Yellow Chair Review liked my “Customer Service” so well they accepted it before their deadline for submissions — another thank-you to Bartleby Snopes.

BTW:  brings my count of accepted short stories up to sixteen.  Now if I could find a publisher who liked one of the novellas or the novel . . . .

Get a taste of “Customer Service” here — and pay attention to the agent’s name.

A friend who browsed the published and about-to-be-published short stories posted here told me he admired the variety of topics and situations that populate my ouevre, and asked where the different ideas come from.

The honest answer is: beats me.  Some draw, usually obliquely, on my own experience. Others — I think I like these best — begin by visualizing and describing a (protagonist) character, and letting my imagination put him or her in a situation that embellishes itself until a story, an insight, presents itself. It’s an approach I came to admire in the collected short stories of the contemporary Irish writer William Trevor, whom some professor in my Fairfield University MFA course suggested I read. Hardly unique to Trevor, but he does it very well.

My most recent accepted story, Parting Company (which will appear in early December in Literary Heist, a fledgling online literary magazine) is an example.  One of my new neighbors has the kind of lanky frame and stride one can recognize a football field away. I played with describing him one day, a kind of idle, musing exercise.  Then into my mind popped a hardware store that thrived in downtown Hartford a half-century ago, but succumbed when a dwindling number of people came into the city to shop. My neighbor — at least as I constructed and elaborated him — would have been at home there. And my maternal grandfather, Charles Lotz, was “a hardware man” who taught me the meaning and overtones of that phrase.

And there I was, writing Parting Company. Sorry to say that I can’t let you read it all until December, when I can post here a link to the magazine. But the copyright rules say I can let you read a lengthy tease.  Read more

   Americans still prefer books they can hold in their hands, the New York Times reported early this month.

   That’s good news for those of us who would like to autograph books for eager readers, or pass them along to grandkids or great-grandkids. And nothing beats a book whose spine you can read if you’re perusing a neighbor’s shelves to see what their reading habits are, or a book whose page you can dog-ear down before putting it on the night table and turning out the light.  (Of course, if it’s “War and Peace,” you may be putting it down not because you’re sleepy, but because your wrists ache.)

   On the other hand, there’s something to be said for reading or hearing about an interesting new book and in a few minutes having it on your Kindle or tablet or desktop, probably at less expense than having a hard copy plod to you in the mail two days or so later.

   And for those like me who are “publishing” short stories in obscure literary magazines that friends are unlikely to buy, online reading is a godsend. I’ll get to the exhortation in just a moment.

    The Times’ story drew from a Pew Research Center study that found 38 percent of Americans said they read books “exclusively in print.’ Another 28 percent were reading a combination of digital and print books.

    Using a slightly different measure, Pew found that two-thirds of Americans (65%) said they’d read a print book in the last year, compared to 28% who’d read an e-book, and 14% who’d listened to an audio book. All those figures had changed only marginally in the last two years.

    I’ve begun this website and blog in hopes of building an audience for my writing that may someday help me persuade a publisher to take on my unpublished novel or my two unpublished novellas.  I’m just shy of a dozen short stories accepted by various literary magazines.  You can poke around, get a taste of any of them and read the whole story if you like the flavor.  Look under Short Stories in the menu bar at the top, or click on the right-hand-side icon to read Strawberries, my most recently-accepted piece.

    I’m also trying to learn more about what people like you want to read, by asking your reaction to some works in progress. You’ll find one I’ve been working on this week, Gigolo, if you click on the Help Wanted icon to the right; or pull down Works in Progress from the menu bar — and help me make any or all of them better.

    But keep on reading those solid-in-print books, too; someday I’ll autograph one for you.