HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Season's Greetings from Susan and John Daniel

The Joy of Story will return January 2. Until then, have Joy in all you do!

THE SMELLS OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

 THE JOY OF STORY

John M. Daniel’s Blog

December 19, 2015

This week beginning on the third Saturday in December I am pleased to welcome Eileen Obser as a guest to my blog. Eileen is a writer, a writing teacher, and a professional editor. She is a published memoirist, and her memoir, Only You, won a prize from and was published by Oak Tree Press.

Eileen’s post this week is about the importance of using all five senses in our writing. What she has to say about including the sense of smell in our stories is, if you’ll pardon me, right on the nose. The nose is a reliable reminder of times and events in our lives. The aroma of madeleines supposedly prompted Marcel Proust to write Remembrance of Things Past, a huge and hugely important fictional memoir, which I confess I’ve never read.

For me there’s another nostalgia-enhancing smell I inhale when I walk into a bookstore at this time of year. It’s probably an imaginary smell, but it’s a mixture of books, customers, clerks, money changing hands, and greetings exchanged with smiles; and it all smells a bit like chocolate chip cookies for some reason. Anyone who has been a bookstore clerk knows the electric thrill of the Christmas rush, which starts right after Thanksgiving and builds and builds and builds until six p.m. Christmas Eve. The customers are frantic but happy, the books fly out of the store in bright colors, and the cash register goes jingle jingle jingle. I’ve always been sentimental about Christmas, and I love the party atmosphere, and it’s also a time when a clerk can be the greatest help to a person in need. I’ve enjoyed every Christmas season I’ve spent in a bookstore, and there have been many.

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To celebrate the joy of bookselling, I include toward the end of this post a promotion of my bookstore mystery, Hooperman. Please check it out.

And don’t forget: you have an invitation to send me your 99-word story for January. See the instructions, deadline, and prompt at the end of this post.

And now, let’s hear from Eileen Obser.

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MAKE SURE YOUR STORIES MAKE SCENTS

         I’m known to have an acute sense of smell, and there are many odors I simply don’t like, including strong-scented laundry detergents, colognes and perfumes, tea tree and eucalyptus oils; foods such as kielbasa, cucumbers, and beef liver. At meetings, in theaters and especially at restaurants, I’ll move away from a heavily Chanel No. 5’d woman because the pungent aroma overcomes my other senses. Companions frown and say, “Deal with it,” but I refuse, and find another seat.

         The sense of smell is crucial in our lives and in our writing, as are all the other senses: touch, hearing, taste, and sight. I teach memoir writing to adults and seniors, and ask students to draw on their life experiences, showing as much as possible, instead of telling. I’m so delighted when they get it; when their recalled memories are infused with the senses.

         I’ve been rereading Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a “treasure trove of information, diverse in space and time and culture but all related to the pleasures of sensory experience,” according to one review.

         Ackerman notes that “one of the real tests of writers, especially poets, is how well they write about smells. If they can’t describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart?”

         In a personal essay published a few years ago called “Santa and His Beer (I mean Deer)” I wrote the following:

         
It was Christmas Eve at our house in Glendale, Queens (New York). My younger brother, Al, and I were scrubbed and shampooed; we had to be super clean, both for the party that night and for Christmas Mass the next morning. Mom fed us a light supper of grilled cheese sandwiches and hash brown potatoes.” I didn’t use the word “smell” but the comforting fragrances of Ivory soap and Prell shampoo, of grilled cheese on Wonder bread and crisp, buttery fried potatoes surround me as I write, as if it was last year, not the late 1940s.

         We went downstairs to join my five cousins, to drink hot chocolate and eat homemade Christmas cookies and wait for Santa Claus to make his annual visit. Santa ho-ho-ho-ed as he chatted and handed us gifts, then happily gulped down two beers that our mothers offered him, causing all the children to grimace. Hence the title of my essay.

         After Santa left, and while we were opening gifts, our fathers appeared, tired-looking and glassy-eyed. “Daddy’s home, Daddy’s home!” the smaller kids shouted.
         Grandma Campbell, who let my father and uncle in the door, said with a scowl, “I can see you’ve both had a snoutful.”
         “Now, Mom, don’t be criticizing us,” my father said, giving her a hug. Merry Christmas!’ He bent down to kiss me, and I smelled the “snoutful” close up.
         “Hi, Daddy.” I turned my nose away and let him kiss my cheek.

         The entire essay can be seen on my website: www.eileenobser.com, under “Read My Work.”

         I bought my real Christmas tree last week; I’ve never owned an artificial one. The local nursery offered me hot cider, fresh baked gingerbread, and peppermint candy canes. And I slipped right back into memory land, sniffing and smiling.

         Wherever you are and whatever your plans for the holidays, I wish you much peace and joy, in every sense of those words.

§§§

Eileen Obser is a writer and editor and has been teaching creative writing in New York for over 20 years. She returned to school in her later years and is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University Southampton. Her stories and personal essays have been published in many anthologies, magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazines, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, Proteus, and The Southampton Review literary magazines. She lives on the east end of Long Island, in East Hampton, New York.

Website: www.eileenobser.com

Eileen’s memoir, Only You, set in her teenage years (the late 1950s) was published by Oak Tree Press in 2014.

Buy or order Only You from your local bookstore, from an online booksellers, or direct from the publisher:

Oak Tree Press

1820 W. Lacey Blvd. #220

Hanford, CA 93230

(217) 825-4489

publisher@oaktreebooks.com

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And now for a word from our sponsor:

Hooperman

A Bookstore Mystery

Oak Tree Press

ISBN 978-1-61009-061-2

Trade paperback, $14.95

Buy or order Hooperman from your local bookstore, from an online booksellers, or direct from the publisher:

Oak Tree Press

1820 W. Lacey Blvd. #220

Hanford, CA 93230

(217) 825-4489

publisher@oaktreebooks.com

Who's Stealing the Books? Who's Bombing the Bookstore?

"Pleasant and unusually good-natured, this novel from Daniel harkens back to a time when printed books mattered and an independent bookstore could be a social club for passionately eccentric bibliophiles." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Hooperman Johnson is a tall, bushy-bearded man of few words. He works as a bookstore cop, catching shoplifters in the act. It's a difficult job for a man with a severe stammer, but somebody's got to do it, because Maxwell's Books is getting ripped off big-time. And, more and more, it looks like the thief works for the store.

Who's stealing the books? Martin West, the foul-mouthed nutcase in charge of shipping and receiving? Millie Larkin, who hates the boss because he's a man? Could it be Lucinda Baylor, the dark and sassy clerk that Hoop's in love with? Jack Davis, the socialist, or Frank Blanchard, the anarchist? Or maybe even Elmer Maxwell himself, the world-famous pacifist bookseller?

Set in the summer of 1972, the summer of the Watergate break-in, Hooperman is a bookstore mystery without a murder, but full of plot, full of oddball characters, full of laughs, and full of love, some of it poignant, some of it steamy.

Hooperman—A Bookstore Mystery celebrates the joy of books and bookselling and also explores the many ways people get into trouble—deadly serious trouble—when they fail to communicate.



To read reviews of this book, visit: http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/hoopermanreviews.html

John M. Daniel is a lifelong bibliophile, having worked in eight bookstores. He’s also the author of fourteen published books, including the well-reviewed Guy Mallon Mystery Series. He lives among the redwoods in Humboldt County, California, with Susan Daniel, his wife and partner. They publish mystery fiction under the imprint Perseverance Press (Daniel & Daniel).

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Call for submissions: Your 99-Word Stories

The deadline for January’s 99-word story submissions is January First. The stories will appear on my blog post for January 9, 2016.

note: this 99-word story feature is a game, not a contest. Obey the rules and I’ll include your story. I may edit the story to make it stronger, and it’s understood that you will submit to my editing willingly. That’s an unwritten rule.

Rules for the 99-word story feature are as follows:

1. Your story must be 99 words long, exactly.

2. One story per writer, per month.

3. The story must be a story. That means it needs plot (something or somebody has to change), characters, and conflict.

4. The story must be inspired by the prompt I assign.

5. The deadline: the first of the month. Stories will appear on this blog the second Saturday of the month.

6. I will copy edit the story. The author of the story retains all rights.

7. Email me your story (in the body of your email, or as a Word attachment) to: jmd@danielpublishing.com

THIS MONTH’S PROMPT FOR NEXT MONTH’S 99-WORD STORY: Write a story in 99 words, inspired by the words “This time I really mean it.” That can be your title, or your first or last sentence, or just the theme of the story. Reread Rule 3, above; this must be a story, not just an essay. If I receive your story by January 1, and if you follow the rules, your story will appear on this blog January 9.

§§§

Thank you for dropping by. There will be no post on this blog next week, starting December 26, but I hope you’ll be back the following week, starting January 2, when we’ll kick off the New Year by resolving to find joy in reading and/or writing stories!

http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/index.html

FAMILY SECRETS AND OTHER MONSTERS

THE JOY OF STORY

John M. Daniel’s Blog

December 12, 2015

“You must not tell anyone,”  my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

― Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

This is the week beginning on the second Saturday in December. As happens on the second Saturday of the month, I am presenting 99-word stories contributed by readers of this blog during the previous month. In November I challenged writers to send me stories with the following opening sentence: “I promised my parents I would never tell this to anyone.”

Charlotte Painter reminded me that this prompt was similar to the opening sentence from a book by Maxine Hong Kingston, and I sheepishly admitted that I had just plain stolen the idea, if not the exact words, from Ms. Kingston. I used this prompt often as an assignment during my twenty years as a part-time creative writing teacher, and I always gave Ms. Kingston credit for the ironic beginning of The Woman Warrior. It was a popular prompt, especially in my life stories classes. It forced or at least persuaded writers to face their monsters and dare to reveal their family secrets, which were often quite dark. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed teaching life story writing is that I’m unabashedly nosy.

The essay below is written with memoir in mind, but the bravery it takes to face the dark is a necessary ingredient to fiction as well. Stories need to be brave. Writers need to face the dark and take on the monsters from time to time.

The stories submitted for this week’s blog are not all dark. A couple of them deal with a common rite of passage in our culture: a child’s becoming aware that Santa Claus is a phony. Well, that’s an important crisis in a child’s hagiology. It’s a major step toward adulthood, which has its plusses and minuses.

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By the way, for a fine example of stories about dark secrets, see the promotion, toward the end of this post, of Katherine Elberfeld’s story collection, published this year, titled Make Yourselves at Home.

And don’t forget: you're invited to send me your 99-word story for January. See the instructions, deadline, and prompt at the end of this post.

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Facing Our Monsters

There are dangers and rewards when it comes to mining your past for the stories of your life. As I’ve said (perhaps more than enough), a story requires conflict, so as you look for good stories to tell about your youth or your younger years, you’re likely to come across a few monsters that you have tried for years not to think about.

I walked out of my mother’s house in the middle of an argument, and I never saw her alive again.…

My wedding went sour when I saw how happily my new husband and my old friend were dancing together.…

I trained all summer for the Grand Masters Chess Tournament, only to be knocked out in the first round by a geeky teenager.…

I should have given my son the bicycle of his dreams.…

There you have themes for potential stories about guilt, anger, disappointment, and regret. These four monsters (and others just as ugly) lurk underneath all our beds, waiting to take over our dreams. Should we continue to smother them with denial? Well, if it works to do that, fine. But maybe it’s time to face those monsters.

How? Psychotherapy? Sure, but remember that as a writer—a writer of your life stories—you have a cheaper, more creative, more enjoyable way to slay the dragons.

Remember that all good stories require conflict, so cash in on your sour memories. Remember too that loss is one of the things that has made you an interesting persons. Also remember that you’re not alone, and your readers will be on your side, because they’ve ridden in the same rocky boats.

Another thing I can promise you: facing your monsters and turning them into well-written stories will not harm you. Just as in a dream, even the worst nightmare, you never feel physical pain, when you’re writing a story, even the saddest story ever told, you will not break down. You may even find a way to make peace with the enemies under your bed.

Sweet Dreams

If you’re like most people, you have some memories that bring you guilt, anger, disappointment, and regret. But most people also have memories that bring them pride, reconciliation, love, and peace. You may, and should, write stories about these experiences too. You deserve the pleasure.

Wait a minute. How can you write an effective story with no conflict?

I didn’t say no conflict. Look a little harder at that memory and you’re likely to find that self-esteem came after you faced a challenge to your pride; reconciliation implies overcoming difficult differences; love is what redeems loneliness; and peace is often hard-won.

Sure, celebrate your sweet dreams in your stories. Show them as victories over the human condition. Never forget the human condition. Don’t be afraid of the dark.

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Now, with no further introduction, here are this month’s 99-word stories:

I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW

by Cathy Mayrides

I promised my parents I would never tell this to anyone. It had to be my secret. Other kids had to hear it from their own parents, in their own time.

I had badgered them and cited irrefutable evidence. There were presents in the back of their closet. And, I reasoned an old man and some reindeer couldn't travel the globe in one night.

When they told me, I cried because they were liars. My own parents! My world was violated. I would never do this to my own kids.

But I was oddly smug in my newfound knowledge.

•••

A PROMISE KEPT

by Jim Gallagher

I promised my parents I would never tell this to anyone, referring to what I discovered several days before Christmas.

Like many kids, I was curious and snooped around to learn what was hidden. As usual, the gifts were already wrapped. It was a challenge to try to determine what was under the gaily-colored paper, by simply seeing its shape.

Holy mackerel!

I discovered something I should not have seen. Mom spotted me and called dad. I figured I was in big trouble. Instead, he smiled and said, “This will be our family secret.”

So I will never tell.

•••

ELF UNDER THE INFLUENCE

by Pat Shevlin

I promised my parents I would never tell this to anyone.

I went to bed Christmas Eve ’58 worried that Santa wouldn’t come because we had no tree.

Noises in the driveway woke me. It was my drunken dad. He had waited until the neighbors were at church for midnight mass, to shop the abandoned “tree” lot across the street.

The wiry five-foot Charlie Brown balsam tree, price tag attached, was a “steal,” saving dad the $35 that he had just left at the bar.

This eight-year-old prayed God would forgive her drunken dad on this Christmas Eve.

•••

I PROMISED I WOULD NEVER TELL

by David Llewellyn

My father’s brother was born on Christmas day. He joked about how he’d been gypped out of a birthday present every year. He died on the eve of his fiftieth birthday. I was twelve years old at the time.

Uncle Flip visited us every Christmas. He was always between jobs. We all looked forward to his visits. Especially my mom.

I was the one who found him lying face-down on the guest bathroom floor on Christmas morning. I was also the first to read the letter he had left on his pillow.

The letter was addressed to my mother.

•••

A COSTLY SWAP

by Jerry Giammatteo

    I promised my parents I would never tell this to anyone. I was the infamous present swapper.

    I was seven and desperately wanted a GI Joe. My parents bought one for my cousin Mick. I was jealous. Mick’s gift sat under the tree.

    One night, I tiptoed to the tree and switched the label that said “Mick” on one box for one that said “Jerry” on another.

    On Christmas morning, I got the GI Joe. Imagine Mick’s surprise when he got a sweater four sizes too big for him?

    My parents discovered my subterfuge. The punishment fit the crime.

 §§§

Recently published by Daniel & Daniel, Publishers

Make Yourselves at Home

and other stories

Katherine Elberfeld

978-1-56474-572-9

96 pages, paperback, $12.00

Publication date: May 5, 2015

Order from your local independent bookstore. This book is also sold by Amazon and other online booksellers. To order directly from the Publisher, call 1-800-662-8351.

What lurks beneath the surface of small-town propriety?

        

Katherine Elberfeld’s stories of small-town life in the American South evoke a pleasant and polite community feeling, and some of them are blessed by strong family ties. But the stories, some comic, some dark, and some both comic and dark, all reveal secrets and resentments that fester in the past and haunt the present. Katherine Elberfeld’s characters range from a little bit odd to downright crazy, as they come to terms with what life has given them, making choices for the better and sometimes for the worse.

The short stories in Katherine Elberfeld’s first collection, Make Yourselves at Home, have an ironic blend of grotesque and comic, mannered and eccentric, loving and vindictive, which may bring to readers’ minds the spare, strong talents of other southern women writers, like Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. Elberfeld’s fiction kindly, vividly vivisects the gentility of southern small-town society.

Asked to describe her fiction, Elberfeld answered: “In the deep South, twisting live oaks and curtains of Spanish moss create a beautiful but haunting environment teeming with lushness and with menaces in the dark. Poisonous snakes hide in the undergrowth and alligators lurk in the black waters. The characters and their lives in these stories mirror that landscape with all its beauty, complexity, hidden dangers and surprises. But occasionally, a shaft of light shines on the water, illuminating the threats in its depth, and the characters can decide whether to wade into the water or not.”

Katherine Elberfeld's careers in journalism, freelance writing, and the Episcopal priesthood inform and inspire her writing. She is the author of To Speak of Love, In the Midst of Sunflowers, Jordan to Jerusalem, and the novel The Lady of the House, and has published short stories and articles in Appalachian Heritage, New Therapist, Concepts in Human Development, and Leadership in Action. A native of Georgia, she now lives in Marietta, not far from her hometown of Gainesville. She invites readers and fellow writers to visit her website: www.katherineelberfeld.com.

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Call for submissions: Your 99-Word Stories

The deadline for January’s 99-word story submissions is January First. The stories will appear on my blog post for January 9, 2016.

note: this 99-word story feature is a game, not a contest. Obey the rules and I’ll include your story. I may edit the story to make it stronger, and it’s understood that you will submit to my editing willingly. That’s an unwritten rule.

Rules for the 99-word story feature are as follows:

1. Your story must be 99 words long, exactly.

2. One story per writer, per month.

3. The story must be a story. That means it needs plot (something or somebody has to change), characters, and conflict.

4. The story must be inspired by the prompt I assign.

5. The deadline: the first of the month. Stories will appear on this blog the second Saturday of the month.

6. I will copy edit the story. The author of the story retains all rights.

7. Email me your story (in the body of your email, or as a Word attachment) to: jmd@danielpublishing.com

THIS MONTH’S PROMPT FOR NEXT MONTH’S 99-WORD STORY: Write a story in 99 words, inspired by the words “This time I really mean it.” That can be your title, or your first or last sentence, or just the theme of the story. Reread Rule 3, above; this must be a story, not just an essay. If I receive your story by January 1, and  if you follow the rules, your story will appear on this blog January 9.

§§§

Thank you for dropping by. I hope you’ll be back next week, when we’ll have a guest post by Eileen Obser, an editor, a writing teacher, and the author of the honest and provocative memoir Only You.

Meanwhile,  may you find joy in reading and/or writing stories!

http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/index.html

A WHOLE NEW WAY OF READING

THE JOY OF STORY

John M. Daniel’s Blog

December 5, 2015

Greetings. Welcome to my blog, if this is your first visit, and if you’re a repeating visitor, welcome back.

You’ll have to forgive me for taking this opportunity to brag that I was published recently, during a week that also included my birthday, Thanksgiving, and a three-day visit from three of our favorite family members, Susan’s sons Cory and Stewart and our fifteen-year-old granddaughter Caroline. And as if that weren’t enough, I also had a short story chosen for the “Flash Fiction” issue of our local free weekly paper, the North Coast Journal.

Let me be honest and tell you that my story was one of seventeen stories chosen, and for all I know perhaps only seventeen stories were submitted. I hope that’s the case, so that everyone who submitted a story was a winner. I mean that. I like to believe that writing is not a competitive sport. (Please note that this blog’s monthly 99-word story feature is not a contest, and everyone who submits and follows the rules is a winner. See the end of this post for further details.)

With no further introduction I proudly present my most recent published “winning” short story, in its entirety:

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Forwarding Order Expired

At ten I received a letter from the man I would become. “I’ve learned to correspond across the years,” it said. “Enjoy your youth.”

At forty, I received the boy’s reply: “I can’t wait to be your age.”

I wrote the next letter forward thirty years. “I hope you’re well.”

My letter was returned unopened.

§§§

Now I want to tell you about a decision I made, a gift I recently bought for myself. I now own a Kindle Paperwhite ebook reader. It wasn’t easy. I bought the device from the Staples store in Eureka, the nearest town that can be called (using a generous imagination) a “big city.” The reason I bought the device from Staples was that I prefer to shop local rather than order on line. Of course shopping at Staples is hardly shopping local, but at least I wasn’t buying direct from Amazon, right? Well, okay, Amazon got a big chunk of the money I spent on that Kindle, Staples Inc. of Framingham MA got most of the rest, and only peanuts remained in Humboldt County, where I live. But I wanted to buy from somebody I could talk to, not just an ordering page on Amazon’s website. The personal touch.

That was a mistake. The device came with no written instructions, and the sales clerk didn’t know how to open the package, much less how to make the Kindle work. I took it home and found out I had to register my new toy before I could use it. With no instructions, and little knack for modern electronic devices, I was frustrated. I went to the Amazon website and found no instructions there (I’m not saying there were no instructions, just that I couldn’t find them), but found a suggestion that I snoop into some users’ ongoing discussions; chats, I guess they’re called. There I found another would-be Kindle owner who had complained of the same problem. He didn’t know how to register his Kindle. He was advised by some genius to order his Kindle from Amazon directly, and it would come already registered in his name.

So I broke down. I returned the Kindle to Staples for a full refund and ordered another one on-line, from the almighty Amazon. It arrived three days later, already registered in my name. Now all I had to do was go to the instructions that were included, not on paper of course, but as a document I could read. On the Kindle. Square one, almost.

Well, I called my friend Eric, who had recommended the Kindle Paperwhite in the first place, and he kindly walked me through the labyrinth of steps I needed to make to get what I wanted from my new toy.

It turns out it’s not impossible. Now I’ve already bought several books—ebooks, that is—and some of them were dirt cheap or even free! I have a couple of long trips coming up, and I’ll be able to carry in one pocket a whole library of literature for the airplanes and airports.

So it wasn’t impossible. But it still wasn’t easy for me, as a lifelong bibliophile, to use an alternative to a real book printed on paper. It wasn’t easy for me as a small-press publisher to support a business model that changed so many rules of the publishing game without asking for my permission. It wasn’t easy for me, as a former bookseller, to support the company that has wrecked and rubbed out so many mom & pop independent stores and replaced them with impersonal service from a giant in Seattle, no matter how efficient that service might be.

Most of all it hasn’t been easy for me to own, use, even enjoy my Kindle knowing how Susan, who is also a lifelong bibliophile, a small-press publisher, and a former bookseller, not to mention my traveling companion, my business partner, and the love of my life, feels about ebooks vs. real books. Well, there had to be a pretty big reason for me to buy this expensive little toy.

There was. There is. I have published five novels as ebooks, resorting to that option after being turned down by print publishers large and small. I thought and still think these books deserved to be read. For that matter, I wanted to read them myself, and so I did. And so can you, if you own an ebook reading device. I can promise you a good read with any of my ebooks. I say that as a self-promoting author, and also as a hand-selling former bookstore clerk. Why not spend four bucks to read treasure like Geronimo’s Skull?

 §§§

And now a word from our sponsor:

The  following ebook is available from Amazon Kindle and BN Nook.

GERONIMO’S SKULL

a novel by

John M. Daniel

On the night of June 8, 1918, five officers in the U.S. Army 11th Field Artillery, all of them recent Yale graduates and members in the secret society Skull and Bones, sneaked into the Apache grave-yard at Fort Sill Oklahoma, opened the tomb of Geronimo the Terrible, and stole his skull.

$4.99, Kindle Edition: www.amazon.com

$4.99, Nook Book: www.bn.com

Whatever happened to that skull, and whatever happened to the ringleader of that moonless, midnight raid?

This legendary crime and its consequences are central to John M. Daniel’s novel Geronimo’s Skull, which takes place over twenty-five years in the early twentieth century, from the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904 to the stock market crash in 1929. It tells the story of Fergus Powers, and his development from a boy of nine, fascinated by energy and machinery, to a young man in his thirties, poised to take charge of a failing company and turn it into the largest manufacturer of oil drilling equipment in the world.

Geronimo’s Skull is romantic and fantastic, full of love and war, friendship and family, magic, danger, and moral quandary. Fergus Powers, the leader of the grave-robbers, is the novel’s guilty hero, hounded for the balance of the book by the Indian warrior’s ghost.

Fergus Powers is a complex man, both modest and charismatic. A skillful, persuasive manipulator of people, he is the captain of the Yale baseball team and the youngest Major in the history of the United States Army. He is a teetotaler, a lover, a dutiful son and responsible brother, a wanderer, a spy, and a man with a consuming goal: to keep a promise he made when was nine years old.

JOHN M. DANIEL is a freelance editor and writer. He has published dozens of stories in literary magazines and is the author of fourteen books, including five mystery novels, two of which (The Poet's Funeral and Hooperman) earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. He and his wife, Susan, own a small-press publishing company. They live in Humboldt County, California, with their charming, headstrong cat companion, Raney.

§§§

Call for submissions: Your 99-Word Stories

The deadline for January’s 99-word story submissions is January First. The stories will appear on my blog post for January 9.

note: this 99-word story feature is a game, not a contest. Obey the rules and I’ll include your story. I may edit the story to make it stronger, and it’s understood that you will submit to my editing willingly. That’s an unwritten rule.

Rules for the 99-word story feature are as follows:

1. Your story must be 99 words long, exactly.

2. One story per writer, per month.

3. The story must be a story. That means it needs plot (something or somebody has to change), characters, and conflict.

4. The story must be inspired by the prompt I assign.

5. The deadline: the first of the month. Stories will appear on this blog the second Saturday of the month.

6. I will copy edit the story. The author of the story retains all rights.

7. Email me your story (in the body of your email, or as a Word attachment) to: jmd@danielpublishing.com

THIS MONTH’S PROMPT FOR NEXT MONTH’S 99-WORD STORY: Write a story in 99 words, inspired by the words “This time I really mean it.” That can be your title, or your first or last sentence, or just the theme of the story. Reread Rule 3, above; this must be a story, not just an essay. If I receive your story by January 1, and  if you follow the rules, your story will appear on this blog January 9.

§§§

Thank you for tuning in. I hope you’ll be back next week, when you'll get a chance to read some 99-word stories about family secrets. Meanwhile, find joy in reading and/or writing stories!

http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/index.html