THE MARDI GRAS MURDERS

"When I am dead, my dearest,
  Sing no sad songs for me;

 I shall not see the shadows,
  I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
  Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
  That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
  And haply thou may forget."

 -  Christina Rossetti

 The night was chill.  The wisps of fog swirled about me like accusing ghosts.  They needn't have bothered.

My own memory accused me every waking moment.

It was Three Kings Day -- the Day of the Epiphany.  The Carnival season kicks off with this day ...
as did the murders.

For the past six years, each Carnival season had the tolling of midnight bring the discovery of a new butchered body.

Each victim had been found innocent though they had been anything but.

The crowd milling around the yellow police ribbons was ugly.  Lt. Trifle beside me was beautiful, her long hair the red of a dying sunset.

The flayed alive man hung upside down on the alley wall, his body smeared in garishly loud green, gold, and purple paint.

The Mardi Gras colors were green, gold, and purple ... each holding hidden meanings.

Green represents faith, gold symbolizes power, and purple is justice.

One burly pimp growled, "How long you gonna let this go on, McCord?"

The drug-thin girl to his left whined, "You're a piece of shit, Cowboy!"

Another voice in the back shouted, 

"Hell, you been hiding in that club of yours for the past six years!  What's wrong?  The big Hoodoo scared of this killer?"

As if separating from the shadows themselves, a tall gaunt man in black robes suddenly appeared beside me and grunted,

"You could kill them as easily as I yawn, McCord-Pasha."

I flicked weary eyes to the Ningyo.  "It would be redundant."

He barked a laugh matching the mood of the crowd and faded into the shadows once more.

Lt. Trifle rasped, "Who the hell was that?"

"Hayato, my wife's deadly, oblivious counselor."

"Meilori?  But she left you six years a...."

Her voice trailed away as she realized the significance of the number of years these murders had been going on.

I sighed, "And Meilori must be dead for Hayato to be allowed to do this for so long."

Trifle said, "I thought you said you would sense it if your wife died."

I shook my head. "Meilori must have been so mad at me that last time that she ... severed our bond."

I sucked in my cheeks.  "Meilori died ... and I never knew it until this night ... until this night."

I wrapped the shadows around me as had Hayato and disappeared to my sanctum named for the wife I now knew to be dead, Meilori's.

The club was deserted due to Mardi Gras festivities.

Hayato sat waiting for me at my table.  I smiled wryly.  He was sitting in my chair, symbolic in a sense:

He had wanted to be Meilori's husband for as long as I had been married to her.  

I didn't object.  His loving Meilori only showed his good taste.

Hayato, Ningyo for Falcon.  Fitting name since his face resembled a falcon's.  

I sat opposite him and asked, "How long have you known?"

His voice sounding like desert wind wisping over sandpaper, Hayato said, "All these six long years."

That I did object to.  "Why didn't you tell me, damn you?"

He shrugged.  "It amused me to see you grieve, the light of an impossible hope burning in your eyes."

His own piercing eyes stabbed into me.  "Now, you know how it feels to harbor an impossible hope."

"Why tell me now?"

Hayato's face became a mask of dead love.  "I grow bored.  Now, I go seek a good death."

The shadows swallowed him ... and me.

***

"Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss."

-  Edward Arlington Robinson

 (Carnival comes from the Latin words carne vale, meaning "farewell to the flesh.")
***
 "I lived as best I could, and then I died,
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide." 
- Michael R. Burch

***
Follow the Xanadu, the world's 1st Air-Steamship
as it sails the skies of the world
in
THE NOT-SO-INNOCENTS ABROAD
Coming Soon:

     

WHAT INSPIRED EDGAR ALLAN POE?

Ever wonder what inspired Edgar Allan Poe?

Edgar Allan Poe's heart was in poetry. 

He expressed his feelings in his poetry.  But then, as now, there was little money in poetry.

 He is remembered as a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a critic,

 but he earned much of his income as an editor. 

He filled up pages of the magazines he edited with his own writings, 

and he was so intelligent and so gifted that the magazines he edited prospered. 

He would have had no serious financial problems if he hadn't had a drinking problem.

If you check the first paragraph of  "The Cask of Amontillado," 

you will find that each sentence is constructed so that the most important word comes at the end. 

The last words are: "revenge," "threat," "risk," and "impunity."

 Poe's life had many hardships that inspired his work. 

 Readers can clearly see the connection to Poe and the other people in his life 

to the characters in his poems and stories.

 Many of Poe's works may seem normal at first, but almost always end in tragedy, just as his life did.


THE RAVEN:

 The inspiration to Poe's darkest and most well known poem, written in 1845, 

was a real raven that was the beloved pet of the writer Charles Dickens who named it Grip. 

 Dickens was fascinated by the behaviors of his pet and kept it in his stables to study it.

 Dickens had been impressed by how intelligent and aggressive the bird was. 

Dickens also taught his raven to speak, just like a parrot, 

which is also what interested Poe the most and acted as a direct influence for his story "The Raven."


ANNABEL LEE:

One of the major inspirations of Poe's career was his wife Virginia, as well as her death. 

 Coming from her death came some of his most well known poems.

In my THE RIVAL, 
 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007JOUJ60/

Edgar Allan Poe is Victor Standish's rival for the affection of the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, 

as the two lovers find themselves trapped in 1834 New Orleans.


SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE:

Poe emulated Coleridge in musicality and vision, also writing about him, and also tried to analyze and advance a theory of poetics and practice in short essays.


MOTHERS and TUBERCULOSIS:

 When Poe was a small child, his mother died from consumption. (Tuberculosis.) 

The symptoms of TB include a lot of coughing up of blood. 

Imagine how traumatic that would be for a small child to witness. 

After the death of his mother, he was adopted into another family. 

Years later, his beloved foster mother contracted and died from the SAME disease.
 
Edgar later fell in love and married his 13 year old first cousin, Virginia Clemm. 

As illegal as that would be today, 

by ALL accounts they were deeply in love and very happily married. 

She was all the world to him. 

When she was about 18 years old, she was giving a performance on the piano and singing, 

when she coughed and a drop of blood came out of her mouth.

 Edgar realized to his horror that she had contracted the same disease 

 that every woman he had ever cared about had suffered and died from. 

Virginia suffered terribly from the disease for seven years, before finally succumbing and dying. 

Edgar could hardly bear her loss. 

In 1849, Edgar wrote "To My Mother":

 Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother," 

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you--
 
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you,
In setting my Virginia's spirit free. 

My mother--my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; 

but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
 
 By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

WHAT INSPIRES YOUR WRITING?

IN THE LAND OF GIANTS

I was reading Anne R. Allen's blog post on why we should use the unfriendly Google+:

http://annerallen.com/2016/02/authors-google-plus-google-awful.html

And she commented she had 9 million visits to her Blogger profile in response to Alex Cavanaugh's 16 million visits.

Me?

A little over 17,000.  I am a fallen acorn in a forest of Redwoods.


Take the new A TO Z CHALLENGE:
http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

There are some Third World Nations without as many citizens as there are entrants into this challenge!

Do you sometimes feel small and insignificant in the enormous world of blogging giants?

Many Bloggers Are So Discouraged By What They Lack 

 They Fail To Appreciate What They Have

 

What do you have that no one else has?

You have You.

No one thinks or writes as you do.  No one has your sense of humor.

 

To Have A Stand-Out Blog ...

Here are some important steps to take:

 

STEP 1: Share Other Blogger's posts in links -

No matter how big or small they might be, every blogger enjoys having their content shared.


 STEP 2: Leave Comments
Don’t just leave any old comment, though…
Write comments which expand the conversation.


 STEP 3: Write comments where it’s clear you read the post.

If possible, be one of the first people to comment on a post.

This is where being an email subscriber and Twitter follower comes in handy. 

When a new post goes live, you’re ready to pounce.

If you consistently leave insightful comments (and you’re consistently one of the first to comment), 

you may just get replies THAT LEAD OTHERS TO YOUR BLOG.

STEP 4: Link To Great Bloggers In Your Posts

A wonderful thing about following authority bloggers is 

you are introduced to awesome content you can feel good linking to and sharing with your readers.


 STEP 6: Be Cool

Don’t be “that guy” or “that girl.” 

Don’t follow, share, comment, or link just so you can immediately hit up someone for a favor.

Yes, much further down the line, asking for a back-link may draw visitors to your blog, but be discreet.

 This — all of this — is about building relationships.


STEP 7: Your Blog Cannot Be Covered in Ads.

Remember the fight scene in Anchorman?  


STEP 8: Your Blog Cannot Be Filled With Grammatical Errors

 Don’t be so imperfect influential bloggers decide you’re not worth the time commitment.

(In short, make sure your posts are proofread and edited before publishing.)


STEP 9: Develop Your Own Voice:

 Attitude, tone, and personal style are part of a writer’s voice.  

Make sure yours stem from your heart and mind.

***
When I write my novels, I write them as movies within my head.  (Do you?)

Here is the music I see in the opening credits to THE NOT-SO-INNOCENTS ABROAD ...

As the Air/Steamship, Xanadu, sails across the skies above a storm-tossed ocean:

IT IS NOT YESTERDAY'S MARKET

We're not trying to sell our books in yesterday's market.

"Everybody Says" and "Conventional Wisdom" - they are always two to five years out of date.



Amanda Hocking used twitter to great results. Now, Twitter is a tidal wave of BUY ME!!!

When everyone is shouting, no one is listening.


John Locke was the pioneer of 99 cent books and buying reviews to pump up interest.

Now. Amazon counts a 99 cent sale as HALF a sale, 

and of course, buying reviews has cheapened the impact of ALL reviews on Amazon.


Hugh Howey and others made an impact on serialization and Wattpad.
https://www.wattpad.com/

Now, tons of authors are trampling over one another to post there, 

bulging readers' inboxes with announcements that a new story has arrived.

"But I am posting my first novel in the series so they will buy my second."

Ah, no, they will just wait for you to post the second FOR FREE in your hope to entice them to buy your third in the series.

TAKE EMAIL LISTS:

"Oh, now, you're getting personal, Roland!"

Yes, there are a lot of email list service providers out there:
http://email-marketing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/ 


THEY are still making money off of AUTHOR EMAIL LISTS.

Authors?  Not so much.

HEY, MY BOOKS SOLD GREAT OFF MY EMAIL LIST!

SOLD.  Past tense.

You may have hit while the market was still green, 

and you have built up loyal followers like Amanda Hocking and John Locke.


But today's reader has an inbox bulging with newsletters 

that she or he has little time or inclination to read 

as they are as personal and engaging as a politician's handshake running for re-election:

Earnest and solicitous ... and hollow requests for money.


"But they are part of my market, otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in my free offer."

Maybe or maybe they were just drawn to the FREE PART.


"But they have given me permission to talk to them about my books in their email inbox."

Yeah ... 

have you ever given a cigarette, lunch money, a lift a few times to an acquaintance 

only to have it become a dreary eternal situation?

BUT WHAT DO WE DO?

Like Hugh Howey, Amanda Hocking, John Locke ...

YOU WALK DOWN NEW PATHS

You experiment on something you have come up with yourself.

How often have you looked at a novel idea and groaned, "That is so simple! Why didn't I think of that?"

BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T TRY, THAT'S WHY.

It is human nature to want things handed to us ...

but those things are all SECOND HAND without the fire of newness.

All the ingredients are there all about us.  

We just have to look at them in a new light, mixing them up in different ways.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WE COULD DO NEW TO MARKET OUR BOOKS?

HOW TO WRITE WELL

[Banner courtesy of McCorkle Creations}

The small palms by my poker table hissed through the shadows of Meilori's with their flaying leaves.

The ghost of Julie London swayed by on her way to the stage.

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again like a theater curtain.

The ghost of Raymond Chandler took a sip from his glass.  

"I know that trick, kid. That was supposed to make you roll over on your back with all four paws in the air.”

"Woof," I said.

Mark Twain chuckled, "God created women so that Man would learn seeing ain't always believing."

Stephen King smiled, drawing a card.  "And why was Man created?"

Roger Zelazny snorted, "So Taylor Swift would have lyrics to her songs when she broke up with one."

Hemingway puffed on his cigar.  "My post did well yesterday, didn't it?"

Roger nodded.  "Surprisingly so since you nay-sayed their dream of slapping a novel together in a month."

Hemingway said, "Dreams alone won't fill libraries."

Roger looked off into the darkness.  

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”

Mark puffed on his own cigar.  

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

Chandler sighed, 

"They are wasting a month hurrying a novel when they should be carefully crafting one.  But there is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

Roger nodded, 

"I always forced myself to sit down and write five pages each morning.  Then, each evening I would slash and hack those pages down into three."

He smiled sadly to me.  “No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”

He tapped his cards against his teeth.  "Here's a tip for you, Roland.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something,

which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -

you just don't know which.

You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself.

Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

Trust your demon.” 

Stephen King laughed softly, "I always do.  Roland, books are the perfect entertainment:

no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.” 

An evil gleam shined in his eyes behind his glasses.  "While we're giving tips to you.  Here's a few:

 “Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.  Learn the strip-tease delay of good fiction, revealing as you go along.  Great fiction is the truth within the lie."

Chandler took a slow sip of his drink.  

"It all boils down to your hero, kid.  He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.

He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor --

by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. 

He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a hero at all.

He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job.

He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge.

He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is the man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. 

If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

"What about women heroes?" I asked.  "Ada Lovelace created the first computer program 100 years before the invention of the computer. 

Abigail Adams healed the rift between two U.S. Presidents. 

Alexandrine Tinne was a Dutch explorer who made the first female attempt to cross the Sahara.

  Aletta Jacobs was a Dutch doctor, a feminist, a pacifist, and a human rights activist."

Chandler smiled crooked, "That was then.  Now, we have Taylor Swift."

The ghost of William Faulkner shook his head.  

"That is your cynicism talking.  Roland, always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” 

Mark Twain lit another cigar.  “What would men be without women? Scarce, Roland...mighty scarce.” 

Stephen King gently smiled at me.  

"As with all creation, Roland, it begins with the Word.  But it must be the right word in the right way at the right time."

He looked away from me and into himself.  

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them --

words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

 But it's more than that, isn't it?

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried,

like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way,

not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” 

For a time, my friends and I were lost inside our own secret hearts.

 

WHAT KEEPS YOU GOING AS A WRITER?

Last week I got called in to the office of the Head of Lifeshare Blood Center.

No hint why the center head wanted to see me.  

With lead stomach, I walked in and found the center  head wanted me to be the Spotlight Employee of the month.

Nice Surprise.

Of course this week I found that my ebooks had been pirated, explaining the ZERO sales of late ... 

so if any of you out there haven't gotten one of my ebooks yet ...

please consider getting one just so I can see a number besides ZERO in my column!  :-)

The pat on the back by my center and co-workers has helped me keep on keeping on this week.

It got me to wondering what keeps you going as a writer? 

Writing is  not about writing in spurts of inspiration. It’s about doing the work, day-in and day-out.

The true mark of a champion is a commitment to the craft of writing.

Read about the lives of great writers.  At one point they all said, "I can't go on."  And then, they went on.  

The WHY of their keeping on varied, but they kept on. 

We all have walked sidewalks. 

Remember the blade of grass thrusting up stubbornly from between the cracks?

Despite the tramp of countless feet, the tiny gram of soil for its roots, 

that one blade reached up for the sun.  That must be us.

Anne Lamont, author of Bird By Bird, wrote:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully 

and have made a great deal of money, 

and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. 

Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. 

All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.

So how do you keep going as a writer?

MY BOOKS HAVE BEEN PIRATED! IWSG entry

Look at the cover of the book you almost didn't get
 to read.

I have finished it, edited it, 

and even added a short story at the end for lagniappe 

with a section for Readers' Discussion and Enjoyment.

(I thought I might encourage readers who have a book club or new readers to form a new club with my suggestions.)

Two Reasons Why You Almost Never Got
 to Read This Book:

1.) My Createspace formatter fell off the face of the earth.

I do not know of any others besides one in Thailand! And he does not do covers anymore.

Google seems to be coy about giving me straight answers about where I might find any formatters.

THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS looked like it wasn't going to be seen in paperback either.

I was afraid my formatter has encountered ill health, accident, or death.  I emailed and Facebooked but no reply.

Google would not tell me anything either.  

I needed the IMF or at least Rebecca Furguson!

She probably wouldn't be able to find my formatter either, but I would be in much better spirits!

I have since found out that my formatter was away on a work-vacation for a week where they did not have internet. Whew!

But Rebecca if you still want to visit, I am still willing! 



2.) MY BOOKS HAVE BEEN PIRATED!


Googling for my formatter's name plus the subject obituary, I found nothing.


On a lark, I Googled my name.  I got a few links to posts I have written, and then ...

I found a link to a page where you could download FOR FREE all versions of my print books with the images of their covers!!

Quote:
 
Do you want to search free download Her Bones are in the Badlands By Roland D Yeomans or free read online? If yes you visit a website that really true. If you want to download this ebook, i provide downloads as a pdf, kindle, word, txt, ppt, rar and zip. 

Obviously, English is not the native tongue of this author!


Now, a few months ago, every one of my Kindle books were bought and returned within an hour of purchase.

It took a month for my entire library on Amazon to be bought and so returned.

And after that, the sales of my Kindle books dried up to ZERO!

It didn't take a genius to deduce that my books had been pirated.  

I contacted Amazon whereupon they obliviously replied that their return policy was a customer service.

I replied that this particular reader had serviced my books for his.  No reply to that.


I decided to do only print and audio books from now on.  

NOW, it looked like the versions of my print books had been pirated!

(All the cover images were from my print books!)

I would give you the link to the page but I have found some dangers to those pages:

The majority of these sites don’t actually have your book.

 Some are designed to install viruses and malware when you click on the “download” button. 

Others are an attempt to steal credit card information when you sign up to open an account. 

 Some are web crawler sites (also known as spider sites). 

They’re designed to crawl around the web and looks for entries for a search engine index.



So not only are those pirates hurting me, but they are using my books to hurt my readers!

This pirating almost made me quit writing altogether.  

But Sandra thumped me on the forehead with thumb and forefinger, saying it was free advertising.  

What do you think about pirating?