Danielle de Valera

DROPPING OUT: a tree change novel-in-stories

 

Publication Acknowledgments

“Busting God” was published in Blue Crow, Vol. 1, Issue 2, October 2010.

“Star’s Story” was published in Cutwater Literary Anthology, July 2009 under the title “No Through Road”.

“Remains to be Seen” won the Ulitarra-Sheaffer Pen short story competition in 1993 and was published in Ulitarra No. 4, December 1993.

“David’s off his Meds” won the Inaugural Nicholas Shand-Beach Hotel short story competition in 1997, was published in the Byron Shire Echo, 9 September 1997 under the title “A Happily Married Man”.

“So long, Baby” won the 1998 Nicholas Shand-Beach Hotel short story competition, and was published in the Byron Shire Echo, 22 September 1998, under the title “The State of Grace”.

“Stella by Starlight” was published in the Christmas edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, December 2008.

“Star Sees the Light” and “A Dark Place” as one story entitled “The Sunflowers” was published in Wellspring, Vol. 2, Issue 9, Jan/Feb 1999, and later in the anthology From the Circle of Women, Volume 1, January 1999.

“Transference” was published in Australasian Penthouse, December 1990.

“While There’s Life” was published in Below the Belt: Experiences with Prostate Cancer, 2015, under the title “The Kid”.

A condensed version of “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” entitled “A Pink Rosebush and a Piece of Lattice” won the Ed Gaskell Award, and was published in Age Matters, Lismore City Council, 2002.

“Pilgrimage” was published in dotlit (formerly Imago): the Online Journal of Creative Writing, Vol. 4, Issue 1, August 2003.

“Another Lifetime” was published in Aurealis, Issue No. 24, September 1999, under the title “Roses”.

Genesis of Stories

1. Busting God

A long, long time ago, back in the early ‘90s, I had my first short story (‘Transference’) published in a national magazine. My children and I were over the moon: the money (AU$1,500) was astronomical in those days. A few years later, I decided to see if I could crack the same market again—after all, $1,500 never goes astray.

I’d just read Narc! Inside the Australian Bureau of Narcotics by Bernard Delaney, who was a senior investigator in the narcotics bureau for some years before becoming Commander for the Southern Region of Australia. So I wrote this 5,000 word short story about an undercover narcotics agent, basing the procedures on Delaney’s book. After the usual eight drafts, I submitted it to the editor who’d accepted my previous story. My timing was bad. A week after I submitted the story, the magazine was sued for defamation. In the chaos that ensued, ‘Busting God’ went nowhere. I put it away and concentrated on the next draft of my Brisbane novel. Some twenty years later, I sent the story to an Australian magazine called Blue Crow, edited by Andrew Scobie, who accepted it enthusiastically.

Now that I‘ve decided to put all my work up online before I fall off the perch (it seems safer than wrapping it in ‘fireproof’ material and putting it in the tin trunk, but I might be wrong), I gave the story yet another draft and put it up on Amazon and Smashwords. In brief, it’s the story of an aging undercover agent who, along with his long-time Vietnam buddy Baby Johnson, is sent to the Northern Rivers of New South Wales to bust a heroin dealer everyone up there calls God because he’s so big. Apart from successfully running God to earth, the major conflict in the story takes place in the hero’s head. Will he stay in law enforcement or get out before his slowing reflexes get him killed? That’s the main idea behind the story, and the idea that leads to the next story, ‘Remains to be Seen’. As part of my plan to try to save the work before I drop off the perch,

‘Busting God’ is one of the three favourite stories I’ve written; there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour. It’s also the first thing I ever formatted. Being the digital klutz that I am (oh yes, I am — see my previous post on this subject at: https://danielledevalera.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/for-all-you-luddites-out-there/, formatting that story took me a long time and I’m so chuffed that I managed to do it. I was further encouraged by fellow writer C S McClellan, who did the you-beaut cover for me. Thank you so much, Connie. Designing an ebook cover is way out of my league.

If you’ve got a moment or so, pop over and take a look at ‘Busting God’. It’s free at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/416303

2. Star’s Story

Sometime around 2004, when I was on the Aged Pension and a more assured income, I had a little time to experiment. I wanted to see if I could get into Meanjin, the foremost literary journal in Australia. I had something of a knack for styles. If I could get hold of enough back copies of a magazine, say ten, I could usually nail down the style their story editor liked. I’d done it with Penthouse and the Women’s Weekly—why not Meanjin? Unfortunately, I could only afford to buy one copy; the pension doesn’t pay that well, and business wasn’t booming at that point in time.

I had always found the stories in Meanjin rather mystifying, and downright inaccessible at times, so I constructed a rather post-modern story with flashbacks and time jumps that weren’t always sequential. Should be inaccessible enough, I told myself. I ended up with a piece of around 3,000 words, which I called “No Through Road”.

I didn’t send it off to Meanjin straightaway, ah no. In my experience, the best way to pick up a little lucre was through competitions. I chose two which had well established writers as judges (one was Frank Moorhouse) and a first prize of $1,000AU. Even getting shortlisted in one those would help to get a more sympathetic reading from the editor of Meanjin.

I was lucky, though I never hit the jackpot. “Road” was shortlisted in the prestigious My Brother Jack short story competition in 2004 and in the equally prestigious Hal Porter in 2006. Right, I thought, now for Meanjin. So I sent the story off — in those days, you still sent manuscripts through the post —– and waited. And waited. Eventually I got a lovely rejection letter from the ed, saying that although the piece had almost made it, they had decided not to take it up.

Well, it wasn’t bad for a first time, and I’d only had one copy to study; I’d do better next time, I thought. Then the internet hit us, and I began to consider publishing on the web. I saw in it a way to obtain print copies of all my work to safeguard when I was gone. Better than leaving the manuscripts to moulder in the tin trunk, I figured. I live in the sub-tropics, it’s very humid, I was worried about how long they’d last. Maybe I could be discovered posthumously and the grandchildren would make a fortune. So probably goes the thinking of millions of indie writers.

To return to the point: I changed the title of the story from “No Through Road” to “Star’s Story” to make it easier for anyone following these stories on the web as they came out singly. Publishing serially like this, as i was in 2015, I needed to remind readers of where they were up to in the collection. I also changed the point of view from 1st person to 3rd; the thing seemed just too confronting in 1st.

Because it’s only 3,000 words long, it’s FREE in three formats at Smashwords. (Amazon won’t let writers sell their stuff for free unless they join Amazon’s KDP Select, and then only for 5 days out of every 90.) I’d love some feedback on the cover, love it or hate it. I could also do with a couple of reviews of this story as it’s unlikely to garner anything favourable from the general population, it being so literary and post-modern, hem hem. The link is: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

3. Remains to be Seen

A long, long time ago when I was younger and my children were still in high school, my son fell in love with all things military. War was nothing new to me. I’d cut my teeth on WWII. My father went over the Kokoda Trial without a scratch — needless to say, he never said a word about it, except to my old Uncle Charlie, who’d been in the trenches in WWI.

With the star-struck son, it was different. I saw every Vietnam war movie ever made. I got to know the kinds of choppers used in Vietnam, and also in Korea — even what kinds of choppers the police were currently using to search for marihuana plantations in the hills in the northern rivers. I learned about post-traumatic stress disorder and what (and what not) to do about it. My son’s passion lasted around four years and fizzled out, thank heavens, before he was old enough to join the army. While it was still at tornado force, I bought him one Christmas a memoir by Colonel David H Hackworth (US Army), co-written with Julie Sherman and called About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

Hackworth was famous, and one of the most decorated soldiers who ever lived. Some people credited him with being the model for Colonel Kurtz, the role played by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; others more reliably credited him with being the model for the gung ho commander of the helicopter unit immortalized in the movie by Robert Duvall. Hackworth did command a helicopter unit in Vietnam at one stage. His journey from all-American warrior (he lied about his age to get into the post-WWII occupying forces in Berlin at 15) to his public rejection of the Vietnam War in 1971 makes fascinating reading.

Unlike my son, I never fell in love with the military, but I did fall somewhat in love with Hackworth, and my little story “Remains to be Seen”, which was lucky enough to win the Ulitarra-Scheaffer Pen short story Award way back in 1993, is a kind of tribute to the man, although it is not about him. My formatting will always leave something to be desired, but the story (set half in the northern rivers, half in Vietnam) is now up on the web.

It’s FREE in three formats at Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454352

3. David’s off His Meds/A Happily Married Man

What with the remaining cat’s veterinary bills, things are a bit tough financially, but they used to be tougher back around the turn of the millenium. At that time the local paper, the Byron Shire Echo decided to hold a competition for a short story of less than 1,000 words. The winning entry would receive publication in the Echo and prize money of $1,000. Needless to say, I decided to have a go. To my absolute surprise, I was lucky enough to win with ‘A Happily Married Man’, which told the story of a young man who thinks he’s had a message from God to eliminate the man his wife has left him for.

That was in 1997.

5. Mr Lawson Regrets/The Real Thing

One day in 1989, when I was struggling with the first draft of ‘Transference’ (eventually published in Penthouse), my good friend and ex, Gianni Cosatto, strode into my house and plonked three handwritten foolscap pages down on the kitchen table.

“There you are,” he said. “I’ve written the first scene of a story for you.”

I picked up the pages and scanned them. The scene was written from the 1st person point of view. It seemed to concern a man who’s sent to a planet called Gerar to check the authenticity of a coin found there. As he sits in Reception, still shocked from the hyperspace, this gorgeous chick with long red hair comes out of an internal door and is rude to him. I gathered that rudeness was a turn-on for this hero, who immediately decides to fall in love with her. End of scene.

“What else happens?”I asked Gianni. “I mean, What’s the story?”

“Dunno,” said Gianni, “I just wrote the first scene. You’re the writer.”

“Well, thanks,” I told him. “I’ll have a crack at it later.” I might as well have said: I’ll bury it later. I had no intention of having a crack at it. I pleaded busyness whenever Gianni enquired about it in the years that followed.

One rainy day in the twenty-first century, long after Gianni had died, I found the story in a drawer and decided to try to finish it. Badly-mannered seductresses with long red hair didn’t interest me, so I made it a gay story. But it never really worked. Sci fi mags I submitted it to were put off by the gay relationship; mags that might’ve been interested in the relationship were put off by the sci-fi angle. I was stuck with it. One day, I realised that the idea of finding a coin on Gerar or anywhere else, for that matter, was so preposterous a plot I might as well set the story in Australia. I chose Maralinga, with its interesting history of British A-bomb explosions in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

So here it is. I’ve recently worked it over yet again to fit the Charles Lawson thread in the short story collection. It’s 5,885 words long and free at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/485382

Whatever misgivings I might still entertain about the story’s far-fetched plot, I’m immensely happy with the cover, which author C S McClellan created from a recent photograph of Maralinga country by Baz Landy.

6. So long, Baby/The State of Grace

Next year, I decided to try the Echo competition again. This time I wrote about a single mother whose life is threatened by a jilted lover with a shotgun. I called it ‘The State of Grace’, to try to explain the sense of calm that came over her in the end, after she realises she is going to die. I didn’t hold out much hope for the story, but they were judged blind and to my amazement, I managed to win again. Now that’s what I call luck. It kind of made up for all those years of rejections. (I sometimes wish I’d kept my rejection slips; I really could’ve papered a wall with them.)

That was in 1998.

7. Stella by Starlight

Nine years ago or thereabouts, the Australian Women’s Weekly ran a short story competition with a first prize of $5,000 and guaranteed publication in this most circulated of Australian women’s newspapers. Being a writer and thus financially on the rocks (I figure I’ve made about $8 a week from my writing over the last 20 years, and that’s a high-end estimate), I decided to enter. I didn’t expect to win, but I thought there’d probably be a short list and the stories on that would be offered publication. And the Women’s Weekly pays, baby, pays.

So I sat down and sweated out a story of 5,000 words and sent it off. Months passed. Eventually the result was announced, but Danny Margaret had scored zero, zilch, and there didn’t appear to be a short list. Well, I thought, so much for that, and I put the story away in the proverbial bottom drawer.

Five years went by. One day (I must’ve had nothing better to do, perhaps it was the wet season) I pulled the story out and reread it. It’s not bad, I thought. Very Women’s Weekly – what a shame it didn’t get anywhere … Then I remembered Australian writer Marele Day saying once in a writing workshop that magazines were always looking for Christmas stories. They were drowning in the other kind, she said; but they were always short of Christmas stories. Hmm, I thought.

At the time my finances were in worse-than-usual disarray. Publication in the WW would sort all that out. O-kay. There was just one hitch: My story wasn’t a Christmas story. To solve this problem, I had the main character’s daughter refer to Christmas in an already-existing phone conversation, and I had two people the main character passes on her way to the beach wish her a Merry Christmas. That’s all I did.

By now, my CV had filled out, and I had a little more confidence than I’d had in earlier years. I approached the editor of the Women’s Weekly by email, gave her my CV and a 3-line synopsis of the story and asked if she’d be interested in reading my “Christmas story”. Next thing I know I’m being offered publication in their 2010 Christmas edition.

The moral of this monologue is: If you put a short story in a competition and it doesn’t get anywhere, that doesn’t mean anything. If you put a story in and it wins, that doesn’t mean anything, either. What matters is being published. Craig McGregor told me this way back in 1979, but I didn’t take any notice. Besides, being a single parent, I needed the money that comps could provide.

Now here is “Stella by Starlight” minus the Merry Christmases. I’ve also made one other change, transforming the main character from female to male, to fit the story into the collection. Everything else, though, is the same, and the theme and moral of the story are unchanged.

“Stella” is now free at Smashwords. I wish I could provide a direct sales link to Apple, but I’m digitally disadvantaged.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/467119

 

8. A Dark Place/The Sunflowers, Part 1

In 1999, Shelley Jackson of Lismore ran a fiction competition for women on the north coast of New South Wales. I was on a roll, so I tried again. The story I entered was called “The Sunflowers”. It was about a woman who’s been married for years to a husband who is physically abusive, but she won’t leave him. Finally, a particular incident involving gardening makes her decide to go. Again, I was lucky.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/492081

9. Transference

When the children were in high school, I found myself with a bit of time on my hands. I lived in a small country town, jobs were hard to get, so I decided to try to make some money writing short stories. I was working in the dark. Although I’d written a novel and had a few articles published in newspapers, I didn’t write short stories; I’d always thought of myself as a long distance writer. Still, as they say (or used to say), Needs must when the devil drives. I tried the Women’s Weekly first, but I had no luck. I didn’t understand at that stage that you need to study the publication you’re aiming for to get a feel for both the style and the kind of content the editor likes.

With no luck there and the need for money still pressing, I turned my attention to the men’s magazines. Here I was lucky: my partner Gianni Cosatto bought a Penthouse every month. Strictly for the articles, you understand. For a year I clawed my way past crotches and garter belts every month and studied the particular likes of the then editor, Phil Abraham. He was publishing one story per issue, good quality stuff of around 5,000 words by such Australian luminaries as Susan Geason, Peter Corris, Roger Raftery, etc. After trying a few different stories on Phil, I finally struck it lucky with ‘Transference’, a 4,500 word story about a man who becomes obsessed with his wife after she leaves him, goes to a therapist for help and ends up becoming obsessed with the therapist.

It was my first ever published story, and a monument to the technique of studying the publication you’re aiming for. The money was considerable for those days, and caused us much excitement. We went straight out and bought a VCR and mainlined movies all through that summer. My mother, who lived with us, was still alive in those days, so she was able to enjoy the largesse—a fact that, even today, gives me pleasure.

Well, there you have it. There’s nothing dubious or smutty in “Transference”; Phil Abraham wasn’t that kind of editor. It’s light with a heavier undertone. It should make good holiday reading, and is available at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/497498

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QUDR8OC

The beautiful image that forms the cover is by ejimac. You can see more of his stunning work at:

http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/digitalart/fractals/?q=ejimac

10. Who Said Cats Can’t Talk/Lady Cynthia Says

11. While There’s Life/The Kid

As 2013 drew to a close I found myself thinking more and more about my neighbour Ron, who passed away in October of this year after a long battle with cancer. We lived across from one another for over 13 years and, although we were never in and out of one another’s places (we would’ve hated that), we were there for one another. He was a single parent, as I had been. When he first moved in, he had a boy who’d just started high school — a wild boy.

A number of years ago, when Ron was still well and I didn’t even know he had cancer, I went over to his place one day for coffee, and he told me his story, how he’d been given less than five years to live and how he’d decided he couldn’t die because no one else would be able to raise his son, whom he called ‘the kid’.

Ron was a born storyteller. The whole story rolled off his tongue and when I came home I simply wrote it down, just the way he’d told it to me. I’ve never done that before or since; I’m not that kind of writer. Later, when I wanted to enter the story in a fiction competition based around the subject of cancer, I added an extra frisson by having the narrator say she’d been on her way to commit suicide and the story of Ron’s courage had stopped her. The story ended up being short-listed in the Cancer Council of Victoria’s short story competition and included in an exhibition of art, poetry and stories, fiction and non-fiction, that toured country Victoria in (I think) 2009.

Ron was stoked to see his story in print. He was one of those unsung heroes who live and die unnoticed by the world, known only to a few friends and family. As his illness progressed, I saw a bit more of him, making him a baked dinner on Sundays when I made my own, but leaving him in peace to eat it in his own time. He had a miniature fox terrier named Bella, and even when things became difficult for him and he was on heavy doses of morphine, we would still see him, growing thinner and thinner every week, walking Bella. He used to say, “She’s been so good for me. I wouldn’t get out and walk if it wasn’t for her.”

You can read Ron’s story FREE at http://www.derekhaines.ch/vandal/2013/11/short-story-the-kid-by-danielle-de-valera/

12. Last Train to Parthenia

In every collection of short stories I imagine there’s always one that causes the author real problems. This was certainly the case with me. ‘Last Train to Parthenia’, a death trip story, caused me more problems than all the rest put together. Maybe it was the considerable length of 8,500 words; I don’t usually work in that length, preferring a shorter one of around 5,000 words. Maybe it was the story itself. I don’t know. I just know the thing caused me all sorts of problems, and took about three times longer to perfect than any of the other stories I’d so far written. In its various incarnations, I ran it past three different readers (two male, one female) none of whom liked the early versions or got what I was trying to convey. I had opted for subtlety, you see, but clearly that wasn’t going to work. I ended up having to spell the darn thing out far more than I had intended, and I hope that, in the collectio, where there’ll be a print book, I can pull back a little again in favour of subtlety. I have always preferred mystery to explicitness — which is why porn leaves me cold, I guess.

The story: Unhappily married, Bob Johnson has taken a night job working on the inner-city circle of StateRail, Sydney. He is a man who has always sought escape from reality in sword and sorcery magazines. His great favourite is the work of Robert E Howard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard), ill fated author of the Conan novels (dead at 30 by his own hand). One night Johnson finds a pewter bracelet on the railway tracks. He decides to keep it, regarding as a lucky talisman—an amulet. A few nights later, while at work, he is hit by a train. In the last seven minutes of his life, before his brain shuts down, he imagines that, through the magic power of the amulet, he has been transported to a romantic world full of broadswords, intrigue and glamorous women.

Anyway, here is the darn thing, and am I glad to be finally leaving it behind me.

13. Star Sees the Light/ The Sunflowers, Part 2

In 1999, Shelley Jackson of Lismore ran a fiction competition for women on the north coast of New South Wales. I was on a roll, so I tried again. The story I entered was called “The Sunflowers”. It was about a woman who’s been married for years to a husband who is physically abusive, but she won’t leave him. I had no experience with domestic violence, but I’d just read a novel by talented Irish author, Roddy Doyle, which was a study in this kind of thing. So I hoed in, got the style and turned out this story, which ended up winning the women’s short story award for 1999. Again, I was lucky.

And there my remarkable streak of luck more or less ended. After that, I concentrated on writing novels and on getting stories published in magazines to improve my literary CV. In those days, you sent the publishers your novel extract by post, along with a pleading letter and what was called a literary CV. A good literary CV might sway editors in your favour. It seemed like a sensible idea to concentrate on this. As the song says, “Know when to fold’ em. Know when to walk away, Know when to run”.

Being only 1,500, 1,000 and 1,000 words respectively, “Sunflowers, Married Man” and Grace” were too short to publish separately on the web, so I put them together in a bundle of 3,575 words called ‘Trio’. In the short story collection these three stories don’t run together as they do in ‘Trio’, but appear separately in various places through the book. ‘Trio’ is FREE at Smashwords in three formats: EPUB, mobi (for Kindle) and pdf.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/492081

 Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow/Reflections

Somewhere around the year 2000, I wrote a short story called ‘A Pink Rosebush and a Piece of Lattice’ that was lucky enough to win an award up here in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. This story ‘Reflections’ is the longer version, and is around 2,300 words.

I’m besotted with the cover, which my US author friend C S McClellan created from a beautiful image I found online at Eden Pics. You can see more of their nature photos at http://www.edenpics.com and, wonder of wonders, their images are free.

This story is the last of the ten stories I have been formatting and putting up on the web over the past fifteen or so months. Because it’s so short, I wanted it to be free, so it will only appear on Smashwords.

In this story, Charles Lawson, the notorious heroin dealer formerly known as God, has been released from jail and, after living quietly with his cats for a number of years, is now so old he has to enter a nursing home. Here he reflects on his life and, in his last moments, imagines he is reunited with his wife Angela, who died some years before him.

It sounds like a pretty grim read when I put it that way, but all those who’ve read it found the story touching and/or uplifting. I hope anyone else who checks it out will feel the same way.

‘Reflections’ is free from Smashwords in various formats, including pdf, mobo and EPUB at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/554292

15… Pilgrimage

16. Roses/The Cyborg’s Story

Just as in every short story collection there’s usually one that causes the writer a great deal of difficulty, I imagine there’s also one the writer likes above all the others. This is certainly the case with me. ‘The Cyborg’s Story’, originally published as ‘Roses’ is definitely my favourite short story—of the ones I’ve written, that is. My favourite short story ever is ‘Catman’, by Harlan Ellison, a wonderful story, which incidentally has nothing really to do with cats.

Published in the Australian sci-fi/fantasy magazine Aurealis in 1999, ‘Cyborg’ tells the story of Michael 64, a winged cyborg security expert hired by Thurston, the human Director-General of Genetic Engineering, to guard Azuria 27, a famous winged cyborg dancer, whom Thurston has operated on so that she can pass for human. Such a procedure is illegal in 2175, the year in which the story is set. Azuria is secretly in love with a man called Elliott. She thinks she is making the change for love, but Thurston has much bigger plans; he is a man who believes that humans are merely a link in the evolutionary chain towards cyborgs. Michael, who starts out in the story as a hardened security expert addicted to Blue Monday, an off-world drug imported illegally at exorbitant cost, ends up in love with Azuria and saddled with the problem of whether or not to out Thurston and his plan for cyborg supremacy.

I had a heck of a time getting this story published in Aurealis in 1999. Dirk Strasser, the editor, had a strict 6,000 word policy for submissions, and the story was 7,000 or thereabouts. He wouldn’t budge as a matter of principle, although he liked it. I sweated some more and managed to get it down to where it is now: 6,350 words. Beyond that, I couldn’t go; I was right down on the bones of the story. Desperate, I sent it back to Dirk, with 6,000 words printed on the title page, and he accepted it. Whether he knew it was really longer, I’ll never know, but honour had been satisfied and the story then called “Roses” saw the light of day. It’s the only sci-fi story I ever wrote. Or ever will.

It’s a very soft story, a mix of love story and mystery. Perhaps that’s why I like it so much. I get bored very quickly with most genre writing, demanding as it does a devotion to straight line narrative, and often lacking any sense of something bigger, particularly in the area of characters and their relationships.