In the woods
the light of fall penetrates
as the leaf canopy opens
to the sun.
In the old orchard, the sharing of the pears,
gravity being generous to the deer.
Inside on the kitchen table
the last roses clipped before the first frost.

They’ve all turned,
half down, half still hanging on.
We’ve peaked,
and it’s been gorgeous,
intense and varied.
Whatever unknown mix it takes of sun and rain and chill,
this year has come round right.

It continues to be a splendid season for leaves.
Except, the walnuts have mostly dropped theirs.
But all along the row,
half still attached to the branches and
half on the ground.

The green husks fire off the mower blades
like little mortar shells.

While appreciating the sweep of fall below the hay field
and up the south-facing ridge,

there’s a funny blob on the grass, way over on the right.

Oh, yes, it is: the ever elusive ground hog,
seeking presumably additional ground to hog.

Perched in plain sight
if your eyes are sharper than mine.

All my writerly instincts go to presentation: show, don’t tell. You shouldn’t explain, just give your story what it needs, enough oxygen for your characters. Good writing serves this end. If a reader is pulled out of your story by clever language, that’s a mistake not a score.

My firm belief. Except, every once in a while, when something is both exceptionally brilliant and moves the story. I’m reading a Greg Iles book, just now, a Penn Cage mystery, dirty dealings in Natchez, one of several. And here’s the sentence:

The past was fighting its way to the surface like a sunken corpse filling with the gasses of decay.

It’s taut and graceful and strong. Right on the edge of just too pretty. But, damn, it’s in a paragraph about dredging a swamp to pull up the bones of long-ago murder victims.

And that makes it okay? Yeah, it does. Probably it’s okay anyway.

There’s always room for a new reader.

¡BRIEFLY FREE EBOOKS!

from the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mystery series

For five days in October 2015, the 16th to the 20th, Friday through Tuesday.

Try one book (or both) for FREE.

      Free on Amazon.com (the covers below are links), available only in Kindle format. If you haven’t got a Kindle Device, Amazon will send a drone to your home (when they know that you are sleeping) and upgrade your microwave, or install a Kindle-reader ap on your computer or tablet or any reasonably intelligent mobile telephone (totally free). You will be everafter able to access many hundred thousand ebooks, not just mine.

Every three months Kindle Direct Publishing invites all authors who sell books on their platform to trade income for exposure and offer books free, or at a reduced price. It’s a worldwide deal on all the Amazon stores (US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, India, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Brazil). People who wouldn’t pay for a book from an author they’d never heard of will go for free stuff. So as the returns roll in, you get to see whether this will be the time there’s finally a bite from the Netherlands or Italy (the only ones I’ve never gotten), or whether that firestorm in Japan (well, four books) will reignite. You take what fun you can find in the marketing process, and hope you pick up some new readers.

The Asheville Story.

The Williamsburg Story.

review snippets (good ones only)

    Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.

    This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.

    A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. Love the old lady with the sharp wit. I’d like the recipes, too.

    The plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.

    This is too fine a novel to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?

    Heart Attack is a great read!

    This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.

    Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.

COMING SOON:

Ghost Walk sample                                                                                                             Little Fishes sample

The Charleston Story: seeking agent

The Atlanta Story, editor ready

The splendor softens, droops,
petals drop and begin to recompose.
The flowers relax, still gorgeous,
but become a little tawdry,
spent.
While others tense, waiting to explode,
become white flowers, like the leaves,
the size of dinner plates.