# Do you write? Publish yourself!



## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=pia+isabella.&x=11&y=23

I took the plunge and published three of my short stories about this small French town onto Amazon's Kindle ebooks. And they're selling!

You can do it, too...just go over to KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and follow the directions. I also registered with the Kindleboard Forum, and the very helpful people over there gave me lots of friendly advice about things I didn't understand (what's HTML?).


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

Here is one example. If you like this story, I'd appreciate it if you would go to the page on Amazon and leave a review for others to read. Thank you.


Some farmers love their animals.

Some farmers love their animals. Some farmers love their animals more than others. Some farmers REALLY love their animals. This is a story about the love that dare not bleat, baa, woof, whinny, or otherwise speak its' name. I really don't have a clue how prevalent this practice is, here in the isolated rural depths of deepest France, but jokes and anecdotes about the practice abound, and there doesn't seem to be too much s------ing, shock, or disgust in the telling.

Of course, perhaps this is because the French tend to not treat their animals as household members or pets. This is true for both the non agricultural French person, who is perfectly capable of leaving their pet and their granny abandoned during the summer holidays, and of the farmer who counts on his animals as the means to his income. Animals are generally thought of as objects that one uses to decorate, please the children, or kill to eat or sell.

In recent years, however, this has slowly begun to change. Small animal 'pet' vets are just now beginning to realize that there may be money to be made in pets by convincing people to treat them as family members and be willing to pay for more than merely their simple food and basic care. Even in our own local veterinary clinic, the difference between today and just a few years ago is a sight to behold. Our local vet has a newly-added and really quite flashy corner of the waiting room where dietetic pet foods and fancy accessories are on display. If an animal comes in healthy and hearty and only has an appointment for a vaccination or two, five times out of ten their owner ends up walking out of the clinic with one or more of the 'added on sales' items from the display showcase. Plus, it's pretty much a given that the animal will live a healthier, happier and longer life. So this is good news.

A few years ago, you'd bring in a sick dog and the vet would say to take him home and let him die quietly, in comfort, next to the warmth of the open chimney fire...and then you'd see the smelly old mutt banished to an old rag on the floor of the barn or in the garage, halfway in a coma until the end of it's life, after which it would be sometimes buried in the garden but usually thrown into the river or stuffed into a feedbag and dumped during the night into the big trash container by the end of the road. Paying real money to put an old animal down was almost unheard of, and done only for those animals that were in agony or whose owners didn't have a gun or a stick or a big rock to do it themselves, had they even thought to do so.

Go into that same veterinary clinic today with a sick dog, and you may not get out for under several hundred Euros, and if the dog should die in spite of it all, the vet will ask you if you don't want a doggy funeral or cremation. Or the dog might end up in the big freezer at the back of the clinic waiting for the rendering plant truck...for a price, of course. I'm not certain that nowadays, you would be even allowed to leave the clinic with the body, to be disposed of at your leisure in the privacy of your own garden or chosen favourite spot.

Of course, that's for the small animal pets, as the farm animals still get treated as much as they have been for the past centuries or maybe even since as long ago as before the dawn of time. Conceived, born, raised and produced in small cages or in the dark windowless corners of damp and drafty barns. Overcrowded in dirty pens and taken for long, stressful rides in open trailers to other countries to be slaughtered and eaten. Kept from their mothers and fed unnatural diets in order to grow more quickly to market weight. Tied up on short chains and packed like sardines in a tin next to others for months during the winter, with hardly any room to lie down or with mucky bedding full of thorns. Slaughtered without benefit of stunning, then left to bleed even without the prayers for the soul that the scorned Muslim Halal meat merits. The list goes on and on, and this is only the small family farmer; Heaven help the animals that are mass produced on the big industrial factory farms.


This kind of animal husbandry is one of the main reasons that we raised our own creatures for food back when we lived in a little house on a big parcel of land just outside of town. By then, after years in France, I had learned enough about how to raise animals and kill them to feel confident enough about doing it for myself. I was determined to do it in a better and more humane fashion than that of some of people around here. And for the most part, I succeeded.

We were carnivores then, and we are still carnivores now,and although I really do prefer my meat to arrive in the headless, hideless,anonymous plastic-wrapped supermarket packaged version that in no way resembles the animal that it used to be, I want to know how the meat that I am eating has been raised and fed and cared for and killed and prepared. So I set out to learn, and found myself a few French farmer friends to teach me the basics.


Once adept (depending on who you ask, for my farmer friends still now laugh at my efforts), I set up shop, filling the place with livestock of any and all varieties. Chickens, guineafowl, ducks and geese wandered freely around, the roosters irritating me when they took to crowing from the top of the plane trees right in front of the house just as the baby, who was taking a nap in the playpen that had been nailed to the table underneath, was sound asleep and I could get a break and have a quiet cup of tea and a cookie to myself. Rabbits and guineapigs were housed under the shade of the old apple trees, in hutches made of recuperated wooden shipping palletts and chickenwire. The dog kept company with several cats. There was a pig that was named Denise, after my ex Mother-in-Law, slowly fattening himself on table scraps and spoiled unsold fruit and vegetables gleaned from the weekly open market in town. The goats and I held a running battle to see who would be the first to harvest anything from the vegetable garden. A couple of ponies and Bunny, the donkey, grazed in the field and sometimes escaped through the forest to visit the neighbors. It was a wonderful place to be, a wonderful place for kids to grow up.....


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

....Nearby was an old folks' home, and sometimes the residents would come by with old bread and scraps for the animals, as well as candy and sweeties for the kids. There were always loads of kids...I had four of my own and the place was a perfect haven for all of their friends to come and play. Mothers would drop off their children and sometimes not come back for a week or ten days or even a month, during the holidays, knowing perfectly well that their kids would eat, sleep, and play all the whole day long, and be put to bed with bedtime stories and singalongs in English, and might come back home with a few bilingual phrases to get them thinking about English as a second language. One mom said to me, 'I know they'll have to be steam- cleaned and sterilized, once they get back home, but they are so happy to have been here'. Gee, thanks, lady.


One particular old man came more often than most of the visitors from the retirement home. I didn't mind, because he usually never really bothered with the kids, preferring to stop and visit the animals, instead. I figured that he was shy. He'd generally be there when we got back from an outing and leave soon afterwards, reinforcing the shy idea. One of the other residents from the home told me that he'd been a farmer before retiring, so I figured that he simply missed his old ways and came by for a souvenier of his younger days. Little did I know what it was that he was missing.


So one day, we drove up to find this old man seemingly urinating out in the open field, as he pulled up his zipper as we were driving in through the gate. I never had a second thought about it, because after all, French men will pee anywhere, and not always against a wall with their backs turned towards you for politeness, either. I did think it rather strange that he was peeing so close to where the pony was, and it almost seemed as if the pony was curiously reaching out with his nose to sniff...but I waved away any 'peculiar' thoughts that might have flitted through my mind on the matter. The strange thing was, was that when I stopped the car, he hurriedly began to shuffle away. And when I put out my hand, in order to politely shake his, he looked almost surprised at my gesture and very nearly didn't return the handshake as he was in that much of a hurry to get away. Once again, I thought he was just a shy person.


A few days later I was having a coffee with a friend at the table outside under the plane trees...the table was long enough to have a place to sit, AND to leave the nailed- on baby playpen in place. The baby loved being in that playpen on the table, because he could pull himself up and watch, all day, as the tractors and trucks that belonged to the the Town Hall came and went, dumping their loads of dead leaves, rocks, wood, and various building materials onto the property right in front of us, which was the local depot for the town. It might not have been the prettiest place to live, but it certainly was the most fun place to live for the kids, with that big, ever-changing, adventure playground right there, seemingly made just for them. To this very day, that nailed-to-the-table-in-his-playpen baby wants to grow up and become a tractor driver.


The woman who was visiting almost spilled her coffee, as she jerked upright and said, "What the hell is he doing?!". So I looked, and there was the old man, sitting on a cement block, apparently offering his penis to the dog. The dog didn't seem to mind, and was sniffing away at it...or at least, that's what it looked like from the distance we were sitting, and I found myself feverently hoping that sniffing was all that the dog was doing. I had to hope it wasn't what I thought, as a half dozen small kids were playing in the gravel, not yards from the scene. I stood there gaping and shocked for a moment, as flashbacks of the scene with the sniffing pony came back into my head.


The old man must've noticed us watching him, or heard us yelling, for he stood, pulled his trousers up, and went over to a tree by the stream, where he 'finished his business' without the benefit of the dog or any other animal partner and walked back out of the gate and back to the old folks' home. At that point I knew that something had to be done, and went over to see the person in charge of the home the next morning. I wasn't exactly sure about how to present myself, or even if I'd be believed, or understood, as at that time my knowledge of the French language...especially those particular terms of the language...wasn't too strong.


I was invited into the office, where Madame la Directrice (the Manager) listened attentively to my story and then asked me to come out into the corridor and take a peek at the clients in the sitting room. She pointed out the old man and asked me if it wasn't him that seemed to be having these 'problems'. It was him, all right, and I confirmed it. She told me that this had come as no surprise to her, and that the office had already had a complaint or two about the old man and another resident's dog, then mading the comment, "Wasn't it sweet to know that the urge is still there, at that advanced age?".


She went on to say that it turns out that the old guy really WAS a retired farmer, and, after seeing his sexual proclivities in action, we had to try and understand that, as he'd never been married, this is what he was used to for sexual relief. And not to worry, as the doctor would be called in and the old farmer would be given regular doses of bromide which would nicely take care of things. I asked if it wouldn't be kinder to buy the poor sod a stuffed animal. I mean, what was I supposed to say?


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

The other stories can be found on my blog. Click below.


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

http://www.amazon.com/Fishmonger-sh...4L5JUE2O&s=digital-text&qid=1301083849&sr=1-4
Another one!


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

Ready for another story?

The Fishmonger



The fishmongerâs wife had died, and he was looking glum. He could be found walking into town or at the local betting shop with his face looking drawn out and sad. He'd lost weight and looked pale and almost ill, compared to the jovial and almost flirty man that made it a pleasure to do business with, and who would throw in a free lemon with a wink and a smile on the days that fish was on the menu and you stopped by the shop to choose a fresh fish of one sort or another for dinner. 



With the wifeâs death, the fish shop had closed for business and was up for sale. Because, as sometimes happens in family businesses where members of the extended family help out with the day to day running of the business, if people working donât get along then the business doesnât work. It seemed that the wife's aunt and uncle, who did much of the work in the shop, didn't get on so well with the fishmonger and there was nobody else available to help run the fish shop. Once the wife died, the older couple were disinclined to come in to work. 



It was really the wife and her old aunt that had done most of the real heavy-duty work in the shop. They were the ones who prepared the cooked platters and take-out meals, and most likely also the ones to do the cleanup afterwards, too. French women are generally the ones in charge of cleaning and things such as childcare, shopping, and the likes, and it didn't seem as if it were any different in this family. In fact, it seemed to be even more the case, as I never saw the fishmonger do anything but wield his big fishknife and raise his eyebrows at the women clientele. The cash register was manned by the aunt's husband, and his sole job was to ask the fishmonger the price of the sale and then collect the money from the customer and hand over the fish.



The family were 'Pieds Noires', decendants of French Colonnial immigrants who had gone to Algeria, only to have left in a hurry after the war and come back to the motherland to finish out their lives in reasonable, non-sectarian calm. It does seem, however, that many of these returnees had come back with attitudes towards women that must've been adopted from their previous hosts, along with the pride that is often par for the course for any member of a ruling elite, which is what they had been in their adopted country before the troubles and subsequent war.



The fishmonger, who was called Jean Bernard, worked among the open ice and fish filled display tables in the shop, smiling and talking to anyone who came in to buy fresh fish. Heâd scale the fish and clean out the innards for those buyers who showed the slightest signs of being squeemish, slice and fillet, then weigh and bag the prepared choices. He would double bag so that the smell of the fish wouldn't get transferred to anything else that you might have picked up at the marketplace that day. He was a talkative and friendly sort of person, always ready with a recipe for the whole turbot you were considering buying, or suggest a helpful 'astuce' with preparations for your dinner. 



It seemed such a shame and so sad to find him a completely different person after his wife died of an aneurism in her early fifties. Moping around town with a drawn face and a sad expression, seemingly preoccupied with whatever it was inside of himself that made him so sad and lonely looking. Heâd always been kind to me when I had gone into the fish shop and I found myself feeling very sorry for the shell of a man he seemed to have become. 



There were children, but they had grown and flown the coop. One had gone to London, where it seemed she was gone to stay for good, only returning once or twice a year with her English boyfriend and sometimes with his family; the all-but-the-details in-laws. Jean Bernard was very proud of his daughter, but it must've been hard for him to know that she'd gone away so far and wouldn't ever be back to stay, especially after his wife died, when he seemed to be so isolated and lonely. 



The son was a gendarme in Paris. 'Gendarmes' translates to 'armed men', and are military police, used also as the local police in the small towns of France. I imagine that this system of military police serves a useful purpose in being able to better control the populance, with a national pool of officers rather than familiar locals, who may or may not be easier to bribe and corrupt. I never met Jean Bernard's son, but heard about how he'd sent his father a gendarme keychain to use for the keys of the car, and how it had saved his father on numerous occasions from being given any sort of traffic violation ticket, as simply dangling it up in sight when stopped by an officer is enough to get free and waved on your merry way.



It's habitual to say 'Bonjour' to people that you pass in the street in villages and the small towns of France. Then to stop and shake the hands of people you know somewhat or to do the double-kiss-on-the cheeks thing with more familiar people or with women. Down here in the SW of France, it's customary to do a double kiss...go further north and you get three kisses, even further and four kisses, one cheek at a time; back and forth and back and forth. My thinking is that you'd need more kisses the further north you go and the colder it gets. In the bigger towns and in the cities, there are no Bonjour for anyone you don't know, although you will get one from a shopkeeper, as well as an âAu Revoir', when you leave. Of course, you are expected to also say the âHelloâ, âPleaseâ, âThank Youâ, and âGoodbyeâ. 



Jean Bernard and I had gone from the handshake to the double kiss as the days and weeks after his wife's death went by and we happened passed each other in town. We'd stop and chat, and he'd ask me how the garden and the kids were and I'd ask him how he was and what he was doing to keep himself busy and not brood too much. I suggested to him that he ought to plant a garden, the trials of doing so were always outweighed by the good results, plus cut flowers and salads and vegetables were useful things to have around, especially as he was single and perhaps not always inclined to shop or to cook well for just himself. He told me that he'd think about it. He said the same thing, every time I saw him. But so did I, and as he wasn't looking any more happy, I kept saying it. He said that he didn't want to bother digging and weeding and watering. 



Time passed and the winter came, with its grey and its cold, its damp and its miserable. I passed Jean Bernard on the street and suggested waiting for spring for his garden, and said that if he was stuck, I'd come and help him out with ideas, Iâd come the end of the worst of the cold, when I could begin to show him how to prepare the soil without too much work on his part. I am a fan of the little-known-in-France method of 'gardening by mulch' that had been pioneered by Ruth Stout back in the seventies. French people often find this method to be strange, and tell me that the French want to see the dirt (and the weeds) between their plants. They also often say that Americans have too many ideas in their heads, which may or may not be true, depending on how you look at it, but the gardening method is one that works, and one I was sure would work for a depressed Jean Bernard.



As for what the French think of my various methodsâ¦I am sure, had I lived here a few hundred years ago I would've been burned at the stake as a witch or tossed into the river at Sauveterre as used to be done with suspect witches, and then said a belated 'sorry' to when I drowned and proved my innocence. Or fished out and burned at the stake if I was lucky enough to float and live. There are negatives and positives to both old and new ideas, although for the most part, the isolated country people of deep France don't much like the newer ideas, especially when suggested to them by a foreigner.....


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

.....

Spring was just around the corner when I again ran into Jean Bernard in town, and we decided that I was to come over and visit his garden, finally. He gave me directions on how to get to the house and on the day prescribed, I went over armed with my Ruth Stout Handbook, a garden catalogue, a mesh bag of seed potatoes, and a few packets of seeds. I was feeling fine, for although I no longer had a garden, being as we had had to move back into the center of town, I was able to help someone else have one, as well as be a part of their getting back into the swing of things with their life. I felt that I was doing my little bit for another human being and the community and the society of the town, as I hummed a cheery little tune to myself on what looked like a fine end-of-winter day with bright, warm sunshine and the beginnings of buds on trees.



I arrived, was invited in, and offered a cup of coffee. We chatted as we drank the coffee, and Jean Bernard told me about how his life was as a young man in Algeria, and how difficult it was for him to have had to come back after the war to France, where his parents had been born but he had never visited. He spoke of the difficulty of being on anti-depressants and the long days and even longer nights since his wife had died. I got the impression of a man that had no idea of how to cook or clean or keep house for himself, and also of one that had never had the time to make good friends and now was suffering from the lack of them. 



The fish shop had been closed because he wouldn't have been able to run it without the help of his wife and her family, and he didn't want to have all the social charges and fees that went with the hire of outside help, as well as the fact that training outside help was not something he was prepared to be doing at his age and with his temperment. Jean Bernard wasn't yet at retirement age, and all the money that might have been available to live on had been put into the shop, which was for sale but hadn't had a nibble from a buyer as yet.



Adding to this, mostly because of his old Colonnial style of pride, Jean Bernard did not want to go and find another job, which at his age might've meant one of working in the nearby pig slaughterhouse or picking kiwis or working with the almost unemployable men for the Town Hall jobs of road clearing and tree trimming. So he spent most of his days at home watching the television in his pyjamas, or, when he did venture out, walking down to the local betting shop bar and joining in on the wagers of the horseracing in the hopes of not only company to talk to but perhaps a small win to cover the cost of the coffee or the beer consumed there. There was a car available to him in his garage, but I suspect that the gas and the insurance were difficult to find the money to pay for, so he walked and it was probably better for him to get out and get some excercise and clear the cobwebs from the brain, anyway.



After the coffee I got a tour of the house, which, for the French, is highly unusual. It's perfectly possible to have long term friends in France and have never been invited for a tour of the house, even if you are and have been a regular visitor for years. You might know where the toilet was located, or the kitchen or the dining room, but never have visited the more private rooms in the house. This is such a difference to life in the US, where first time visitors are not only invited but expected to take a look through all the rooms and closets and insides of cupboards, as well as being told the price or the value of both the house and the furnishings within.



Jean Bernard showed me his bedroom, and then he showed me his wife's bedroom. I remarked how sad but poignant it was that he felt he could no longer sleep in the bedroom that he had shared for so many years with his wife, now that she had died. He didn't say anything. The entire tour felt rather unusual, and I wasn't sure of what role I was supposed to be playing but shrugged the feeling off, thinking it to be only the results of Jean Bernard's mourning and depression.



We went back into the kitchen, me jabbering on about Ruth Stout while I picked up the coffee cups from the table in preparation for bringing out seed packages and explaining all about how a garden could be easy, simple, and enjoyable. I&#8217;d put the cups and saucers into the sink with the dishes that were already piled up there and suddenly found myself grabbed and turned around, pressed against the sink, and given a deep, very nice, very sensual kiss and then felt one of Jean Bernard's arms around me holding me extremely close with his hand caressing my hair, while his other hand busied itself between my legs.



Well! I must admit that the first thought in my head was that this man probably knew perfectly well how to do the thing that he seemed intent on doing, and that he probably knew very well how to do it perfectly. This could certainly end up being easy, simple, and enjoyable; possibly even more so than gardening. I caught myself just as I felt my body responding to him, and neatly slid out of his grip and managed to sit us both down with the big oaken kitchen table between us. Besides the obvious, I had to know just what was going on.



Whew! With what I'm sure was a flushed face and the rest of the flushed me being thankfully hidden beneath winter sweaters, I asked him what he was playing at, since I thought that I had come to cheer up someone with a spot of gardening, and that I had not come to plant his carrot and that the sowing of his personal seed was not the deal. I used exactly that language, as corny as it sounds, in order to create some kind of break in the atmosphere and try to laugh off the incident. Boy, sometimes I am SO naÃ¯ve and dumb.



It turns out that gardening was the furthest thing from Jean Bernard's mind. In fact, he had never thought that gardening had ever really crossed my mind, either. It turns out that the man had spent the past twenty years seducing every woman that crossed his path, and thought that I was simply going to be another one to add to his conquests. He had the good graces to look slightly sheepish, when I convinced him that I was there because I felt sorry for a sad old man who had lost his wife and looked so glum, and had thought to kindly help him feel better, although not quite in the way he'd had in mind.



This time it was me that served us each a cup of coffee, and we spent the next hour or so talking about his life and the fact that he'd been almost on the point of a divorce right before his wife had died. And that it had all been his fault, as she had been fed up with the endless parade of recently-seduced women coming into the fish shop in order to make another rendevous for more of the same from her husband. He did say that each time after an indiscretion, he'd felt remorse and regret within twenty minutes or so but could simply not stop his urges to continue, especially as his wife had never been the same after the children had been born, when it seemed that she wasn't as available sexually as she had been before and when lovemaking on the floor in front of the chimney had been the norm rather than the exception.



It wasn't that he was sad to have lost his wife, although her dying so young was a shame, it was that he was sad to have lost his business and his name in the community as a shop owner along with the opportunity to meet, flirt with, and seduce the female clientele. He missed his wife and was depressed because of the loss of status and income, as the plans for the divorce had been to keep working together at the fish shop but live their separate lives in private. Now he was well and truly stuck, as the house where he had been living during his entire twenty years in France, the house that the divorcing couple planned to stay and both live in, albeit separately, was not his but belonged in name to the old aunt and uncle of his wife that refused to come and work for him in the fish shop after the death of their niece, his wife.



If it hadn't have been so sad, it might have been funny. I could see the poetic justice in Jean Bernard's predicament, but I could also see that he really did have absolutely no clue as to which direction to head in. And to top it off, he had chosen some very strong medication as a form of anti-depressants. So I again suggested gardening, which provoked a rueful laugh. But I meant it, and meant well, and so Jean Bernard took it in the spirit in which it was offered, and we came to the conclusion, as I prepared to go home, that he would consider thinking about gardening and I would think of him as a friend. We solemnly shook hands and I collected my seeds, potatoes, my Ruth Stout book, and wished him well on the road to happier times. 



As I stood up to take my leave I once again felt myself being taken into his arms, with the offer still standing of something more than gardening. More than likely it was, I recall thinking at the time, an offer having something to do with the floor in front of the fireplace. I have to be honest and say that I seriously considered taking Jean Bernard up on what I was sure would have been an excellent offer as he had a way with the style and mode of caress that held such delicious promise... To this day I think that, should I ever be really and truly in need... 



I still run into Jean Bernard in town, every now and then. He seems happier, his face isn't the drawn and sad one of years ago. I sometimes pass him by the betting shop, where he's often laughing and talking animatedly with his friends. He looks as if he's doing okay, now. We stop and do the double-kiss thing, and now there's slightly more to it and his hand will linger on my shoulder or on my hips, and then...his eyes are the key, they look for response, they follow me. What can I say? It's nice to be a woman and to feel alive.


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## Halfway (Nov 22, 2010)

Way to go Susie. Best of success to you!

Will check out the links, thanks.


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## Danbo (Feb 2, 2011)

Thanks for the info!!!! I used to write poetry chapbooks and had a couple of poems published in those Anthologies, but never was able to get a publisher to bite. My wife writes as well. This is another avenue we had no clue about. Thanks again.


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## Our Little Farm (Apr 26, 2010)

Good luck to you Susie!


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

The Green Chair






There is going to come a day when I stop and ask them to move that chair. Every single time I drive up that hill and see that green chair just sitting there in the garden, I tell myself that very thing. If the kids happen to be with me in the car, I say it out loud. The kids have gotten so that they look for the chair and will to be the first to call it out, "One of these days...".




I won't be asking them to move it very faraway. I just want it moved so that it's scooted far enough to make sure that I can't see the ---- thing as I drive past. I simply don't want to see that intricate, wrought-iron, grass-green spray painted garden chair there in all of it&#8217;s glory.




One of the local gypsy families lives in the house where the chair is sitting outside at the back in their garden. They used to live in town, parents and 13 kids crammed into a tiny stone house along the narrow cobbled lanes in the center of the village. A teensy tiny little house with just enough room for a scullery, a fireplace, a toilet and a narrow winding staircase on the ground floor going up to one room above that, and with an attic room that had somehow taken over the next-door neighbors&#8217; attic space as well. 




Actually, I'm not sure that there even was a toilet, as I'd often see the various household members going over the small bridge that crosses the stream, and into the public toilet that sits outside the betting shop cafÃ©. Surely there was not a bath or a shower, as such things weren't standard accessories until only a very few years ago. Even my own house, which is not so far from the one belonging to the Gypsy family, had no bathing area when I bought it, and the toilet that was in place must've been one of the first of its' kind, according to the plumber that put in a new one when I had the house modernized.




By the time I moved into the town, most of the Gypsy kids living in that house had grown up and gone off to marry their cousins and breed their own batches of petty thieves, child whores, and village fete rumble-mongers. The old man that was the father of the brood was put out each sunny day, to sit hunched over and drooling, on a hard wooden kitchen chair just outside the door by the single small window that served as illumination for the house. He'd sit there motionless for the better part of the day, never moving. As the sun moved across the sky, he&#8217;d be sitting in direct sunshine for a few hours each afternoon, never seemingly bothered by the uncomfortable heat of it. Maybe he couldn&#8217;t move, although sometimes he'd mutter, so I knew that he wasn't dead. The house had a never-ending stream of visitors...grown children (none of the kids ever moved further than five kilometers away), grandchildren, cousins, extended family members...but it didn't seem to me that anybody ever bothered to talk to the old man. Maybe because he wasn&#8217;t able to talk back to them, I don't know.




The old woman of the house was still going strong back then, yelling at the grandkids, stirring pots at the old woodstove in the corner, leaving saucers of catfood under the old man's chair for the ragged-looking tomcat that hung around the place. I'd often catch a glimpse of her sitting at the small table inside over a coffee with one or another of her daughters. Sometimes I'd see her shuffling off with her wicker basket over her arm on market day, dressed with her flowery full apron housedress over her everyday clothes, walking around and visiting the stalls to find the best bargains on the vegetables and bits of meats for sale so she could bring them back and make the soup that goes with almost every meal in most French households.




She always nodded a polite 'hello' to me as I passed. Most people generally say &#8216;Bonjour', but with her it was simply a nod. I used to think this was because the Gypsies thought themselves inferior to the other people living in town, but I later came to realize that it was for quite the opposite reason and I should feel honoured by the salutation. These were town Gypsies, not to be confused with the sort that travel in fancy trailers and were to be found running the rides and cotton candy sales at every carnival and fair or village fete during the summer.




It wasn't as if they kept apart from each other, these two tribes. They sometimes intermarried and they always stuck up for each other in the bloody fights and feuds that often had their climaxes during the village fetes and carnivals, leaving the streets red-splattered with blood and the locals outraged that such a thing could happen in their village and at their harvest celebrations. Generally, it was with the rugbymen that the real big fights ensued, as the smaller spats were almost always because of the women and only involved the men after numerous incidences of catfights and hair-pulling had not solved the problem of who was sleeping with whom, or even who was flirting with whom.




The town Gypsies have been living in real houses for generations. But everyone knows that they are Gypsies. They seem to be able to do whatever it is they want, and the residents of the Town Hall seem to be powerless to arrange things otherwise. The local politicians are very wary of these Gypsy families, if not downright respectful. The Gypsies have strong family ties and seem almost to be like bees in a hive...when their queen decides something, it's a done deal, and woe be it to anyone to mess with the collective hive once it's mind is made up.




I'm a stranger here in this town, as well as being foreign and not French-born, so I have to feel glad that they live and let live when it come to me. Some of them can be quite likeable in small doses as long as I remember my place. When they happen to come and knock on the door to ask a service the first thing to remember is to keep my wits about me. So when the old lady from the Gypsy house knocked and asked if she could have the chair that I'd just recently finished painting and putting out by my multicoloured flowerpots and planters in front of the house, I had to think fast. I liked that chair and I didn&#8217;t want to give it up. I told her that, yes, I was willing to give it to her but asked her if she didn't mind waiting for a time, as I'd just recently spent some 50 francs on the can of spray paint for it and would like to be able to enjoy it for a while first, and that I&#8217;d let her know when she could come and pick it up.




She gave me about a week. The chair was gone when I woke one morning during the annual week-long salt festival that the town celebrates each September. Perhaps I should've been more clear and explained to her that I meant she could have it after the summer had passed and only when winter and the bringing indoors of pots and plants had come. I never saw the chair for years after that, and always wondered just where she'd put it in that tiny house of hers.




Eventually, one of the daughters of this family bought a house out on the main road that goes to the next town over. The parents were getting on by then, and the old dad was actually being carried out in his chair into the sunshine, rather than being led out and sat down in it. I found myself wondering if he didn't sleep in that chair as well. Soon after the purchase, the family decided to move the elderly parents in with them into their new house. I knew this because I&#8217;d see the old man sitting slumped over in his same wooden chair out in the bright sunshine by the side of the new house, with the cars and trucks passing by so close on the big main road that it was a wonder he didn't get run over.




One day, coming back from a day out visiting a nearby lake with the kids, what did I see but my green chair sitting right out in the back garden of the Gypsy&#8217;s new house. Their house is at the bottom of a small hilly plot on a twisty road, so I only got a quick glimpse of the chair. But I knew right away that it was my chair....no other chair in France could be so ornate and so green. No other chair in France would be in the garden of the very same thieving Gypsy family that had been after that particular chair, either. It was a frustrating moment and I knew there'd be more frustrating moments in the future, as that road and the view of that chair were on a road that I often had to use to get to the places where I was going .




I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to laugh about it. Not that this was an easy thing to learn to do. And so this is how I began to tell myself that one day I'd stop en route and ask them to kindly move that chair. To just give it a little scoot, enough for it to be out of my line of vision when I drive up that winding hill. I haven't done it, yet. Not that I'm hesitant to do so, mind you...it simply because I'm not sure if they'll be able to understand the irony of it all.


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## susieM (Apr 23, 2006)

Has anyone ever felt slight twinges of something like guilt and so asked 'permission' of the characters in a story? Ever gone to say to someone that you've written a story about them or something that happened in their lives?

Don't do it. It doesn't work. In fact, it not only freaks them out but it ----es them off, too...even if they can't read the story because they don't speak the language.

Although the Fishmonger DID offer sex on the kitchen tabletop.

(I declined)


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## Ken Scharabok (May 11, 2002)

I have written and publish one - which is the one I'm offer as a free eBook. I reporint one on which the copyright expired. I purchased the copyright for one, had it reformatted and then printed. The fourth is a third reprint of a popular blacksmithing book with written permission from the original author, who retained copyright.


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## motdaugrnds (Jul 3, 2002)

Nice going Susie. Good luck to you.


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## joebill (Mar 2, 2013)

I am a published author, which does not make me a genius or qualified critic, but I'd like to comment;

Your talent is larger than your topics. The vulgarity robs rather than enhances your writing. It limits your markets and masks your ability to entertain a wide, wide readership, and you do not need it to sell books. Write a story that you would feel at ease reading to your mother and a 10 year old child in one sitting, with pride, and you will have grown as an author.

None of my business, and I wish you well, but that's my two cents worth.......Joe


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## jedoud (Jan 21, 2015)

How have you done with your books? I have a couple I am working on, and I have a few that are only good for the short market, so I have been saving those to publish as a collection. If you have success with the short form, I think I could get some of them up there right away as one offs.

I am still working on the full length pieces, one is in second draft, the other in first draft process, and will put them up. I put up a couple chapters for a serialized version I was considering, but the response was so low, I decided that it would not be worth continuing the serial, so I will hopefully release the full length version this spring.

If you have had some success with your short works, let me know, I would be grateful and certainly am willing to try it if it is worth the effort. Do you do a lot of off site marketing of your books, or how do you get your books sold.

I considered some ebooks, but I am a really bad teacher, so I thought I would stick to what I know, literature. I too wrote poetry once, and had some published years ago, but I realized that the only good poet was a dead poet as far as the publishing world is concerned. Does anyone actually pay for poetry, and for that matter does anyone actually write peotry any more. I have seen a lot of stuff I would not pay for, but very little that would be worth my money, and even that is only because I feel I should support the artist.

So just a few questions to anyone?


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## unregistered358895 (Jul 15, 2013)

Congratulations to all of the writers brave enough to share their works with the world. I am proud to be among you. I'm working on three novels in tandem right now. I've got two full length novels published, one novelette, and a litany of shorts scattered across the internets.

May we all find editors who understand us, readers who love us, and critics who are honest but pleasant.


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## MNBobcat (Feb 4, 2011)

Susie,

How many ebooks have you sold so far?


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## WildernesFamily (Mar 11, 2006)

The knowledge of the link opening to a page with a book cover showing an image of a woman's bare breasts may be helpful to some. (Not SusieMs books.)


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