Jeff Posey's Blog, page 9

Anasazi Novels: Writing Number 10, “Snake Medicine”: Week 2

This week, I focus on creating a list of potential character names. I begin with the list of characteristics on my Story Vision Board from last week.

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Story Vision Board for Novel Number 10: “Snake Medicine”

Because these are historical Anasazi novels, I use a dictionary of the Hopi language, descendants of the Anasazi, to look up the key words I ginned up last week: Hopi Dictionary/Hopiikwa Lavaytutuveni: A Hopi-English Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect. It’s a hard copy I bought for about $85 when it was first published. Used editions are now selling for more than $300, and new ones for more than $600. Yikes! Glad I got mine when I did.

I like to work by hand to get me away from the computer, where I spend too much time as it is. Here’s what my notes look like:

Anasazi Novels Character Name Ideas from Hopi Language Dictionary

Here’s what I came up with.

East: Contrary Lizard (Victim)

Hopi words for Lizard

Kitsíipu, kuukutsi, mátsáakwa (horned toad), nahu (plateau whiptail lizard)

Possible name derivations: Kutsi, Nahu

Terrify

Mashurúuta (mas=corpse, derived from Másaw, the god or spirit of the underworld and death)

Name: Mashu

Dream

Tuumoklawu (tumok=dream), tumokviptsa (viptsa=perceive)

Name: Tumok

Imagine

Piptsa=perceive; piptsani=notice

Name: Pip

Sleep

Tookya=sleep and put out fire (man, I didn’t expect that—to sleep means to put out the fire of wakefulness!), tokva (go to sleep)

Name: Tookya

South: Blue Heron (Seeker)

Waterfowl

Paawikya=duck

Name: Wikya

Accept

Kwusu (receive, get, accept); kwusuna (receive, in acceptance), nakwha (agree or acquiesce)

Name: Kwu

Acceptance

Hu’wani (permission, consent), hu’wa

Name: Hoowani

See

Postala (able to see, vision); posta (eye), aw maamatsi (to see as in understand)

Names: Posta, Matsee

Reflect

Naakuk.wuwa (ponder past events), kuk.wuwa, naawuwa, wuuwa (think, ponder)

Names: Nakuk, Nawoo

Solitary (alone)

Naala (by oneself), súnala (to wake up all alone)

Name: Sunala or Soonala

West: Skunk (Warrior)

Skunk

Kolitsiyaw

Name: Litsee

Respect

Kyaptsita

Name: Kapsit

Reputation

Naamataqa

Name: Amataq

Ego

Kwiivi (egotism), kwivi’nangwa

Name: Kwivi

Charisma

Tuskyapta (charm as in bewitch)

Name: Yapta

North: Contrary Black Panther (Victor)

Black panther

Tohòo, toho, tohow (mountain lion), qömvi (black), qöötsa (white)

Names: Tohow, Qomqoot, Kwamqoot

Judgment

Tsìikwa (give a decision)

Name: Seekwa

Fear of darkness, death

Qa taala (darkness), mookiwu (death), tsawini (fear), maqasi (fear)

Names: Qatala, Mooki, Sawini, Maki, Sutoki

Distracted

Sùutoki (become distracted)

Name: Sutoki

Center: Snake

Snake medicine

Tsuu’a (rattlesnake), taawataho (mythical snake), tuhiknanatuwna (practice medicine), ngámoki (medicine bundle), tuuhikya (medicine man)

Names: Soo, Tsu, Wataho, Nanatoona, Moki

Creative

Tuhisa (creative person)

Name: Heesa

Leader

Mongwi (chief), Tsu’mongwi (leader of the Snake Society), layma (direct, guide)

Names: Soomongwi, Soomong

Wise

Somatsi (discerning, astute), wuwni’yta (to discern)

Name: Somatsi

Transform

Alöngta (change), -niwti, himunwiti (transform into)

Names: Himoonwiti, Himoon

Dance

Wukta (assail with words; stepping or stomping in a dance), tiihu (dancing)

Names: Wukta, Teehu

Fire

Uuwingw (flame), qööhi (element of fire), qööh (fire root word), tookya (put out fire, be asleep, extinguish), Kookopngyam (Fire clan)

Names: Ku, Koo, Tookya (again), Oowing, Uwing

Healer

Qalaptu (to become healthy), tuuhikya (healer, unspecialized; a general practitioner), tuuhik (healer root word)

Names: Tuhik, Toohik

Whew! That’s exhausting. But I like having a large piles of character names to pick from when I begin daydreaming up a story.

Now I go to my storyboard, a big metal monstrosity I mounted on my office wall for using sticky notes and magnets to organize and visualize my Anasazi novels stuff. First, I lay out all the names on little sticky notes under header cards for each step of the Story Vision Board.

Character names laid out on storyboard for “Snake Medicine”

After I stare at it for a while and say the names out loud, I pick my favorites. See the magnetic arrows? Those are the winners. Next, I label them so I know which step of the Story Vision Board they go with (E for East, etc.) and lay them out in a balanced cast of characters. I refined this over the course of writing about three novels, but it’s original inspiration comes from the awfully titled but brilliant book on screenwriting, My Story Can Beat Up Your Story: Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay from Opening Hook to Knockout Punch. Yeah, that’s what I thought. I wouldn’t have ever bought such a horrendous title except that it came highly recommended in a session of the 2013 DFW Writers Conference.

Cast of characters for “Snake Medicine” laid out on storyboard in a symmetrical mirror.

The idea is that both hero and villain have an equal and opposite cast of supporting characters, a Doubter and a Believer in the area of Trustworthiness, a Feeler and Thinker in the area of Logic, and a Deflector and Protector in the area of Morality. It’s pretty powerful stuff.

Time spent: About eight hours.

Next week: Speed-read the first two novels in this series, Soo Potter and The Last Skywatcher, to get my brain back into the storyline (I plan to publish all three at the same time, followed by two more groups of three for nine historical Anasazi novels in the series). Work up character sheets for the main characters using exercises from a couple of Donald Maass’s books on writing: The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great and Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. And then write flash scenes (short scenes or scene fragments) for each character. That’ll be a long week. Might spill over into the next. We shall see. I’ll be finished this weekend with my final comb-through read of Novel Number 9, Price on Their Heads, to send to my first reader, so I’ll have more time to devote to Number 10.

Anasazi Novels: Writing Number 10, “Snake Medicine”: Week 1

For two years, I’ve devoted myself to the goal of writing ten Anasazi novels as quickly as I can. Why? To learn and improve my skill in creating long-form written stories. And to experience the creative joy of abundance I used to feel about short stories back when I wrote dozens a year. For each of my first nine novels, I focused on what I felt, at the time, was my greatest weakness: point of view shifts, character motivation, dramatic plot development, etc. Last week, I finished a solid draft of Novel Number 9, Price on Their Heads, (yay!) and now, for my capstone effort, I want to try something completely different for a historical novel set among the Anasazi of southwestern Colorado a thousand years ago.

While my wife, Danielle, and friends Jason and Wendi work on their vision boards for 2014, I begin with a Medicine Wheel (link takes you to Wikipedia). I draw Medicine Cards (link takes you to the site that sells these cards) and place them in this order: east, south, west, north, and center.

Anasazi Novels: Writing Number 10, “Snake Medicine”: Week 1

I look up each animal card as explained in the Medicine Cards book, and make a list of primary characteristics for each:

East: Contrary Lizard (“contrary” means I drew the card upside down, and the characteristics are the opposite of those for the animal shown)

Lives in a nightmare
Inner conflict—terror
Lack of sleep/dreamtime
Lack of dreams for future
Lack of imagination
Suppressed feelings
Resistance to new ideas and creations
May dream, but does not learn from them
Resistance to shadow, time of no shadow (dusk and dawn), time of possibilities
Poor vision
Drab colors
Cannot shed skin or tail

South: Blue Heron

Ability to accept all things
Flies over those unaware of who they are
Drops a blue feather from time to time, a signal for those below to reflect upon themselves
Finely honed self-reflective skills
Does not blame others
Sees truth of motives, actions, feelings, dreams, goals, inner strengths and weaknesses
Sacred water bird
Eats small fish, insects, rodents, mammals, turtles, etc.
Locate prey by sight
Solitary
Wade in deeper waters because they stand above the waterline
Predators: bears, raccoons, eagles, big owls, hawks

West: Skunk

Powerful reputation that precedes it
Respectful of getting close
Threatens senses more than life
Playful, without ego
Nonchalant
“I dare you” attitude in confrontations
Walk your talk, expect respect
Powerful body language
Attracts some, repels others
Charismatic
Repels those who sap (take) energy
Attractive sexually; sexual prowess; musky

North: Contrary Black Panther

See situations in black and white, accepts no middle ground
Full of prejudice
Reaches half-baked conclusions
Jumpy, nervous, confused, paranoid
Fear of being alone
Fear of “what if”
Fear of darkness, of midnight, of death
Constantly trying to figure things out
Worried about being “less than”
Distracted by foolish interruptions
In Choctaw culture, black panther symbolizes death; hence contrary black panther symbolizes life

Center: Snake

Snake medicine (rare)
Ability to resist or transmute poison—mental, physical, spiritual, emotional
Ability to shed skin, transform, become renewed, reborn
Ability to experience anything without resistance
Two snakes intertwined=healing
Interconnected male/female=divine energy
Universal being (all cultures recognize)
Fire energy
Power words: passion, desire, procreation, physical vitality, ambition, creation, resolution dreams, intellect, power, charisma, leadership, wisdom, understanding, wholeness, connection to Great Spirit
Thought+action+desire=wholeness
Magician: transmute poison
Dance freely
Sensual dance of power
Dormant after feeding
Precisely follows the path of its head

On a blank mounted canvas, I draw what I think of as my Story Vision Board. After staring at it a few days, I overlay the most basic Hero’s Journey (link takes you to Wikipedia), which I boil down to: Victim, Seeker, Warrior, Victor.

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Story Vision Board for Novel Number 10: “Snake Medicine”

I still don’t know what the story is, which is a bit frustrating. But the whole thing is slow-cooking in my mind. Feels good and right.

Next week: Create character names. They just don’t come alive for me until I’ve named them.

Total time spent: About four hours.

Jeff Posey is a Managing Editor for Lucky Bat Books , a fee-for-service publisher than never takes a royalty percentage. For a free half-hour consultation by phone or Skype by appointment, send an email here: Free Half-Hour Book Publishing Consultation .

What’s Your Novel Worth? NPV and Cash Flow

For better or worse, I have an MBA in corporate financial analysis. That means when I think of royalties earned by an author’s novel, I think Net Present Value (NPV) of future cash flows: your “novel worth” in financial terms.

It’s easiest to imagine NPV in reverse. Let’s say you go to a bank and ask their financial wizard how much you’d have to give them to get, say, a $50 check every month for forty years. The number they give you is essentially the NPV of the future cash flow of $50 per month. NPV has a long track record in business and law.

We’ll make these calculations over forty years. Too long, you say? No. It’s not. Copyright is the life of the author plus seventy years. That’s way longer than forty. But forty is the outside horizon for useful NPV calculations in the business world, and it’s about how long I expect to live. But I have made one grand concession to reality: after twenty years, I assume you’ll stop writing and publishing. A twenty-year run is a good one.

To calculate your novel’s NPV, you have to come up with a few numbers:

What is your average monthly royalty per title across all venues? If you guess, go low.
How often do you publish new titles? Number of new books published per year.
How big a boost does publishing a new title give your existing titles? If you guess, go very low.
What is your cost of production? Do you hire or buy anything to publish your book?

From that same information, we can also calculate an estimated net monthly cash flow, though we’ll project only twenty years into the future. Beyond that is rather ridiculous. We’ll see little graphs of those. It’s an interesting curve.

Remember, this is not reality. This is a simple projection. Your results will most certainly vary. And if you’re impatient and want to run your own numbers, go ahead and download my NPV Novel Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet.

Example 1

Let’s say it’s your first novel, you intend to write another one every five years come hell and no water, you’re going to do everything yourself and hire nothing done, you feel certain you can earn $15 per month royalty, and you think there will be so much demand for your literary skill each new book will boost your sales 20 percent.

            NPV: $7,249

That’s the financial value of your novel. If it takes you five years to write, say 250 hours a year, then you are a very slow writer earning $5.79 an hour in NPV dollars. Pretty classy.

Cash flow is even better:

 You’ll live like a fast-food burger-flipper king.

Example 2

A more serious one. You’ve published five books that earn, on average, $50 per title per month average across all sales venues for the past year, you are committed to writing and publishing two books per year, and you spend $2,500 per book on professional production services (editing, cover, print interior design, ebook programming, etc.). Each new book boosts your overall royalty earnings by what you consider a barely measurable 5 percent.

            NPV: $55,618

If it takes you 500 hours total, you’re earning $111 per hour in NPV.

And cash flow gets really interesting around Year 10.

A fellow could live on something like that.

Example 3

You’re a seasoned writer with a dozen books earning an average $150 per title per month and you have perfected the craft of publishing three books per year by spending $5,000 each on high-end production. Also, your accountant claims each new title released boosts overall royalty income by 5 percent—you think that’s way too high and use 3 percent instead.

            Answer: $145,015

Yep. More than $500 an hour if it takes you 250 hours to write each novel.

And those twelve novels already in the hole give you a boost in cash flow.

What NPV Tells You

In each of these examples, the NPV tells you the present monetary value of your intellectual asset if it generates the expected cash flow over the next forty years. It emphasizes the value of long-term steady flows of small amounts of cash, and also helps quantify the value of your time investment (you only have to write a novel once for it to earn income for forty years or more).

What is NPV not? It’s not cash flow. See the next header for that discussion.

Let’s say you’re weighing whether to take a second job and put all those earnings into a retirement account or not take the job and write another book. The money you save for retirement this year is the NPV of that financial asset. Compare that to the NPV of writing another novel.

If you write under, say, two pen names, one thriller, one fantasy, your average royalty is different for each, and you can write only three total books per year: What mix makes the most financial sense? NPV helps you decide.

Also, if a traditional publisher comes calling, you can compare your NPV to their financial offer. Good rule of thumb: Never sell a cash-producing asset for less than its NPV unless you get something you really want in exchange.

And finally, it’s good for explaining to your significant other why you’re sitting alone in a room with a keyboard so much. “But honey, I’m making $106 per hour!” Just watch your checkbook. Cash flow and NPV are not the same thing.

Cash Flow

It disappoints you, doesn’t it? You want to write a few novels and the money start coming fast and hard. It might. Probably won’t. But if you work at it, find enough people who read more than one of your books and recommend them from time to time (also called a fan base), you can build a nice income. If you’re persistent. Talented. And patient.

Cash flow that arcs up in a graph, that accelerates over time faster than the cost of money (interest rate) is an extremely valuable financial asset. You expect to earn more wealth relative to inflation every year. How many jobs pay like that? Not many.

Most importantly, this whole exercise drives home a message: The most productive thing a publishing writer can do is write and publish. Even in Example 1, you earn nearly $6 per hour in NPV dollars. How much do you earn per hour by “marketing” on Facebook and Twitter (if you’re very perceptive and keep good records, you can figure this out)? And in Example 2, what kind of other (legal) job could you possibly find making more than $100 per hour?

Lesson: Write more, do other stuff less.

Finally, you can discover how much intellectual property asset value you create each year. In Example 3, the author is creating nearly a half-million dollars in NPV asset value annually. In Example 2, it’s more than $100,000 per year.

Try it yourself. Download my NPV Novel Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet and punch your own numbers. What do you get? What is your novel worth? How can you use your Novel NPV to improve your publishing decisions?

Jeff Posey is a project manager for Lucky Bat Books, the kind of publishing company writers want—they don’t take a percentage, ever. He offers a free fifty-minute consultation over phone or Skype by appointment. If you’re interested, send an email here: Free Book Publishing Consultation.

SEO for Book Publishers: Five-Step Tune Up

My brother is an electrical engineer for a company that specializes in listening for the echoes of explosions. They make a big noise, sound waves travel into the earth, are reflected by various layers, and faint echoes travel back to an array of geophones on the surface. That’s how modern humans search for increasingly smaller deposits of oil and gas. It’s also how SEO for book publishers works.

Two things are crucial: Hearing and a bang.

There’s an interesting axiom in operation here: The better your hearing, the smaller bang you need—or inversely, the more (data) return you get from a big bang.

Put another way, if your passive tool is really good, your bang-making tool doesn’t need as much energy.

As the owner of a small publishing business, this is how I think about marketing. The better my passive marketing, the greater return I get from my active marketing (aka promotion). And before I make any noise, my passive marketing system had better be in place first, so I miss as few return echoes as possible when I do start promotion efforts.

For small business owners, the Internet is the motherlode of passive marketing—which means mostly Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It’s a complex field, and I’ve studied it more than most (from the perspective of small publishers), but not nearly as much as legions of experts over the last decades.

Step One: Brand Survey

Start with the two most-enduring brands you will have: Your name, and the titles of your books.

Now look up your brands on all the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Repeat with the major online bookstores: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Sony, Apple, Createspace, AbeBooks, etc.

Repeat with reader sites: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, etc.

Step Two: Prioritize Sites

We can do nothing about sites over which we have no control. So ignore them. Think only about sites where you, as an author, as a business owner, can go in and control your own information.

You have the most control over: Your website and social media pages, your product and publisher listings on the retailer sites, and your author/book pages on reader sites.

Your ranking will look something like this:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Createspace (if POD)
Smashwords
Kobo
Goodreads author pages
your website
your Facebook
Shelfari (will it go away now?)
your Twitter

Don’t do a lot of research to make this accurate or precise. Your gut will usually tell you close enough to warrant action.

Step Three: Make List of Search Terms and Test

Think like a fan. After they read your latest book and like it—what do they say to their friends? What will those friends remember well enough to take to their computers or smartphones to search for your book? (Never forget: Word of mouth among fans is always the most effective marketing for you and your body of work.)

This is far easier if you resist the temptation to over-think. Your list will look something like this:

Author name
Book title
Key setting
Key character (especially if recurring in a series)
Key theme
Key (especially if unusual) tools/creatures/powers
Genre
Subgenre
Sub-subgenre
Other

Notice the top two are your key brands. I also tend to rank standard genre low—how many of your friends have said, “Hey, I just read this great fantasy book!” No, they say, “Man, I just read this great book about flying wizards with explosive saliva!”

Any clues what good search terms are for this book? Yep: “flying wizard” and “explosive saliva.”

Check your search terms:

Google AdWords Tool. Note: There have been 6,600 monthly global searches lately for “flying wizard.” The more searches for your terms, the better. Especially if your competition is “low” or “medium,” which the AdWords tool tells you.
Google Trends. See if use of your search term is rising or falling over time. Note: The term “flying wizard” looks like an enduring search term that’s been at roughly similar usage levels for nearly a decade. I’m sure we have JK Rowling to thank for that.

Reprioritize your list.

Step Four: Load Brand and Search Terms into Priority Sites

For all your book-selling sites, this is your metadata. At the ones where you have direct accounts—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords—you can manage this on your dashboards, with these guidelines:

Focus on your top-level brand words (author name, title of books or series or enduring theme) everywhere you can place information that is not tied only to a single book title. Meaning author pages or bios, mainly.
Per title, focus on all but your top brand words (because they’re automatically featured), in search fields. Make them the same across all platforms.

For retail sites where you have no account and no control, the metadata embedded in your ebook file and/or filed with your ISBN will play a more important role. That’s beyond the scope of this discussion. New titles are easiest to work with. Existing titles will have to be modified and resubmitted.

For reader sites, such as Goodreads, fully exploit your author pages and what you can control. (Tip: If you have physical books published within the last six months, the Goodreads Giveaway program is an effective promotion.)

Focus on your top brand words

Step Five: Website and Social Media

For your website and social media, insert your top brand and search words where you can.

Use an SEO optimization tool on your website or blog (such as WordPress SEO by Yoast) and set it up correctly. There is a lot of help out there on the Internet for how to best set up your chosen SEO plugin.
Use #hashtag search strings for your brand words on Twitter.
Make very sure your Facebook and Twitter and G+ accounts are updated with a bio and description that features your brand words.

If you blog and do social media, keep it up. Being active and engaged is important. You can set up automatic Facebook and Twitter plugins on your website to help. I recommend HootSuite to manage several social media streams (example: You can schedule messages ahead of time to go out on Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn). Tweet Adder is not free, but it has the very interesting feature of being able to automatically follow anyone on Twitter who mentions your brand words. Imagine saying “flying wizard” and having the author of a story about flying wizards follow you back. Good social media activity strengthens any SEO program.

I also highly recommend installing a mobile plugin that allows people with mobile devices to see a simplified version of your website. Modern search engines prefer mobile-ready web pages.

How Long Will it Take?

Every job is custom, of course, when you’re dealing with something as subtle as intellectual property licensed for entertainment (you know, a novel). But it will look something like this:

Step One: Brand Survey. About 1 hour.
Step Two: Prioritize Sites. About 1 hour.
Step Three: Make List of Search Terms and Test. About 2 hours. If you fall into over-think, it’ll be more like 17 hours.
Step Four: Load Brand and Search Terms into Priority Sites. Highly variable, but plan about 2 hours per title.
Step Five: Website and Social Media. Highly customized. At least 2 hours.

Total time invested: About 8 hours.

Return on investment: Your geophones will pick up every little tremor generated by fan actions and your promotional activities. That means more sales per bang and fewer frustrated potential readers who can’t find you work.

What Works for You?

Did I leave anything out? What SEO for book publishers has worked in your publishing practice?

10-Novel Plan

I’ve struggled with what to do with this blog, and I had one of those insights that should have blinded me. Fortunately, I can still see. But I realized as long as I have my books here in the Hot Water Press tab, then I would remain forever confused about what to write here. Is it about books? Or me.

So I’m taking this back and kicking Hot Water Press off to its own site. Not immediately. I’m slow. Over the next few months. I think I’ll try a Pressbooks site. Play with that, anyway, before I default to WordPress.

And I’m going to turn this website and blog into something that’s interesting and useful for me. Which means I’m kind of building and writing this for myself. Does that make it a monologue? Kind of. I’ve been known to talk to myself.

I’m a few thousand words away from completing the first draft of my seventh novel, and I’m exploring more things than I can keep track of. I like that. Long rabbit trails get my attention.

I decided a year or more ago to write through my tenth novel and play with everything, from point of view to pacing to voice to action to internal monologue (kind of like this), all to apply some creative juice to my novels that I used to have in short stories. I discovered that, because a novel takes so much more effort than a short story, I was being too creatively tight when I wrote them. So now I pick a couple of things and tackle that while I write an entire novel. For my latest, #7, a historical fiction story tentatively titled Soo Potter: Anasazi Spy #0. Yeah, #0. Because writing this story sparked the idea of an Anasazi Spy series, set around 1100 A.D. The idea has me charged, so that’s my plan: finish out my 10-novel challenge with the first three in a spy/mystery series set among the world of the Anasazi.

Meanwhile, I continue to learn book self-publishing from the inside-out. First in the constant effort to learn and master the art of long-form written storytelling, then in creating clean ebook code (I’ve become something of a master of ebook programming, as well as a project manager, for Lucky Bat Books–best job I’ve ever had). Next I intend to learn cover design, then interior print design, all while trying to slowly build a readership base that will earn me a modest living. That’s the big goal. I’m still taking baby steps. It takes a good body of work to raise the value of any intellectual property in the entertainment business.

So watch for changes here. I’m thinking about adding an Anasazi timeline. That’s a crucial tool for me. I have it in Microsoft Excel format, and I’m still toying with how to build a useful Web page to display it. That and other tools that help me write, plus these occasional blogs, are what this site will become. And my books will move off to their own world, though I’ll still link to them here of course.

Tarahumara: “Modern” Anasazi Runners?

I thought a lot about the Tarahumara runners when I wrote Anasazi Runner. And a couple weeks ago, I tried to make some Tarahumara running shoes from an old tire with some friends in Oklahoma. Complete failure. Couldn’t even manage to cut the tire tread in an acceptable way. Enjoy the video.

Watch this video on YouTube.

“Witness,” Excerpt 14 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” by Jeff Posey

Part 2 of Chapter 7 from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.

Available in paperback and ebook.

Then Williams grabbed Reeves by the shirt and pulled his face close. “She carried your baby, didn’t she?”

Reeves shrugged. “She said so.”

“Then you want him dead as much as I do.”

Reeves didn’t care one way or the other. Truth be told, which he almost never did, he felt relief when he saw Pam lying dead. He’d only been with her because Williams offered him money to get her pregnant with a grandson, something Oley obviously wasn’t man enough to do. But things had gone awry when Pam said she wanted to be rid of Oley. Wanted to divorce him, but worried about her father’s reaction. Why Oley killed her mystified Reeves. Made more sense for her to kill him. But maybe Oley didn’t see any other way out. Trevor Williams was a man who liked to have control. For all Reeves knew, he had Oley by the balls as firmly as he had Reeves. He had no sympathy for either of them. They could all die as far as he cared. The only reason he put up with Williams was money. With only a fraction of Williams’s wealth, Reeves could live like a king.

“You do this for me,” said Williams, still clutching Reeves’s shirt, “before the police get to him. Make him pay. And I’ll…I’ll make you my heir. Like her son was supposed to be.” He pulled at Reeves’s shirt, his face that of a wild-eyed madman. “You hear me?”

Reeves nodded, leaning away.

Pam’s father released his shirt and raised his finger. “But only if you bring me his head. I want to see his face. Dead. You understand? My entire fortune for his head.”

His head. Reeves wondered how in the world he would transport Oley’s head to the crazy old man. In a plastic bag? No, a cooler would work better. With dry ice. But first, he had to find him. A job made difficult because he couldn’t stop thinking about inheriting the estate of Trevor Williams. That would make him one of the top ten richest men in Texas. Running his pipsqueak little marketing firm would never earn him that kind of payout, no matter how hard he worked. For the chance to step into the shoes of Trevor Williams, he would bring in the heads of a hundred men. Thousands. It’s what he wanted since childhood. He’d always been destined for riches.

Williams stood with his face screwed into pure pain and surveyed the room, Pam the centerpiece. “Make it look like Oley did it,” he said.

“Already does.”

“Then call the police.” Williams began to walk out.

“Wait,” Reeves said.

“What?”

“Your footprints.” He pointed down. Williams had stepped in blood and left tracks. “You have to stay and explain them to the police.”

Williams lost it and went on a tirade, cursing Tom Oley and the police and then finally calmed, breathing hard, and nodded. Reeves dialed 911. Detectives questioned them carefully. Reeves had the impression they didn’t fully believe his story. They seemed puzzled by the bookend in Pam’s dead hand. Had she tried to cave in Oley’s head with that, and he killed her with it instead? He didn’t really care. But it made some sense.

The next day, the unblinking eye of the press outside every door, Williams showed Reeves a will leaving everything to him. But with no signature. “His head, Reeves. Bring me his head. Then I’ll sign this.” He didn’t tell Reeves that the great Trevor Williams fortune had more debt than assets. His only hope of staying solvent lay in that deep well prospect Oley put together. With Oley out of the way, the operating majority of the deal fell back to Williams. Pam was supposed to have eliminated Oley. But the poor girl messed up and now he had to rely on the idiot Reeves.

After Reeves left, Williams thought about hiring another man to tail him. Erase that loose end after he took care of Oley. The phone rang, yet another problem with the deep well project. With Oley a suspect in Pam’s death and his disappearance, the investors were getting cold feet. If Williams couldn’t mollify them, he’d have to front up their share of cash, and he didn’t have it. He tried to talk them down, then consulted with his chief financial officer about squeezing more cash from his Dodge Financial holdings, his final option. His life had become hell.

Meanwhile, Reeves methodically went through his contacts, thousands of them, the result of years of partying and schmoozing. Asked people to look out for Tom Oley. Anyone who paid attention to the news knew why. He worked email and phone for sixteen hours a day. It had been his old straight-laced boring-as-hell college roommate who hit pay dirt.

Reeves walked to a whiteboard covered with last week’s marketing ideas that didn’t make it. He erased them and drew the crude outline of the United States. He dotted Dallas, Cincinnati, Atlanta, New York, Pagosa Springs, all the places Oley had been after the murder. Why Pagosa? Maybe because it didn’t make any sense. The best place to hide is where there’s no reason to look. The only way Reeves knew where Oley might be was the luck of the pilot.

Reeves flashed to Pam. The image of the bloody handprint on her back, the motion it must have taken for Oley to push her down hard enough to crack her skull on the corner of the coffee table, then the heavy bookend as the coup de grâce, placed to make her look like the attacker. Why? Oley had his own wealth, though Reeves knew Trevor Williams financed a lot, maybe even all, of Oley’s operations. But still. Would that have boxed Oley in enough to make him kill Pam rather than divorce her?

Reeves shook his head. Maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was the baby. Oley knew it wasn’t his. Maybe he even knew it belonged to Reeves.

He nodded his head. That’s it. In a fit of anger, the cuckolded husband slaughtered the cheating wife. Old story. With a good attorney, he might even find sympathy from a jury. But not from Reeves. He must be a hunter without mercy. He pressed his lips together and grinned. A head hunter.

Standing in his office, his fists clenched in front of him, the office manager walked by and gave him a quizzical look.

Reeves relaxed his arms. “Need to take some time off,” he said aloud and followed the office manager. Told her he would be out for a couple of weeks. Go into the mountains. Take it easy. She smiled and said that was the best idea he’d had in ages.

 

Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….

Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.

“Witness,” Excerpt 13 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” by Jeff Posey

Part 1 of Chapter 7 from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.

Available in paperback and ebook.

“Is that him?” the voice on the cell phone asked.

Reeves enlarged the photo on his computer. It could be. With no hair. Hard to be sure.

“What makes you think it’s him?” Reeves asked.

“Body language and voice,” said the man, a private pilot who flew rich Wall Street clients around in a Cessna Citation he doted on like an only child. He’d been at a bar in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, when he thought he saw Tom Oley, shaved clean as an egg. He took a picture and sent it to Reeves, his old college roommate. “I’ve met him, remember? The party?”

What constituted “the party” to the pilot meant “a party” to Reeves. He had no idea which party the pilot meant. Didn’t really care. Reeves tolerated him only because it was cool to know a pilot for the rich and not so famous.

“How long are you there for?” asked Reeves.

“A week. But could be longer. Or shorter. You know how these people are, especially this one I got now. Rich-bastard stock market day trader, which is a class of weird sons-a-bitches let me tell you. But this guy’s gotta be the weirdest. Arrogant as God and looks like trailer trash. Hangs out with a bunch of ugly mugs with stupid nicknames, like he broke ’em out of prison or something. Scares the hell outta me to get off the ground with these people in the back.”

Reeves didn’t care if the pilot hauled around angels of the Lord or Satan himself. But he sure wanted to find Tom Oley. He imagined the face of Pam’s father when he saw that bloody handprint on the back of her nightshirt. It could have gone either way for Reeves at that moment. Fortunately, it had gone right, and he would not squander his opportunity.

“See if you can find out anything about him,” Reeves told the pilot. “The name he’s using. Where he’s staying.”

“I might can do that.”

Reeves muttered his thanks and closed the call.

He leaned back in his office chair. If this turned out to be Oley, what would he do? Call in help? Handle it himself? He shook his head and sighed. No, he didn’t trust anyone else. He had more brains and drive than anybody he could find to hire, but not the right skills. That had its own risks. He shook his head again, unhappy with his lack of good choices.

His mind played again walking into Pam’s house after she didn’t answer the door. He saw the scene and froze. So much blood, Pam’s hair matted in it, her face ruined, ribbons of red spatter from the corner of the coffee table. A pair of empty shoes beside her body.

Reeves rarely examined his own emotions. Disliked emotion. Took pride in his lack of it. He didn’t rush to Pam’s side and try to resuscitate her. Too late for that. And it would disturb the evidence. Crime-scene investigators would want everything pristine. He stood listening for anyone else in the house. Maybe the murderer was still in the house, left his shoes and went upstairs to clean and change. He crept up the carpeted steps, careful to walk on the outside edges in case they held evidence he couldn’t see. But the place was empty. Oley had escaped. Killed Pam and ran, the gutless bastard. Reeves hated him from the moment he met him. Such the pet of Trevor Williams. He hoped the police found him and put him on death row. Reeves would gladly testify against him.

From the top of the stairs he looked at the scene, the normal everyday living room frozen in time with the imprint of murder. He pulled his cell phone to call 911, but changed his mind and dialed Williams instead.

When Williams saw the body of his only child, he reacted strangely. Said nothing, clenched his fists, his face reddened. “Oley,” he said.

“Looks like it.”

 

Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….

Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.

“Dinner at JJ’s,” Excerpt 12 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” by Jeff Posey

Chapter 6 from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.

Available in paperback and ebook.

At dinner, Elby and Garvin sat at their table on JJ’s back porch, quiet with each other, talked out, the river rushing past with an occasional deep dollop and clunk of shifting stones.

“That fried codfish they had here sure was good,” said Garvin.

“They don’t have it anymore.”

“They don’t have that elk steak, either. What the hell’s going on with this place?”

“Just order anything. We’re not here for food, anyway. We’re here to see this psychopath you’ve hooked us up with.” She cringed at her own word choice. Settle down, she told herself. Be civil like you promised. She gently bit the tip of her tongue.

“We’re about to spend a week or so looking for Anasazi signs. That makes me hungry. I’m getting the pork chops. And a Caesar salad. And calamari for appetizer—but I’m going to tell them not to overcook ’em. Those little squid bodies cook real fast….”

A shaved-headed man walked to the table and stared at them.

Elby turned and her mouth opened. “Oh. My. God.” She punched Uncle Marsh on the forearm and pointed. “Please don’t tell me that’s Baxter.”

Garvin turned and looked. “Yep. That’s Baxter. Baxter, this is Elby, my niece.”

“We’ve met,” said Baxter.

Garvin looked back and forth between them. “I can see that.” He looked at Elby “How’d that happen?”

“Friday night. When I went out. I told you. To listen to the bluegrass band.”

Garvin continued to look back and forth. “Maybe I should’ve gone with you. Looks like you two needed a referee.”

“Well, you didn’t. I had a nice little…chat…with this man here about family secrets, though he never told me his name.”

“You never told me yours, either,” said Baxter.

“You didn’t ask.”

“And you didn’t drink your shot of tequila.” Baxter flashed at her, but forced himself to soften it with a grin. And relax his body. As long as she didn’t cock her arm like she would throw another drink at him.

“Sometimes there are better uses for tequila than drinking it,” she said.

“Now I’ve got to stop you there,” said Garvin. “There is no better use for tequila than drinking it unless it’s that bottom-shelf stuff.”

“I agree,” said Baxter. “But your niece here seems to like to use it to end conversations.” He kept his grin, unsure of what the girl might do.

“I don’t know what you two are talking about,” said Garvin.

“We’re just a little surprised to see each other,” said Baxter. “I’m sure we’ll be able to fix that problem when you and I leave—just the two of us—on our trip.”

“Yeah, well…,” started Garvin.

“Oh, that’s fine with me,” said Elby. “I didn’t plan to actually go with you. No, what I’m doing is taking my own trip up there, and keeping an eye on you. This is the last uncle I’ve got. I don’t want him to go on a wild-goose chase without me. Gold fever is a life-threatening disease.”

“See, I told you we didn’t…,” said Garvin.

“Wait. Wait.” Baxter held up a hand and Garvin stopped talking. Elby and Baxter locked eyes. “I don’t mind. You can come along. I’ve got a family secret to unlock. I told you that much already. And I like Professor Garvin. He reminds me of my grandfather. So I understand why you’re worried.” She would be nothing but trouble. But he could sense that resisting her only made her more determined.

Elby narrowed her eyes and waited for the vile response sure to come out of her mouth. Between her father and two or three others she allowed to get close enough, she learned to treat men like poisonous snakes. Yet, she felt a sudden warming in her heart. This man she wanted to hate compared Uncle Marsh to his grandfather. “So what would you do,” she asked, “if your grandfather took off with a stranger into the mountains searching for a fairy tale treasure?”

Baxter nodded his head. “Follow him.”

Elby smiled and he felt like he emerged from under a cloud and a ray of sunshine struck him. No, he thought, imagining a cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, skidding to a stop. Must resist at all costs. Especially if she’s going up into the high country with them. This woman will be nothing but trouble.

“Ah, okay, good then,” said Garvin. “Sit down here, Baxter, and let’s eat. I’m starving.”

“I’m not really hungry,” he lied. He wanted to get away. Think about how to keep from losing his mind to this girl. Concentrate on gold and the authorities that chased him and his dead wife. He couldn’t have anything to do with a woman now. Had to cover himself in steel. “And I’ve got lots of packing to do, all that new stuff. I’ll see you in the morning. Five o’clock.” He looked at Elby, nodded to her, then turned away.

“I can’t believe that’s your Baxter guy.”

“What is it with you two? And where’s that waitress?”

“I’m not hungry either.” She stood, wanting to walk and think.

Garvin looked up at her. “Am I the only one who has the sense to eat a decent meal before we….”

“Are you taking your truck?”

“What? Oh. Yeah, he’s parking his in our garage and we’re taking my truck up. Leaving at five-thirty. You know how I like to get an early….”

“I’ll take my own car.”

“Why do you always do that?”

“It’s good to have two cars at the trailhead.”

“Because of that one time.”

“Twice,” she said.

“That time with the battery doesn’t count.”

“But three flat tires do?”

“They shouldn’t have gone out like that. I didn’t run over anything. I don’t know what happened.”

“I’m going back to the house. Enjoy your pig meat.” She walked away.

Garvin shook his head and worried about the girl. Not so much because of Baxter anymore. Elby was tough beyond measure, and that made him proud. But deep inside, she was still broken. In spite of his best efforts, he hadn’t been able to heal her deep places. He didn’t know how. She didn’t either, obviously. But sooner or later she had to do something to unbreak herself. When she did, he didn’t know what would happen.

 

Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….

Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.

“Rock Art Hero,” Excerpt 11 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” by Jeff Posey

Chapter 5 from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.

Available in paperback and ebook.

All afternoon, Elby thought about the change in Uncle Marsh. Or her perception of a change. They’d never had riches within their reach before, and maybe that disrupted things. Like a drug you don’t want overtly, but secretly crave. A normal human reaction to a pile of gold within reach of the imagination.

She even found herself daydreaming about it as she took a long walk before dinner. Before meeting this mysterious Baxter. She had to get away from Uncle Marsh and settle her thoughts. But instead of disciplined thinking, her mind whirled with the power a windfall of gold and money could bring. An image flashed in her mind. An old Victorian mansion with a sign out front: “Elby’s Safe House.”

What the hell did that mean? Safe from what? Her mind filled the house with children. The kind of children whose faces grew taut in worry when they should have been relaxed in innocence, who smiled and laughed and played, but only on the outside, their insides always full of hurt and burn. The kind of child she had been before Uncle Marsh took her in. Before he let her into his own version of a safe house.

At the top of Reservoir Hill where she walked, she found herself in tears. Why? Had she so easily succumbed to gold fever? Was it as easy as that to lose yourself in impossible dreams? But the image of that house full of children seared her heart. It erupted full-blown and spontaneous as if her subconscious had been constructing it for ages. It felt like one of her creative moments back when she worked her art. She used to collect things from the forest and combine them with torn fabric and paper, rough string and fiber, and put them together with a spare and judicious application of paint. Like one might collect broken and torn children and make them into something beautiful and interesting on the outside, and healed just enough on the inside to tolerate being alive.

Shortly after moving to Pagosa with Uncle Marsh, she found a heart-shaped rock broken nearly down the middle. On a board, she painted a hazy brown background fading to black at the top, squeezed a gob of red paint onto it, and then turned it on its side until the red ran down in a drip. After it dried, she glued the broken heart onto the red glob. The image of it haunted her so much she hid it, but she saw it in her mind at times. It kept her awake at night off and on for years.

Elby felt as torn and broken as the bleeding heart-shaped rock, her two selves (were there only two?) in full skirmish, even outright war at times. The graceful, self-assured veneer she grudgingly built and polished under the persistent and protective eye of Uncle Marsh versus the angry, raw interior that didn’t trust men and never would. She didn’t want to be hateful with men most of the time. It just came out that way when she opened her mouth, when she opened the crack of her heart and the blood flowed.

The academic in her forced a calm, disciplined internal debate as she walked the trails on Reservoir Hill. Intellectually, Elby knew how exciting finding a new genuine Anasazi marker outside its known range would be for Uncle Marsh. She used to get that feeling of being on the trail of something new and important in her literary research before she lost her drive. She remembered the energy that kept her up eighteen hours a day for weeks digging through the old records of remote European churches and museums looking for those lost and forgotten nuggets, the intellectual equivalent of hidden gold.

Much younger, before her parents died, she’d sensed that joy of academic pursuit in Uncle Marsh before he retired. Before he took Elby in. The stark contrast between him and his sister, her mother, and her father.

It’s possible—no, more than that, it’s probable—that the gold didn’t light up Uncle Marsh as much as the idea of finding that Anasazi symbol did. She sighed. She wanted that to be the reason he seemed so animated. It seemed more pure somehow than the rabid pursuit of gold.

Her father, he wouldn’t care a thing for something as esoteric as an undiscovered Anasazi glyph. In the pursuit of easy money, he would have gleefully destroyed such a thing to get his claws on what he wanted, all he really cared about, in spite of his thin coat of religion and holiness.

And yet she felt what he must have felt. That same pull of how much better a sudden fortune could make life, not just for yourself, but for others. She shook her head. How arrogant. How full of ego. How reprehensible.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to relive the time when Uncle Marsh found that new Anasazi petroglyph at Chimney Rock. He told the story dozens of times, giving it more texture and exaggeration every time. But he never drifted from the root storyline. Elby leaned against the rough bark of a tree and imagined it.

During his third year of guiding tours at the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, he started understanding the alignments with the sun and planets and stars. He began standing for hours at certain locations, watching the shadows move.

One day while giving a tour and explaining the shifting shadows, he stopped talking, seized by a sudden realization. As he told it, he grasped how an Anasazi skywatcher would see that very place. He spotted a series of low cliffs on a foothill far away and pronounced that there would be a spiral sun marker there. The retired archaeologist for the area happened to be within hearing and stepped in, shut Uncle Marsh down right in front of the tour group. Said they’d scoured the area, including those cliffs, and there were no pictographs of any kind in that direction.

Without a word, Uncle Marsh set off and hiked to the cliffs, found the dim remains of a solar spiral, took pictures, and hiked back in time to show them to a few members of the original tour group. One happened to have a daughter who worked at The New York Times, and Marshall Garvin became a local hero, the man who could interpret the sun like the Anasazi.

She remembered how energized he had been from all the attention. That’s what he wants, she told herself. More than gold. She decided to go softer on him. If there’s another Anasazi marker up there, she could certainly see how it would draw him. Give him another shot at being the hero, the savant of ancient rock art.

That gave her all the more reason to want to go along on his trip with this Baxter fellow. She had hiked these mountains since she arrived as a pre-teen, always at the heels of Uncle Marsh until she learned to out-walk him. Since the beginning, he tried to walk hard and long enough to make her drop off, but she never succumbed. She felt it as a point of pride. As they both aged, it had reversed. Garvin now refused to fall off her heel, and she liked to push him, make the old man work. It had become a game, one they hadn’t played in years.

She walked back home feeling better but still whirling, her inside-outside selves still merry-go-rounding on the swivel-point of possibilities a treasure of gold would bring. She would try, she promised herself, to be civil to this Baxter. To hear him out. To help Uncle Marsh become the rock art hero again.

 

Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….

Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.