I was meandering through the dictionary (I knew I spelled “whininess” correctly, even though my spell check claimed there was no such word. I’m editing a story and it may or may not make the final cut, but the point is I WAS RIGHT.)
And there it was: Dark Side staring at me from another ad.
I love this, make no mistake, but it’s feeling a little… aggressive. Wherever I go, it’s already there. Waiting.
And the next thing you know…
So this just happened:
It’s probably because of my browser cookies, but still: I kind of love the idea of the internet harassing me to buy my own work.
This story originally appeared in Short Sips: Coffee House Flash Fiction Collection 2, published in March 2012 by Wicked East Press. Let me know what you think! -Stefanie
If It’s An If
“What if I can’t give you a baby?”
His hand stilled on the taut skin of her belly. “Of course you will, my love. Don’t trouble yourself about it.” It resumed its lazy path around her navel, seeking lower.
She pushed it away and pulled the blanket up.
“And if I can’t? What then? Did you know Sylvia down the street is expecting her third? Her third, John. She’s younger than me, too, by a year.”
She felt his chest rise against her cheek as he inhaled deeply, then lower again as he sighed. He said nothing.
“I worry sometimes, is all.”
He leaned his head against the top of hers. “Hmm? About what?”
“Oh, about any number of things. That we’ll never fall pregnant. Or that we will, but I’ll be too old by then and it’ll have something wrong with it. Even more, I worry…” She looked down at her fingers twisting the hem of the coverlet. She whispered, “I worry that you’ll leave me.”
He kissed the crown of her head. “Darling, don’t think of it. You know the doctor says worry won’t help. Remember?”
She nodded. “I just want to make you happy.”
“When it happens, you’ll make me the happiest man alive.”
“When, when, when. You never say ‘if’. What if it’s an if?”
“Well.” He thought for a moment. “If it’s an if, we’ll just take Sylvia’s.”
She was sure she’d misheard. She turned her face up to meet his. He returned her gaze with a placid one of his own.
“Take…?”
“Oh, yes. There’s still a few months left before she brings home the new baby. We’ll keep trying for our own in the meantime.”
Her brow furrowed. Surely he didn’t mean it. Couldn’t possibly.
“Listen, we’ll only do it if we haven’t managed on our own by then.”
She began to feel dizzy.
“We’ll use the spare key. It’s under the rock by their door; I’ve seen Henry use it once or twice. He’s gone all day, and she always putters around in the garden while the kids nap. So: she’ll go out the back door, and we’ll come in the front. Simple.”
His face had relaxed into the same wistful expression it wore when he talked about the lottery. But now there was a certain sharpness in his eyes that made her breath catch.
“We’ll take him — I so hope it’s a boy, don’t you? — and drive up to the lake house for a while. There shouldn’t be many people around this time of year. We’ll have to find someplace new to live, after, of course. And we’ll need new names. Mine will be…Richard, I think. You can pick his.” He sighed again, contentedly this time. “A whole new life. We’ll be so happy, the three of us.”
He reached over and snapped off the light.
“Now get some rest, dear. Good night.”
This week:
I bought a new purse: black faux-leather with giant fuck-off studs covering the bottom. If I ever swing it old-lady-style at a would-be mugger, there’s gonna be some damage. This pleases me.
I realized that few things make me as irrationally enraged as door-to-door salesmen who try to trick me into opening my door with a “shave and a haircut” knock. Same guy three days in a row. ONCE WHILE I WAS NAPPING. I was the cartoon bull with steam coming out of my nostrils. No one, and I mean no one, messes with my naps. It gets ugly.
I picked up a five-year journal at Chapters, because I realized there are so many firsts in my writing career that I want to record. Like my first 5-star review! I have so many plans for my career, and I think it will be neat to compare what’s happening this year to what happens the next, and the next…
I made SniderWriter buttons:
Click here if you want one.
Pretty chill, quietly satisfying.
How was your week?
My family rules.
My husband’s Great Aunt Sharon posted the following to her Facebook:
…with the caption: Little Stephen King reads his 1st story in class — we have a budding Stephen King in our family — Stefanie Snider. I can’t tell you how that made me smile.
Sunday we visited my brother- and sister-in-law, the ones with my adorable nephews. The littlest nephew will be three in June, and has a baby monitor in his room. Turns out that the new monitor my in-laws bought doubles as a two-way speaker. My nephew was chilling in his room when his Mommy picked up the parent-end of the monitor and made the Grudge noise into it: “Aaaahhhh-h-h-ahhhhhh…” Cue the kid flying down the stairs, wide-eyed, and a lesson in silly jokes. Nephew pulled me upstairs to his room, pointed at the monitor, says “Makes a scawy noise, Ahhhhhhhh,” giving me a perfect rendition of the demon-noise from the movie, then giggling. This is how I know I belong in this family.
“Partners Garrick and Ortega are assigned the stakeout of a suspicious house, using a thermal imaging camera. But when the equipment picks up a strange presence nearby, their mission takes a dark turn.”
Here’s a teaser:
“Holy shit, Eric, lookit this! Eric!”
“What?”
“Seriously, check it out. Number 126.”
“We’re supposed to be watching 124.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Dude, just look.”
“Quit calling me ‘dude’.” Garrick snatched the thermal scanner out of Ortega’s hand. “What am I looking at, exactly?”
“Heh. You’ll know.” Ortega leaned his seat back so Garrick could aim the thermal past him. Its screen changed colours as he traced the house across the street.
“Which one’s which, again?”
A small wisp passed over the screen as Ortega exhaled loudly. “I told you. Red is hot, blue’s cold. It’s not hard. You shoulda been paying attention in training.”
“Right. Well, us big boys sometimes have other things on our minds.” He twisted the gold band on his finger and thought about belting the kid, just once. “You keep your eyes on 124 while I’m looking at…whatever you find so interesting.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll let you know if I notice a nice man carrying a bushel of marijuana over his shoulder… See it yet?”
Garrick had traced the front bushes and first floor of the house: nothing but faint glimmers from the electricity in the walls. Now he raised the machine, sweeping back and forth as they’d been trained. Paid attention to something, you little shit, he thought. The screen reddened slightly as he aimed the imager up the stairs and past a warm room — a bathroom, someone probably had a shower — then at once the screen blazed with colour. There was movement, repetitive and rhythmic. “What the hell?” It was something living, for sure, but it was much bigger than a person…
Grab a copy and see what’s going on at Number 126…
What could be going on right next door to you…
Available now at Amazon and Smashwords, and soon on iTunes and B&N!
I spent the week with that nasty, chesty cough that’s going around. The one that makes you feel like your own lungs are trying to drown you, and your head isn’t far behind. I stayed home from work for two days, thinking I’d take it easy, maybe get a little writing done from the comfort of the sickbed. Instead I laid on the couch whining like a four year old while C patiently brought me food and drink. (In retrospect, I tended to sleep right after that: he may have been slipping me cold meds to make me shut the hell up. Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed him.)
I read quite a bit, curled in a bitchy little ball in my bed, including Bentley Little’s His Father’s Son, the ending of which I predicted but loved just the same. It gave me fevered clown dreams, though, which were more terrifying than the book itself.
I decided to get a desk. A real, proper, writerly desk that weighs a ton and is beat to hell and back. I want something wooden, something substantial, something I can use as I pen stories and novels for years to come. Pen being the operative, here: my current setup isn’t cutting it. Writing longhand at a rickety chrome-and-formica table makes the whole works shake until I worry that it’ll all fall apart, severing my legs on the way to the floor. I went thrifting with my friend Leslie in hopes of finding a big wooden behemoth to call my own.
Somehow I came home with this instead:
That white horizontal line is the light catching her grooves. She’s lenticular and turns her head when you walk past her. Have you ever seen such splendor? Not for a dollar, you haven’t. I have the feeling she’ll be coming to live in my office.
Also, have this:
How was your week?
“What they don’t tell you is what it feels like not to die.
They don’t tell you that the casket isn’t actually padded; that there’s only a bit of cushion under your head and shoulders, and that’s for your family to feel better, not you. You’re supposed to be dead.
They don’t tell you that the backs of your clothes will be cut away, and that you’re not so much wearing them as being covered by them, like lying under a quilt whose pieces are unattached. No one worries about decency, or dignity for that matter, when it comes to dead guys.
There’s no such thing as comfort, when you’re supposed to be dead. Take me: my left leg is broken just under the knee, because by the time they found my body it had stiffened oddly to the side. It’s all in how you fall, see, and it’s hard to worry about the convenient alignment of your body when you’re trying not to die in the first place. They cracked the bone to make it lie neatly in the casket, in case an inquisitive relative (nosey, they said, because they didn’t know I was listening) should happen to peep under the closed end of the box. They want you to look like you’re just resting, like even if you were able to get out, you’d still be there because it’s just so damned comfy.
No one sleeps like this: body ramrod straight, arms on chest, hands twined together. When you go to bed tonight, try it, then tell me if it’s how you’d want to spend eternity.
God, I hope I wink out before eternity.
At least now they’ve stopped fussing at me. I wouldn’t have thought myself a prudish person in life, but somehow when you know that you’re being stripped out of your soiled clothes and laid out, naked, to be washed by strangers, you develop sudden surprising shynesses. You try to remember whether you showered the morning she killed you, and whether or not you wore clean socks. It becomes paramount that the rubber-gloved attendant now seeing to your final needs not be embarrassed or disgusted on your behalf.
That’s not how you’d be remembered, if you could have a say. If they could hear you.”
– from You Only Live Once, a short horror story by Stefanie N Snider.
Get your copy from Amazon or Smashwords now!
I just finished watching What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? for the first time (I know, I know, shame on me). It was a great film, but what I liked best was the ending.
Spoiler alert for those of us who have been under rocks since 1962.
Okay, so the best part was the precise cut at the moment the cops run down the beach to check on Blanche. I loved it because the movie ended right before we find out whether Blanche is dead. We see a psychotic Jane spinning and dancing in the crowd, and the crowd moving away, and the cops almost reaching Blanche, then BOOM! It’s over.
Did Blanche die? If so, will Jane be going to prison? When Blanche told Jane that she’d caused her own accident, was Blanche only trying to befriend Jane so Jane would go get help?
I loved it so much because I love complex endings. I love not being told precisely what happened. I love it when the exact ending is left up to my imagination.
It’s something I try to do with my own fiction: take What’s Inside, for example. The story has an ending, in a way, but it’s up to the reader to decide what comes next. Some reviews wanted the story to have been longer, and I get that some readers enjoy complete resolution. But I like leaving an end or two untied.
The flirtation between “finished-enough” to be satisfying and left “unfinished-enough” to let the reader interact with the story is something that excites me as a writer. I want you left curious. I want to encourage you to participate in the story, to think about it long after you’ve put the story down.
It worked in the case of Baby Jane, and I hope it works in my stories, too.
If you’ve found your way here, you just might be a writer. You might be thinking of joining the glamorous world of e-book publishing.
If you wanna make this easy, make sure you’re from the States. Sell stories. Get paid. File your taxes. Boom! You’re done.
If you wanna make it interesting, be from anywhere else.
Welcome to the wild world of cross-border taxes. Exciting, no?
When I first started publishing, I knew I’d have to pay the Tax Man. No problem, I’ll worry about it later, it’s no big deal. But what I didn’t know, and you may not either, is that unless you file the correct paperwork with American-based publishers (Amazon, Smashwords, and the like), they’ll be withholding taxes from your sales right off the top. How does 30% sound? That’s money going to the IRS before you’ve ever seen it. Then, when you get your cheque, guess what? You’ll be paying MORE tax, this time to your own country.
The good news? If you’re in a country that has a tax treaty with the US, you can reduce or even eliminate withholding.
Now, you might be writing “for yourself”, with nary a thought of filthy lucre tainting your artistic dreams. How lovely. But if you don’t want any of your money, why are you selling in the first place?
Let’s be real.
So, what do you need? You’ll need to send a W-8BEN form to your publishers. And before you can file that, you’ll need an ITIN (takes up to ten weeks to get your number). And before you can file that, you’re gonna need a notarized copy of your identification: a passport works well here. Expect that to take another ten days. And the kicker is that the government doesn’t really walk you through the forms. (Though I remember reading that you can call a long-distance number for help, or contact your embassy…)
Luckily, I found someone who’s written up some great instructions, but before I tell you where to find them you need to know that neither she nor I are legal-types in any way. If you’re filing these forms yourself and you need more help, I’m afraid you’re on your own. Sorry ’bout that.
Good? Good.
Go here for ITIN instructions, and here for help with the W-8BEN. Again, I can’t promise anything definitive, but I can say that I used Angela’s instructions successfully.
E-publishing can be tough; don’t make it any tougher by giving away your hard-earned dollars.
sniderwriter 