Books. Fiction. Some free, some not. | Writing advice. | Haiku.
Books
Testimony of Outlaws
Haiku poetry. A new story about Christmas. All for 99 cents.
Wounded Bride
About the Book
The city of Chicago is relentless. Murders and other violent crimes pile up: a woman lies in the hospital in a coma, a man is brutally attacked in his sleep, and a child suffers.
Detective Maria Mateo is new to the Chicago Police Department, but she’s not soft. In spite of her strength, every case that arises brings troubling memories of her past and fear that her deepest secret will be revealed and threaten everything she’s worked for.
When her captain discovers she’s having difficulty with her health, she faces the possibility of losing her badge for good. Mateo struggles to keep her personal baggage out of her work, but when a woman is almost smothered, the investigation leads Mateo to help someone she never thought she’d see again.
Our Place: Monica and Brad Start School
Free Fiction
It’s all yours!
Please download, share in any format, and print. All that I ask is that you include a link to this website and don’t rewrite, change, sell, or repost my work (links and short excerpts of a few lines with links are nice.)
The Dark Tide – revised version available NOW for free!
The Dark Tide, a short piece of fantasy fiction, has been published with Smashwords, as a blog post on this website, and also a podcast episode on Anchor.
Billy
Billy is a young man whose stories I love to tell.
- Lockdown — Complete Story — Horror Fiction
- Isolation — Complete Story — Contemporary Fiction
- Powder — Horror Fiction — Coming Soon! Will be FREE! on Smashwords!
2020 NaNoWriMo Romance Novel
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
Time Gone By – story in progress
Science fiction. Time travel. Four children and their grandmother trying to prevent a second civil war.
The Christmas Room
This is contemporary fiction, and the story has two endings.
The Basket – story in progress
I started writing a story for Easter 2021, intending to tell it all in two parts, but the story’s turning out to be longer.
Ruth – story in progress
Ruth started by accident. I needed some sample dialog for a post about writing, and ended up with a story.
The Choice
The Choice was my first piece of free fiction. It was posted in six very short parts in April 2020, and those are still way back in the archives, but I link only the full story here.
The Choice – blog post
The Choice – podcast episode
In Life – story in progress
Sci-Fi Fantasy. A young woman who has lost everyone she loves. A new world for her to discover. Will she find friendship and love, or will she encounter only misery, horror, and brutality?
- Update about In Life
- Until it’s published for free on Smashwords, the first fifteen parts of In Life are still available to read on the In Life page.
Random Writing Advice Post
Writing Advice – Point of View
Pistol: Why, then the world’s mine oyster. Which I with sword will open.William Shakespeare — The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2, scene 2
There are no rules about POV. That’s right, there really aren’t any.
In this post about Starting NaNoWriMo, I said that I was struggling with third person narration in a book with lots of point of view (POV) switching. As I reread my words from what seemed like a long time ago, I realized that there was no reason I couldn’t use first person narration or even use a mix of both styles.
There are no rules about POV. There’s the writer, and there’s the story, and that’s it. Since stories need people to write them down, the writer gets the fun and enviable task of deciding which POV to use.
First person is a very “in the character’s head” kind of POV. It can make some things challenging, such as describing events that the character wouldn’t know about, or not being all that pleasant if the character is self-centered, but there are also advantages. You can really get to know a character from the inside, and transitions are easier because you don’t have to keep zooming the “point” of third person POV in and out to focus on different characters, settings, and action.
Third person narration lets the storyteller become omniscient, and who doesn’t enjoy knowing everything?! However, third person doesn’t always work well, and if used ineffectively, can make the story read very clumsily indeed. If used well, third person can make your fiction captivate your readers.
You might be wondering, since there aren’t any rules, how do you choose the best POV for your story? The one-word answer is: experimentation. I wrote an entire novel in the third person, only to realize that parts of it needed to be in the first. I went back and changed every single “he” to “I.” I also had to change a bunch of “him” to “me,” but it was worth it. The character experiences events in a very internal way, and third person just could not get me deep enough inside his head for that to capture properly. There’s also no problem if POV shifts, as long as the transitions are smooth and clear. When I tell that same story from other characters’ points of view, I switch to third person and it all benefits the story. As for my science fiction novel with third person throughout, I’m now toying with the idea of changing some of it into first person POV or maybe even all of it. I can use scene or chapter breaks for the switches, and having a lot of characters really isn’t a problem like I originally thought.
POV is a tool. You can do whatever you want with POV. It’s flexible and you can shape it any way you like to create the story you want and need to tell. There really are no rules, and the (fictional) world is your oyster. So get your keyboard or pen, pick up your pages or open that file, and start thinking about POV and how it can work best for your stories.