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Posts Tagged ‘fiction’

ebookcoverI can’t seem to manage blogging with any amount of consistency these days. WordPress told me today that I had 5 days to renew my site or they were giving me the boot. I’m a little disturbed that in renewing, I can’t get that ad off unless I pay, when I was the one who volunteered to have the ads here in the first place. Why did I do it? ‘Cause everybody else was doing it. Well, maybe not you but somebody was, so I figured I should too. Now, I don’t want it anymore and can’t get rid of it without paying. Like a bad marriage.

But I won’t whine any longer. Today, I’m sharing a story from my beloved book of tales, Sock It to Me, Baby. I must also share the review George gave the book on Amazon. I never solicited her to do this but I thought you’d like to know, and I’d like you to know, what’s being said about me and my work (wink, wink):

Ms. Fomby explores the complexity of human interactions in well-drawn sketches  of her contemporary “Cannery Row” characters. The characters are presented without sentimentality and with their flaws and foibles intact. The portraits are often harsh, and always humorous. There are the down-on-their-luck folks and the self-indulgent swindlers, the lazy, the addicted, the hypocritical and the self-important. The sketches are boisterous, outrageous, funny and familiar. Ms.Fomby writes with a natural style that draws the reader in. She adopts the dialect of her characters throughout lending credibility to their voices. “Sock It To Me, Baby” is entertaining, hilarious, bawdy and entirely readable. A solid
first book.

I never properly thanked George for her well-written review. With her being the smart woman she is, I believe every word she said. (Wink, wink). Thank you much, George. You’re most appreciated, as well as the readers who visit this blog. Now, let me spin a little tale for you, folks…

Some Souls to Keep

What he felt and wanted to say to his dying mother was caught in his throat. She lay, closer to dust than life, and the most he could do was stand above her looking, the memories of faceless men coming and leaving her bedroom from way back. One even peeped in his door and stepped a foot in ‘til he heard her drunken voice calling about bringing some weed back from ‘round the block.

There were no mix of emotions. He felt nothing at all. Not even bitterness welled up. His sister walked in, filled with enough for them both.

About these ads

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ebookcover

Besides my blog posts, I’m a published writer as I speak. Now, what else could that mean since everybody and their mama can publish a book nowadays?

Well, first off, I’m somebody’s mama so I can’t tell you about nobody else’s. What I can tell you is why I wrote this book of flash fiction. It’s chockful of very short stories that kinda bite the shit outta you, hence the title. There are tales that make you say, “Well, I damn!”, while others make you feel just downright sad.

You see, I don’t write about folk who have it all. I’m attracted to folk who have little or nothing or all, whether that’s materially speaking or intellectually. You can very well say I’m an advovate for the underdogs of the world. These folk are often on the fringes of society and skirting the edges of insanity or mixed in mayhem in some form or another. They are lonely, desperate, loving, dangerous and don’t always make the best choices. They are folk you know and some you wished you had no memory of. Yet, as in life, you hope and want the best?for them ’cause you’re good-hearted that way, despite their fool-heartedness. All in all, they are everyday folk, with their own peculiarities.

The other sweet deal of this book is that some of these stories have images to tell you about the story you will read. Sorta like a grown folk picture book.?Can you imagine the image created for stories like Jived by Juicy or Rent Money? Well, the only way to know that is to buy the book and see.

Now, I’m shy about promoting myself like most artistic?types?but how the hell else can I sell the book if I don’t market it? So folks, because it takes me a minute to compose contest ideas, I may come up with one that I’ll advertise here at some point. In the meantime, an invite to post or interview on your blog may be cool.?I promise I’ll behave myself.?Maybe I could do a give-away of some of the art in the book. Yeah, I could do that, I suppose.

In another meantime, you can purchase Sock It to Me, Baby for $1.99 at Amazon.com. To date, the jury is still out on whether this will evolve into a hard copy. I may wait until my second book is published so I can have two books on the shelf instead of one. Just looks better, know what I mean?

So, what’s ahead for Totsy? Shit, I’ve gotta get back to writing is what. I’m working on my novel and the critiques are going very well, I should add. And who knows, I may give Beatrice a shot at starring in her own series. Otherwise, I shall continue painting, writing on this here blog and and hope to keep making you smile.

Thank you, good folks. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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countdown

About the book:

As an avid gamer, sports fanatic and TV and film graphic designer, Geneva Cass is literally “One of the Guys” and has been best friends with Jackson Rhames since junior high. If her geeky-athlete persona wasn’t enough to keep her a dating pariah, her disdain for anything pink, frilly, or remotely connected to weddings, is sure to cement her single status.

The door to her heart revolves until Aaron Michaels, an ambitious, smooth-operating acquisitions manager, sweeps her off her feet and tries to uncover the sexy, vixen burrowing
inside her. But while Aaron is away on a business trip, Geneva pairs up with Jackson to celebrate the new year. A few days of reminiscing about the good ol??days, spark more than a little curiosity about what might have been, and a single kiss between friends, changes everything.

You may purchase Countdown to a Kiss at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for your Nook or Kindle.

About Kandie Delley:

Mystical lands, adventurous kick-butt divas, and super-hot romances are just the tip of the iceberg in author Kandie Delley’s literary gems. Her stories feature strong women, their adventures, and the men who love them.

Kandie lives in North Texas by way of the California coastline and the emerald forests of the Pacific Northwest. In her leisure time she travels, and enjoys graphic design, filmmaking, and spending time with her family!

Her current release, “Countdown to a Kiss” is her first sensual southwest romance!? Check it out and tell a friend!

For more information visit: http://www.kandiedelley.com @kankan929 on twitter

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"Lunch with the Girls" Art and Cover Design by Totsymae Copyright 2012

“Lunch with the Girls” Art and Cover Design by Totsymae Copyright 2012

Hope you folks enjoyed your holiday. Hope you had a happy whatever it is you celebrate. Or if you don’t do that sorta thing, hope all’s good and well with you. I had a fine time myself. Been working on getting my eBook published and man, is it work! It’s all good though. The image above is one of the stories in my book. I have 100 flash pieces in the book but no, I won’t be painting 100 pictures to go inside. No can do.

I was over here deliberating myself, like I often do, and I’ve discovered that I’ve developed an addiction that I’m none too pleased about. Folks, I am addicted to reality TV. Those shows are like Lays Potato Chips, you see. One of two won’t be enough. I think I’m up to five of them now. However, it’s not my fault. It’s this little circle of folks around me that got me into it ’cause I really don’t have addictive characteristics. At least, that’s what I’ve been claiming for years. And I’m not in denial ’cause I won’t tell you I can quit anytime I want on account of me not wanting to just yet. Sometimes you just don’t wanna do shit about such habits and that’s where I am right now. If I told you otherwise, I’d be a liar and since I have a conscience and making strides to live consciously, I won’t be lying and whatnot to you.

So folks, I’m about to consciously scan these networks to see if there’s a reality show marathon on while I paint a coupla more pieces to go in my book. I’ll check on you good folks after the New Year. Be safe and Happy New Year.

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Okay. I have this cool title for my book of flash fiction. Right now, it’s gonna be in ebook format only. I’m calling my debut publication Sock It to Me, Baby. I told you that before but?in case you didn’t remember…

I’m?not altogether sold on this cover, so I’ll present another, hopefully, before the week is out.? I find it so hard to satisfy myself. I’m halfway done with the second piece of artwork, so I’ll do my best to have it posted in a coupla days. I feel myself getting ill again. Not like me. The quick turnaround, so maybe it’s a temp kinda thing. Meaning, it’ll be all good tomorrow.

For this book, I even have a concept for my book trailer. I don’t know if folk do that for flash books but oh well, I am. It’s gonna be fun. I hope. If I don’t cower, it should be fun. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure?out this whole e-publish formatting. The cover is right, from what I’ve read so far.

I thought of writing something on the raunchy side but I’m not the raunchy type. Least nobody’s ever told me that….Hmmm…Wonder if that’s a good or bad thing. Maybe good, for a Southern Belle as myself.

sock it to me baby

Artwork and Cover Design by Totysmae

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“Patches” Watercolor/Ink on paper. Copyright 2012 Totsymae/www.toshfomby.com

Thank you, good folks, for your insightful comments as we continue race talk in collaboration with the special that will be airing on PBS. It’s airing tonight, folks. My apologies for not telling you in advance. I just didn’t know how to break it to you that it was airing on the same night as the second presidential debate. Damn! But you know what? I’m gonna have to record them both ’cause I’ve got a little work to do tonight. What I’ll do is record and we can talk about it later on this week. I know you folk think you’re all smart and whatnot and I’ll go ahead and give you that. I feel like I’m in real good company. Thank you for letting me in your little circle and all.

Well, today, I wrote a few shorts that kinda reflects what happens in this world we live in, inside America. I think we’re all like a stitch in this country that holds it together or cause it to unravel. And then there are those stitches that are barely holding on and trying to keep the fabric of what’s been created together. Anyhow, I wanted to share a coupla stories and maybe the thing you could assess is why/what do we think when we hear such stories in real life. Do our contrasting histories, inevitably, make us think as we do? Or don’t mind me at all. I’m not hear to tell you how to think. I’m just making it my damn self.

ooooOOOoooo

Snippet No. 1:

“You recognize any of’em?”

Lana couldn’t focus on the line-up of faces. Too distracted by the lieutenant’s eyes boring into her flesh that felt close to somebody ramming himself between her thighs again. She never caught sight of a face with her eyes toward the ground. All she heard was grunting and the sound of her tears dropping on the cold pavement. It had to be one of the black men though.

Snippet No. 2:

Melody was known for doing things differently in her family. Today’s different was bringing home her boyfriend who spoke broken English and worked like the devil doing all kinds of odd jobs. The evidence showed with cuts and bruises on his hands that knew her body well. As soon as the door swung open, she felt her mother’s eyes piercing Jose’s seed in her womb.

ooooOOOoooo

Check out the PBS video here and your local listing for airtime, folks. Also, to learn more about the Race 2012 project, visit Monica’s Tangled Web, where you can read other participating writers. Thank you again for your thoughtful assessment on race in America as we move closer toward this very important election.

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Since my post, Is It Hard to Tell the Truth? , I’ve been bombarded with emails from folks all over the country. Well, that’s not exactly what’s happened but it would be a nice change of pace to respond to so many emails. Good or bad ones.

Anyhow, that whole bit about becoming a liar is working out for me. I told folks, after Mittens Romney dissed half the nation,  that I wasn’t part of no 47% and it felt good too. I got to be all snobby and a rich ass bitch in my head until I forgot I had to wash dishes and take out the trash. After washing the dishes and dumping trash, I turned back to lying mode and acted like the grass was cut and Mittens had done it for me. That was a nice vision, seeing him out there sweating and me holding back on the ice water. You know, just letting him be thirsty. And he wasn’t on no riding lawn mower either. That mofo had a wagon hitched to his pick-up with his lawn equipment and a stack of flyers ready to stick in folk mailboxes.

Then, I lied when I told folks his wife, Annie, was at home trying to scrape a meal together, talking about, “This is hard” with batter on her face from baking some box cake that didn’t turn out right. I then went over to visit with her and told her to stop all that whining and make the damn cake so I could have me something sweet. Shit. I ain’t got time for no whining woman unless it’s me.

She commenced to baking too and then ole Mittens comes stepping in, smelling all polluted from grass cutting and air, talking about, “That cake ain’t ready yet, Boo? Whatcho problem is?” I was like, “Damn Bro, you speaking my language,” and he gave me a high five and we got to doing the bump and shit. You know, that dance from back in the day. I then told him he should run for president ’cause he was so down with me but all he wanted was to sit around drinking Schlitz Beer and pass gas in the kitchen while ranting about Annie not having his food ready. Then, he had the nerve to tell me he was on probation for tax invasion and that “I can’t be running for no president with jacked up shit.” I corrected him and said, “Naw Man, it’s evasion” and had to leave at that point ’cause I don’t misuse words like that. I mean, damn. I was embarrassed for him and Annie who was battling it out with another box cake.

You see the beauty in lying, folks?

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Illustration and book cover design by Totsymae. Blog content and artwork copyrights 2011 by Totsymae

For the first time, I’m re-posting. Will try not to make it a habit, however. There are five mini-chapters and you may visit Grown Folk Tales to get the full story. Hope you enjoy.

Chapter One

Once upon a time, a woman named Desperita met this fine ass man. Oh, he was the shit. Talked shit. Walked shit. Was simply, the shit. Period. Matter of fact, she thought she had a fine enough shape on her almost-forty body and a cute face, so she could be classified as the shit too. They were at their local Piggly Wiggly, which should’ve been a clear sign to Desperita then and there, for reasons that can’t rightly be explained.

Desperita was a good woman of education and acquired things like, a big ass house, where all of her furniture was fully paid for, a modest-priced car, and a fairly nice paycheck, even stocks and bonds before the market sunk a deep hole in her future savings. She had everything except somebody breathing next to her at night. Not even a snotty-nose child sitting across from her at the dinner table. She ate with Will Downing calling out her loneliness from her stereo. Oh, sometimes the pain tuckered in her long and deep. One Friday after work was one such time, when she ran up on Bootleg Man.

“Hey, there. You go right on ahead of me in this line, so you can hurry on home and get off your pretty feet,” he told her, looking at her all up and down, like the wolf did Little Red Riding Hood.

Shit, it didn’t take much to blow her lonely mind, so they got to talking. Matter of fact, they stood in the parking lot damn near half an hour, so the so-called concern he showed for her feet wasn’t worth no more shit than he was but Desperita didn’t reflect on that, even in her educated mind. She was too busy being all impressed with this new fella, who also had him some education, read books like history, philosophy, business and the like. Oh, Bootleg Man had her ’cause she didn’t run up on too many men who read philosophy. She didn’t understand it herself. Shit, she was just waiting for this one to ask for her number.

“You know what? I really enjoyed talking with you,” Bootleg Man told her but had to catch himself from licking his lips when he looked at all her fineness again and the latest model of the Volkswagen Passat she was driving. It was clean inside, which meant she was just as clean at her home he wanted to get inside and lay up in. He liked himself a clean woman, especially one that cleaned up after him while he went to his piece of a job, where he had the habit of cutting a fool and landed himself on the shit list. Any wrong move could send him in the throes of the unemployment line. He was looking out for his future and ole girl looked to be a real soft place to land.

“I really enjoyed you too. I’ll write my cell number on the back of my card.” Desperita scribbled her number on the back and handed her card over to  Bootleg Man.

Shit, he was smiling when he got that card and read it. She was a vice-principal at a school for the county. A good paying and secure job, she had. Plus, she was fine. Damn! “I’ll be calling you, Desperita. I usually don’t come in here to shop but I’m glad I did today. Must’ve been fate,” he lied through his phony grin. His ass went in there all the time on foot on account of his car being broke down in his driveway.

Copyright 2011 Totsymae

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Even after three days, Freedah didn’t feel like washing her ass. She’d been dumped like a bag of shit while Henry planned marriage to some other woman. In two days coming, the wedding would take place at her own church home, where folk talked shit secretly and faked pity in her face.

“That no good bastard,” one woman told her. “The Lord ain’t blessing him in the long run.”

Freedah didn’t care about no blessings or the Lord. Her heart and pride were broken. She counted the days ‘til wedding time, crying in between, with a .45 under her pillow.

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I’m playing with an idea in my head about a writing project, folks. And it’s been bouncing around for a good while. Months. And months. But the other day, I got to thinking about the title of this post and that woman, Kathryn Stockett, who wrote The Help, came to my mind. I won’t get into the controversy of that book ’cause what I wanna focus on is that she wrote about situations and folks as she knew them. And you know she’s a divorced woman now. I don’t know if it was pending already but I have the book and it said she was married in the little bio. Well, if a divorce was pending, why say you’re married, right?  I know it’s not my business but I’d like to know if her writing that book had anything to do with the divorce. I’m curious, that’s all. I know she pissed off a lotta folk in Mississippi. But let Kathryn tell it, she was writing about what she knew. And about who.

You know, Terry McMillan’s first ex-husband, not the one who came out the gay closet, took her to court for that book, Disappearing Acts. There was a movie on HBO about it. I bought the DVD and it was real decent to me. My way of saying it was good. Well, he didn’t get anything out of it. Just raised a buncha hell without profiting. Anyhow, you never know who’s gonna come out the woods and cut a fool on you when you come into a little cash. Then again, probably the same folk who’d been acting a periodic fool all along.

You ever think who’d go to acting ugly if you wrote about them? In my mind, you, as an artist, have the right to write about these folk without disguising who they are ’cause that’s who they are in your life. They oughta act right, especially if they know you’re aspiring to write professionally. Shit, if they weren’t cuttin’ up, you probably wouldn’t have nothing to write about. But. Do you want to alienate them? That’s the question.

In any case, I don’t think you should go off and do it with spiteful intentions. And what if there is no malice thinking on your part and what you say becomes the elephant in the room that everybody wants to take a whip to? Do you say no matter or write your truth with grace or grit, however your situations, or folks, have presented themselves? What do you think?

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“Deliverance” Watercolor on paper. Copyright 2012 Totsymae

She Said I Do

Couldn’t love him through the pain of hating himself and continue packing flesh-colored powder around the black and blues of what used to be a beautiful face. Laura stuffed  grocery bags and rushed to the boys’ bedroom, where dry splatters of blood stained their walls from last week. Then, headlights came beaming through the window.

Her Last Thoughts

Never planned to lay dying at forty. Projects waited for her to complete them. She wondered if Clara, her only friend, had washed the dinner plates in the sink from days before. While the monster ate at her last breast, she imagined her last drink of wine, the glass rim stained with signature maroon lipstick.

The Choice

They paraded outside with signs, bantering with a sense of rage that she was vile for cutting the cord to life inside her. Noma wept inside and out, thinking of the baby that her step-father planted inside to swell up her thoughts, while her mother sat with folded arms and anger etched across her face.

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"Walking the Block" Watercolor/Ink on paper. Copyright 2012 Totsymae

All he wanted was to get the mail out the box down the little driveway. Stars were twinkling bright and shit. Of what could be seen. The crickets chirping reminded him of peaceful, country nights back home as a boy. Shit, how long ago was that? Forty some-odd years?

Soon as he stuck his hand in the damn box, something hard beat down on his head. He found himself fighting for his life. And he wasn’t doing a good job of it either. Shit, had he known an unexpected ass-kicking was coming, he’d have kept it in the house. Damn!

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