Story published five years after winning award

Last year at about this time, I launched my first e-book, "The Feast of Stevens," though it's hard to call it a "book" when it's less than 5,000 words.

This year, I'm releasing another e-short-story, "Mighty Fortress." This story, under its previous title "Ein Feste Burg," won First Place at the 2007 Royal Palm Literary Awards in the Best Short Story Unpublished category. So here it is, published, after five years, a title change, and a kick-tail edit.

It's not as if I spent the last five years collecting rejections of this story. No, I gave up even trying to place it because I could not find a venue that would accept a 4,000-word historical short story. Every publication I could find required lower word counts than that. And as my aforementioned tail-kicking editor, Kat Heckenbach would tell you, this story was already too sparse.

So it was liberating when Kat told me I needed to add things. With no concerns about arbitrary word count limits, I was able to reveal much more about Pastor Gottlieb, the story's hero.

This is the great thing about e-publishing. It doesn't matter whether I call it a book or not. The story can be, as a pastor of mine used to say, "as long as a piece of string." Which is to say, as long as it needs to be.

I now have three stories on Smashwords, two of which are Christmas stories and all of which can be downloaded for free through January 6:

Mighty Fortress
Pastor Gottlieb helps a Jewish family escape the Nazis, but their elderly grandmother must stay behind. He hides her in the church, caring for her and learning from her, until one fateful Christmas Eve.

The Feast of Stevens
On a space station far from Earth, animal liberationists inadvertently jeopardize thirty-eight innocent turkeys. The station’s cook, Stevens, ensures the fowl shall not have died in vain. In this science fiction Christmas comedy, cultures clash, hearts are won, and dinner is served.

The Last Buffalo
The legendary White Buffalo Calf Woman said that when the last buffalo dies, the world will end. The zookeeper caring for the only remaining American Bison is about to see that prophecy fulfilled.

Next time, I'll discuss how I came to write two such drastically different Christmas stories as "The Feast of Stevens" and "Mighty Fortress."

Mad Cow conquers a classic

When I asked my patient other half, "If I buy tickets to this play, will you come with me?" his only question was "when?"

It seems to me that few modern men are interested in classical theater, and the audience at the theater reinforced the idea. I believe the women outnumbered the men two to one. Almost as bad a ratio as at a figure skating show.

Well, the absent fellas don't know what they're missing. The Mad Cow Theatre Company's production of She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith is brilliant.

Mad Cow Theater Company photo of
Elizabeth Takacs as Constance Neville
and Melanie Whipple as Kate Hardcastle

Mad Cow Theatre is tucked into the ground floor of a downtown office building. The cast and crew make excellent use of a quirky space: The theater is L-shaped, with the stage in the corner and the seats in each branch. It's a cozy house -- seating about 220-250 people, I guesstimate -- so the performance really is intimate. When characters break into soliloquy, they really are talking to you.

The cast is fabulous. Brian Brightman as Marlow and Melanie Whipple as Kate are especially charming in their repartee. Engaging, star-quality performances.

In an article about Oliver Goldsmith published in 1935, Alice B. Fort & Herbert S. Kates wrote: "this play sounded the keynote of Goldsmith's 'mission' . . . to render more natural the comedy of his time and to strike a decisive blow at the 'genteel' or 'sentimental' comedy of his contemporaries." She Stoops to Conquer may not be considered natural by modern standards, but it is nevertheless fresh and delightful.

It's a shame that such a small house was not sold out on a Saturday night. It was nearly full, but still, I had thought a play this clever and funny, performed by such outstanding actors, could fill even a large auditorium.

Perhaps it's because not many people have other halves who enjoy theater as much as mine does. Or maybe it's that not many people offer to buy the tickets.

She Stoops to Conquer is playing at the Mad Cow Theatre through Dec. 19. If you enjoy comedy, buy the tickets. You'll love it.

Breaking out and splashing down

I want to give a Blatant Plug to P.A. Baines, the first member of the New Authors Fellowship to land a book contract. His Alpha, renamed Alpha Redemption, will be published this fall by Splashdown Books. At left is the cover art by Zoë Demaré, also of the NAF.

The fellowship grew out of the critique-partner atmosphere of last year's Marcher Lord Select contest. I post about once a month on the Fellowship blog.

Speaking of contests, my poorly named A Gift With Which To Serve was a runner up in the Novel Journey contest, apparently getting no help from a name change to The Prophet's Chronicle. The judges wrote, "Very good story. Initial set of characters needs work--tripped from the beginning, not realizing there were three different people on stage. A little smoothing out and this piece could be awesome!"

Slightly discouraging, because I thought I'd smoothed this opening out already. Ah well. The folks at my new, live-in-person critique group, Word Weavers, can have at it next month.

Cancel this "special order"

This just in, from one of our faithful correspondents:

I have received an e-mail that looks like it is from Amazon.com but is not. I am sure it is a phishing scam.

The mail is very well done in that it has the Amazon logo and claims to be from "order-update@amazon.com.
It tells you to click on the attached link for an update on your order status.

The tip-off for me was: 1. I have no current order with Amazon, and 2. rather than a hot link to UPS as I would expect from Amazon, the mail had an attachment that was a .zip file with the instruction to open the zip file for order update information.… This one is pretty sneaky in that is does not try to scare you, e.g. "your credit card data is wrong," or sell you something. But I'm positive the zip file would unload some nasty bit of malware that would either steal my data or just trash the hard drive.

Malware, indeed. Akin to the "special delivery" e-mail noted earlier, this type of scam often involves software that logs your keystrokes, giving a hacker access to the things you use your computer for, like shopping and banking, either of which can get the hacker your credit card number. Alternatively, if you are using a Windoze computer, malware can turn your PC into a "zombie," generating even more spam to the unsuspecting masses.

For more information, visit Symantec's Web site.

Like American Idol -- without Simon Cowell

Marcher Lord Press, which publishes Christian speculative fiction, is putting a new spin on publishing.

"Marcher Lord Select is American Idol meets book acquisitions," says publisher Jeff Gerke. About 40 completed manuscripts will be presented, and readers will decide which one should be published.

The contest will proceed in phases. In each subsequent round, voters will get larger glimpses of the competing manuscripts.

The first phase will consist only of the book's title, genre, length, a 20-word premise, and a 100-word back cover copy teaser blurb. Voters will cut the entries from 40 to 20 based on these items alone.

Following rounds will provide voters with a 1-page synopsis, the first 500 words of the book, the first 30 pages of the book, and, in the final round, the first 60 pages of the book.

The winner of the final round will be published by Marcher Lord Press in Spring 2010.

Marcher Lord Select begins Nov. 1, 2009 and runs until January or February 2010. All voting, discussions and other Marcher Lord Select activities will take place at The Anomaly forums in the Marcher Lord Select subforum. Free registration is required.

Contestants are admitted by invitation only, but anyone may register to vote for the winner.

"In order for this to work as we're envisioning," Gerke says, "we need lots and lots of voters. So even if you're not a fan of Christian science fiction or fantasy, I'm sure you love letting your voice be heard about what constitutes good Christian fiction. So come on out and join the fun!"

Fair disclosure: My book is entered in this contest. Gerke encourages authors to direct as many people as they like to the contest, as long as they don't campaign for their books in the forums.

'Fun' with M$ Office.2

For ages, I have wrestled with Entourage, which I love. I really do. But, like the people I love, it sometimes does things in a way that's not the way I would have done it if I were them.

Entourage's Tasks list, for example, can be sorted by due date, or priority, or alphabetically. But, given three items of equal importance with the same due date, it won't let you manually move one to the top because it's a prerequisite for another. Or move one to the bottom because it can't be done because some prerequisite piece of the project yet to be recieved from another person or department.

And there's no obvious way to export the Task list as an editable text file.

Well, I finally discovered this article which describes how to get Tasks out of Entourage using BBEdit. Why I never found it before, I can't imagine. Perhaps it's Google page rank wasn't high enough before. I don't know. I'm just glad to finally be able to get my Tasks out of Entourage and into something editable.

The article was written in 2005, but I tried the technique using BBEdit's sibling, TextWrangler, and it worked just as well. Dragging into Word, however, copies only the first item in a group. So you have to drag each task individually. That means if you have 12 tasks, it will take you 12 times as long to copy them into Word as into TextWrangler.

Oddly, while Word only picks up the first item in a grouped list of tasks, Apple's TextEdit only picks up the last. So TextWrangler rules.

Once you get the tasks out of Entourage and into TextWrangler or BBEdit, they can then be imported into OmniOutliner for even more control. Love it.

This simple drag-and-drop export method also works with Notes and Calendar items.

If only the things ON my to-do list could be handled so easily.

Connections are good

After gathering dust for many years, my short story The Last Buffalo has been cleaned up and given its debut. It appears in the 2009 Coffee House Fiction anthology.

I was directed to Coffee House Fiction by an entry in Hope Clark's "Funds for Writers" newsletter. I met Hope at last year's Florida Writers' Association conference. And I joined the association on the recommendation of Jim Lussier, whom I met in connection with an arts project for OBJ.

So this post is just a big thank you to everyone in the chain.

Webmasters hate old eyeballs

How else can one explain the vast number of Web sites that use teeny gray text? Today I visited a blog that had white text on a black background. I've also seen brown text on a fake parchment background.

These myopia-disdaining designers are the reason the Firefox plug-in Accessibar is my new favorite gadget.

According to Aycan Gulez at Wow Web Designs, designers like gray text better than black because it's more attractive when looking at the page as a whole. "Unfortunately, some visual designers sacrifice readability for a slight increase in visual appeal because they do not really read the text on screen," he writes. "They treat it as a large block of horizontal lines, and the darker those lines are the uglier they look."

Well, that depends on how you define "ugly." I find illegibility ugly.

I suppose my perspective is different because I've worked in print journalism so long. The publisher would chew me out if I printed news stories in gray.

If form follows function, and the function is to disseminate information, then the form should be one that allows the information to be read by the greatest number of people.

Even myopic people.

Because I said so

This video, "The Mom Song" is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages. Anyone who is a mom or who ever had a mom will appreciate it.

What the Pickens

T. Boone Pickens met with American City Business Journals editors at their annual meeting this week. Pickens explained his plan for diversifying America's energy sources.

His opinion on the two major parties' presidential candidates is particularly interesting: "They do not know anything about energy."



Pickens spent an hour and a half with ACBJ's editors. As of this writing, two video excerpts have been posted. I anticipate more to come.

Great Leadership

In Demon-haunted World, Carl Sagan pointed out that the founders of our nation were a highly educated group of philosophical thinkers—products of the Enlightenment.

Sagan noted that, at the founding, the population was about 2.5 million. At the time he wrote, the population was about ten times more. Now, it is even greater. Then, Sagan asks this profound question:

"If there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jeffersons today.

"Where are they?"

Sagan wrote that book in 1995. We're still waiting for the answer. Ronald Reagan suggested that the great leaders were probably in business, but given what's been going on in the Wall Street soap opera these days, I'm not so sure.

Here, courtesy of The Teaching Company, are a couple of freebies--lectures that examine two great leaders: Lincoln and Churchill.

We still may not have leaders of this caliber today, but we can still look to the past--since hindsight is so much more acute than foresight--for what defines a great leader.

Sportsmanship — or sportswomanship, as the case may be

One of our favorite modern complaints is that the Olympics are too politicized. We imagine that the ancient games were pure and unsullied by such vulgarity.

Although the ancient games of Olympia were a sacred act of devotion to the Greek gods, they were not free of politicking.

The people of Elis organized the first games at Olympia, but other Greek city-states often tried to gain control of the area. The nearby city of Pisa (the Greek one, not the Italian one) did so several times. In 364 B.C., during one such occupation, the Eleans' battle against the Pisatans not only took place during the games -- a violation of the vaunted Olympic Truce -- but took place on the field of Olympia, while the wrestling portion of the pentathlon was taking place.

I learned this, and much more, from Ancient Origins of the Olympic Games, a lecture that's available for free download through Sept. 4 from The Teaching Company.

I listen to audiobooks, podcasts, and lectures during my commute, to keep the time from being a total loss. These lectures were a great use of time, not least for the story of Kallipateira, a widow who trained her son for the games. She accompanied him to Olympia, even though women (except, interestingly, young unmarried ones) were forbidden to attend on pain of death. She disguised herself as a man but was -- shall we say -- exposed when she leapt over a barrier after her son's victory. The judges pardoned her, not only because her son had won, but because her father, three brothers, and a nephew were all Olympic victors.

Yeah. Way more entertaining than top 40 radio.

"Destroying the status quo"

A fellow writer pointed me to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. She pointed out that this seems to be doing for film what print-on-demand is doing for publishing.

Dr. Horrible is produced by Joss Whedon, whose prior work includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dr. Horrible is a supervillain musical (of which, Whedon writes, "there are too few").

If you visit the Dr. Horrible Web site, be sure to read Whedon's "Master Plan," in which he outlines why he chose to release his film this way.

It's a good film—both amusing and thought-provoking. It has a catchy soundtrack, too.

Warning: If you're as much of a prude as I am, you'll be annoyed by a few naughty bits of dialog and lyric. If you're more of a prude than me, you might even be offended. If you're like most Americans, though, you'll be wondering why I characterize those bits as "naughty."

Putting the C in YMCA

The Dr. Phillips YMCA Family Center is holding a Back to School Community Prayer Breakfast Aug. 7, 2008, at 7:30 a.m.

I would have liked to put this in the paper, but there’s just no place for it, because it’s a back-to-school event, not a business event. I explained this to the PR person, and she replied that she knew that but submitted it anyway, “since everyone needs prayers for their businesses to last through the economy.”

And you know, she's got a point.

Off the map

Jeff Gerke, founder of one of my favorite online hangouts, Where the Map Ends, is launching an independent publishing company, Marcher Lord Press. He recently posted the prologue to MLP's first release, Hero, Second Class, which Jeff describes as "a laugh-out-loud comic fantasy." I, for one, am really looking forward to this book. And I really did laugh out loud.