Once again it is Read an E-Book week, a tradition which began in 2004 in order to promote what was then an emerging technology.  Since then, the event has grown each year along with the market for e-books which is now changing forever the publishing industry.  Printed books are not going away anytime soon, but every year a larger proportion of e-books are sold.

To celebrate this event, four of my e-books at Smashwords.com are on sale for 50% off (that’s just .99).  Click on the title links below and enter coupon code REW50 when checking out to receive the discount.  All titles are available in multiple formats that are compatible with a wide range of devices.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Three stories about two neighbors who meet as young children and grow up together on Long Island during the late 60′s and early 70′s. The comforting and loving world they live in changes around them as their families fracture, society descends into chaos, and a war rages on. In the aftermath, they left on a wrecked, smoking landscape, searching for a new way to live when all of the sign have been burned down.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” *****

-Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” *****

Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Read an excerpt.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Smashwords Edition.

Natural Selection

A corporate manager is on the verge losing it all. Office politics, a growing drinking problem, estrangement from his family, and a looming layoff are pushing him to the edge of a personal abyss.

I wrote about how this story came to be in “Into The Abyss.”

Read an excerpt.

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.

A Couple

Rob and Debbie are spending their last spring break in Florida. Graduation is looming and they face an uncertain future. Family expectations, peer pressure, and their own hearts are driving them apart. I wrote about this genre of story in my post Doomed Couples.

Read an excerpt.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

Bonnifer, Smashwords Edition.

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Debbie and I had been fighting all week long. She dragged me everywhere. We ate rubber shrimp at an over-priced restaurant with stone-age decor. We visited an authentic Seminole village where they sold authentic stuffed baby alligators. We paid twenty-five dollars apiece to watch a blonde ride a killer whale. And on the night before our last full day, we drove down to North Miami to visit Debbie’s grandmother.

“Be careful what you say,” Debbie warned me as we drove down A1A. “There’s only one thing worse than my parents finding out, and that’s my grandmother finding out.”

“It can’t be much worse than if your parents find out.”

“Oh yeah? If my parents find out from my grandmother, she’ll make them feel guilty, especially my mother.”

“Never approved of her, eh?” I asked.

“Something likes that. If my grandmother lays it on my parents, can you imagine how my parents will lay it on me? Not one, but two layers of guilt.”

“You mean three instead of two,” I mumbled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind,” I said. “I just don’t see why you make such a big deal out of it. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“I just don’t like walking around knowing that I’m lying to them.”

That way she had of constantly accusing herself always annoyed me. Her parents were difficult enough without her helping them along. “If you don’t tell them anything, you don’t have to lie.”

“They ask questions. What’s the matter with you? Don’t WASPS make their kids feel guilty?”

“Of course they do,” I laughed.

“How come you don’t show it?” Debbie chuckled and added, “I’m sure you have plenty to feel guilty about.”

I most certainly did. Just several weeks earlier, I had taken Debbie down to New York to meet my parents. My father didn’t say very much, but I knew what he was thinking. It was just one of the thousand ways he was disapointed in me. I had gotten past caring about it enough to even have a fight.

“WASPS work silently,” I said. “They don’t say a word and just let the guilt build up silently. Psychological warfare. That way they can’t be blamed for anything. We always cover our asses.”

“Not a bad idea,” Debbie said thoughtfully. Then she turned abruptly and said, “And don’t smoke, whatever you do.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Sussman lived in a senior citizen’s condominium, inland from the coast on Miami Gardens Drive. Debbie had a little trouble remembering which twenty-five story building in the complex her grandmother lived in and it took some time for her to remember some old landmarks. We drove slowly around the man-made lake, around which the towers were built. Finally, something caught her eye. “There it is,” she said, pointing to one of the floodlit concrete structures. “They planted some new palm trees since I was last here.” They all looked the same to me.

We found a parking slot marked VISITORS, locked up the car and walked slowly toward the entrance. Debbie put her arm around my waist, sliding her hand down into my back pocket and whispered, “Don’t worry. Relax. I love you, you know.” I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, trying not to worry. With Debbie, however, worrying was a way of life. As we entered the lobby, I began breathing deeply, filling my lungs with the cool, purified air.

On the elevator ride up to the fourteenth floor, I grabbed Debbie, embracing and pressing her back into the wall of the elevator car, kissing her mouth powerfully and deeply. It was something we had always done during our first year together in the high-rise dormitory at school. Making love on an elevator, if you could call it that, had always been one of my more bizarre fantasies. The scintillating sense of danger was heightened by the fact that we were in Debbie’s grandmother’s elevator.

Suddenly we felt the elevator slow down and as always, I jumped away from Debbie and we composed ourselves, preparing our faces to feign innocence. The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and an elderly couple stepped inside. The man wore white shoes, plaid slacks, a polo shirt, and a golf cap. His wife, although she was on the heavy side, was an attractive woman in her late sixties, wearing a print skirt and a lavender blouse.

The man pressed nineteen and turned to me. He grimaced and said, “Who are you?” The skin under his chin flapped when he spoke.

I stuttered for a moment and then Debbie said, “We’re visiting Golda Sussman on fourteen.”

“Oh, you must be Debbie,” said the woman, smiling. “Your grandmother told me all about you and your brother.”

Debbie smiled nicely at the woman and then glanced at me as a warning to be pleasant.

“And who is this handsome young man?” her husband asked, giving me a smile. A small one.

“He’s a friend of mine from college.”

“Rob Dickinson,” I said shaking his hand.

The elevator slowed down and stopped at the fourteenth floor. We said goodbye and as we stepped off the elevator, the woman said, “Tell your grandmother that Rose and Milton send their regards and that she has a beautiful granddaughter.”

The door of Mrs. Sussman’s apartment opened and Debbie fell away from me into her grandmother’s arms. There were tears in her grandmother’s eyes as she said softly, “five years, five years.” Then Mrs. Sussman stepped back, composing herself, looking Debbie up and down. “See how you’ve grown up. You’re a young woman now. A beautiful young woman.”

The dinner table was to the right, just off the kitchen as we entered the living room, exquisitely set with silver and crystal. The entire room was decorated in off-white. Across the room was a velour apholstered couch and love seat positioned around a glass-topped coffee table. Beyond that was a terrace that overlooked the moonlit lake. Mrs. Sussman closed the glass door and switched on the air conditioning. Debbie introduced me and I shook Mrs. Sussman’s hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said. “You don’t have to wear that tie just for me. Take it off, make yourself comfortable.”

“It’s all right, it doesn’t bother me at all,” I lied. Debbie and I sat down on the couch, making sure we were at least six inches apart, and Mrs. Sussman took the loveseat. I sat back momentarily and felt a small pillow at the small of my back, which I suddenly had noticed was damp, so I crossed my legs and leaned forward, clasping my hands around my knee, trying to look comfortable. I glanced to my right and saw that Debbie had adopted almost the same position.

“Can I give either of you a drink?” Mrs. Sussman asked. “I have plenty of liquor in the house. I don’t drink it myself, but I like to have some in the house just in case.”

“No, thank you,” Debbie said.

“And you, Rob?”

“Oh no thank you, Ma’am.”

“Are you sure?”

Debbie and I both shook our heads earnestly. If Debbie had said yes, I would have also had a drink. Normally, Debbie would never turn down a drink before dinner. When she said no it was for a very good reason. I guess it was bad enough for her, bringing her goyisherboyfriend to her grandmother’s for dinner, she didn’t want to worry about what her grandmother would think if she saw the two of them drinking together. I decided that it would be best if I played along with her.

“Maybe you would like some soda,” Mrs. Sussman offered. “I have Cocoa-Cola.”

“No, thank you,” I said. I hate Coke.

“Are you sure? I went out and bought five bottles when I heard you were coming?”

“I’ll have some, Nanny,” Debbie said.

“You two stay right here and relax from your drive,” Mrs. Sussman said, getting up. “Are you sure you don’t want anything Rob?”

Following Debbie’s lead, I finally gave in and said, “I guess I’ll have a Coke.”

“I won’t be a minute,” Mrs. Sussman said as she scurried into the kitchen.

Debbie and I sat quietly in the living room listening to bottles open and ice cube trays cracking and soda fizzing. Just before Mrs. Sussman returned, Debbie leaned to me and whispered, “Don’t worry, she likes you. She thinks you’re adorable. I can tell.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Because I think you’re adorable and she always spoiled me.” Mrs. Sussman returned carrying a metal tray with two glasses of Coke. “They certainly look good,” I said, trying a little too hard, as I reached for the nearest glass. I took a sip and felt the syrup coating my teeth.

Debbie and Mrs. Sussman got involved in a long conversation about the family back in Bayside. Her older brother was finishing law school and was now applying to every law firm in the country. He had offers from Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, and Washington D.C. He was most likely going to take an offer from Great Neck, Long Island. Debbie’s younger brother was now a senior in High School. Mrs. Sussman was rather upset that he was only going to a community college, but Debbie calmed the woman by emphasizing that he was going to transfer after two years. Then, Mrs. Sussman asked Debbie what her plans were.

“I’m going to move back home and get a job downtown,” Debbie said.

“What was your major again,” Mrs. Sussman asked. “Accounting?”

“Marketing,” Debbie answered.

“Oh yes, that’s right. Well, you’ll do fine. Everything is in New York. And what are your plans, Rob?”

“I’ll be going to graduate school in Boston,” I said. I didn’t want to say too much right away so that I could gauge her reaction.

Mrs. Sussman’s face lit up and she said, “Oh you’re getting and MBA. How marvelous.”

“It’s not an MBA, Nanny,” Debbie said.

“Oh.”

I’m getting a PhD in Classics,” I said, enjoying the disappointed look on her face.

“Rob has an assistantship, Nanny,” Debbie said. “They’re going to pay him to go to school.”

“What will you do after that?”

“Probably teach college,” I said. “My specialty is Latin poetry.”

“I see,” Mrs. Sussman said, looking down and straightening her skirt. For some reason, upsetting the women’s material sensibilities made me feel more in control, more independent. Being looked down upon has always given me a feeling of defiance. When people look down on you and think that their opinion means something to you when it really doesn’t, you can privately place yourself above them. The least it can do is save your self respect. In any event, Mrs. Sussman’s opinion of me was now permanently fixed.

For dinner, we ate pot roast (Debbie’s favorite meal as a child) with mashed potatoes, string beans, creamed corn, dinner rolls and rye bread. Mrs. Sussman also served an extremely sweet sparkling wine, which she called “champagne.” She kept filling my glass, telling me to tell her when I had enough because I still had to drive that night. I kept telling her I had enough, but she kept filling my glass anyway. Actually, I could drink that wine all night long and not get drunk. I might get cavities, but I wouldn’t get drunk.

Mrs. Sussman also forced on us second and third portions of everything else, which was actually very good. The pot roast was tender, the strung beans were not over cooked, and the rolls were freshly baked. After we finished, I tried to help Debbie and her grandmother clear the table, but I just seemed to get in the way. Afterwards, Mrs. Sussman brewed a pot of coffee and pulled a huge cherry cheesecake out of the refrigerator.

We sat back down at the table and Mrs. Sussman poured the coffee. I managed to convince her that I only want a very small piece of cake. “The coffee is very good,” I said.

“Thank you. You can have as much as you want. And as much cake too.”

We spoke for another half hour about college, the city of Albany and Debbie told Mrs. Sussman about her old friends from Bayside. Mrs. Sussman had a very good memory and could talk all about Debbie’s junior high school friends and their families. Finally, Debbie diplomatically said, “It’s getting late and Rob still has to drive us back to Pompano.” She looked at me and winked.

At the door, Debbie and her grandmother embraced and rocked back and forth. “Don’t wait so long next time. Any time you want to come down, just call me, I’ll send you a ticket.” Then it was my turn. “It was very nice meeting you, Rob. Good luck to you.” She hugged me and kissed my cheek while I obligingly kissed the air next to hers.

In the hallway, Debbie breathed a sigh of relief as we heard the door close behind us. In the elevator, I pressed Debbie into the back wall of the elevator, her thigh between mine, and kissed her mouth deeply. Then I held her tightly as I kissed the side her neck and my hand slid down her back and into her slacks.

Read the rest…

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image A Couple (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 29, 2011.

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

“I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”

“We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities…still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Saturday

Dietrich’s plate is full. Actually it’s overflowing. He’s got juice from the baked beans running into the potato salad and over the edge of the plate onto the table. The chicken wings are sitting on top of a salad and two ribs have tumbled off the plate onto the table.

“It will probably be Thursday,” he says. He bites into a full, uncut gherkin and the juice squirts across the table onto my plate. There’s a smudge from the potato salad on the corner of his drooping mustache. “The personnel files went to legal yesterday.”

“What for?”

He shoves the severed end of the gherkin in his mouth and mashes down on it as his eyes dart over my face and the sun glares off his bald head. We’re supposed to be peers, but he’s a well connected bottom feeder; I don’t trust this motherfucker and he knows it.

“To make sure there’s nothing in their records that could give them grounds to sue the company.”

“Like what?”

He picks up a wing and inserts it in his mouth. The skin and meat are tender on the wing, so without using his teeth, he sucks the bones clean and tosses them on the table. He picks a rib up from the table and starts gnawing on it.

“Any document that might have implied guaranteed employment, or a harassment complaint that they may have made in the past. Or if it’s a woman, if she’s knocked up. Don’t want to cut the bitch when she’s spawning. Better to wait until after she’s popped.”

He stops eating for a moment and looks at me carefully across the table. “You don’t have anybody on your list that could give us a problem, do you?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“You reviewed all their files, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

I tense for a moment and then remember that Diana Jenkins, a Quality Assurance tester on my list and showing at six months, still hadn’t submitted her maternity leave paper work. As far as the company was concerned, she wasn’t pregnant. No case, unless she finds a particularly tenacious lawyer. I’d reluctantly put her on my list because, at thirty hours a week, she is a part-time employee. If I could get her to submit the paperwork, I might be able to save her and maybe even her position. Nick, the CEO, has a hard-on for testers since “they produce nothing and take money out of my pocket,” but given the quality of the company’s software products and the number of pissed off customers, I’d personally start with the engineers before cutting the testers. It is, however, Nick’s stock grants and options, Nick’s handpicked board of directors and, in the end, Nick’s company. He’s not shy about letting you know that.

Dietrich stops chewing and looks me over carefully, sensing something. Stone faced, I sip my beer. You have to be careful with Dietrich. He’s always poking and probing you, looking for some weakness in character or performance that he can file away for when he needs it. He’ll gladly put his own sins on display in order to disarm you into revealing yours so he can record them and pass them on to a Vice President or the CEO when he decides it’s time for you to go.

On my second day in this company, six months ago, Dietrich introduced himself to me by sticking his head in my office and saying, “Columbus Savings and Loan, which you probably don’t know is your most important client, is threatening to throw us out and they are writing a letter to Nick. What are you going to do about it?”

I’d seen this sort of thing before. It was that aggressive sucker-punch, just to see how I would react.

“And who the fuck are you?” I asked.

That seemed to be the proper response. He stepped into my office and said, “I’m Bill Dietrich, director of customer support.” He was tall, probably 6’2″, in a dark blue golf shirt and tan Dockers. He held a clipboard in his hand.

I stood up, but remained behind my desk. “Nice to meet you Bill,” I said, holding out my hand. He was too far away to reach my hand to shake it, so he had to take two steps toward the front of my desk. We shook hands and I sat back down in my chair. I leaned back, clasped my hands behind my head and crossed my right ankle over my left knee.

“Since this is my first day here and don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, and you are the Director of Customer Support and know everything I need to know in order to fix this problem, obviously I need your help. I don’t have access to the problem tracking system yet, so, if you don’t mind, could you have one of your people print out all of, who’s that client again?”

“Columbus Savings and Loan”.

“Ok, Columbus Savings and Loan,” I repeat. “Let me read through all their open issues. Also all the closed ones going back two years so I get an idea of the history. Let’s meet this afternoon in your office to discuss it. What time is good for you?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, looking down at his clipboard.

Quickly, I answered my own question. “Two o’clock is good for me.” He was looking skeptically at his clipboard. “I could really use your help on this, Bill,” I added, addressing him by his first name for the first and last time. He was one of those guys who got called by his last name in the schoolyard and it stuck.

“Okay,” he said, looking up.

“That’s great, it would be a great help to me and I really appreciate it.”

I ended the meeting by making eye contact, saying, “I’ll see you then,” and then, tilting forward, focusing my attention on the papers on my desk.

After he left, I leaned back in my chair again, took a sip of my coffee and waited for the adrenaline rush to pass and for my testosterone level to return to normal. I wondered how long I could maintain uberalpha level without causing physical damage to myself or to others. Then I turned to the computer on my desk, signed on to the problem tracking system, and pulled up Columbus Savings and Loan’s technical support history. Later, when I received Dietrich’s hard copy, I noted that he had excluded two critical issues. I wouldn’t let him know that I knew about them until we were both on a conference call with the client.

As Dietrich talks and eats, I’m saying very little. We’re seated across from each other at the annual picnic. There’s a family at the far end of the table: one of my software engineers and his wife. Their two daughters aged seven and nine, are fidgeting at the table. “When can we gooooo!” the younger one whines. Her mother puts her arm around her and lifts the girl up onto her lap, smoothing the hem of the girl’s yellow frilled skirt over the girl’s knees. “A little while longer, little darlin’,” the software engineer says in his lilting Irish voice. “We need to see the boss.”

“Or he needs to see us,” his wife says flatly, looking over at me.

Dietrich and I are discussing the coming layoff. They do them every few years. Officially, it’s about eliminating jobs to keep the company lean and mean, but it’s really about eliminating people. I have a recruiter in Human Resources actively looking for replacements for some of the people I will fire this week. Conducting a layoff gives us some measure of protection from wrongful termination suits. Several of the people on my list are there because Human Resources, for one reason or another, wouldn’t let me fire them months ago. Then again, several are not. Legal cover. Fire the guy you want to get rid of, but who might have a case and then fire someone with a perfect record too, so it doesn’t appear discriminatory.

I’ve got food on my plate, but I’m not eating much. I’m feeling nauseated from watching Dietrich, the ninety-degree heat, the aspirin I’ve been popping since this morning, and from last night’s drinking session at Bogart’s. I don’t have many friends in this company, but the ones I do have, like to drink.

We’re regulars at Bogart’s. We spend a lot of money there and we tip well. It’s become a ritual. When I arrive late and the gang is already started, any one of the waitresses, it could be auburn-haired Monica, or blonde Heidi, or brunette Ashley, is immediately at my side, with her arm draped over my shoulder asking, “Can I get you a Stella with a backup, sweetie?”

“And a backup for the backup,” I say.

Someone pulls over an extra chair and I sit down at the table. “Don’t you love when she does that to you?” I ask.

Bobbie, my best friend’s wife, says “Not as much as you love watching her do that to me.”

Her husband, Ian, is a Brit with a fascination for everything American especially baseball. He’s looking away from his wife and is engaged in conversation with Mike, a software engineer who works for the company’s other development director. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his wife is a flirt. Or he’s completely cool with it. Or he’s completely resigned to it. I’m not sure what to make of them. They are very devoted to one another and I like each of them individually, but as a couple, they have a doomed Scott and Zelda quality to them. He’s a rather bookish and dull Englishman and she’s an American army brat who grew up on the continent and was educated in convent schools. At thirty, she’s enjoying breaking free from all the rules of moral conduct the nuns had drummed into her. It’s only a matter of time before she breaks Ian’s heart. Or he breaks hers.

Somehow, I seem to find them. Birds of a feather we might be called. Somebody politely invites me out for an after-work drink. Being new in the company, and feeling a little isolated, I accept. I meet the small clique at the after-work hotspot and there’s a natural progression. First it’s one night a week, Friday, and then it’s Thursday too. Finally, we seem to be drinking every night except Monday, a concession to the fact that I actually do have a wife and a daughter at home.

It takes its toll on me and most mornings, I’m hung over, sweating and popping aspirin until noon. I’ve even acquired the skill of swallowing them dry.

Dietrich has finally finished eating. On the table between us, is the wreckage of his meal, a collage of chicken bones, half-eaten ribs, and a viscous mixture of mayonnaise, barbeque sauce, and ranch dressing, slowly creeping across the table as if to mount an attack on my untouched plate. He leans over and grabs a wad of napkins from an adjoining table and wipes his greasy mouth and chin. Then he wipes the sweat off his forehead.

I look at my watch. If I can get out of here within the next hour, I might be able to catch at least part of my daughter’s dance recital. I hear some scattered applause and the sound of chairs sliding on the concrete patio. I turn and look over my shoulder and see the crowd in the center aisle of tables parting. The country club staff is darting around in the crowd, pulling chairs and tables aside side to make room for the entourage that is slowly moving toward the podium that stands in front of the vine covered rock wall. I hear some more chairs moving and everybody seems to be getting to their feet. My Irish engineer and I exchange looks. “Here we go little darlin’,” he says as gets to his feet and lifts his daughter up and holds her against his hip. I’ve finished my beer, so I take a sip of my earlier selection: a gin and tonic. It’s almost an hour old so the ice has melted and it’s filled with lime pulp. I slowly get to my feet.

There’s a break in the crowd and Nick, our CEO, emerges, followed closely by his right hand man, the CFO, and his other right hand man, the COO. Again, people are clapping. For some reason that I don’t understand, I join in.

As he slowly walks up the aisle, Nick stops at some of the tables along his route and exchanges handshakes and smiles with his employees and their families. The Director of Corporate Communications is walking backwards in front of him, snapping pictures. When he gets to our row of tables, he stops and shakes my Irish engineer’s hand and puts his arm over his shoulder. He leans over and with a broad smile on his face he reaches for the hand of the engineer’s daughter. Her father whispers something in her ear an turns toward Nick, offering her to him. She reaches up and Nick gently takes her tiny hand in his. They both smile as the Director of Corporate Communications’ camera clicks and whirrs with multiple exposures.

“There’s some artwork for the annual report,” Dietrich says.

Nick and his entourage reach the stage. Nick steps up first and turns to face the applause. His two subordinates step up and occupy positions in back of him and to his right and join in the applause. Nick starts clapping and makes a point leaning forward slightly and panning the crowd before him, as if to say, “No, no, no, this is all about you, not me.”

Nick Poulos, the son of Greek immigrants, is impressive. He has just come from the golf course where he has, no doubt, crushed his entire management team. He stands six feet tall and shows no sign of his sixty-seven years. His face, chiseled and handsome as classic Greek statue has a golden tan. As he holds up his hands to clap, forearms, sinewy and powerful, have the same golden tan. Standing as he is in the afternoon sun, his perfectly trimmed white hair is not a sign of his age. The sunlight it reflects, coupled with his powerful, athletic form, makes his age seem irrelevant. He is the oldest person at this gathering, but he looks healthier than everyone else feels. He’s also a lot wealthier too. You can’t be that old and look that good without having been rich for a very long time.

He stops clapping and, again to show his deference to his employees, he reaches out with his palms up and pans the crowd. As the clapping tapers off and the crowd settles into their seats, I take the opportunity to start making my way out. Nick saw me and waved to me as he passed by, so it should be safe for me to leave, as long as he doesn’t see me doing it.

I pick up my melted gin and tonic and tell Dietrich that I’m getting another drink. I make my way to the outside of the garden patio and slip into the crowd of standees, hopefully disappearing from site. I’ll stay for at least part of his speech, but I’ll do it from a distance. Enough people will see me there in different places, so they’ll remember that they saw me there. A carefully staged withdrawal.

I really do need another drink, so I stop at the outdoor bar near the entrance to the clubhouse and get a beer. I can’t see Nick from here, but he’s picked up the microphone and I can hear him begin.

“My friends,” he says, “this day is really all about you. The hard work you do, the loyalty, the dedication, the sacrifices you make. And it’s not just about those of you who come to work every day, it’s about the husbands and wives and sons and daughters who make it possible for you to come to work every day and do amazing things.”

I look at my watch. Five more minutes, or half a beer, whichever comes first.

“It’s been an honor for me to lead this company for the past twenty years. The culture that we have created here along with all of you is our most valuable asset.”

I raise my glass and gulp down my beer. “And by the end of the week, one third of our most valuable asset is going to be on the street,” I think. I glance slightly toward my left and see, in the tailing end of the standees, Dietrich. He looks over at me and waves. I wave back and smile at him.

“I’ll cover for you.”

I turn and see Mike, my Irish engineer, next to me at the bar with a glass of beer in his hand.

“Where’s your family?”

“They left. We came in two cars. No sense putting them through any more of this shit than they have to.”

“You’re a good husband and father.”

“Where’s your family?”

“Dance recital and I’m trying not to miss this one for a change.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Stay put for a minute.”

Mike orders another beer and takes it with his own and starts walking toward Dietrich. He turns and says, “I can handle him, go be with your family.”

When he reaches Dietrich, he offers him the beer. I see two of them turn away and walk toward a table with their backs to me. I put my empty glass on the bar and walk through the clubhouse and out to my car.

The parking lot at the high school is still almost full. It’s a good sign that I haven’t completely missed the whole recital. I have to park far away from the entrance. I grab the convenience store bouquet of flowers off the front seat, slam the door and run across the lot and up the front steps. Inside the lobby, I hear cheers and applause coming from the auditorium. I squeeze through the throng of people standing in the doorway. Onstage, I can see all the students from my daughter’s dance studio applauding their teacher. They are of all shapes and sizes, the littlest ones kneeling in front. As my eyes adjust to the light, I pick out my daughter standing in the third row back with her group in their nineteen-forties USO Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy tap costumes.

It’s over.

Read the rest….

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image Natural Selection (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 25, 2011.

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

In the years since then, two more of my stories were published there as well.  These were new stories and I think they were much better than the first one.  “Brothers” was the next one and it turned out to be the first of a cycle of stories that I’ve been working on over the past few years.  The third, “Truths,” was a short fictional vignette about  tryst that I composed from several fragments of stories that by themselves had fizzled out and were never completed.  I never throw anything out.  The writing challenge that I gave myself was to write an explicit bedroom scene to help tie the pieces together.  It’s the kind of writing that I’d always avoided doing in the past, even when a story obviously needed it.  A friend who read an early draft of “A Couple” remarked, “Fred, the best parts of this story happen in the white space between the scenes.”

It was true.  In my stories, three asterisks (“***”) could mean a movement in time, or a movement in space, or it could mean that somebody’s getting laid.  Given the nature of some of the stories I write – exploring intimate psychological and emotional relationships – the absence of these scenes is noticeable, kind of like Lucy and Ricky sleeping in twin beds.

Writing sex scenes in literary fiction is fraught with danger.  Somewhere between vulgar and clinical is a place where eroticism and sensuality and metaphor intertwine.  That place is very elusive.  Finding it is extremely difficult.  All that is certain is that when it’s bad, it’s really bad.  There’s even an annual award for bad literary sex that’s been won by some very respected writers and the offending passages cited are always cringe-worthy.

Novelist Elizabeth Benedict has written a book specifically about this challenge for writers called  The Joy of Writing Sex. It was this book and studying with Benedict at The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute that encouraged me to take this on.  To face the music.  To open the kimono. To put it out there.  After all, if John Updike could make a fool of himself and win several bad sex awards, what was I so afraid of?

I didn’t quite get there in actually depicting specific act or technique, but I did at least try to deal with the challenge of anatomy.  As these things go, it’s still fairly timid but I was nonetheless nervous when I sent the story out.

I had always been impressed by the high quality of writing in The Square Table, excluding my own contributions, so I assumed they wouldn’t accept anything that would end up being embarrassing to them or me.  Surprisingly, it was accepted and published.

Last year, after many years of publication, The Square Table shut down.  I’m not sure, but the editor and publisher, having completed law school, was now consumed by a career that leaves no time for labors of love.  Because my stories there were effectively “unpublished” I began looking for new homes for them, or at least two of them (“Absolutely Fourth Street” can safely fade away).   I sent “Truths” to the Loch Raven Review, an online journal that had previously published one of my rare poems.  I don’t write much poetry, I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but occasionally something strikes me.  I’m never sure of the result, so submitting them to journals is always frightening for me.  This was definitely the case with the poem that they published, so when it came time to find a place to republish this story that made me nervous I thought of them.

I am pleased that they have confirmed what The Square Table had told me.  The story is valid.

“Truths” is appearing in the winter issue of Loch Raven Review.

In the meantime, here’s a link to the poem they published a few years ago: “A Victorian in 1990“

Elizabeth Benedict’s inimitable guide:

See larger image The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $18.99 USD New From: $4.85 In Stock Used from: $4.86 In Stock

She practices what she preaches:

See larger image Almost (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $13.95 USD New From: $0.01 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” ***** Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” ***** Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Available now at Smashwords.com (use coupon code MJ87Z for 100% discount until June 6, 2011).

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

My short story “Natural Selection” has been released as an eBook at Amazon.com.  This story has previously been available at Smashwords.com and other retailers (see my eBook Store Page), but this is the first time it is available at Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer. Kindle books can obviously be read on their Kindle dedicated device, but Amazon has also provided reading software for PC’s,  Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones.

As for the story itself, I must credit the magazine that originally published it, Cantaraville.  I’ve written several blog posts about the story already (Into The Abyss, Natural Selection), so I’ll refrain from writing anything more.  As a general rule, the number of words an author writes about a story should never exceed the number of words in the story.

In the near future, I’ll be offering additional titles at Amazon.

See larger image Natural Selection (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 25, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

In the coming weeks, this mini-eBook, along with the others, will also be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Apple Bookstore, Kobo, and Sony.  The folks at Smashwords have been working their butts off implementing all of the distribution deals that they have been put in place.  Given the fragmentation of the eBook market that currently exists, where the retailers each have their own formatting requirements (unlike the world of print publishing), Smashwords is solving a real problem in bridging the technology gap and helping authors reach as many readers as possible.  It’s exciting to watch and to be a small part of Smashword’s quest.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

A coworker got his iPad this weekend, so I checked out what my eBooks look like on it.  I’m very impressed and eBooks may end up being the killer app for the iPad.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

A selection of my previously published stories and essays are now available as eBooks through several different sales channels.  The the books can be purchased and downloaded directly in multiple formats from Smashwords.com as well as from the following online retailers:

• Diesel eBooks
• Sony
• Barnes & Noble
• Apple iBooks
• Amazon

It’s a simple exchange of values. You give them money, they give you an eBook. 

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Three stories about two neighbors who meet as young children and grow up together on Long Island during the late 60′s and early 70′s. The comforting and loving world they live in changes around them as their families fracture, society descends into chaos, and a war rages on. In the aftermath, they left on a wrecked, smoking landscape, searching for a new way to live when all of the sign have been burned down.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” *****

-Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” *****

Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Read an excerpt.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Sony
• Diesel eBooks,
• Barnes & Noble
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

Natural Selection

A corporate manager is on the verge losing it all. Office politics, a growing drinking problem, estrangement from his family, and a looming layoff are pushing him to the edge of a personal abyss.

I wrote about how this story came to be in “Into The Abyss.”

Read an excerpt.

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image Natural Selection (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 25, 2011.

A Couple

Rob and Debbie are spending their last spring break in Florida. Graduation is looming and they face an uncertain future. Family expectations, peer pressure, and their own hearts are driving them apart.  I wrote about this genre of story in my post Doomed Couples.

Read an excerpt.

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image A Couple (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 29, 2011.

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Bonnifer, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble,
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image Bonnifer (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 30, 2011.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay

My memoir about a writing workshop and the teacher whose lessons on the art of fiction and the art of living continue to teach and inspire me, thirty years later.  There’s some back-story about how this essay came to be written in my post eBook Week, Meta-Memoir.

Read an excerpt.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image After The Fire: A Personal Essay (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date February 3, 2011.

© 2010 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Living in Interesting Times

This week, March 7 through 13, is “Read an eBook Week.”  Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords.com, has an interview at Huffington Post with Rita Toews, who created the annual event in 2004, long before all the recent hoopla and turmoil in the publishing industry regarding pricing, devices, digital rights management (DRM), Google’s attempt to monopolize access to every book ever printed, Apple declaring war on Amazon, and Macmillan picking a fight with Amazon while bloodying the collective noses of its authors.  Add to that mix a reading public getting very used to “free” content on the internet and print on demand (POD) technology and things are getting very chaotic.  The publishing business as we have known for the past hundred years or so is rapidly changing, but it’s hard to know what it’s changing into.  Gutenberg knew he was changing the world but probably never imagined that his printing technologies would drive the Renaissance and create the modern world.

Maybe we’re on the verge of some new Renaissance, maybe we’re not.  Where things are going right now is completely unknown.  Unknown to the publishing houses, the major retailers, literary agents and the technology enablers.  All of the people who are supposed to understand their markets and their businesses are clueless.  Some are embracing change, others resisting it, all are jockeying for position and trying to corner markets no one can understand.  Some are heroes, some are villains,  some are both at the same time.

The publishing houses, aware of what happened to the music industry, have not resisted the digital revolution, and have been offering their books in digital formats for several years now.  eBooks still make up only a small percentage of their total sales, but each year the percentage increases significantly, fueled by improvements in eBook devices.  Growth is still hampered by one major factor: The lack of a single electronic format that works seamlessly across all devices.  If eBooks are going to displace print books, it’s going to be an uphill battle.  If you include the codex, the printed book at nearly two thousand years of age, is still the most perfect communications device ever invented.  All it takes to read a book is at least one eye and one hand.  No expensive electronic equipment, batteries, Wifi, or USP port required.

Unfortunately, this problem is not going away and it’s actually getting worse because the major players are hell-bent on monopolizing the distribution channels.  Amazon, to its credit, has created the most successful eBook reader to date, the butt-ugly Kindle, and has done more to popularize eBooks than anyone else, but they use the eBooks themselves as loss leaders in an apparent strategy to become the sole means of distribution, able to dictate prices to suppliers.  If that doesn’t sound so bad, go ask a former employee of Rubbermaid what they think of Wal-Mart.

To the rescue came Apple, with its announcement of the iPad, and its own eBook pricing model.  Instead of being a retailer, Apple will function as an “agent” of the publishers.  Publishers get to name their price, and Apple will take a 30% cut.  Macmillan immediately took advantage of this and demanded the same kind of deal from Amazon.  Initially Amazon refused and retaliated by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan and Macmillan imprint books on their site.  Eventually, Amazon had to give in.  Interestingly, it took over a week to restore all the buy buttons when it had only taken them a few hours to remove them.  I’m a computer guy, and quite frankly, that does not compute.

While this battle was going on, I visited various blogs and news sites where this was being discussed.  There was the Amazon-is-evil faction, there was the Steve Jobs-is-evil faction, and there was Micro$oft Sucks faction, even though Microsoft didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.  Then there were those blamed it all on those greedy publishers and authors (note that this is the first time in this article that the actual creators of “content,” authors, are mentioned).  While there are some authors who earn millions of dollars from their writing, the other 99.9% have to have day jobs.  Greed is not an option for them.  Unfortunately, our consumption driven society seems to regard “everyday low prices” as a right, no matter if denies everybody else the chance to make a living, or forces third-world sweatshop workers to live in poverty, or causes environmental devastation in Asia.

Obviously, eBooks should cost less than their print counterparts, but it still costs money to create them.  Aside from the author, there are editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, marketing managers, advertising copywriters, lawyers, and accountants all involved in producing them.  All of them are entitled to be paid for what they do.

I complain as much about the major publishing houses as any other unpublished author, but there are a few things that I’m willing to accept.  I wish that HarperCollins hadn’t inflicted Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten nonsense on us.  On the other hand, it was HarperCollins that took a chance on first time author Ryan Smithson’s important memoir, The Ghosts of War.  Trash finances art.  This has been true ever since the beginning of both trash and art.

Apple shouldn’t be given a free pass in this.  They are not a white knight.  It’s true that they are adopting a strategy that is the exact opposite of what they did with the iTunes store, where they dictated terms to the music industry.  Their goal, however, is no different than any of the other players in this game: to gain proprietary and monopolistic control over the book publishing business.  The danger of this is made apparent by an action Apple took recently in censoring iPhone applications.  Based on some complaints from a family-values group, Apple removed all adult-oriented applications from its iPhone App Store.  Along with all the strip-poker games and hottie-of-the-day viewers, applications provided by literary magazines, such as  Keyhole Magazine, were removed because the short stories had adult language and controversial themes.  What will Apple do when they open their bookstore and the family values crowd complains, as they always do, about Lolita, Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

A Smashing Idea

In the midst of all this chaos is internet startup Smashwords.com, Mark Coker’s eBook publishing company.  It’s not a publishing company in a traditional sense, but acts as a distribution company.  For no upfront cost, an author can upload his or her ebook where it is made available for purchase at a price set by the author.  Smashwords takes a set percentage of whatever the price is for each sale.  Additionally, an author may choose to make his or her book available for free or to allow the purchaser to name their own price.

In order to make the books available to the largest audience possible, Smashwords provides the books in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Barnes & Noble ereader, Sony ereader, and adobe PDF.  It takes a lot of technical wizardry to take a single Microsoft .doc file from an author and to publish to all those formats, and to have them look reasonably good.  A program, affectionately known as “The Meatgrinder,” does a pretty good job of it, provided the author has followed some strict formatting rules. Given the fragmented technical landscape that now exists with all the competing digital formats, the Meatgrinder, is the key technology.  As a software product development manager, I tip my cap to Mark Coker and company.  They looked at an emerging market and asked, “What’s the specific problem that needs to be solved, what can we do about it, and can it be a viable business?”   They’re still in start-up mode, but they seem to have put more thought into it than all those hare-brained companies that fueled the first internet bubble in the late 90’s.

Unlike any other business that offers its services to unpublished authors, Smashwords doesn’t try to scam writers.  Unpublished authors are a particularly vulnerable bunch.  Vanity presses, illegitimate agents, and other unseemly types prey on writer’s dreams and separate them from their money.  I wrote about this in a post last year.  Even POD publishers who ask for nothing up front, push all sorts of premium services that can end up costing an author thousands of dollars just to publish a book that will be bought only by the author’s family and long suffering friends.  Smashwords is completely up front about it.  “You aren’t going to make a lot of money,” they say, nor do they try to sell you premium marketing or editorial services or make any money outside of what they make from selling books to customers.  They don’t do any advertising for your book either, they’re honest about that too, and that’s what you get for no money down.  Marketing is your job.

The honesty in a field normally filled with scam artists is refreshing.

In addition to individual authors, there are also some small publishing companies that have signed up with Smashwords that have published multiple titles.  In that case, the companies are providing the sorts of things that traditional publishers do – editing, cover art, marketing – and are using Smashwords as a sales channel.

Smashwords has also made distribution deals with the other major retailers.  All Smashwords books that meet a set of formatting standards are shipped electronically to online retailers such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.  More relationships are promised to be on the way.  This is a very shrewd strategy.  Let the war among those giants rage on, and in the meantime, do business with all of them.

This may be a glimpse of what the future of publishing will look like.

We are the world, in prose.

One of Smashwords most recent releases is short story collection, 100 Stories for Haiti, the brainchild of a group of editors and writers in Europe.  About six weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, word went across the internet that submissions for the book were welcome from all around the world.  Smashwords had signed on to handle the ebook distribution.  One hundred percent of the proceeds are going to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.  It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and it’s also nice to see that while the rest of the publishing industry is scheming how to corner this or that market, a grassroots movement can leverage technology in a new and creative way and actually do something altruistic.

I’ve bought my copy and it was well worth the money I donated.  It’s filled with exceptional writing.  Kudos to Smashwords and all the writers who contributed.

Books mentioned:

See larger image Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI (Hardcover) By (author) Ryan Smithson List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $9.23 In Stock Used from: $4.54 In Stock Release date April 21, 2009.

See larger image Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition (Paperback) By (author) Vladimir Nabokov List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $7.24 In Stock Used from: $2.86 In Stock Release date March 13, 1989.

See larger image Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback) By (author) James Joyce List Price: $13.50 USD New From: $10.03 In Stock Used from: $0.98 In Stock

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.98 In Stock Used from: $2.46 In Stock

See larger image Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Mark Twain List Price: $6.95 USD New From: $3.08 In Stock Used from: $1.28 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.