Guest Post: Patti Abbott

This is a first for the Corner, today we have a guest blogger. Patti Abbott is the author of a new collection of short stories released from Snubnose Press called, "Monkey Justice". Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know Patti's blog http://pattinase.blogspot.com/ and all the wonderful things she does for writing community from her "How I Came to Write this Story" posts to Friday's Forgotten Books. She's also one of the best writers I know. Don't believe me? Check out her story "A Saving Grace" over at The Thrilling Detective web site http://www.thrillingdetective.com/fiction/07_06_01.html And here's Patti:


First, my thanks to Sandra for the invitation to talk about my collection of stories Monkey Justice. It’s nice to get out of my house once in a while and this constitutes a new way of doing that.

I think the biggest issue for me in putting together this collection was choosing which stories to include and deciding the order in which to place them. Many of my early stories were too literary to fit in well with the thrust of the collection. Easy to eliminate them. And some had not yet appeared in print or online, so I couldn’t use them. From the number that was left, I tried to pick ones that showed some range in plot, character, etc. I also tried to balance lighter stories with darker ones. Good luck with that.

Most interesting to me were the things I discovered about myself working with the stories. Of the 23 stories in this collection, 14 are from the male point of view. I’m not sure what this says about me as a writer. Do I write from that viewpoint because I see men at bigger players in life than women; do I see them as the primary perpetrator of violence; is my inner voice more often male? I’m not sure. Seven of the stories are about old people, not surprisingly since I am nearly there myself. But there also about the same number of stories where people under twenty-five are major characters.

In MONKEY JUSTICE, I kill a lot of people, but that’s the kind of story I write. Even before I stumbled into this community, my stories were always dark. As hard as I might try to write a lighter tale, things always turned out badly. In my very first published story, a man dies and his friend steals his collection of pornographic pictures of the town’s female sheriff. You could see the road I was on already—although when I say already, I was in my mid-forties. Definitely a later bloomer. In my second published story, a woman electrocutes her husband because he’s so untidy. Both of these stories were in so-called literary magazines, but it was an uneasy fit. There they would sit amongst the poetry and stories of angst-filled college students, drowning their sorrows in the nearest bar.

In this collection people are torn apart by dogs, smothered (2), shot (2), killed with a knife (2), killed by a dropped bus (1), killed by a dropped mirror (1), strangled (2)—once by legs. And if you count the mice that die in the last story-killed by mousetraps. Sometimes no one dies, but no one is very happy either.

Recently a friend remarked she didn’t know how my husband could sleep soundly knowing the likelihood of my smothering him with a pillow. What I don’t know is how he reads all these stories without wanting to smother me.

Thanks again to Sandra for this opportunity to talk about MONKEY JUSTICE.

You can find Monkey Justice here http://www.amazon.com/Monkey-Justice-Stories-ebook/dp/B005UOR9UK/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_3