My story “Grace, Period” is now on-line at Plots With Guns. I had a lot of fun reading it and you should all go check it out.

Liner notes:

This story is a sequel of sorts to “Goodnight, Gracie“, also published at Plots With Guns. Do not go and read it, though, as it contains certain spoilers for “Grace, Period”.

Though there’s plenty of adult content – sex, violence, and, especially, profanity – this story was intentionally styled as the sort of thing you might see in Ellery Queen’s or Alfred Hitchcock’s, if they ran this sort of thing, especially in the pacing. This isn’t a dirge, a long, lonely plod to a tragic ending; it’s a mambo. Conga line, everyone!

The story takes a few jabs at the bookselling world, but it’s not really a satire. More of an in joke for those who follow publishing new. I’m not really suggesting that strong-arm tactics could save bookstores. Although now that I think about it… The specific “bix box” bookstore I describe is modeled after the Borders where my writing group meets.

With the exception of Tommy Roccaforte, all the Italian names here are taken from well-known drummers:

Pete Morello – inspired by Joe Morello, jazz drummer for Dave Brubeck, who inspired me to use these names. Sadly, he died before this story was published. My all-too-predictable reaction was, “Joe Morello was still alive?!?”

Sal Porcaro – Jeff Porcaro, founding member of the rock group Toto and noted session drummer. He played on albums by Steely Dan, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, and many, many others.

Vito “The Libido” Fontana – DJ Fontana, Elvis’s drummer. DJ is from my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, and was the house drummer for the Louisiana Hayride, where Elvis first gained popularity.

Carlo Garibaldi – David Garibaldi, drummer for the influential funk group Tower of Power.

Finally, if you have half as much fun reading this story as I had writing it, well, you had fun. This story was as much fun to write as anything I’ve *ever* written. I hope it shows.

Everyone saw the death car as it roared down the sleepy country byway, the demented tramp laughing at the wheel, Inis St. Erme sprawled beside him, already dead or dying. A family saw it as it swerved to strike their beloved St. Bernard. An artist saw it as it sped through his semi-circular drive, scattering his easels and grinding the paintings beneath its wheels.

John Flail, however, did not see it, as it ran him down from behind.

And, more remarkably, Henry Riddle did not see it either, despite the fact that the car he himself drove sat stalled at the entrance to Swamp Road, at the other end of which the car was found. A half-dozen witnesses saw the car, with St. Erme slumped to the side, his arm hanging down against the door, but Riddle did not.

The horror would not be real until they found St. Erme’s body, and it was Riddle himself that found it, as a hastily assembled group searched the swamp near where the car was discovered. Half-sunk in the muck it was, with only an arm visible. An arm without a hand.

The reader can see as well as Riddle that all the signs point to one man as the killer. But Riddle won’t believe it, so he sits writing in a dead man’s house and tries to find another explanation, an explanation that sounds at first like a madman’s raving, but then, incredibly, it begins to make sense. And the reader begins to doubt his own sanity.

This brief description doesn’t do justice to the oddness of Joel Townsley Rogers’ 1945 novel The Red Right Hand. The oppressive atmosphere of insanity pervades every scene, every word even (though I never actually though myself insane; no more than usual, anyway). To my mind the novel was clearly influenced by Cornell Woolrich, and not just in the tone – outrageous coincidences abound, for example, and the ultimate explanation is bizarrely far-fetched. The last twenty pages essentially rewrite every single event that precedes them. And yes, there’s a damn good reason that right hand is missing.

In fact, the solution is so convoluted that I think Rogers made a mistake. The killer does one thing that he would never have done had he known… but by that time, he did know. Also, it was half an hour after I finished the book that I realized who one of the bodies belonged to.

This book doesn’t have Woolrich’s propulsive narrative drive – the first forty pages are slow going – but once it got moving I couldn’t put it down. It’s certainly not a great book, but it’s a really good one, and it’s very much out of the ordinary, so if you like your mysteries mixed with a little horror (two great things that go great together), this book will fill the bill.

Over the past year I’ve created a few Kindle books for my friends Victor Gischler and Steven Torres, and along the way I’ve learned a few things about the process, mostly through trial and error. Here, then, is the condensed version of the wisdom I have learned along the way:

1. Download Mobipocket Creator. Mobipocket was purchased by Amazon a few years ago, and it’s the native format for Kindle books. It’s not the best eBook creator – my favorite is Sigil – but all of the others use the EPUB format, and there are various problems converting to Kindle.
2. If you don’t have a Kindle, download the Kindle Previewer. This little program will save your butt many, many times. If you haven’t checked your book on either the Previewer or the Kindle itself, don’t publish it!
3. Create your cover art. You don’t have to be a brilliant artist to do this. The limit of my art “skills” is taking a stock image and slapping on some text. Here are a few tips:

   — There are many sources of stock images on the web. My own favorite is Shutterstock. Deviant Art is a good source of artwork in addition to photographs. You can also find an image you like in Flickr and contact the artist to purchase the appropriate rights.

   — The final size of your cover art should be 800 pixels high by 600 pixels wide. Having said this, I urge you to actually work with the largest size image available. Just make sure it has a 4:3 ration of height to width. For example, the cover for Killing Ways 2: Urban Stories began life at a resolution of 5461 by 4096, which is within a fraction of 4:3.

   — The image editing program called Paint is included with every copy of Windows, and does a decent job, but if you don’t have anything better you may want to download GIMP, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It’s free, and quite powerful. GIMP has one particular function that Paint doesn’t – you can create layers for each of your design elements – for example, the title text, the author’s byline, and the base image itself. This makes it very easy to change something if you don’t like it.

   — On the Kindle, images tend to look darker than they do on your PC screen, even in the Kindle previewer. For dark images, you will want to increase the brightness.

4. Convert your document to HTML file(s). I prefer to create one file per chapter (or story), as it makes editing them easier. I’m not going to go into all of the details of editing HTML but here are the basics:

   — Do NOT just export from Microsoft Word to HTML. When you do this Word basically opens the file, pukes in it, and walks away trying to look nonchalant.

   Instead, create a new empty text file. If the sections will have names that naturally indicate their sequence (“Chapter One”), rename the file to “Chapter One.html”. If the names aren’t in sequence, put a number on the front to indicate the order. For example, if you first story is named “West, Texas”, the file name would be “1 – West, Texas.html”.

   — Once the file is created, copy all the text from your original document and paste it in the file. This will give you nice, clean text, but will remove all the formatting. You’ll need to add the HTML tags on your own. Your title should be surrounded by <h2> tags, for example: <h2>West, Texas</h2>. If this is a multi-author anthology and you need to include a byline, use <h3> tags.

   Each paragraph should be surrounded by <p> tags:
   <p>Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.</p>
   In Notepad you can easily find where your paragraphs begin and end by pulling down the “Format” menu and turning off Word Wrap. Be sure to save your changes when done.

   — As I said, pasting plain text will remove all the formatting. You will need to find all instances of italic, bold, or underlined text and surround them with, respectively, <i>, <b>, and <u> tags. Word will let you search for specific formats. Press Control-F to bring up the Find dialog, then click the “More” button. In the expanded dialog click the “Format” button, and click “Font” from the pop-up menu. Then you’ll be able to find all instances of italic or other formatted text.

   — If you want to include images in the contents of your book – author photos, perhaps – put them in the same directory as the HTML files and include them in the HTML text using an image tag:
   <img src="GrahamPowell.jpg"/>
   Again, that image must be copied to the same directory as the HTML file that contains the <img> tag.

   — Now you’re almost done. Include the following code at the beginning of each HTML file:
   <html>
<head>
<title>Chapter Title</title>
<style type="text/css">
p {text-indent: 2em}
h1 {text-align: center}
h2 {text-align: center}
h3 {text-align: center}
</style>
</head>
<body>

   Replace the text “Chapter Title” with the title of the chapter. Now paste this code at the end of each file:
   </body>
</html>

   The first code block indents each paragraph by the width of two em-dashes, and centers all the text inside the <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags. The second block closes all the HTML tags.

   Yes, creating clean HTML is the most tedious part of making the book, but it’s very important if you want your text to be formatted correctly and consistently.

5. Now you’ve created your cover art and the HTML files that will make up the content. You’re FINALLY ready to create the book in Mobipocket. Launch Mobipocket Creator and create a new publication. You’ll be prompted for a name. Enter the title and click “Create” to accept the defaults for the rest:
   

   — Mobipocket will now take you to a list of files included in this publication. At first it will be empty. You can click the “Add File” button or just drag and drop all your files onto this space. If you drag and drop them they will probably not be in the right order. To reorder, click on a file name and use the up and down arrow buttons to change the order. When you’re done you should have a list of all your files in the correct order:
   

   — Now you’ll need to add any images that appear in the body of your book (note: this does not include the cover). You can either copy them to the publication’s directory yourself, or simply add them the same way you added the HTML files, then remove them. Adding them copies them to the directory, but removing them does not delete them. If you don’t remove them, each image will appear on its own page in the finished document.

   — Now let’s add the cover image. In the links on the left-hand side of the display, click “Cover Image”. This will display the “Add Cover Image” button. Click it and select your cover image:
   

   Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

   —Next up: the Table of Contents. Click the “Table of Contents” link in the left-hand column, then click the “Add a Table of Contents” button. You can change the header text if you want to. Since we used the <h2> tag for chapter headings, we’ll use that to generate the entries in the table of contents. If you have multiple levels, for example “Book One”, “Chapter 5″, you can use different size headings and have them appear in heirarchical order. But the simplest is just to use h2. Please note you don’t need to use the angle brackets:
   

   Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

   — Now click the “Metadata” link on the left side. At a minimum, make sure you enter the book’s title and the author’s or editor’s name. Fill in as much other information as you like:
   

   As before, you must scroll down and click “Update” or these changes will not be saved.

   — Before we can complete making changes to the book, we’ll need to build it. Click on the “Build” button on the toolbar at the top of the window. Don’t choose to use compression or encryption, just click the “Build” button in the middle of the page:
   

   Once complete, click “Go back to the publication files”:
   

   — Now, click on the “Guide” link on the left-hand side. The guide sets up certain landmarks inside the book that the Kindle uses for navigation. The “coverpage” item is set automatically, and once we built the book, the “toc” item is also created. The “start” item tells the Kindle what to display when a reader opens a book for the first time. By default, this is the first page of content from the first file (in this example, “1 – West, Texas.html”). If this is a collection of short stories, you may want the reader to begin at the table of contents instead.

   To do this, click the “New Guide Item” button. In the “Type” column, select “start”. This will automatically set the item title to “Startup Page”. Next, copy the file name from the toc item and paste in into the same field for the start item. This filename should be mbp_toc.html and is generated automatically:
   

   Add additional items as required. As always, click the “Update” button or your changes will be lost.

   Now click the “Build” button and rebuild your book. You are nearly done.

6. The final step is to edit the Table of Contents. This step is only required if you will need to set up categories or headings for your stories.

   Once the build is complete, make sure the option “Open folder containing the eBook” is selected and click “OK”. You’ll see a folder that looks something like this:
   

   You’re looking for the file named “mbp_toc.html”. Click on this file with the right mouse button and select “Edit” from the pop-up menu. This should open the file in Notepad. Again, general HTML editing is outside the scope of this article, but you can modify this file as required. Do not edit the links, however, as these are required for the table of contents to work.

   Once you have finished editing this file, rebuild the book before you make any more changes to the book. If you make any changes, the table of contents will be automatically regenerated and any modifications will be lost.

7. Preview the book. Be sure to check the cover, the table of contents, and every single page. Have your friends and family check it. The more eyeballs go over it, the more chance you’ll find all the errors, and there probably will be some. If so, correct them, rebuild the book, and check again.
8. It’s Miller time! Your book is complete. Upload the finished with extension .prc to Amazon, along with your cover image. Watch as your bank account swells, along with your head.

Obviously I can’t cover every possible combination of elements you might want to use, but this should help you avoid the most common pitfalls.

This past weekend I watched a really good movie called Ride The High Country. An old lawman and gunfighter takes a job protecting a shipment of gold. As he arrives in town he meets an old friend, and asks him if he wants a job helping out. So they, and the friend’s young partner, head off to the remote mining camp to pick up the gold.

Two old cowboy actors, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, star as the two old cowboys, and the movie is really about getting old. Are you the same man you used to be if you can’t do the things you once did? It’s an old-fashioned Western, with just enough melodrama and just enough gunplay, but it got me thinking about another Western – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

That movie debuted just seven years after Ride, and despite the huge differences in style and perspective, they do have some similarities. Both have a sort of sad, elegiac tone. In Ride it’s because these two old men have reached the end of their line. In Butch Cassidy it’s because the new West has no place for outlaws. They will be driven out, hunted to extinction.

I had to wonder, watching these two movies only a month or six weeks apart, if a little of the lament in Butch Cassidy wasn’t for the kind of people who watch the old Westerns. Society was changing, and fast, and even sophisticated cowboy flicks such as Shane semed simple-minded in the world of M*A*S*H.

It’s not too surprising, I guess. Into the middle decades of the 20th century there were lots of people in this country who lived in ways not too different from the cowboys they watched on the screen, and not too different from others throughout the world. But just since 1970 or so, many of the old certanties of life have changed. (Many for the better, let’s not forget.) Out with the old, in with the new.

Now I don’t believe that America ever really loses its innocence – each generation, and each person, loses that on their own – but I do wish we were still a country that could go see a movie about heroes on horseback wearing white hats, and the black-hatted baddies who were bound to lose in the end.

Well, there’s still Rango. That’s something.

So a few weeks ago Patti Abbott issued a new flash fiction challenge: incorporate the sentence “I really don’t mind the scars” into a story of 800 or so words. An idea came to me in a (heh) flash. So without furher ado, I present:

The Tale of the Tape

by Graham Powell

“I really don’t mind the scars.”

He turned the shuttle wheel and jogged back ten seconds, pressed pause, and noted the time on his pad. A smile as he played it forward again, scribbling down her words. That would make the cut for sure.

The woman was saying, “I tell myself it was a trade – yes, I got this” – she waved a hand at the mottled blotches that ran from under her collar, across her cheek, and to the side of her head, covering a ruined ear – “but I also saved a child’s life. I mean, who wouldn’t take that deal?”

She was good, really good, modest but not shy. She didn’t acknowledge the scars again, but you couldn’t look away from them, the plain evidence of what she’d done.

He sipped his coffee and squinted at his pad. The editing booth was dark except for the light from the monitor. Aside from the scars, the woman was cute in an 80s sort of way, hair teased and hairsprayed, cheeks with just a hint of baby fat. She looked like Markie Post on Night Court, circa 1988.

No one remembers Markie Post, he thought.

Now she was looking down at her hands in her lap as they twisted round each other. When she looked up her eyes were wet. Her voice cracked as she said, “I only wish I could have saved them both.”

Gold, that was pure fucking gold. There was an award out there somewhere for this. He could see it on his desk already.

The dipshit host nearly let her off the hook then, taking a break to let her regain her composure. It was his first interview, he was young, inexperienced, didn’t know when to step on the gas. A twist of the wheel and footage of the woman smiling ruefully as she wiped away tears, sipping water, a PA fixing her hair and makeup, all flashed by at the speed of a Keystone Kops movie.

As she settled back in her chair and began speaking, he slowed the tape to normal speed. “…so I was out jogging, like I do every morning,” she said. “I’d seen the new family there, seen the kids playing there in the street, so when I saw the fire…” She shrugged. “I knew I had to do something.”

That shrug. He paused the tape and looked closer, at the modest little smile that pulled at the scar tissue. She loved the attention. Loved it. This was going to make her a star.

He spent an hour logging the rest of the interview then popped out the disc and loaded the surveillance footage.

There was a convenience store on the corner, just half a block from the house, and it had caught most of the action. A digital readout in the lower right-hand corner displayed the time. He jumped ahead to 5:45am.

Even in black and white you could tell the old Victorian had seen better days. The side yard had been covered in gravel for use as a parking lot, and held an assortment of junkers, beat up old imports and big American land yachts that had been new when Kojak was on the air.

5:52am. There was a flash in a window near the back of the house, down near the ground. He knew from the police report that this was a basement window, where the water heaters were. A gas leak, maybe. The window brightened slowly, almost imperceptibly, until the flames themselves were visible, licking up the side of the house. And here came the woman, sprinting into the bottom of the frame.

She banged on the front door, wrestled it open, darted inside. At 5:56 she reappeared, and elderly woman shuffling along behind her in a gown and slippers. The grandmother, he knew. The whole downstairs was brilliantly illuminated now, but the grandmother pointed back into the house, and the woman went.

Nothing for five minutes. Then, at 6:01am exactly, the upstairs bedroom at the front of the house collapsed into the entry hall, and nine-year-old Jasmine McDonald died.

Two minutes more, and the woman managed to crawl through the wrecked front door with Jasmine’s sister Angela tucked under her arm.

He hit rewind and picked up his pad. And managed to dump hot coffee directly onto his crotch.

Cursing, he jumped up and swatted at his pants, brushing most of the coffee to the floor. Much of the rest he blotted up using his cuffs. When he saw the display still zipping back in time he slapped at the pause button. It stopped at 3:15.

His eyes narrowed. No way.

Rewind to 3:13. Play.

No fucking WAY.

A familiar figure stole up the street, keeping to the shadows. In her right hand was – what? A gas can? It looked like a gas can.

Up to the house, but this time around to the back. The figure disappeared, down a flight of stairs to the basement. She was in the house this time for three minutes and forty seconds, then up the stairs, down the street, out of the frame.

He sat back, pulling at his lip. An extreme case of Munchausen’s-by-proxy – she got to play the hero. The fire, though, wouldn’t follow the plan. A child was dead, and the woman scarred for life. But that wasn’t so bad, not if she wanted attention. She’d have all she wanted now.

More than she wanted, when this tape hit the air.

He smiled. Pulitzer, for sure.