FAM bookmarks

The Fine Art of Murder bookmarks arrived today. I love them. Also on the front side is the cover of Decades of Dirt, which we published last year. The covers for the other three anthologies are on the back. All of them include stories written by members of the Speed City chapter of Sisters in Crime. I have stories in four of the five books and co-edited DoD.

The launch for FAM is Sunday, Oct. 23, at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at 86th and Keystone in Indianapolis. We will be there from noon to 6 p.m., signing books. We will have a program and reading at around 2 p.m.

Hope to see you then.

Thanks for reading.

An excerpt of Miss Hattie Mae's Secret, published in Decades of Dirt (2015).

Hello, everyone. Many of you have 'liked' my author page on Facebook (Look for author MB Dabney, on Facebook, and like me if you haven't already.) and months ago read on excerpt from my story, Miss Hattie Mae's Secret in the anthology, Decades of Dirt. My story is the last one of 15 stories of murder, mystery and mayhem in the book, which is still available on Amazon for $9.99. And you can also get an e-book version for $2.99.
So please, if you can and haven't yet, get a copy of Decades of Dirt. And enjoy all the wonderful stories you will find there.
And for a taste, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Miss Hattie Mae's Secret by MB Dabney.
_____  

Miss Hattie Mae farted...

Often.

When anyone mentioned the flatulence, she’d blame it on the dog. She blamed most things on the dog. Only problem was, Miss Hattie Mae didn’t have a dog, hadn’t for years.

What Miss Hattie Mae did have was a secret – one that spanned decades. The secret was like a respectful traveling companion: generally silent but always present. She was one month shy of 96 and the secret had come to define her life for more than eight decades.

Her small, five-room dwelling had a distinctive, although not all together unpleasant, aroma from all the years Miss Hattie Mae had lived, cooked and farted in the house. She was born there, lived there most of her life (even after she married), and raised her children under its leaky roof.

Hattie Mae’s father Ezra Reeves built the house right after he moved to the area with his new bride Ruth the year before Hattie Mae was born. At the time, the house sat at one end of their land, which stretched 40 acres. Over time, and with hard work and careful buying, Ezra’s property grew to more than 200 acres on which his extended family farmed cotton and soybeans. A small portion of land, the part closest to the house, also held apple and peach trees. Her mother’s apple pies were legendary in the small black community outside of Clarksville, Tennessee. When she wasn’t forced to work in the fields when she was growing up, Hattie Mae liked to play along a line of oak trees visible at the other end of their property.

The house, now sitting on a small parcel of land, was all the property she had left, though it wasn’t her only financial asset. In truth, Miss Hattie Mae was a millionaire, a recent development she cared little about.

Last year, the federal government used eminent domain to take most of her land – and paid her handsomely for it, which explained her wealth. Plans were for the expansion of a four-lane highway for traffic heading to and from Clarksville. Large land movers arrived last week to start tearing down those oak trees and reworking the property in preparation for the highway construction.

 But the land held secrets; long buried secrets that were about to be exposed for the first time in decades.

Miss Hattie Mae’s eyesight was poor, but she could still distinguish the flashing lights atop the police cars among the land movers at the edge of the line of oak trees.

“Boy,” she said, her tongue licking her lips, “Betta go tel-ah-phone yo pappy.”

____

Thanks for reading.

Challenges at the end of 2015, and beginning of 2016

I was away from this blog for most of last year, so I didn't post a series of challenges I faced at the end of the year that extended into the beginning of 2016.

There was some good, of course. The anthology I co-edited, Decades of Dirt, was published in the late summer. Throughout the fall, we had several wonderful book signings and book presentations. One of my favorites was in Greenwood, Indiana, on Oct. 17. I think there were six of us on a panel in which we discussed writing, the anthology and our stories. We had a nice crowd that afternoon and I was well-pleased as I drove the roughly 20 miles home.

That is, I was pleased until I was about two miles from the house. It was at that point when the driver in another car failed to yield  the right-of-way and inexplicably turned left into my path. It was totally unexpected and we collided nearly head-on with me going about 40 miles per hour.

 

Both air bags in front went off, smoke filled the car, I couldn't open my car door (and thus was trapped inside) and I was nearly in shock. But when they arrived 8 minutes later, rescue workers determined I didn't break my neck or my back, and they were able to lift me into the passenger seat to get me out, and rush me to the hospital. My neck was killing me but, as I said, wasn't broken. However, I broke a bone in my left hand -- which made it difficult for me to type for weeks -- and I spent the night in the hospital as they monitored me for possible damage to my heart, which could have resulted in a heart attack.

Needless to say, the car was totaled. The impact bent the frame of the car from the front to the back on the driver side. Which meant, of course, my body absorbed energy strong enough to bend metal.

But I recovered after several weeks.

In December, just a week before Christmas, our furnace failed at the beginning of a cold winter. Two nights later, as we were considering our furnace options, we had a small electrical fire in the outlet next to my desk. We had to spend two nights out of the house and EVERYTHING in my guestroom/office was removed and cleaned.

In early January, we finally replaced the car that was totaled but by then I was having to mentally and emotionally prepare for surgery.

In the late summer last year, doctors determined that, once again, I had prostate cancer. Since I had radiation for cancer over the winter in 2009-10 -- it was my Winter Project that year -- I couldn't have radiation again. Surgery was the best of two poor options.

The surgery was the day after Valentine's Day and went wonderfully well. The surgeon, a tall man by the name of Dr. Large, was very pleased. Spent three days in the hospital, mostly because it took me that long to pass gas, but had a urinary catheter for FOUR WEEKS. (You can't tell it from the picture below but the catheter is why I was wearing a skirt.) Having a tube coming out of my penis for that long is beyond tiring.

Anyway, I still have challenges from the prostate surgery but I'm feeling much better. And the good thing is my PSA is zero and I can still write. But I was so consumed with the fall car accident, the furnace, the house fire and the surgery, I couldn't focus on a book outline about the Indianapolis 500 that I promised a local publisher. An opportunity lost but, as I am still among the quick, I will just have to grab another opportunity.

But life does get in the way sometimes.

So that's a little of what's happened lately. Thanks for reading and keep writing.