I’ve been fortunate to have a number of short stories published in magazines and anthologies. Some were reprinted two and three times. Each one filled me with warm fuzzies when it went out into the world and came back with an acceptance. I’m as proud of my short stories as I am of my mystery novel, MEMORY OF A MURDER. After they were published and had their time in the limelight, I retired my shorts with loving care in my hard drive.

Not long ago, I thought about them. Each one represented a ton of time and hard work and bore my sweat stains. It bothered me to think of them gathering dust in a cold, dark storage sector, languishing as nothing more than anonymous kilobytes of data. They served me well in their time and still had a lot to offer. After all, writing doesn’t have an expiration date. If it had, we’d never have heard of Poe, Doyle, Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway and the rest

That’s when I decided to publish a collection of my short stories.

I couldn’t include all of them, so I had to make hard choices. I felt like a father forced to decide which of his children would go to the party and which ones would stay home.

Even before I began choosing stories for the collection, I had another decision to make. My stories tend to cover the gamut of sub-genres from hardboiled to softboiled to humorous. After a lot of thought, I decided to include some of each. I like variety when I read and I know other people do, too. When I open a short fiction magazine, I find an assortment of sub-genres inside. Why shouldn’t my collection be the same?

With that decision made, I began selecting stories to include. One was a relatively easy choice. That’s the one that brought home a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society

After that, it got tougher. Mollie Goodall is one of my favorite characters and has appeared in half a dozen stories. As sheriff of a small county in Texas, she mixes humor and a warm heart in administering her duties. I selected three Sheriff Mollie stories for the collection, including the one in which she has to deal with a naked man on a rooftop.

On the hardboiled side, I chose the one about a street-weary cop who steps outside the box – and the law — to deal with a murdering drug dealer who beat the system and walked free. Another hard and gritty story selected concerned a woman forced at gunpoint to recall a horrible event she thought she’d flushed from her life twenty years ago.

And so it went until the grueling selection process was finished. I ended up with sixteen stories, totaling a little more than 53,000 words, the size of a small novel. But that only brought me to another challenge.

Now I had to do the formatting required to publish it. Being a technical dummy didn’t stop me from diving into a sea of unfamiliar terms and procedures. What’s HTML? What’s a pixel? These and other mysteries kept me thrashing around in muddled waters for weeks.

Halfway through the project, my wife stuck her head in the door to ask, “How’s it going?”

“Horrible!” I wailed. “I can’t take any more. I’m going to jump off the roof and kill myself.”

She sighed. “Again? Well, make it snappy. Dinner’s almost ready.”

Somehow, to my own amazement, I made it through the formatting process, and my collection, SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS was ready to go live as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, Sony, and all other electronic readers.

But having no better sense, I jumped back into unknown waters and published it as a print book through CreateSpace.

I don’t mind saying I’m proud of the way it turned out, but I’m also proud of myself for getting it done without losing my last few ounces of sanity. You’ll find all the information about it over on my website: earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

While you’re there, you can read Chapter One of MEMORY OF A MURDER, my first mystery novel, which earned thirteen Five Star reviews.

You’ll also find two of my short stories there. One is “The Day I Almost Became a Great Writer,” which some say is the funniest story I’ve ever written. There’s another one called “White Hats and Happy Trails,” about the day I spent with Roy Rogers.

Thanks for allowing me to visit here and talk about my favorite subject – writing.

Best regards to all.

Earl Staggs

Derringer Award winning author Earl Staggs has seen many of his short stories published in magazines and anthologies. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine and as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. His novel MEMORY OF A MURDER earned thirteen Five Star reviews online at Amazon and B&N. His column “Write Tight” appears in the online magazine Apollo’s Lyre. He is also a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make Mine Mystery. He hosts workshops for the Muse Online Writers Conference and the Catholic Writers Conference Online and is a frequent speaker at conferences and writers groups. Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net Website: earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

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Okay, you wrote a book. You painfully put your baby through a critique group who obviously doesn’t get it but you survived and made some of their suggested changes. You did a self edit and spent months or years either looking for an agent or publisher or both. You finally, after using rejection letters for wallpaper, signed up with a publisher. Wow, you are now an author! You have gone from a writer or aspiring author to a real live author.

NOW WHAT?

You sit back and watch the money roll in? You get asked to do book signings with long lines of eager book buyers who can’t wait to meet you? You’ll be on TV and radio, right?

Well, guess what? You have just completed the first two steps of the process. You are an author who no one knows (except your mother and maybe a few friends).

The publisher will send you on book tours? NO! You are now your own marketing director! You are the one who sets up book signings and sends out information about them (some bookstores help out using their e-mail list or may put up your posters). You must meet and greet and convince a potential customer to purchase your book and he/she may not have come into the store looking for you or your book. YOU get to try and get coverage in newspapers and other media. YOU get to try and get whatever speaking engagements you can. YOU get to try and get on panels at writers conventions. YOU are the guy or gal who must make the difference.

Writing is a solitary affair. Critique groups are meetings with fellow writers, BUT marketing is YOU. It is stressful, and not much fun if you are not a people person.

BUT when it works-it is great. It is wonderful seeing someone with your book and hearing nice reviews and seeing your first royalty check. So hang in there, doing this part has a long learning curve but you do learn what works and what doesn’t. Going to book fairs with just your books and sitting at a booth trying to market doesn’t work as well as when you are a speaker.

So get gigs speaking and as much publicity as possible and Good Luck! In the mean time, start that next book.

Dr. Dave Ciambrone is a retired scientist, Oceanographer, archaeologist, professor, magician and author living in Georgetown, Texas with his wife, Kathy.

For more about Dave visit his website: www.davidciambrone.com

Old Dogs and Blue Leopards

By Sylvia Dickey Smith
www.sylviadickeysmith.com

Not only can old dogs learn new tricks, but leopards can change their spots. You don’t believe me? I’ve “seen it” with my own eyes, for I’m that old dog leaping backwards over an inflamed barrel. I’m also the blue leopard with the big orange polka dots

In my bio, I describe myself as having been born backward–one foot first and left-handed–and seem to have done most things backward ever since. At seventeen, and still a high school junior, I married a preacher and soon became “the preacher’s wife.” Today, it’s difficult to imagine a girl, barely 17, take on that responsibility–a kid playing grown up. But I sailed along just fine, any answer I needed given to me by my husband. He even gave answers to many questions I hadn’t even asked.

I started college as a forty-year-old freshman and in a few short years gained a degree in sociology, a master’s in educational psychology, and then a divorce! Five years later, I got engaged, bought a house, took a honeymoon in Hawaii, and married in Las Vegas on the way home.

You still with me so far on this backwards thing?

After many years working in the human services field, I retired and took on a whole new career–I wrote a mystery book that soon turned into a series of three–so far. (The Sidra Smart mystery series. Dance On His Grave, Deadly Sins Deadly Secrets and Dead Wreckoning.)

Now, I find myself in the midst of rebranding myself as a writer of women’s fiction. Why? I’ve realized that is where my passion is. So, I might write mystery, historical fiction, or something else, but whatever I write, it will feature a strong woman. Of course she likely won’t start out that way, but by the time I’m through with her, she will be.

Think that’s a reflection of my life? You bet your bottom patootie it is!

One thing I’ve learned is it makes no difference whether you live your life backwards or forwards, the important thing is that you LIVE IT!

Never say never. Never not do something because you think you’re too old, too dumb, too smart, too whatever. If you want to do it, go for it.

My latest book is A War Of Her Own, set during a fascinating period–World War II. A small town’s population explodes 700% almost overnight when local shipyards gain contracts to build destroyers, destroyer escorts, landing craft, tugboats and the like. People still suffering the backlash of the Great Depression flood the town for jobs for the taking. Soon, all hell broke loose. Society and culture changed right before people’s eyes. Women took jobs previously performed by men–and did them well! Many families slept in rented “hotbeds”–beds still warm from the body of the person who just arose and went to work at shipyards that ran around the clock. War housing was built over night on river sand pumped in from the river bottom.

I recall many stories over the years about what life was like. I’d tuck those ideas away, pull them out and work on the project for a while. Then I’d stall over the hook and put it aside. Many stories revolve around family secrets, but I didn’t know that of my protagonist Bea Meade’s. Then several elements in my life clicked and the whole idea cemented itself in my psyche.

Bea Meade reminds me so much of my mother (and her sisters) who worked at the shipyard during the war and dealt with a world changing faster than could they. It is important we remember those years. They held great significance for women who, for the first time, moved into the work place in record numbers and performed jobs heretofore performed only by men.

A War Of Her Own is available for sale at online bookstores like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com and brick and mortar bookstores. Autographed copies are available to order on my website at: www.AWarOfHerOwn.com

Other Website links: www.sylviadickeysmith.com
                                           www.sylviadickeysmithbooks.wordpress.com