"I Tell You Things, You Tell Me Things...

 ...Quid pro quo, yes or no?"

If you didn't recognize that quote, then you need to watch it again.  Little Starling, fly, fly, fly.

I write A LOT of stories.  So many that I often forget that I wrote them, stumbling upon them later and thinking, "Is that one of mine?  Is that one I finished?  Is that one any good?"

So, today I'm mentioning a story I wrote called "Quid Pro Quo," and the answers are Yes, Yes, and No.

But you know what is pretty good?  The cover Big made for me.  I mean, he may speak Portuguese instead of Spanish, he may not like Tina Turner or food on Wednesdays, and he may occasionally worship Belial, Nephew Of Beelzebub, but the man definitely has a knack for cover design.    

It would NOT create "a man and a goblin shaking hands, standing in a doorway,"
so I had to generate the two images separately.

Last week, I sent him an image of a goblin and an image of a man, and told him to combine them, so it looked like they were shaking hands.  I gave him this mockup (which I recognize is pretty shaky, but it wasn't meant to be seen, not even on this blog):

The rough mockup.

And this was the finished product:

Big's finished, combined version.  They ALMOST look like they're together and touching.

Then, I was pot-committed, as they say in Cricket circles.  

I'll be honest, I would not have published this story AT ALL if Big's cover hadn't been so solid.  He just keeps doing it, too, and that's an enabler of the finest/worst kind.

Speaking of the worst kind, "Quid Pro Quo" is a short story about a man, Alex, who gets a knock on his door by a little man who turns out to be a goblin.  The goblin has a proposal, if Alex will do him some mischief.  

And that is all.  The story can be found HERE.  I recorded it the other night, and tried to "make up" a foreign accent for the goblin to speak in, and ended up sounding like Martin Short's character in FATHER OF THE BRIDE.  On behalf of goblins everywhere, I heartily apologize.

*Write?  Yes.  Finish?  No.

Rish Outcast 277: Under the Covers

Rish and Big Anklevich get together to talk about the cover art they created for Rish's stories, mostly in 2023. Apparently, some of Rish's past covers were so bad, that even he couldn't let them stand.

Note: There is an accompanying blog post at my blog, with all of the images discussed. Check it out HERE or here: https://rishoutfield.blogspot.com/2024/03/under-covers-image.html

Download the file directly by Right-Clicking HERE.

Support me on Patreon HERE!

Support Big on Patreon HERE!

Support your local gunfighter HERE!

Logo by Gino "Undercover Brother" Moretto.

"Rest Stop" One Exit Back

I first started publishing on Amazon in 2013, and did quite a bit of it early on*, but then slowed way down.  These things are habit-forming (just ask Big Anklevich, who in 2024, has put out fifty or more stories and collections on the site, and thrice as many covers.

But I got into this habit of putting an Afterward in my stories, explaining where they came from, that I eventually started calling "A Word About The Story."  I would often record an audio version of the story, write the Afterward, then publish it, long before I started editing the audio (many of the stories just sat for years, unedited, and sit there still).

But a few of the earliest ones didn't have Afterwards, and as Big has been helping me switch out my old (and sometimes "old") covers for new ones, that all have the same font and shape of byline, I've been adding a few words at the end of them, when I can.

Enter "Rest Stop," one of my darker little tales about a man whose dog is called by something into the snowy woods and he goes after it.  I revisited the duo in a story last year, and am eager to share it with you (not eager enough to edit or publish it, mind you, but eager nonetheless).  

This was the cover it had had for the last couple of years (which isn't at all bad, even if it has the font that Big soon grew to despise):

You know, it gets the job done.

But I found another image on Unsplash that expressed the same thing**, and is the correct shape, so why not upgrade, right?

I'll try to get to the continuation of Jordan and Geronimo's story sometime this spring or summer.  In the meantime, here it is with a new cover, and a new Afterward.  Or rather, HERE it is.  Thanks.

Same feel . . . just better-looking.

This feels good, so I'm going to keep doing it.

*I also published on Smashwords, which was a bit more open than Amazon, allowing me to make some stories available for free, then distributing them all over the web.  But they required a weird formatting with no tabs and a word-for-word disclaimer that I eventually stopped doing . . . but if you think I should start with them again, I've got eight or ten stories I'd put up there and not on Amazon.

**What I WANTED was a snow-covered sign, where you couldn't read what it said . . . and I found one on Unsplash just the other day that was exactly what I needed.  It must not have been uploaded last year when I went looking for new art.  Should I swap it out . . . or just move on with my life?

Fem-Pro Available On Amazon

In 2021, in this very library, I wrote an introduction to a short story collection featuring girls and women, to be titled "Female Protagonist."  And then it sat.  And sat.  

And sat.

Is this image offensive?  While I sort of hope so, it wasn't meant to be.

But here we are, in the middle of Big's mid-life crisis, and his enthusiasm for publishing and cover art has infected me, to the point where I actually sat down again and finished putting "Female Protagonist" together.

And it was way too long.  I included the stories from the 2021 version (except for "The Night Clerk," since I figured that could go in a Dead & Breakfast collection), and then the two or three stories I had written since 2021 that fit in there . . . and then a couple more I discovered today just going through files.  And we were well past one hundred thousand words.

And that bummed me out.  I had come up with an excellent cover for it*, and I was eager to get it published (Big has put out his collection already, despite starting on his a full two years after mine), but I didn't want to have to lose stories like "The Scottish Scene" and "Underdecorated" and "Subtext."

So . . . why not a second collection of similar tales?  

I could do a Volume 2 sometime, and it was already halfway full!  I asked Big what he thought of a collection called "Female Protagonist Returns," and he counted with "Female Protagonist Strikes Back," or "Dawn of Female Protagonist."

This dookie just writes itself, doesn't it?

But having that excuse, that I could put "deleted" stories into a second collection, made it all easier, and before long, I was done, and ready to publish.**

She's SUPPOSED to be looking in a window, but the green wall or whatever at the bottom is
perfectly-positioned for a title, so that ended up my pick.  And I love it.

There are nine stories, an introduction, and one novella in this one, equaling just over eighty thousand words.  It includes such gems as "Office Visit" and "A Lovely Singing Voice," and then such--what's the opposite of a gem?  A rock, maybe?--rocks as "My Funny Valentine" and "Creature Feature," and "A Gallon A Day."  

So, if you're interested, "Female Protagonist" is available on Amazon at THIS LINK.

And now I'll get started on the old man one.

*Actually, for once, there was an embarrassment of riches in coming up with the image of a teenaged girl looking into a window at something glowing green.  I would've been happy with three or four of the images that A.I. dreamt up for me, though all of them had a slightly different feel (and girl).

**The audio version will take longer.  But hold me to it--you know I am eager to let things lie.

The Sweetest Words Of All

No, not "I've been a very naughty girl!"  What kind of blog do you think this is?

Famous photo of Adolf Hitler writing "Mein Cramp" on his laptop.  He was fond of Lenovos, oddly enough.

Actually, I was talking about the sweetest two words of all, the ones every writer longs for during the process of planning, drafting, reorganizing, and pushing through the uninspired quagmire that inevitably comes.  I got an idea for another Lara Demming story in March, one where she goes to Colorado and gets to see Holcomb interact with other witch-types . . . and finally, I got to this bit:

I finished another story, and that's good.*  But is the story good?

Who knows, and maybe at this point, I should pose the question: Does it even matter?  

You get better at writing by doing it, which makes it pretty much the opposite of any sport where the younger you are, the better (of course, I'm not talking about a nine year old playing basketball--we're talking adults here)(or golf, where Donald J. Trump is a world champion despite being in his late seventies).  I have written excellent stories decades ago, I'll admit it, but now I can see places where they could be improved and discover parts that just don't work, because of my years of experience.

This is my tenth Lara & the Witch story, one that takes place between "The People We Touch" and "Here To Help," and it didn't turn out as dark as I had intended, mostly because Lara Demming is a nicer person than I am.  I also found that the ending I planned for it no longer applied, and had to be entirely thrown out (although I started on a story called "Accept No Substitutes" last year that could use that for an ending, so maybe not entirely). 

I don't have a title for it, but I did try to come up with cover art . . . and did not succeed.  But Big has gotten better and better at taking two images and marrying them into one image, so it might not be a bad cover after all.  You'll find out in a year or so.

This image was a mistake, of me taking a photo of the glowing mushroom I wanted to use on the cover, to send to Big, but it caught my reflection, and when I tried to do it again on purpose, either my face or the shroom ended up out of frame.

*I should've finished it ten or so days ago, but I am easily distracted.  For example, I started this blog post a week ago.

Won't You Tell Me Now, Who's Bad?

Like I mentioned earlier, I've been upgrading the cover art on some of my available stories, and in doing so, I've stumbled upon some tales that I thought were out there, but turned out not to have been published.  Among them was "The Bad Man In Room 2," one of the Dead & Breakfast stories (and one of two that I thought I'd put out a while ago (the cover art for this one was from over a year ago).

I even had cover art for it. 

But I think neither of us loved that one (I'd grabbed a rather non-descript photo of a hotel room door from Unsplash, but the only thing that tells you the genre is the text.

So, here we are, only a couple of hours later, and he's sent me a better one . . . BUT I went out and asked my computer friend to make me something a bit more distinctive, not to mention a bit more indicative of the story itself.  I had to go a few rounds, but this is what it/we came up with:

I had to manually stick the 2 on the door, but you'd never notice if I hadn't said so just now.

The story's available RIGHT HERE, if you wanna check it out.

But Who's The Protagonist?

The month is half done, and I haven't gotten to one of the big goals I set for myself, namely putting out a story collection (either Female Protagonist or Geriatric Protagonist).  But Big Anklevich has gone crazy with his publishing, so I let his momentum carry me along, and am going to see if I can't put out both of them before the month is out.

When I came up with the Female Protagonist collection during the pandemic, I was going to include a Dead & Breakfast story in it (either "Meet the New Clerk" or "The Night Clerk"), but now I think I'll put "Undecorated" in there instead.  

I thought it would be slim pickings finding enough stories to fill up the collection, but with "Office Visit," "A Lovely Singing Voice," "Friends In Paradise," and "The Scottish Scene," I realized I was already close to 75,000 words, and that hadn't included the dozen or so stories I had been saving in 2021 when I first set out to put this together.

Holy moley, I've got too many stories with a female lead character (and I hadn't even CONSIDERED putting in long tales like "Not The Same" and "Ten Thousand Coffins").  Makes me think I should split up the stories into two volumes.  Can you believe that?

For Geriatric, I've got two novellas with old men as the leads, but I can't include both of them (it's already long enough with just one), and I was on the fence with a couple of stories, like "Old Man River" and "Last Call," which are about old dudes, but the POV characters are both young men.*  Also, one of the stories I'm considering using is a Christmas tale, and those ought to be in their own collection(s).

I really had my heart set on including either "A Mark on the Sky" with its years-later coda, or "Who Can It Be Now?" with its years-later coda.  But AMOTS is just too long (it would be half the collection in and of itself), and WCIBN isn't necessarily about an old man, just an ailing one (I based it on my uncle, who was only ten years older than me . . . am I old?).  I don't know what to do.  I also considered putting in "Newfound Fame," but it's nearly a novel too (and if someone would just give me money to expand it, I'm SURE I could get it past 40,000 words with no problem).

But here's the strange thing: in working on these two collections, even though it's eaten up my valuable sit-around-looking-at-Facebook time, has been kind of a rush.  In the same way as coming up with new cover art (for stories I published long ago, and stories I never bothered to publish) has been weirdly fun in a semi-creative sense, putting these together, organizing the stories in the order I think works best, and writing up introductions for them, has felt pretty good.  I hope that feeling lasts.

*I ultimately decided not to include those two, since the collection was running long anyway.

Rish Outcast 276: Ten Thousand Coffins II

Rish presents the second section of his novella "Ten Thousand Coffins."

Medtech Brook Lisst has seen the hand of the intruder on the ship . . . a vampire's hand. But vampires don't really exist, do they?

To download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

To support me on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "Many Coffins Died To Bring Us This Information" Moretto.

(Still) Here To Help

In case you're interested, the audiobook version of the Lara & the Witch story "Here To Help" is available over on the ever-contemptible Audible.com.  This is the story I wrote only last year about Lara meeting another witch, Perpetua Trevorly, who wants something rather indelicate from the girl.  Yes, you guessed exactly right.  It's not a lengthy tale, but if you're a fan of Lara and Old Widow Holcomb, I can promise you I did my very best with the performance (and that this story led to the one I'm almost finished with right now).

Check it out, if ye like, RIGHT HERE.

P.S. But Rish, I hear you ask, why buy the audio from Audible when I can just wait until you run it on the Outcast?  Good question, except that I have yet to run "You're In Good Hands" on the Rish Outcast, and that story takes place before this one.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Voltaire famously said "Perfect is the enemy of Good," and I've never forgotte--  Okay, that's a lie.  I've heard that quote a half dozen times over the years, but always forget it, much less who said it.

What it means is, if you try to make something perfect, it gets in the way of . . .  Actually, I don't know what it means.*  All I know is that, as I continue to tinker with my story "The Washer Whispers," I was reminded of it.

I published "The Washer Whispers," a story I wrote in 2022, about a month ago (it was apparently the first week of March, when I double-checked), and the story was finished.  Except that I felt like it was missing something.  But a lot of times, enough months or years have passed since writing it that I get a fresh(er) perspective of the story when I do my rewrite, and I catch errors or moments where a scene should've been (for clarification, tension, or just to understand the character better).  Invariably, my stories get longer in the rewrite--sometimes considerably.

This was no exception.  

I often struggle with feelings that I am an inadequate writer, or that something I write that resonates with me might not resonate with a (potential) reader, and it keeps me from putting it out there.  There's the nagging voice in my head that, maybe if I made it juuuuuuuuust a little bit better . . .

There's a scene (largely unnecessary for the book, but my favorite of the scenes) where Gil sits down with the previous owner of the house, and asks him if he ever experienced anything supernatural.  The old owner (who I never give the age of, so probably should've been in his thirties or forties, though I voiced him as though he was at least retirement age) goes from grouchy to vulnerable to emotional and then to hostile.  And he tells about his wife's experience in the house (his late wife).  I gave this guy a high-pitched, pseudo-Arkansas accent and really enjoyed performing the scene, to the point that I doubled it in length, and eventually split it into two chapters.  This was me at my most indulgent, as the information could easily have been conveyed with Gil's daughter telling Gil about the conversation she had with the previous owner, who I gave the god-awful name of Alphonse Grindler.

By the way, this is the second time writing this blog post, as it somehow saved a blank document when I was done with it over the nearly-finished one--a little glimpse into the eternity of damnation that apparently awaits me for creating images such as this one:

I was editing the scene, and discovered Gil once refers to his daughter as his sister (which is understandable, since Caroline is inspired by my sister), so I set up the microphone to re-record that line, and then thought, "I'm going to add a bit of clarification in another paragraph in this scene," and did so.  I took an hour to do this and then splice it into the original recording . . . but I noticed that my voice quality was not the same between sessions (doing Gil's voice would absolutely wreck my vocal chords after an hour or so), so I went back and recorded a few other lines around it so it would be less noticeable.

I vaguely remembered there being a bit about Dreyer's ice cream, and when I looked in the document, sure enough, there was a section in there that didn't match what I had recorded (initially, he gives a single sentence to explain what happened with his wife, but at some point, I rewrote it to find out the whole story).  So, I plugged in the mic yet again to re-record that bit, and remembered a callback to the ice cream later, so I just decided to go ahead and re-do the whole rest of the chapter, through to the end.  I had not counted on doing so many takes, though, and by the time I reached the end of the chapter, my voice was absolutely cheese-grated.  

I only had four more sentences to go, but I was now coughing whenever I tried to read anything in that voice, so I decided to jump to the last line in the chapter (because I had changed the word "August" there to "summer," having discovered I used August as a metaphor for hot weather three times in a story that takes place during the schoolyear).  I redid that line, then ported it over, cleaned up the audio, and stuck it all together . . . and darn it, the two voices didn't match.  

Should I record it (yet) again?  'Cause it's still not perfect.

I found what I thought was a plothole (or at least, a plot . . . hairline fracture), and thought I could fix it by a single line by the voice from the dishwasher** saying, "There are things I'm not allowed to say."  But instead of sticking that into an earlier scene, I decided to create a new scene (a little one) where he asks the questions that I think the audience would ask, and she tells him nothing.   

Originally, I had a bit about it being too bad that my story's not about an alien being emerging from the dishwasher, 'cause this cover would be perfect.  But I'm just gonna let it sit here this time.

I mentioned Caroline, the daughter (sister?), and that reminds me: one time during the rewrite, I realized I had started calling her Carolina, so I did a Search and Replace for those, changing them all to Caroline***, but while I was editing the audio, I discovered there had been a "Carolina" that slipped through.  So I set up the mic again and re-recorded that bit, then re-published the text version.

But I started to think about that, and decided to put in an intentional Carolina around the middle of the story, as sort of an Easter egg that would affect only me (if this were a screenplay, I'd include a parenthetical that said, "Note that she says CAROLINA instead of CAROLINE," so they'd keep it in).  But that meant I had to set up the mic again and re-record that bit, then clean up the audio and splice it into the finished Chapter 10.  Worth it?  Probably not, but this is art, not science.

The story was getting better, I thought, but I kept finding things to fix, things that weren't perfect, and that's the whole reason for this blogpost.  Voltaire, you see, was right.

Yes, M. de Voltaire in a kitchen.

So, the story went from twelve chapters to fifteen, and from a bloated, overlong short story to a novella on the thin side.  And as Shelly Winters used to say, "It's better to be a skinny novella than a fat short story."

Still not quite perfect.  Yet.

*It certainly flies in the face of my religious upbringing, so maybe that says something.

**I made the mistake of calling the story "the WASHER whispers," not realizing that it tricked my brain into thinking it was about a washing machine, and oh, there were about nine examples throughout where I called the dishwasher the washing machine.  I hope you can forgive the, oh, eleven other uses of that word in the story, as well as the fact that I'll now spend the rest of my life calling the appliance by the wrong name.

*** Apropos of nothing, I once had a co-worker I quite liked named Carolina, and have never known a Caroline.

P.P.S. A week later, and I discovered the section I had highlighted to re-record had stayed highlighted, even after I re-re-re-republished it.  Whoops, still not perfect.

Exercise Report - March

 Doin' alright, I gotta say.