.  I’m reluctant to call it haunted, as the word implies a level of malevolence which didn’t exist, as the wraiths that roamed the halls never intentionally did anything to hurt us.  It was home for them, just as it was for us.

Regardless, as an adolescent boy with a wild imagination, they scared the shit out of me.

       I don’t know why they were there.  Ours wasn’t a solitary, ramshackle house on a country lane casting an evil silhouette against the orange and reds of a late evening sky.  Nor was it an isolated place high in the mountains where a psychotic father had attempted to murder his entire family during a late winter snowstorm.  As far as I knew, it hadn’t been built over an ancient burial ground either.  It was a normal house, in an average suburban neighborhood, in a typical American city.  It was new and still smelled of carpet, fresh lumber and paint.

Since I could remember, we’d lived in the same small house, the first my parents ever bought.  It was in a neighborhood filled with other small houses packed so tightly together that if you were in the bathroom yelling for someone to bring a roll of toilet paper, your next door neighbor might bring it.  The home had been perfect for a family of four- myself, my sister and parents- but as three younger brothers came along, it got crowded.

The boys were paired up, two to a room.  Our sister, the only girl in the family, got a room to herself. 

Saying my brother Jeff and I shared the room might have caused Noah Webster to redefine the word.  We fought incessantly.  We fought over whose bed was closest to the door.  Which dresser drawers we got to use.  Whether the window blinds were open or closed.  About whose side of the room was worse when Mom yelled at us for living in a pigsty.  We fought until our parents couldn’t take it anymore.

They decided to buy a house in a new subdivision not far from where we were living and we spent what seemed like a month of our valuable summer vacation packing everything up, moving and unpacking.

In the new house, we each got our own rooms.  Mine was in the basement.  One wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves.  Since I read everything I could get my hands on, I was excited to have a place of my own to display my small but growing library.

The best, and as it turned out, the worst thing about my room was the door that led to the garage.  It was the one and only entrance to the garage from inside the house.  The garage had a garage door, of course, but it also had a door that led to the backyard.  The day I moved into that bedroom I began making plans to sneak out in the night.

Things were going well in this new place.  I had my own room.  My brothers each had rooms upstairs near my parents.  My sister’s room was downstairs, next to mine.  Once the moving was done, the furniture arranged and boxes unpacked, Mom and Dad were more relaxed without all the constant fighting.

But then, I began to notice the ghosts."

If you're interested in what happens to this young man, in this house occupied by ghosts, you can find the rest of the story on Amazon for the Kindle.  Don't have a Kindle?  You can download a FREE Kindle app to your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad or Android.


Enjoy!

Is There Really "Nothing There?"

My new short story, "Nothing There," is finished and has been uploaded to the Amazon Kindle store (it's currently not on the Nook, or elsewhere- I explain that decision here).

The story evolved from an idea which was swirling around in my head for awhile, but gained some traction as I read a couple of books by Neil Gaiman- "M is for Magic" and "American Gods."  Stories all come from experience, whether from our lives or from what we read.  When I write, I mesh and meld, take from everything.

In "Nothing There" I took partly from my own experiences of growing up in the home I describe in the story (that home is pictured on the cover).  I really did live in a basement bedroom that had a door that led to the garage.  At times, the noises the door made freaked me out.  Made me wonder who or what was on the other side of the door.  There was even a point in my life when I didn't like to be alone in the house.  Once, a Halloween prop sitting in a chair at the table, nearly made me wet my pants when I came around the corner and saw it there when no one was supposed to be home.

The supernatural aspects of the story, the idea of whether or not there are ghosts, or trolls or gods, began to mix with the ideas of living in that house as I read the books by Neil Gaiman.

Ultimately, by combining these ideas, I came up with the story in "Nothing There."  It lays out the questions of what we see and what we don't.  Are there beings in another plane of existence that touch our own?  Or, do our imaginations take hold of a noise, a thought, and plant the seed of an ethereal plane surrounding us?

In "Nothing There" I let you be the judge.