When Things Don’t Work Out

WHEN I WAS WRITING SHORT STORIES:

Dear Ms. Havey, 

Many thanks for submitting “When the Song Ends.”  I like this story very much, if not quite enough to buy it for Avenue–and so I’m returning it herewith. I would, however, be pleased to consider other stories, if you wish to send them in.  With best wishes, Gary Fisketjon. 

I failed to send him another…though I did look over my work, wondering if there even was another that I thought might be good enough. 

Because: Gary Fisketjon is widely known in the literary world both for his hand in revolutionizing the modern book publishing industry in the US, and for his reputation as a meticulous and comprehensive editor…As a young editor with many contacts among emerging writers, Fisketjon saw that the literary market lacked a proper format in which they could be published, and…founded Vintage Contemporaries, “a line of high-quality trade paperbacks” that created a new forum with much better distribution through independent booksellers.

Its immediate success transformed how contemporary fiction was published in the country; it also helped authors including Jay McInerney and Richard Russo to become well-known with their first books, and brought new readers to established but underappreciated writers such as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. Mr. Fisketjon … settled at Knopf as vice president & editor-at-large, and worked with a number of acclaimed writers, including Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Kent Haruf, Patricia Highsmith, Tobias Wolff, Julian Barnes, Cormac McCarthy, and Haruki Murakami, while also picking out and fostering new talent.

So Dear Friends and Fellow Writers, it is still a very long road! But in order to pump myself up and keep querying my NOVEL, When The Cottonwoods Blew…below is the first paragraph. Also what we call the HOOK, a statement to make you all curious:

When Ella Singleton’s four-year-old daughter, Sarah, is abducted, memories of Ella’s dead mother, Cecile, take on new power, propelling Ella into a search that will not only redeem her child, but also extricate Ella from a debt Cecile and society owe the kidnapper.

Comments, complaints, confusions are very helpful and welcome. Thanks so much, Beth 

WHEN THE COTTONWOODS BLEW    Elizabeth A. Havey CHAPTER ONE      ELLA  Chicago, Illinois, Late August, 1998   

She never meant to run this far, rows of cottonwoods arching overhead, so many crows caw cawing in the swaying branches, Ella Singleton again on Greenwood Avenue, the corner home where her mother Cecile had raised her. Ella checked her watch, fifty minutes until her 3-11 shift… enough time to discover if it was still there, the abandoned house at the end of their street. In childhood, a place of danger, of ignoring Cecile’s warnings…Bingo Gallagher, Rick the Skinny daring neighbor kids to climb crumbling, shattered walls, escape iron rebars that reached out to gouge any kid who scrambled, jumped. A place of escape, child Ella lying on smooth stones, falling asleep under overhanging branches, tangles of weedy trees that magically protected her during a spring shower…all before, the child who screamed.

PHOTOS: a crow…crows are featured in the novel, as they recognize faces; my collection of short stories, published in 2015; Gary Fisketjon;  

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