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.

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)

Excerpt…

Brothers (Part 1)

When I was a boy, my father was a pressman who worked nights at a daily newspaper on Long Island. Although he worked those unconventional hours, both he and my mother did their best to keep us on a normal schedule. He left the house at 10:30 PM, after my brother and I had been put to bed, and returned home in the morning just in time to see us off to school. When my mother met us at the bus stop in the afternoon, she would always remind us that Daddy was sleeping so we should be quiet when we got home.

“Remember, Daddy is sleeping,” she would say again on the front porch, just before she opened the front door. We slipped off our shoes and stepped onto the hardwood floor in on the foyer of our house in our stocking feet. We looked up the steps and could see that the door to my parent’s bedroom was closed.

I could not contain all my energy after a day at school. Sometimes my feet would hit the steps too hard and fast and my older brother, who was behind me, would grab my belt to pull me back to slow me down. He’d solemnly put his finger across his lips.

Quietly, we slipped into our bedroom and changed into our play clothes. Our house was small and my brother and I had to share a small room next to my parents. He was two years older than me, so he got to sleep on the top bunk. After we had changed into our blue jeans, we went back down the hall stairs, sneakers in hand, and into the kitchen to see what snack my grandmother had prepared for us that that day.

She was a slight, stoop shouldered old woman who knitted and cooked and baked for us forever. My grandfather had died the same year my parents were married. My father was in the army at the time and there was no money and no time for my parents to find a place to live, so they had moved into my grandmother’s house in Queens. When my father shipped out to Korea, my mother kept my grandmother company and learned to cook all his favorite meals.

Now she lived with us in Port Jefferson, in a room on the first floor of our house. She shared the household chores with my mother, but specialized in baking wonderful breads and pastries. My favorites were the horn-shaped puffy shells filled with whipped cream.

Sometimes we would have small little cakes with nuts and raisins that my grandmother had made that day; she called them “Yeast Cakes.” Other times it might be vegetable soup or even her special pancakes, paper thin and made only with eggs, milk, and flour, and filled with apples or peaches. While we ate our snacks at the kitchen table, my mother would ask us how school was that day. Tommy, my brother, spoke first, telling her about his math quizzes and how many runs he scored at recess. Then she turned to me.

“And how was your day today, Johnny?”

Whenever Tommy had spoken first, I always struggled to make my story compete with his. Tommy had always been a straight ‘A’ student. He always got placed in classes with the smarter kids. I, however, struggled along in the middle rankings. I couldn’t read as well or add and subtract as well as Tommy had at my age.

After finishing our snacks, we put on our sneakers and left the house through the back door in the kitchen. Most often, we would ride our bikes and my mother would tell my brother to bring me along with him when he rode up the street to visit his friend Mark.

“Do I have to?”

“He’s your brother,” my mother would remind him.

“Oh all right,” he would say, hurting me with his reluctance. Then he would smile and say, “Ok squirt, I’ll race you to the corner,” and off we would go.

Mark and his family lived two blocks up the street. He had an older brother and sister, Ben and Sara, who were teenagers, and a younger sister, Miriam, who was my age. They lived in a much larger house than ours with a huge lawn in front that was perfect for playing touch football. When Ben and Sara and some of their friends were around, we played during good weather. Actually, the older kids played. Being too small to run and catch and throw with them, Miriam and I squared off at the line of scrimmage. We counted Mississippi’s until it was time for us to awkwardly wrestle each other, one of us trying to reach the quarterback, the other trying to block.

Mark’s family had a rec room in their basement. There was a ping-pong table, an old worn out couch from their grandmother’s old apartment in Brooklyn, and a portable stereo record player. It was a cabinet the size of a small suitcase and the turntable opened out and folded down from the cabinet-like a shelf. On rainy days, Mark, Tommy, Miriam and I would have ping-pong tournaments and put a stack of Ben and Sara’s Beatle records on the stereo. Miriam was a pretty good friend to me, almost as good as another boy, but whenever they played the song “She Loves You,” she would sing along and smile at me.

When Mark’s mother called them up to dinner, we knew that it was time for Tommy and me to climb aboard our bikes and head home.

Sometimes, as we road our bikes slowly home on the darkening street, Tommy would tease me about Miriam.

“Johnny’s got a girlfriend,” he would yell at the top of his lungs, for the entire world to hear.

“I do not!” I would shout back.

“Johnny and Miriam, sitting in a tree,” he would shout.

“Shut up!” I would scream and try to run my bike into his. Then he would rise up on his peddles and race up the street, singing “K-I S-S-I-N-G.” I would chase after him as fast as I could, but I was always smaller than him.

Once I caught up with him just as he was putting his bike in the shed in our back yard. I slammed into him as hard as I could. Tommy fell backwards onto the grass and I flew over my handlebars. I scrambled off of the tangled pile of bicycles and threw myself onto Tommy’s chest.

“Take it back,” I screamed, “Take it back!”

He laughed at me. I started flailing my arms, trying to punch him, but first he covered his face and then he grabbed my wrists.

“Take it back,” I screamed.

Just then, I felt my sweatshirt tighten and bunch up in back, as my father lifted me off Tommy.

“Stop it, both of you,” he yelled as he set me down on the ground next to Tommy. “What are you fighting about?” he asked.

I was too embarrassed to say what it was. “Nothing,” I said meekly.

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” he said sternly. “Both of you put your bicycles away and get cleaned up for dinner. And I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.”

Silently we both picked up our bicycles and wheeled them into the shed. We slowly walked across the yard to the house. It was dark and the light coming from the open kitchen window was bright, casting giant shadows behind us. The radio was on, reporting more dead in Vietnam. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” my brother whispered. “Friends?”

Through the kitchen window, I saw my mother and grandmother setting the table for dinner. My father sat at the table with his glasses on, reading the newspaper. My cheeks were burning from anger and the furious ride home. The knees of my jeans were damp with grass stains. “All right,” I muttered.

Seething, I pushed past Tommy through the door and into the light of my mother’s kitchen.

Read the rest of this novella:

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.

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).

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Short stories from the web.

For daily updates follow #LunchTimeStories on Twitter.

© 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: $5.32 In Stock Used from: $5.33 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: $5.99 In Stock Used from: $1.50 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: $7.56 In Stock Used from: $0.55 In Stock Release date March 13, 1989.

See larger image Ulysses (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (Paperback) By (author) James Joyce List Price: $13.50 USD New From: $10.95 In Stock Used from: $2.67 In Stock

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.59 In Stock Used from: $2.68 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: $3.98 In Stock Used from: $3.08 In Stock

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