The Color of the Rose: Three Short Stories

I'm dipping my foot into the digital world! We've e-published a set of three short stories under the title THE COLOR OF THE ROSE with Amazon Kindle. The first two stories are short shorts are explorations of characters I wanted to use in my first novel, ALWAYS AND FOREVER. I knew I wanted Josie and Cleo to be half sisters, one the slave, one the mistress, in a Creole household in Louisiana. These stories were my way of thinking about character, settling in on what each girl wanted and needed. Neither "Color of the Rose" nor "Afternoon Tea" appear in the book as scenes, but the budding of character is in these stand-alone stories. The third story, "Summer Heat," is considerably longer and has nothing to do with old Louisiana. Etta and Mitch are doing the best they can with all the deprivations in the rural South during the Great Depression. It's a love story, plain and simple, a romance ending with happy ever after.

We're curious about this new publishing environment. So many changes going on for publishers and authors alike, and it's coming to seem like many will be to the authors' benefit. Certainly the big publishing houses like Kensington, who published my first two books, function as arbiters of what's worth reading, not accepting manuscripts that are not really ready for the big time, but also not taking any chances on books they are not certain will be big money-earners. They are increasingly nervous in this time of recession, which has certainly hurt them, while at the same time being challenged by all the digital alternatives for publication. It has always meant lower quality in most everyone's mind to offer a self-published book that hasn't been through the rigor of filtration through agents and editors. But that's changing rapidly. In acknowledgment of these new opportunities, we though it would be interesting and maybe even fun to self-publish these short stories at the lowest Kindle price. Hope people enjoy them.