Over the weekend, I received a notification from WordPress that I had passed my 16th anniversary on this blog. You can read my very first post here. I was embarking on a career as a cozy mystery novelist, and I thought that if I kept a public record of my effort, I could hold myself accountable.
My writing career has evolved since then, in ways I never would have imagined, but I still have a few cozies in my file, and I shop them around periodically.
__________
The photo above was taken 16 years ago, on August 19, 2007, the same day I started this blog. Obviously I was out at my cabin on the same day I began the blog. (Though the cabin wasn’t built yet, so I was at the tarp strung between the trees that day.)
I took that shot looking across the still lake in the area below where the cabin would eventually stand. The dirt bank just above the reflection of the four tree trunks is where the main beaver lodge is. (Those four trees are long gone.) I couldn’t have guessed that my lake would have beavers back then either.
__________
Like most young people in this country, I got my driver’s license when I turned 16. As I remember, I got the lowest passing grade on the driving part of the test.
__________
My 16th published short story is “The Lonely Road,” which appeared in Penduline Press back in March of 2013. The link still works. This is one of the early stories in my One-Match Fire universe and is a core story of that novel.
__________
Chapter 16 of One-Match Fire is titled “Unmet Expectations.” Chapter 16 of the sequel, Nature Always Wins, (which is on submission at the publisher), is titled “Catch and Release.” And as it currently stands, Chapter 16 of Motherlove is about a pair of newlyweds (who feature in the other two novels) and the eye-opening challenges they are facing in their rush to adulthood. (I haven’t titled the chapters in Motherlove.)
I was recently interviewed by Annalisa Crawford of the Blogging with My Fountain Pen site. It was a pleasant experience, and Annalisa has given it a wonderful presentation. You can read the interview here. You’re also free to leave a comment there.
Annalisa is a writer herself, and there are links on her blog to her novels and short stories.
I don’t seem to have been posting much here because there doesn’t seem to be much writerly stuff going on in my life (except the marathon of writing I’m doing on a sequel to One-Match Fire, which, like a real marathon, is not very glamorous until you cross the finish line).
But this morning I do have some writing news. My humorous short story “2AG” has been accepted by OpenDoor Magazine for publication this summer. I had submitted for their Envy theme, which my story does seem to fit pretty well. (According to Duotrope, where I record my submissions, “2AG” had been in consideration there for 292 days, which is long though not unheard of. The publication had sent an email last fall saying it was changing its frequency — going from a monthly to a quarterly — so I was fine with letting my story remain under consideration for however long it took.)
“2AG” is an acronym (can you call it an acronym if one of the characters is numeric?) for “Second in Age Group,” which is an award category for running races. (Believe it or not, I have won a 2AG twice in my running career!) I had talked my wife into doing a 5K with me long ago, and she had a miserable time. But then one of us won a 2AG for the event. You’ll have to read the story when it comes out to learn who that was.
Curiously, OpenDoor Magazine published my story “A System Reboot” last summer. That was also a fictionalized account of a very interesting day my wife experienced.
I’ll post a link when “2AG” appears online. Should be the end of May.
I heard a writer (on a podcast, of course) make a clear distinction between being a writer and being an author. A writer is anyone who writes. So while I was drafting One-Match Fire (and my other stories, and even back to the ancient days when I was writing feature articles), I was a writer. But now that OMF is published (in two weeks, but still), I have become an author.
Being an author is being in the business end of this calling. It’s the promotion and hustle and glad-handing and seeking interviews and giving interviews and meeting people and doing readings and all manner of things that are anathema to an introvert who would rather be sitting at his laptop in his quiet room.
Among the things I’ve found I must now do is have a dedicated webpage. A mere blog is no longer a sufficient presence in the digital world once you’re an author. And so now I have a webpage. You can have a look at it right here. This is a work in progress, and I and my crack technical team will refine and hone it to a glittering sharpness in the weeks and months to come. But the webpage does link back here, and If I can get my creaky wheels turning, I’ll figure out a way to make the blog link to it too.
You’ll see that the URL is paullambwriter. I realize the “writer” part might seem pretentious. But it turns out that another Paul Lamb in the universe took the simple paullamb before I could. A British blues harmonica player has that URL.
I’m also finding that there are other Paul Lamb writers (and presumably authors) out there. I am currently linked to eleven books on my Goodreads page though only two truly belong to me. (I’m working on getting that fixed.)
And there’s even another One Match Fire novel out there, though the title lacks the hyphen mine has. (And I guess this is a good time to point out that Moby-Dick is the name of the novel but Moby Dick is the name of the whale.)
__________
One-Match Fire (with the hyphen) is currently available for pre-order, notably at Barnes & Noble, though any bookstore can order it for you as well. The official launch date is October 18, 2022.
I’ve mentioned here a few times that 2022 has been a good year for my writing life. To date, I’ve had six short stories accepted in lit mags (but reduce that to five since one of the magazines failed to come to life and my story was returned — still, five in one year is my high).
But I’ve been sitting on a secret that is even bigger news.
Last June I learned that my novel, One-Match Fire, was accepted for publication by Blue Cedar Press, and it’s due to come out next month as a paperback and a little later as an ebook!
Long-time readers will remember that I have been writing the individual stories — I originally called them my Fathers and Sons stories and then later said they were part of my One-Match Fire universe — for ten years. I wrote the original story, “where late the sweet birds sang,” in 2012. It was about a little cabin in the woods and a son’s struggle with whether to keep it or sell it to pay medical bills affecting his family. I had intended the story to be a one-off, and I vaguely intended it to be a guide for what my own children might do with my little cabin in the woods when the time came. That story eventually became the prologue for One-Match Fire the novel.
I found, after completing that story, that I wanted to stay with the characters I had created and tell more stories about them. They came easily: I knew the characters well, and I certainly knew the setting well (the picture on the cover of the novel may or may not be of my own little cabin taken nine years ago). And so I wrote another story about them. And then another. And another. At first I was just writing the stories that came to me, based on likely situations the characters would face in their lives. But at some point I realized that there was a whole greater than the sum of its parts in what I was doing. I thought maybe I had the beginnings of a story cycle, but a friend told me that no, I was writing a novel. And so I was.
One-Match Fire came into its final form sometime in 2019, and I began shopping it around to likely agents and then more likely publishers, but I wasn’t getting any bites. Still, ten of the 24 chapters had been published in lit mags, and I was proud of that achievement. Maybe that was enuf. In fact, I was considering serializing One-Match Fire on Substack. It was in December of 2021, when I was researching likely publishers for Obelus (still circulating) that I came upon a listing for Blue Cedar Press in Wichita, Kansas that published “excellent and courageous literature.” That sounded like a good fit for One-Match Fire, so I sent in the manuscript.
And then I heard nothing for five months, which isn’t out of the ordinary for such a submission. It was in May of this year that I got an email from an editor at Blue Cedar Press asking me if the novel was still available. I wrote back instantly saying that it was, and the editor responded that in that case, she would continue reading the manuscript but that she liked what she’d read so far.
In June I was invited to join a Zoom call — and given about a half hour’s notice — where I and four members of the board at the press chatted and rambled for about an hour, never quite coming to the big point. They finally asked me if I had any questions and so I asked. Yes, they answered, they did want to published One-Match Fire! Was it still available?
The weeks and months since then have been a whirlwind. I have read the manuscript a half dozen times, going through the line edits and sending proposed changes and responses back and forth. I worked up proposed covers (or rather, my talented daughter did) and we settled on the one above. I solicited blurbs. I began what appears to be an unending job of trying to get profile and publicity for the forthcoming novel (getting on podcasts, finding book review blogs that might be interested, finding the few remaining newspapers that still do book reviews, finding the scant radio programs that might discuss books, learning how libraries select books for their circulating collections, finding bookstores that might be interested in a reading, even getting my alumni record updated to show the publication). It’s a full-time job!
One-Match Fire has an official publication date of October 18, 2022, though it will likely be available before then. It is already available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble and IndieBound (and even one Australian book ordering site). I hope to see it soon on Bookshop, and it will also be on Blue Cedar Press’s catalog page. (It won’t be on Amazon, at least for the present, but that’s another story.) And it’s up on Goodreads (though navigating that space as the author is challenging).
I will undoubtedly deluge you with news and updates about the life of One-Match Fire in the weeks and months ahead. It’s kind of a big deal to me.
__________
Your careful eye likely noticed that the title of my novel has a hyphen in it: One-Match Fire. There is a hyphen-less novel One Match Fire by Lissa Linden that works a different angle on that title. And it seems that there are several authors with the name Paul Lamb.
I was poking around in Goodreads the other day and found myself listed there. Now, there are a half dozen writers listed there by the name of Paul Lamb, and they are not me. But one reference I saw listed a publication called Crossed Genres. It sounded familiar, so I clicked on it, and it turned out to be an anthology that had taken one of my stories back in 2010. I didn’t know it at the time — or until the other day — that the anthology came out in a print edition.
The story is titled “Diaspora” and I’ve written about in several times on this humble blog. The best link is here. I see from that old post that I did know that a print edition was coming, but I guess I never heard anything more about it; I was never sent a copy or invited to purchase one.
But I did find it on Amazon for just a few dollars, so I bought it. I should have it in a few days. It will go on my shelf of print journals that have taken my stories. That will be nice to see when I look up from my creative labors to the bookcase across the room where those journals sit.
I had another story in a printed journal that I did know about at the time, and I was invited to purchase a copy. But the price was $27! I checked around, and several people had complained to a blogger who keeps track of these things reporting the same thing. Apparently it is the method of this publisher to accept work and then solicit purchases from the accepted writers as a reliable revenue stream. I didn’t buy a copy, but I do check occasionally on ABE Books to see if that issue is there and at a reasonable price. Someday, maybe I’ll have that document to put on the shelf across the room too.
Update 5OCT22 – The journal arrived and when I slid it onto the shelf with the other journals I have with my stories, I found that I had already received a copy of it. Not sure how I’d forgotten that. And now I’m waiting on another physical copy of a different journal. I had thought that I would get a free contributor copy, but after a couple of months I wrote to the editor who said that they didn’t have the budget for that. So I bought it for a few dollars (plus shipping). Another to put on my shelf anyway.
My story “A System Reboot” is now online at OpenDoor Magazine. Here is the link for a download. Click on the Mental Health issue cover, July 2022. Then click on the tiny Go To Link text at the bottom. Then you’ll need to scroll to page 61. (So yet another of my stories that doesn’t appear in the front half of the publication, but it is featured on the cover!)
I wrote about this story in an earlier post. The coincidence of my character regaining her memory on the same day that the nation inaugurates a new president — both a brain and a nation getting a system reboot — might seem too coincidental to be plausible, even in fiction, except that it really happened. My wife did have an episode of Transient Global Amnesia on the day before inauguration. Her recovery began the next day. While I have fictionalized the incident, and left out a lot of family-specific details, it pretty much happened in the real world they way I describe it in the story.
I’ve had an affinity for Greek mythology, going back at least to high school Latin class (which I guess should have steered me to Roman mythology, but here we are). And I’ve had a semi-ambition to write my own modern versions of some of the tales just because they are colorful and peek into human nature so well. (Michael Cunningham has done something similar with his collection Wild Swan, though he used folk tales.) My early story “Moron Saturday,” for example, is a retelling on the Diana and Actaeon story.
The only other story I’ve brought to completion in this endeavor is “Pandora’s Tackle Box,” set in the Ozark mountains and dealing mostly with a crusty character I named Old Festus, who stands in place of Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods. Hephaestus was tasked with creating Pandora, whose purpose in turn (according to some myths) was to tempt the Titan Epimetheus and bring about his downfall because his brother, Prometheus, stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. (The Judeo-Christian character of Eve is believed to have been derived from Pandora.) Hephaestus gave Pandora all of her lovely attributes, and Zeus gave her the box (better translated as “jar”) full of woes and hardships. Pandora, being the weak female character needed to explain/excuse male weakness, opened the box and let all of the woe and hardship into the world, leaving only hope left in the box.
In my story, the ne’er-do-well character Ep wants to win a fishing tournament, and Old Festus sees this as a chance to rid himself of his high-maintenance daughter, Dora, by marrying her off to Ep. He begins this seduction by equipping Dora with some very nice fishing tackle. Ep falls for it. On the day of the tournament, as Ep and Dora are on the water in a small boat, a tussle over the tackle box sends all of the lures to the bottom of the lake. Only one lure remains.
“Pandora’s Tackle Box” was first printed in A Golden Place in the spring of 2011, an online journal that has since disappeared. (They also used my real name in the byline rather than my pen name, so maybe it’s just as well that it’s disappeared.)
I later submitted it to the Harnessing Fire anthology. It’s described as a Hephaestus Devotional. Since my story had the Old Festus character, I thought it might be a good fit, and it was. The print anthology appeared 2013. This is part of a series of devotionals devoted to old Greek gods and demigods published by Bibliotheca Alexandrina. (I’m not clear if their intent is actual worship of the Greek gods or not.) My story appears in the latter half of the bound anthology, which seems to be where all of my stories are destined to be placed.
As I was preparing yesterday’s post about “A System Reboot” being accepted at a lit mag, I received an email letting me know that my story “Memento Mori” has as well! “Memento Mori” will appear in the “This is the End” themed issue of Cape Magazine. It is my understanding that the issue will come online this month. When it does, I’ll post a link.
This is an interesting story for me. It’s essentially my rewrite of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (though mine is in a dark and dirty place, and I have a different ending — also, thanks, Pete, for the link to your version). I explained this when I made the submission, though I have no idea whether that affected the approval decision. And although it stands on its own and makes no reference to it, the story is part of my One-Match Fire universe.
I had conceived a series of stories revolving around a single incident and how this incident would ripple through the lives of people connected to it, even tangentially. In a different story (“First, Do No Harm,” which I’m shopping around vigorously) two of my OMF characters happen upon the incident and react as their characters would. “Memento Mori” is the incident itself.
I found myself so giddy after receiving two acceptances in a matter of minutes that I continued to check my email repeatedly through the day to see if there were any more! (Alas, no!)
I learned over the weekend that my story “A System Reboot” has been accepted by OpenDoor Magazine for its upcoming Mental Health issue. It should be coming out online later this month. When it does, I’ll post a link.
This is perhaps the most unique story I have written. It is about an incidence of transient global amnesia that serendipitously happened on the day before inauguration in 2021. My protagonist temporarily lost her memory for a day due to an accumulation of stress that had peaked that morning. (Among the stress was the dread of what might still happen in the last few hours that the Orange Man was still in office.) Her memory returns — her system reboots — on Inauguration Day, just as the nation is rebooting and leaving a trauma behind.
Such a fine, metaphorical coincidence might seem too pat, too opportune to be allowed. Except that it really did happen that way! And it really did happen to me and my wife! She had an episode of TGA on the day before the inauguration. It was scary for a while, because I feared she was having a stroke. Once that was ruled out, and the “benign” diagnosis of TGA was given, the day became fun in a way. She kept asking me the same questions every twenty minutes, having forgotten that she’d just asked them. Essentially, she lost the ability to make short-term memories for a day, and her long-term memory was clouded for a time. She didn’t know we had grandchildren, didn’t know that our own children were married, didn’t even recognize her iPhone. Most comical of all, she thought that Ronald Reagan was president. I think that was the most merciful aspect of her affliction: she didn’t know who the actual president was at the time.
She was fully recovered by the next day, though she has no memories of the actual event. I began writing this story merely to give her an account of what happened. Then I modified it into a piece of fiction, and now it will be published.
Lucky Rabbit's Foot 