Christmas Past and Writing News

Sunday morning in Cornwall and it's snowing lightly.  I'm here on the last of my holiday vacation, visiting my parents as I do a couple times a month .  The Christmas decorations are put away and we disassembled the tree and packed it in storage for another year.

Christmas Past

The tree we've used for the last fifteen years is a six foot artificial fir.  It's a fine, thick, robust tree decorated with multi-coloured lights strung up and down the branches, but it's a heavy beast and awkward to haul up and down the basement steps and we almost didn't use it this year.  My parents are getting older and, as autumn turned into winter, they started thinking a smaller tree would be more practical so they bought a three-foot table-top tree that they would display in the corner of the living room on my grandmother's old claw-foot end table.

When I heard about this change to our family's Christmas tradition, I kept my thoughts to myself.  I always loved that tree, but if they wanted a smaller tree that would be easier to manage then I was behind it.  (Fortunately,) They ran into a problem as soon as they started trying to decorate it.

Many of the decorations that they had collected over the decades, including heirlooms from my mother and father's childhood, didn't fit on the little tree.  There was no room for my father's white cathedral or his little bluebird.  My Aunt Norma's 12 Days of Christmas ornaments, cast in pewter, were too big for the branches.  And you could forget about trying to hang my sister's "Baby's First Christmas" ball.  They conferred and it went straight back to the store where it came from.  A few days later, I arrived for one of my regular visits and the old fir was hauled out and decorated to much fanfare and deep appreciation. :)

Writing News

"Conservation": Initial Success?

"Conservation" seems to be faring much better on Feedbooks.com than it ever did on Smashwords.com.  If FB's analytics are correct, as of this writing "Conservation" has been downloaded 38 times in just under 24 hours.  That may not sound like a lot, but let me put things in perspective: "Conservation" was live on Smashwords for nearly a month and got no more than seven downloads, despite being admitted to the Premium Catalogue.  

I think I may have blogged about using Feedbooks to build a readership in previous entries.  I know that that had been the plan in my head, but the siren call of the dollar lured me away.  The amazing performance I'm seeing now confirms that it was a mistake to use Smashwords at this time.  I say "at this time" because I still think Smashwords has value for independent authors, but authors who have established themselves.  In a year or two, after I have more stories to offer, I may try my hand at it again, either with Smashwords or Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Program.

"Cool Water": Outlined and In Progress
"Cool Water" is now fully outlined in my Feedbooks interface, all five parts.  The only change from my previous post about this is that I have opted to drop the prologue, everything else remains the same.  I'm excited about this story.  After long weeks of struggling with the plot, letting it lie while working on detective fiction, then struggling with it some more, the story feels like it holds together well.  It feels like a story I would enjoy reading.  In the end that's what a storyteller should aim for, right?  Write to entertain your toughest critic: yourself.