3 Free Kindle Short Stories

2 DAYS ONLY!

On Sunday, November 30 and Monday December 1, these short stories from my Twins Mystery Series will be FREE on Kindle. Click on the titles to link to the page.

Mirror, Mirror - A man sees premonitions of serial murders but no one believes him, until psychologist Sara Ziegler is sure that her twin sister Gen is the next victim.

Ring of Truth - Sara and Gen Ziegler suspect a neighbor of domestic violence, but what does that have to do with the ring Gen finds in her vegetable garden or the bunny that's eating the lettuce?

Rapid-Eye Murder - During a week of dream research, psychologists Gen and Sara Ziegler uncover evil hidden deep in the realm of Morpheus.



Happy Holidays!

SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM is Released!

I KNOW a lot of people who won't read short stories. They seem to believe that if a tale takes less than 70,000 words to tell, it somehow isn't worthy. Me? I love shorts stories. I can devour one in a quick sitting when I don't have much time. Like a lovely bite of chocolate between meals.

I've been reading shorts as long as I can remember. My love for the form was especially cemented in place by the short mysteries and supernatural tales of Agatha Christie. I branched out from there to read other classic mystery authors' anthologies, like Dorothy L. Sayers and, of course, all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Then modern authors who excel in this form, like Lawrence Block, Margaret Maron, Robin Hathaway and others.

As an author, I found that I loved writing short mysteries and ghost tales. 19 of mine were published individually in periodicals, though most without a wide distribution. That was the last I thought the world would see of my stories. However, the advent of electronic books allowed me to make the tales available to Kindle users.

Still, not everyone has a Kindle. Non-Kindle readers were seeing that these stories existed and started asking me for print versions of them. So I decided to put together an anthology of my own. I'm happy to announce that SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM was released this week, which includes these 16 titles:

Mrs. Fanaglio and The Body On The Beach
Mirror, Mirror
REM Murder
Ring of Truth
Kill...with Personality
Ginseng Tea
True To His Country
Cliff-Hanger
Showdown At Sundae Gulch
Favorite Haunt
Who Tempt The Dangerous Way
Swan Song
Ultimate Layoff
Rocky Road To Murder
Who Ate Billy Penn?
Here's Blood In Your Rye

4 of the stories feature Gen and Sara Ziegler, from my Twins Mystery series. The Mrs. Fanaglio tale came out in Death Knell V last year and so it's NOT available on Kindle. Plus I've added an introduction to each story, for those of you who like to know where authors get their ideas.

You can find SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM on Amazon right now. It should be available to other distribution channels within the next week or two. The ISBN is 978-1500662240 if you want to order it though your favorite bookstore.

If you want to whet your appetite for short stories, there's a free one on my website: "Job Interview."  Enjoy. And thanks for reading.

Robin Hathaway's Short Story Tips

My guest today is Robin Hathaway, who writes the Dr. Fenimore mystery series and the Jo Banks mystery series. Both feature medical professional sleuths battling crime in South Jersey and the Philadelphia area. Robin is the winner of the Malice Domestic St. Martin's Press Contest and an Agatha Award for her novel The Doctor Digs a Grave. Besides her novels, Robin has had many short stories published and that's her topic today.  Visit her website at www.robinhathaway.com.

SHORT STORY TIPS

The following tips are just that. They are not rules, but suggestions.

1.  Know your ending before you start writing. This is not necessarily true when writing a novel, in which the ending may evolve gradually as you write. But with a short story, I usually write backward, with the ending clearly in mind from the beginning.

2.  Economy and precision. These two things should be foremost in your mind when you are writing a short story. You must choose your sentences carefully, making each one count. There is no room for lengthy descriptions of setting or characters. You must choose exact details that say what you mean, rather than generalizations. Be precise.

3.  Limit your characters to 3 or 4 at the most. A large cast of characters is unwieldy and confusing in a short story.

4.  Have your plot clearly in mind before you begin, if possible. If you know your ending this shouldn’t be too hard.

5.  Read some good short stories before you begin, by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc. and sample some contemporary authors in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. Study how others succeed.

6.  Have fun!

Robin Hathaway

Caroline Todd On Short Story Ideas

My guest today is Caroline Todd, half of the formidable bestselling writing team called Charles Todd, authors of both the Inspector Rutledge and Bess Crawford mystery series, set during and after World War I. Their Rutledge novel A LONELY DEATH was an instant bestseller. Bess Crawford's A BITTER TRUTH made its debut last summer.

 

Caroline and I have worked together on many DEATH KNELL short story anthologies. As our Sisters in Crime chapter hatches plans for a fifth DEATH KNELL, I asked Caroline to share her expertise in the short story realm for our Sisters. I pass along her wisdom here..

Short Story Ideas

by Caroline Todd

Everyone says that short stories are harder to write than a novel.  I can tell you from my own experience that it isn’t true.  The real difference is the plot.  Some plots are best in a novel, where there’s ample room for character development and red herrings and lots of action, etc.  If you’ve read Harry Potter, you can see why it took not one novel but several to follow Harry as he learned to be a wizard.  Other plots have no need for greater development.  They can be told in 1/10 the number of words.

Look at a sit com, for instance. There’s one story line and one set of characters. The problem, whatever it is—getting a date, preparing for the in laws to visit, looking for a job—can be dealt with in one half hour show.  LAW & ORDER  has more convoluted plots, more characters, and it needs an hour.  Have you ever wondered what would happen if you went off to work one morning, and  the small apartment building’s outer door is locked as usual, but there’s a body lying by the mailboxes?  Once your shock is over, and the police have gone, would you start to worry about the other residents—and whether one of them killed the man?  Would you look at them differently? And would you see suspicious behavior in several of them?  Maybe one of them had already seen the body, but for personal reasons didn’t want to get involved, and so he went back upstairs instead of calling the police.  Maybe the young woman in Number 6 who used to smuggle her boyfriend in so that the other people in the building wouldn’t know she was having an affair with a married man, had a falling out with him and stabbed him.  When you try to talk to the older woman in Number 5, she nearly bites your head off.  And then someone comes to your door that night and tries to get in. What do you do? 

Plots like this can start out in so many different ways.  First person, third person, it depends on what fits the story best.  And what kind of story is it—traditional, police procedural, suspense, horror?  For instance a horror story would have a dead former resident coming back to kill the present apartment owner.  Procedural would take it from the point of view of a new policeman on the block, not one of the apartment folks.  Traditional would let the woman who found the body solve the crime.  Suspense comes with the knock on the apartment door. What did you do last week?  Take your car into a garage for work? Go to the dry cleaners? Have dinner in a small new restaurant?  Walk along the Brandywine River?  Any one of those apparently harmless errands could lead to a tidy little murder. And not everyone will see them in the same light.  Another way to deal with a short story is to take one of your favorites and outline it.  Not to copy but to analyze.  To see how a published author took a single idea and turned it into a very interesting story. 

Writing is like knitting or running marathons or cooking an Italian dinner or anything else you love.  It takes a little work to do it well. And here you have a chance for your first publication!  Handed to you by your local chapter! Did you know that when the first Death Knell came out, most of the authors weren’t published?  Did you know that some of them went on to win awards and see their novels published? If you want to try to write, there’s no better place to start out than with your Sisters, who will help you, advise you, and never laugh at you, however rough your first attempt.  Nobody can ask for more than that.

Caroline Todd