Many of us love them, but the modern versions have changed a lot.

First, as genres categorizing stories, they’re too general.  Add “psychological” or “legal” to each one and you’ll have too common subgenres. Add “romantic” to each one and you’ll have two more. Second, they’ve become more violent and sexy, the latter now including LGBTQ themes and S&M, so much so that Victorian readers would be shocked. That just means that they’ve kept pace with changing times, of course, and become more realistic.

We’re all familiar with Holmes and Watson, but there were other early characters like Father Brown who began to change the mystery landscape. H. Rider Haggard’s adventure stories (surely Indiana Jones owes something to them) morphed into the thriller genre. (Maybe Star Trek owes something to Jason and the Argonauts, but I digress.)

Even the classical who-done-its (Christie comes to mind) have changed. How-it-was-done has become more important, sometimes blurring the line between mystery and thriller. Many of my own novels lie on that fuzzy boundary. (For example, Rembrandt’s Angel starts like a classical Christie mystery and ends up a thriller.) In my case, I’m experimenting a bit, with telling a good story always the goal.

The usual distinction between the two genres are often as follows: In a mystery, some villain commits a crime, and the protagonist must figure out who did the deed. In a thriller, the reader usually knows who the villain is and what he plans, and readers learn how the protagonist prevents the deed from happening. This is over-simplification, of course, but I ask: Why not both? In particular, a lesser crime can lead to the protagonist discovering a major conspiracy in the process of solving that crime. Even my first published book Full Medical, the plot was like that (so it’s a sci-fi mystery/thriller!).

Does all this confuse readers? I hope not. Fiction is storytelling, and good stories can be told in many ways. While I dedicate Rembrandt’s Angel to Agatha and her two great characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, I don’t follow her plot plan.

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I won’t go into relatively new forms, like flash fiction and some memoirs and celeb books (with the fiction sometimes discovered after publication). I won’t deal with the genre question (I got into trouble on Goodreads for doing so). I’ll only discuss the traditional forms—short stories, novellas, and novels.

The best (and maybe only reasonable) way to separate them is via length. (I’ll probably get in trouble for that too.) Length is measured in thousands of words, abbreviated kwords, whether you use simple or complex ones, erudite ones, or slang and regional language. For me, anything less than 10k is a short story (many ‘zines want less than 3k); between 10k and 40k, it’s a novella; and anything above 40k is a novel, although most novels are 60k and above for the simple reason that publishing even an ebook is expensive, and anything less than 60k is hardly worth it. That doesn’t mean that authors don’t play around with word count. Word count is also a function of genre (again, I won’t discuss that).

There are more subtle ways to separate them that are usually fuzzier and more controversial. The number of characters in a novel is generally much larger than the number in a short story, but you certainly have some novels that have only a few characters (hard to imagine it going the other way—you can probably make a whole short story just listing all the characters in Clancy’s Red Storm Rising). Description of settings in a short story also tends to be sparse and extensive in a novel, as well as the number of settings.

In brief, the short story is bare bones while novellas and novels have more meat in them (apologies to the vegetarians and vegans among my readers). Because of this, some people claim the short story is the hardest to write well. Maybe that explains why anthologies and short story collections don’t sell well, and why the vicious circle closes, because authors don’t bother writing them as a consequence.

“Everyone has a story in them” goes the adage, but there’s a corollary: …but everyone doesn’t have a novel in them, despite what NaNoWriMo claims. I was recently corrected about that program: NaNoWriMo doesn’t expect you to write a novel in a month; the idea is that wannabe novel writers learn to follow a schedule and organize their time so that they can eventually write that novel.

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[Note from Steve: One thing I immediately liked about A. B. Carolan was his wry humor. He sent this very short short from Cork, Ireland. Didn’t say what he was doing there, but I imagine some pubs were included in the visit. He wrote this before President Trump’s meltdown with Secretary Nielsen. Prescient. Have fun!]

Refugees

Copyright 2018, A. B. Carolan

Grigl materialized in an alien vehicle that was flying over an ocean. It didn’t seem to be an efficient way to move lots of passengers because there was a lot of wasted space. A female alien passed right through her/him; she didn’t seem to notice. She/he shimmered and vibrated a bit and continued to move about the flying boat, taking it all in.

It was her/his fifth solo mission. If successful, she/he would earn her/his first merit badge and pass to the next maturity level. She/he would never be able to bear the embarrassment of being held back, so all her/his surveillance sensors were operating at max.

One male alien who was stretched out in an oversized chair had strange fur on the top of his head and looked a bit too bronzed from the starlight falling on the planet. He said, “Get me the DHS secretary. We have to stop this nonsense!”

The sounds meant nothing to Grigl. But she/he understood the thoughts behind the words. Is this the planet’s leader?

Other aliens seemed to fawn over him. He seemed to enjoy it.  One handed him some kind of communication device.

“Kirstie, honey, I want them turned away. ASAP.” There was a pause. Then: “Yeah, I know. Mothers and children. So what? I made a campaign promise. Those Mexicans will destroy our country.”

Grigl saw the leader was watching a wall display that showed mostly alien females and young loitering about in some kind of camp. How nice. A picnic. But wait! These aliens are suffering.

She/he probed the alien leader’s mind—it seemed completely disorganized and full of contradictions—and found a better place for the suffering aliens to have a picnic. She/he teleported them all onto a wide, green expanse in front of the leader’s abode. For good measure, she/he then made all the aliens’ primitive weapons around the planet, including those this leader prized so much, vanish into another dimension.

She/he then returned home, feeling good about providing the suffering aliens with a better and bigger picnic place.

Were you successful? the nest asked Grigl.

Yes. I now feel I deserve my first merit badge.

Very well. We concur. You can now pass to the next level. By the way, your choice of destination was a bit dangerous. That planet isn’t a nice place to visit. The intelligent lifeforms there aren’t so intelligent, especially the current leaders. The one you met, in particular. But you did your good deed. That’s all that matters.

***

Want free fiction? The above story is free, of course; you’ll find other A. B. Carolan stories archived in the blog category “ABC Shorts.”  I also give my short fiction away now.  Besides what you find in the blog category “Steve’s Shorts,” I offer free PDFs containing short stories and novellas.  You don’t even have to email the request anymore.  Use this URL to see the list and download what you want.  (You might want to peruse the same list on the webpage “Free Stuff & Contests” because the list on OneDrive just contains file names, some suggestive of contents, others not.  Remember, I write in three genres.) Of course, you can still request via email…and subscribe to my email newsletter while you’re at it.  Happy reading!

In libris libertas…

There are little ones and big ones.  The former are generally moneymakers for the organizers—the author is either charged an entry fee or pays a “reading fee” (even if reader-judges are volunteers!).  The latter generally have some august committee of erudite scholars and narcissistic old women and men who have no idea what good storytelling is.  I don’t have much use for either the little or the big.

Sour grapes? No.  I haven’t entered any little contest in over ten years, and that was only because it didn’t require an entry fee (A. B. Carolan has turned that short story, “Marcello and Me,” into the YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—the short story won some kind of honor I can’t remember and am too lazy to check my records for). They don’t quite represent as much time an author can waste querying literary agents (the latter almost an oxymoron in most cases), or sending short stories and novellas to cliquish ‘zines run by tyrannical editors in most cases.  And they don’t quite represent as much money an author can waste paying for a Kirkus review or some fancy promo campaign run by so-called marketing gurus. I don’t recommend the little contests and award programs—they’re a waste of time and money. ‘Nough said about those.

The big ones are worse.  In general, you can’t enter them.  That august committee of erudite scholars decides who they’ll ask to enter. And sometimes that august committee isn’t so august! Consider the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s generally meaningless gesture designed to appease the faux literati, and the committee is now suffering through its very own scandal. You can read about that elsewhere, but one consequence is that the prize’s prestige will forever be tarnished at worst, and certainly more meaningless in the future at best. The committee’s makeup has suffered too. It turns out that once you’re elected to that committee, you’re something like a royal Swedish knight and can’t resign—you’re in it for life. This has led to members on both sides of the scandal no longer participating, and the committee no longer having a quorum to proceed with the business of nominating an author for the prize. There will be none this year. I imagine the choice of Bob Dylan didn’t help either (although he’s probably a better poet than any committee member).

We’ve all heard about the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes—the latter’s committee also has its own scandal by giving one to a rapper (I don’t particularly care about that, but why not Bob Marley, Neil Diamond, or some other singer-poet?).  Now a more recent award program (contest?) now exists, Katie Paterson’s Future Library Project. Ever hear of it?  I’ll confess I had no idea who Katie Paterson is, so I had to google this. The idea is that ye olde august and erudite committee for that project decides every year to invite a famous author to submit a manuscript (MS).

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I used to participate in discussions on Goodreads and LinkedIn. I no longer do so. The reasons are many. Here’s one: both have gone downhill since Amazon and Microsoft bought them, respectively. That might explain why there seem to be some moderators who are little tyrants; I’m open to discussions, but they aren’t. Same for members of their discussion groups.

In Goodreads, these few moderators assume their group is their little fiefdom; in LinkedIn, they’re often against indie authors and small presses and favor big publishing conglomerates and their associates. Sour grapes? No. These moderators are rare, but there’s no regulation from either Amazon or Microsoft who give the despots free rein to cancel anyone they please. They offer some “Terms of Service” discussion group members must follow, but the latter often ignore them. (And you thought it was just Facebook and Twitter?)

I’ve already cancelled ALL my memberships in Goodreads discussion groups (it was cathartic to do so from my Kindle, because Amazon bears most of the blame for not cleaning up Goodreads’ act.) I just don’t have the time to discover the bad apples hiding in the barrel among the many good ones. I will avoid any discussion on these sites. Same goes for many reading forums where you’ll find this us v. them mentality (us = readers and/or some publishing professionals, and them = certain authors they like to bully). I’m first and foremost an avid reader—always have been—so that turns me off, to put it mildly.

To be fair, some authors abuse their privileges on these sites. I never have, except for giving “discussion group” its literal meaning “discussions invited.” When thin skins, agendas, and pride get in the way of intelligent discussion, I bail. I’ve also been bullied, lied to, and even threatened by other group members. (Perhaps I should name names, but I’m not that kind of guy.) From what I’ve seen, I’m not unique in having these experiences. It’s sad that we have come to this!

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A new Avenger’s movie is drawing crowds to the silver screens around the land. It provides me more fodder for asking, “What’s going on?” And then wondering further, “Do readers ever get this excited over a book?”

My books, in particular. I once smiled upon reading a review of Angels Need Not Apply, something akin to “This book is awesome!” Except for the excitement expressed, it isn’t a particularly good representative of reviews that are useful for readers or writers, although it might indicate that sort of elation viewers of a Marvel movie might feel.

That’s the only example related to my personal book list, but, then again, I don’t have many reviews.  After two dozen plus books, I haven’t been discovered yet, except by ebook pirates—that’s not unusual, I suppose, but all my books are probably more current than when I wrote them, and the majority have action scenes comparable to most thriller movies, if not the Marvel movies.

I was a comic book reader. That even made me create my own, which is how I learned to read and write at a pre-school age—I needed something to put in the balloons, after all. Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Walt Disney (I loved the adventures of Donald and his nephews when they traveled with Uncle Scrooge—I suppose that was a precursor to reading H. Rider Haggard books, with Alan Quatermain as the original Indiana Jones?), Tarzan, and a few others (if I’d saved them, I’d be a wealthy old curmudgeon—now I’m just a poor one). I’ve even reviewed a graphics novel for Bookpleasures—a great story about a divided U.S. with one new country, the bad guys, dominated by Ayn Rand followers.

I’ll confess I enjoyed Wonder Woman—I like the actor, and the plot was an origins story.  I didn’t like Black Panther as much because the origins story played second fiddle to the generalized mayhem.  I liked the last Wolverine movie—the antithesis of an origins story and akin to The Lone Ranger, where Depp’s character Tonto walks, not rides, off into the sunset, a poignant twist on Hollywood westerns’ tradition (of course, that movie isn’t Marvel, just to head off the nitpickers). Bottom line: most Marvel movies do nothing for me because they add nothing to my experience obtained by reading the comics—elaborate visual mayhem and sound effects can’t compete with my childhood imagination!  Or even my current imagination.

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Les deseo a todos nuestros amigos mexicanos un feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Happy Cinco de Mayo to all our Mexican friends.

Comments on blog articles. My apologies: I discovered that you couldn’t make them! If you tried to do so, a message akin to “You must enable Javascript and allow cookies to comment” appeared.  That’s not so. There’s nothing in WordPress (WP) settings (my website software) about Javascript or cookies.

This problem was driving me nuts, and became a major distraction from my writing, but I think I solved it.  The old long-term memories stay around better than short-term, and some of the former are visual.  I couldn’t remember seeing a “WP Antispam Filter” plug-in (WP’s version of an app or subroutine) in my list of WP plug-ins. I deleted it.  Now readers can comment.

At least I can comment.  If you still can’t, use my contact page to inform me (probably the most convenient if you’re already on the website), or shoot an email to steve@stevenmmoore.com, which is the same thing.

And my sincere apologies to all readers in the past few months who wanted to comment and couldn’t.

Amazon, I’m ignoring your targeted ads! Your little bots can’t help you sell books to me. My reading tastes and habits are too unpredictable and varied for their feeble little computer brains and those limited (non-reading?) minds of the software wonks who program them. Your ads, Jeff Bezos, are deleted without me even reading them.

Unfortunately, I can’t label everything from Amazon spam because they’re also selling my books. I guess that’s the proverbial being “between a rock and a hard place.”

Non-fiction PDFs free for the asking. On a cheerier note, I’d like to remind readers about other PDFs:

“’Future History’ Timeline”—free information tool for readers who want to connect up many of my stories and characters by placing them on a fictitious timeline;

“Two Articles for Readers of Rembrandt’s Angel”—for readers who want to know more about how I wrote my recent mystery/thriller novel published by Penmore Press;

“Who Is A. B. Carolan?”—a history of how I met my collaborator–will we be the Preston and Child of YA sci-fi?—this also contains 10 discussion questions related to the YA sci-fi mystery The Secret Lab;

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I had one correspondent say that my book she read would just be fine without the bad language. I overheard another person say that a musical play would be much better if it weren’t so crude.  This has me thinking about the audiences for my fiction stories. Because this is intended to be a PG-13 website, I won’t go into examples here, but I want to analyze authors’ use of cursing all the same.

First point: Cursing is a cultural phenomenon. It’s an old one too, although cursing publicly used to be more frowned upon. New Yorkers curse, for example. Can you imagine a hard-boiled NYPD homicide detective not using a few swear words, especially when s/he’s in a firefight with some bad apples in the Big Apple? Certainly those bad guys will use foul language. I’ll repeat Clancy’s maxim: fiction has to seem real. Language reflects culture, so language used in fiction has to seem real.  “I am in a gun battle with some bank thieves” might be correct English, but you’d have something more colorful in that situation in a real firefight.

Second point: Curse words are often part of slang. While I’m against slang being used throughout a book because it can be tiresome for readers who don’t know that vernacular, it can be used initially for color and to make situations seem more realistic. When I was writing Rembrandt’s Angel, I spent a year studying British English, including slang, while I was writing.  It’s clear that my character Esther Brookstone, whose father was a vicar, was probably taught to be prim and proper and not to use British swear words, but she utters a few throughout the book she probably learned by working in MI6 (barely mentioned in the book) and Scotland Yard. Everyone picks up slang and swear words in their work environment.  Everyone uses them judiciously, right?

Third point: Cursing and slang, or the lack thereof, can differentiate characters and establish POV. The latter is important in narrative, most of which shouldn’t be written in omniscient in order to establish that it only represents the thoughts of one character X. The reader will unconsciously think that these are X’s thoughts because they reflect how X speaks. This can also be used in dialogue to avoid clumsy tag lines.  Think about it.  You’re listening to a discussion among your friends. You can generally know who’s speaking just by how they speak, although timbre, rising and falling of a voice, and so forth are important too (the latter is harder to convey in written dialogue).

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A. B. Carolan liked a short story I’d written long ago called “Marcello and Me.” He asked if he could make it into a novel. Ha! Now he owns it. The following excerpt from his The Secret of the Urns is the same one that appears at the end of his second edition of my YA sci-fi mystery The Secret Lab. You might not have read that new edition, though—you should, especially if you didn’t read the first edition! By the way, A. B. doesn’t have a website or Facebook author’s page and prefers to keep his email address a secret, but he does have an author’s page on both Amazon and Smashwords. He’s a wee bit reclusive, you see, but if you want to send him a message, send it to me using my contact page.

The Secret of the Urns

Copyright 2018, A. B. Carolan

Chapter One

My leg was broken.  Way to go, girl!

That wasn’t my only worry.  Kids break bones all the time. Hard Fist’s climate would kill me, not the break.

There wasn’t likely to be anyone near, and no one knew where I was. I didn’t even know, and, even if I did, I couldn’t communicate the location to anyone. Nobody within yelling distance, and even radio signals would be blocked where I lay flat on my back in pain.

Although it was still hot, the white sun had just gone down behind the precipice’s edge, leaving me in shadow, except for Big Fellow’s pale light dominating the twilight sky of its satellite Hard Fist.  Soon night would fall, temperatures would plummet, and I would freeze.

At least the ubiquitous sounds from the satellite’s rainforest had started up again to provide me with some funeral music. Of course, those sounds would make the dirge a bit primitive; some might even say they were threatening. You could almost hear chanted words to the effect, “Humans don’t belong here!” Yeah, tell my parents that!

My usual cheery thirteen-year-old innocence and positive outlook on life had suffered a major blow along with my leg. I was thinking they’d morphed into stupidity instead. Fact is, I’m not stupid—I’m the child of a triad that had bioengineered my mental and physical attributes as well as they could, given the genetic material they had available, which was AOK considering each member of the triad had the same thing done for them. But I’d just acted stupidly, so I could almost hear old Darwin crowing about natural selection being the better choice.

So far, growing up on Hard Fist hadn’t been easy. The planet-sized moon orbits the gas giant Big Fellow, almost a star itself and about twice the size of Jupiter.  This largest planet in the Fistian star system lies at the E-zone’s edge, so its satellite is theoretically habitable, but barely so in practice, at least for Humans.  Some of my difficulties growing up there had their origin in the harsh environment. And now it might kill me!

Hard Fist broke all the rules. Tides were huge due to Big Fellow’s proximity. When they combined with strong winds from a storm, lowlands close to the shore flooded, so communities weren’t found close to the shore. Lush tropical forests took advantage of 0.9 relative to E-normal gravity and the greenhouse effect, but all that vegetation also saturated the air with free oxygen while fixing excess nitrogen. The whole atmosphere is in a strange equilibrium that scientists were just beginning to understand. Other nearby but smaller satellites toyed with Big Fellow’s powerful attraction enough to keep our moon from being tide-locked to the gas giant, another precarious equilibrium, although that didn’t matter much because Big Fellow wasn’t a star. These were strange equilibriums that had lasted for eons, though. I’d never wanted to understand their intricacies, but we all suffered from their capricious nature.

Even in the 21^st century, Human scientists knew there were many planets in near-Earth space. Turned out many are habitable; in other words, there are many places where Humans can live.  At the personal level, though, people don’t have to like living in those places.  For my tenure on Hard Fist, I had no choice.  I couldn’t leave my legal wardens, my parents, until I was eighteen—or, unless I received their permission to do so, which I’d been on the verge of asking many times recently.  Because I was often invisible to them in a manner of speaking, having a chance to ask or receive permission wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, though. I did the best I could to cope.

I had difficulties with grown-ups in general.  Most of these problems could be traced to their not remembering what it was like to be a kid.  They were mostly scientists, engineers, and other technical people who were sent to Hard Fist to study that strange moon.  While there should have been a law against it, some of them had kids.  I’m one of those.  My name is Asako Kobayashi, a Human Fistian, the first one.  Others followed, but I’m unique, as if that mattered. Write that on my funeral urn, Mom and Dad2. Of course, they might never find my body!

***

Humans had found native Fistians on Hard Fist—we didn’t know how many exactly, but certainly a lot more than Humans.  The Human grown-ups didn’t socialize with them.  The “official reason” was that they were studying native Fistians and everything else Fistian, the entire biosphere, in other words, so they didn’t want to lose their objectivity.

By the time I turned ten (Earth standard years, not Fistian years), I knew the real reason: Humans generally didn’t like native Fistians.  Some even expressed their prejudices openly, especially recent arrivals.  Others never admitted to having them but exhibited them through their actions.  Almost everyone considered the moon’s natives barely sentient and primitive.  I knew better.

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