I have decided to put out a second edition of The Scent and Other Stories.
My primary reason for doing this is because I don’t like the cover any more. It is too dark and bland. When I initially created it, having been a (film) photographer at one point, I thought a black and white photo of a woman looking at the reader would be intriguing.
However, when I searched Books-a-Million to see if they carried my works (and they do), they came up with only four, of which The Scent… was one. It looked very dark and bland and ancient on their website. It was nothing to entice a viewer. Therefore, I have developed a new cover, which you can see here. It’s much more eye-catching, which is important when it’s laid out side by side with a dozen others on a computer screen.
I started thinking about a second edition some time back. I wanted to include another story entitled “Bye-Bye”, which was previously published by Fictionontheweb.co.uk. After I added the story to the current manuscript, I discovered that I had 90 pages. In the Amazon printing world, they can print the title on the spine of the book so long as the book is 100+ pages. I really want the title to be on the spine to make it more marketable in bookstores. So I have another 10+ pages to add.
I searched my electronic files and found a story entitled “American Dream” which I started a few years ago, but never got more than 40%-50% done. I calculated the number of 6×9 pages the story would be currently to eight. So I decided to finish it and include it in the second edition. I am still working on it. Once finished, it will probably be more like fifteen to twenty pages in length. Maybe one day, if I write more stories along this line (and I hope to), I will put out a third edition and include those.
The story so far is that a rather wealthy and bored, young wife named Laura is waking up in her bedroom in Corpus Christi while her husband is out of town on business. She is trying to decide what to do for the day. She thinks about the nightlife she enjoys and the lovers she has had (her husband is frequently out of town) as a result. She wants to call up her current guy on the side, Malcolm Flynn, but he is up in San Antonio for the weekend with his girlfriend. In a little while, a friend named Jill calls and asks Laura to go to San Antonio with her. She agrees thinking that San Antonio is a big town and she probably won’t run into Malcolm there. Of course, Laura and Jill spot Malcolm and his girlfriend in a cafe on the Riverwalk.
That’s as far as I have gotten. I am still toying with ideas for what happens next and how the story ends.
One side note on the story is that it includes Malcolm Flynn. Malcolm is a character in the novel I am planning to finish after Shadows and Stars: The Man Who Escaped from Hell. I also have plans to include Malcolm in some short stories. He is one of my varied alter egos that crop up in my work from time to time. Malcolm won’t be the protagonist in The Man Who Escaped from Hell (that’s Jake Brody), but he will be a close friend of his.
Let me know what you think of my plans and if you have any questions.
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Hasta Luego.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 