New SF Story at Beat to a Pulp

Over at Beat to a Pulp, "Six Bullets for John Carter" is the weekly punch. It's a great tale. For my take on it, head on over to SF Safari. Then go read it. Read it now!

My first published short story this weekend!

It is difficult to explain how excited I am about this weekend. On Sunday, over at David Cranmer's wonderful and entertaining Beat to a Pulp ezine, my first published short story, "You Don't Get Three Mistakes," will be published. This is the first piece of fiction I've written that will be published.

It's a western but with some deductive flair.

When I got word from David that he'd accepted my story, needless to say, I was ecstatic. Beat to a Pulp's editor, Elaine Ash, then contacted me and we worked through a few points here and there. I hope all editors with whom I will work in the future are as easy-going Elaine. We got the story into ship-shape and now it is going to be sent out into the world.

I hope everyone will head on over to Beat to a Pulp on Sunday when the story goes live. This week's two-fer of Frank Bill stories makes him a hard author to follow.

Thank you, David, for accepting my story.
Thank you, Elaine, for helping me get it publishable.
Thank you, Readers, for just being there.

And check back here on Monday to see what this one little story hath wrought.

"On Paladin Road" by Patti Abbott

Here's irony: of all the blogger friends and pals I've met on my journey, I have not read much of their fiction. And believe me, they have written a lot of fiction. Ya'll know who you are.

Patti Abbott, the head mistress of the fabulously fun Friday's Forgotten Books, has a new story up at A Twist of Noir. It's called "On Paladin Road" and you have to go and take a read at it. You won't be disappointed.

Patti's lamented a few times about the types of stories she writes and the available outlets for said stories. And I think she has a point. There's the hard-edged sites and the soft-edged sites and there's not a great middle ground.

But a story like Patti's is a precious thing. Her prose has a nice, graceful elegance to it, the kind of prose one normally associates with 'literary' writers. As the grandson of a carpenter and the son of a woodworker, I can feel and see the type of workshop Patti describes here: "The steely gleam of sharpened tools, the bouquet composed of oils, wax and freshly cut wood, the familiar pitch of a blade making the first cuts into a good piece of Pennsylvania cherry, were intoxicating." To me, it's the little nuances like this passage that brings a basic story up a notch or two, becoming something else.

Over on her blog the other day, she posed a question "What great movie would you not watch again?" I made my choices (you'll have to jump to her site to see them) and one of the movies I consider very good I'll never watch again merely for the ending. What I'm not saying is that the ending isn't good. It is. It stays with me and everytime I think about the movie, a hole in my stomach opens up.

I got that kind of feeling with the ending of "On Paladin Road." It fits, of course, but it's, it's...well, just go see for yourself.

Beat to a Pulp: Debut Issue

It's here. Beat to a Pulp debuted today. BTAP is the brainchild of David Cranmner, the creator of The Education of a Pulp Writer blog.

And the trivia question for the future? Who wrote the first story published in Beat to a Pulp? That would be Patti Abbott, proprietor of the Friday's Forgotten Books project, over at her blog.

Here is the cool title page of BTAP. And be sure to check out the longer artwork bar when you click on the story.

Here is Patti's story, "The Instrument of Their Desire."

And if you need *any* incentive to head on over--right now--and read this story, just read the first paragraph and tell me you don't want to know more.

Cool Story Site (A Twist of Noir) and Fun, Fun Story

Courtesy of a link on David Cranmer's blog "The Education of a Pulp Writer," I discovered a nice story site on the internet: A Twist of Noir. The story David highlighted is "The Dumb Factor" by Sandra Seamans. The site is a place I hope to land a story one day. And Sandra's story is nice, short, pretty dang funny (I'm not sure I can watch "The Brady Bunch" the same way again), with a brutal ending.