Lance Mannion's Foreign Office: Kathy's life and my story

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The excerpt below from my story "Her Life" is the last one I'm going to post. I'll explain why in a minute.

If you'd like to read all the excerpts in sequence---close to sequence; there's a scene missing---here's a table of contents:

Kathy and her sister share their thoughts on love.

Kathy tells Robby the truth---most of it, at any rate.

Kathy's ex-husband is out of jail and feeling thirsty.

Kathy looks for Robby...or Rob...or the D-Man...whoever.

This should have been her happy ending.

Thanks very much to all of you who left comments or wrote in about the story. I appreciate your help and encouragement. And I'm sorry I have to cut things off two scenes short of the ending. But here's the deal.

I posted the first excerpt, This should have been her happy ending, with no plans to post any more. It was meant as introduction to my Cape blogging and that was all. Vanity got the better of me, though, so I kept going. The problem is, I'm afraid that if I post the whole thing online I won't ever be able to sell it to a magazine. Not that there's a chance of that in the immediate future, but it's always been the goal.

I'd like to just offer to email everybody who wants one a copy then, but there's an important part of me that rebels at the idea of giving away my fiction for free.

Blogging is different. You start up a webpage you are volunteering to do the work for free. Donations are always gratefully accepted and I'd like to sell more ads, but I don't expect either. (Thanks again, though, to all who have chipped in in the past!) But it's different with my fiction. It's not your concern, but writing stories is what I set out to do when I set out to be a writer. It's worked out that my non-fiction and journalism, and now my blogging, are what I've spent most of my time at a keyboard doing, but that's because I offended a teacher back in college who turned out to be a witch and put a curse on me, a story I'll save for a rainy day.

Telling tales, though, is my real love. So it's a point of pride with me that I treat it differently from my regular blogging.

I've thought about this carefully, and I've come up with a plan.

The plan is this: If you'd like to read the rest of the story, you can have it for a donation of $2 to the tip jar in the upper right corner of the page.

Hold on! There's more.

Since I'm springing this on you and I've already posted most of the story, I will send you all of Her Life plus another story.

There's still more. For a donation of $10 I will send you both stories and a story a month for the next 10 months.

And I'll tell you something. I'm pretty good at this. Her Life is my favorite story, but it isn't my best.

At any rate, here's how it will work. If you pay through Amazon, make sure you click on the button to let me know who you are and give me your email address. PayPal automatically does that. Also include a note telling me what file format you'd like the story sent in, WordPerfect, Word, or RTF. I'm working on creating PDF files of both stories too, but that won't be ready until the weekend. If you're willing to wait, let me know.

If you'd prefer to pay by check or money order, please make them payable to E. Reilly, and send them to Lance Mannion, PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561.

I will also be glad to send hard copies by snail mail, autographed even, although I can't imagine anyone really wanting one. My autograph, that is. Make sure you include your address and add $1.50 for postage.

Of course, if you'd like to donate and don't want the stories, leave a note saying no thanks at PayPal and leave your donation anonymous at Amazon.

I'm sorry for not being sorry about doing this. But as Wodehouse says, " Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns."

Thanks again for your support and patience and, whether or not you donate, thanks very much for reading my blog.

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