A Bojangles day

He danced for those at minstrel shows and county fairs
throughout the south
He spoke through tears of 15 years how his dog and him
traveled about
The dog up and died, he up and died
And after 20 years he still grieves

-- Mr. Bojangles by Jerry Jeff Walker

My son called last night from Ohio. There were tears hiding at the edges of his voice, but they stayed there; he doesn't like for me to hear him cry.

"I had to put Schatzie to sleep," he said. "The vet said she was just old, that there wasn't any more he could do for her."

In our family, "put to sleep" is a euphemism for euthanasia. Schatzie was a German Shepard that has been an important part of my son's life since high school. He was thirty this year.

And then, this morning, my daughter called to talk about it. She said her brother took it hard, but she was more concerned about my grandson, Dylan, who is nine and has never known a moment when Schatzie wasn't there. It is the first time he has had to deal with the death of a loved one.

I know there are people who will say, "It was just a dog." But I come from a family of dog lovers; I can't remember a time, growing up (and then growing older), when there wasn't a dog lolling around the house somewhere and they have always been as much a part of the family as anyone else.

As we grow older, we become, if not used to the idea, at least inured to the thought of the loss of a pet. My mother used to say that folks get hard-hearted; maybe so, until we have to witness such a loss through the eyes of a child.

So I cried this morning, and said a prayer for Dylan, may he never grow so hard-hearted that a death like this means nothing to him. And I prayed for Schatzie, too. She was a boon companion; may she rest in peace.

Against the grain

The muse didn't just touch me this morning; she smacked me up along side of the head. And so I spent five hours, from six to eleven a.m., writing a piece of flash fiction.

Folks have differing definitions of flash fiction, but the one that seems to be shared more and more is a complete story under one thousand words.

A complete story presents all the necessary elements of fiction -- characterization, setting, conflict and resolution; not an easy chore in so few words. It's like sticking a moving dismount from a balance beam; difficult to pull off but a thing of beauty when done right.

I think that happened today. Against The Grain is a blend of humor, science fiction and murder mystery. It is set at the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle and is the second appearance, in one of my stories, of Seattle Police Detectives John Osbourne and Dorothy Gale. I like the two of them well enough that I hope to involve them in future stories.

Writing this way is so much fun, and when the characters start to whisper in my ear, to tell me how the story should progress, it is such a high. The words rush by and I have no idea the time has passed.

As to whether or not I stuck my dismount; I just sent it off to Jordan and Camille at Everyday Fiction. We shall see.

Today at Everyday Fiction

Another piece of my short fiction, Hair of the Dog, was published today at Everyday Fiction.

It is, no pun intended, a shaggy dog joke; if it were a Monty Python sketch, Eric Idle would be waggling his eyebrows, doing some elbow-poking and spouting "Nudge, nudge; wink, wink. Know what I mean? Know what I mean?" I think all sorts of things are funny, but I have a weakness for this sort of humor; sometimes, I think I should just be taken out back of the barn and shot.

The link below will take you there; give it a look. It won't take long and there's a spot to leave comments or give each story a rating up to five stars.

I hope you like Hair of the Dog. If not, I offer my apologies and the promise that there will be another story along tomorrow to takes its place.

Hair of the Dog at EverydDay Fiction

Making the rounds

I'm getting ready to send Veronica out for another round of potential assignations.

For those few of you who do not know, Veronica is my novel—Lifting Up Veronica. I have been sending the manuscript off, from time to time, since June 2007, trying to find a publisher who will recognize it as the work of genius that it is.

I have hopes, of course; if I didn’t I wouldn’t be wasting the postage, which is starting to mount up. But if I were gambling, at a casino or with a lottery ticket, what I am attempting would be considered a long shot.

According to Harper’s Index, more than 1.4 million different titles were offered for sale in the United States last year; and Bowker, a leading source for bibliographic information, just over fifty thousand of those books were novels.

Average sales for a novel are 500 copies, but that is because seventy-eight percent, a few books shy of thirty-nine thousand, sold fewer than one hundred copies and twenty-two percent sold between one hundred and one hundred thousand copies.

Five novels—.0001 percent of the total—sold over a million copies. Is it any wonder that publishers dream about finding an author who can generate that level of sales, and will move heaven and earth of make certain that their next book is just as popular.

There is a better chance of winning a multi-million-dollar lottery than earning a substantial amount of money through sale of a novel. But then, buying a lottery ticket is a lot less work and a lottery ticket doesn’t cause anywhere near the heartache, stuck away in a drawer.

One ringie-dingie

I don't want to sound like a Luddite, in fact, I love new technology, but there are times that I want to go back to the day when telephones weight twelve pounds, had a crank dial and you had to dial the operator to make a long-distance call.

This week has been one of those times.

I hate my cell phone. No, wait. It's AT&T that I hate. I have had the phone, a nice little Motorola that looks like the communicators in the original Star Trek series, for almost five years. All that time, it hasn't held a charge for more than twenty-four hours, but it has always worked, more or less. But over the past month, it has become more and more cranky, dropping calls at odd moments and refusing to charge.

I took it to one of the AT&T shops that are more ubiquitous than Starbucks.

"It's not the phone," the techgnome at the counter told me. "It's the battery."

"How much is a new one," I asked.

"Beats me," he said. "We don't carry that one anymore."

Right. So, I went looking. Radio Shack. Frye's. One of those "batteries 'r us" kiosks at the mall. Nobody carries that one anymore. When I went back to AT&T, desperate for help, they offered to set me up with a new phone.

Well, okay. I've been an AT&T customer for a long time and I'm currently on a month-to-month agreement, so I figured if I signed a new two-year contract, they would give me a phone. Nope. It seems that when we moved to Seattle, I changed service areas, and all the customer karma I had accumulated was in the other service area.

"You're not eligible for an equipment upgrade until 2010," the AT&T gnome told me. "It's going to cost one-hundred-twenty-five dollars (the minimum); unless you want this one." You could hear the italics in his voice. This one was a piece of junk. I have always been one for the grand gesture, and so I said some unkind words to him and huffed out of the store.

Then, on Monday, I plugged my phone into the charger and and it told me, in bold, block letters, that it no longer would hold a charge. NOT EVER.

And so, I now possess a lovely matte black and brushed chrome paperweight; since it won't let me use it for it's intended purpose, it might as well be a rock. I hate it.

And I will hate it even more when I finally go back into the AT&T store and shell out money for its replacement.

Rust Belt woes

Canton, Ohio, where I lived for most of the seventies, has made a national top ten list. It’s not anything to brag about, though.

According to Forbes Magazine, Canton is one of America’s fastest-dying cities. It’s no surprise that the city is smack in the middle of what has come to be known as the Rust Belt. So are five of the other ten communities—Detroit and Flint, in Michigan, and Cleveland, Dayton and Youngstown, in Ohio.

All six cities have relied upon the steel and automobile industries, for work, for decades.

Forbes based the study on three factors—net population change since 2000, the unemployment rate and the gross domestic product (GDP) of the metropolitan statistical area. Canton hasn’t lost population, in fact it has a net gain of 200 souls, but it’s unemployment rate was 6.7 percent, the fifth worst in the nation and it’s GDP was only .7 per cent. That’s point seven.

On the bright side, if you are working, Canton is an inexpensive place to live, compared to most of the nation. And recent declines in housing costs are negligible. Of course, housing costs never really skyrocketed in the first place.

I’ve said it before—Ohio is a good place to be from.

Hair of the Dog

The Everyday Fiction table of contents for August was posted yesterday. My second story to be accepted by EDF is scheduled to appear on Monday, August 25. It's called Hair of the Dog; a piece of tongue-in-cheek satire that is kinda-sorta about childrens' television programming. I'll mention it again, when it gets closer, and provide a link.

Everyday Fiction has also accepted two more pieces of my flash, I Must to the Barber's Chair, a love story, and In His Prime, a time-travel fantasy. Look for those in September and October.