Tag Archives: #finished

Press Release: New Anthology

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RJ MINNICK, December 15       MTbookCvr

I am pleased to announce that THE MAYOR’S TALES: Stories from the Kyleighburn Archives is now available at Amazon.com as well as from its participating authors.

I have been lucky enough to participate in a project with a terrific local writing group called Off the Page. At the formation of the group, we were taken with the idea of building a world and populating it with characters whose stories we would tell in an anthology.

As Editor, I was thrilled with how our writers drew on their skills to not only craft solid stories, but to grow their talents. Several of us worked outside our comfort zones. However, the stories, diverse as they are with romance, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy and from similarly diverse authors, build a picture of a small community in North Carolina that undergoes a mysterious event that permanently affects its future.

from the cover:

Welcome to Kyleighburn, North Carolina, (population 3,000). A labyrinthine cavern has suddenly opened up beneath sleepy little hamlet and what it reveals to the startled residents will affect the town and its residents forever. The huge complex is filled with weird glowing flowers and vines tended by a swarm of over-large bees. Where did this come from, and who will it affect? The answers are in the stories.Dip into the archives and read the stories of Kyleighburn, NC and its good citizens. There’s the mayor, Marino Esposito, a very unbureaucratic civil servant who seems perpetually at odds with The Mayor (always with a capital T.M.) who happens to be a canine. Tattooed and pierced and amnesiac, Joe the bartender doesn’t remember his past, and perhaps that why he seems so cheerful about his present. The town’s bubbling, vivacious librarian can’t follow her own rules, and a quiet handyman flutters the ladies’ hearts and confuses everyone with his lack of history.Each story from the archive casts Kyleighburn in fresh light, with tales from the ancient past to the bustling present, stories about love and family and war and cruelty, all tied in some way to the event that changes things forever.In what began as an exercise to see what they could do, writers from Off The Page built a world to share and people to live there. The authors then contributed unique stories, each from their own preferred genres. The result was more than they expected. In this book you will find science fiction, romance, history, comic humor, and mystery, all written in straight-forward fashion. The Mayor’s Tales: Stories from the Kyleighburn Archives is an achievement of dedication, talent, and enthusiasm. Everyone should be so lucky to have a Kyleighburn.

 

The Mayor’s Tales: Stories from the Kyleighburn Archives

An Off the Page Anthology

  • Paperback: 294 pages
  • Publisher: Independently published (December 15, 2018)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1790966183
  • ISBN-13: 978-1790966189
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches

 

A little expansion…

Aside

Just dropping a note to say that I’m adding posts under the Remainder page. The first gives a little background on the writing of the book and also a peek into its plot.

I’ll follow up with more, especially if you have questions. Feel free to comment, and I hope you’ll  enjoy my book.

Never promise what you can’t deliver…

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… a brief monologue on the ways that can backfire on you

 

Besides being a means of offering my excuses for missing deadline once again, this short list enumerates various ways promising something can get you into trouble.

  1.  Most obvious and pertinent: Never put in writing the date your book will be available unless it is on its way to the printer. And not even then. Those of you who are alert will  note the ‘update’ of launch info for FLYING PURPLE  PEOPLE SEATER. I won’t bother you with excuses; there are some. It will be out soon.
  2. Never promise you will  never do something. A certain editor I know vowed she would never go so far as to cross borders to see a performance she admired; guess where she will be next month? (correct if you said not in her home country)
  3. Never promise to house-sit or pet-sit when you don’t really know your own plans. (Was that the weekend you scheduled for minor surgery on Friday and were told you’ll be out of it from the pain meds for three days?)
  4. Never promise you will be there for the birth of a child (except your own, and then not if it is your spouse who is delivering). Do I really need to mention that babies are unpredictable?
  5. Never promise payback –  whether it’s a favor, a visit, a loan, or revenge. Life is also  unpredictable.
  6. Never promise to write an article from a certain slant. You  never know when you will discover information – even during an interview with the subject – that will change everything you’re going to write.
  7. Never promise a friend or a family member that you will name a character after them or, worse, ‘put them in your book’.
  8. Following from #7 is, never promise (or brag) that you’re going to kill off your mother-in-law (or anyone real in your life) in your book. — We all do it; just don’t say so.
  9. Never put so many people or things in the plot of your novel that you can’t keep track of them. You’ll have things like boats with gunmen on them vanishing  into thin air when they would have been in a position to turn the tide of battle, but you can’t have them there because that’s not how the fight turns out. (yes, that was a thing)
  10. And never, never, as the saying goes, put a gun on a mantelpiece in a scene unless someone is going to get shot.

That’s a saying that was taught to me by my screenwriting son. It refers to economy and purpose in writing.  When you put an object or person into a scene, there’s a reason they are there. There has to be, particularly in any short writing, but even in novels.

Mysteries may be notorious for red herrings and misdirection, but that’s not what you’re doing if you are introducing stuff into scenes and not doing something with them.  Ie, there is no reason for a gun on the mantelpiece in a young woman’s apartment, unless there it is going to be used. Maybe it’s self-defense, because she feels stalked. Maybe it’s  self-defense, because she feels under siege by law enforcement. Maybe it’s self-defense, because she feels stalked and under siege by an ex-boyfriend. Maybe it just goes off and the bullet strikes her baby. Maybe she’s going to sell it, turn it in, clean it, or use it on the damn cat, but that gun needs to be used somehow. Or it needs to not be  there.

Even 600-page novels have a finite number of ideas to convey, in a finite number of words. If you can’t deliver follow-up why something is on the page, if its being there doesn’t serve a purpose later on, don’t promise the reader that it does. Take it out.

Now I’ll go finish my book. No, that was not a promise, but I will.