Words & Pics

Do you like contests? I haven’t done many promotions for my ebooks, but I thought I’d try something fun for my newest collection of horror stories, Big Chills

For the Labor Day weekend I’m offering a $10 Amazon gift certificate to the first three people who can name the female character in “Crusher”,  one of the stories in Big Chills.

For more details, go here.

Back in 2001 I decided to start sending out short stories to online magazines. Short fiction writers like Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor have always been my heroes, and I had a dream of being a successful short story writer myself. I put that dream off for many years, but when I saw how many magazines there were on the Internet devoted to “flash fiction”, or ultra-short stories, I decided to jump into the pool.
I joined an online flash fiction writing group, used its feedback to polish my stories, and I started sending them out.
And I had success. Some of my stories got published. Actually, a lot more of my stories got published than I had expected. It turned out that editors liked my writing. I went around in a pretty good mood for awhile, thinking that I could finally call myself a short story writer, because, hot damn, I was published!
My euphoria faded a bit with time.

See the rest of this story at McDonnell Writing.

For a free download of “Big Chiills”, my book of horror stories, go to: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/73898

If you could write a review and post it on Smashwords, that would be great!

Offer good till July 31.

As part of a Smashwords promotion, I’m offering my ebook “The Christmas Gift” for free till July 31. It’s at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7073

What will the world be like when we’re all wearing thought helmets?
Recently I read a report about “thought helmets”, which are devices the U.S. military is developing that will enable soldiers to communicate by sending thoughts to each other. Sensors inside these helmets scan electrical signals from the wearer’s brain and a microprocessor inside the helmet turns the signals into words that are then transmitted to a receiver’s hemet.
You can see how this would be useful in a military situation. Soldiers who are on stealth missions, such as sneaking up on an enemy camp at night, could communicate without making a sound. A soldier could direct his mates to avoid obstacles, spread out, get ready to attack, or any number of other messages, all at the speed of thought.
Things will really get interesting when these helmets are developed for consumer use — and you know that will happen eventually.
Read the rest of this story HERE.

John McDonnell’s Smashwords Page

My daughter is graduating from college in a few days. She’s happy, of course, but also a little scared at the prospect of going out in the world and starting a career.
My words of wisdom to her? “It’s going to be all right.”
Maybe that’s not the most profound statement a father can make, but I still think it’s valuable.
In fact, it’s a constant thread running through my role as a parent. (See more of this post HERE.)

John McDonnell’s Smashwords Page

I can’t think of a better Mother’s Day present than this. Last night we took the family out to dinner, and we saw a rainbow. The amazing thing is that we went to dinner at that very same restaurant almost a year ago and saw a rainbow that night also.
The last time we went it was for my wife’s birthday; this time was for Mother’s Day. Both times there were some showers just before we got to the restaurant.
And then we saw the rainbow.
Rainbows are such magical things, and I always think that they are an omen of good fortune. So what does it mean when you see two rainbows a year apart at the same place? It must mean we are going to have some amazing things happen to us.
I think it was about the best Mother’s Day present anyone could ask for, and my wife agrees.

A long time ago in another universe I worked in a bank. It was a small town bank with half a dozen offices, and my grandfather had helped to start it with some local businesspeople in the 1920s.
I only spent two years at that job, but I learned some lessons I’ll never forget.
The biggest one was: Treat your customers like friends. Everybody from the president down to the tellers at that bank knew their customers like they were part of the family. The branch manager knew if the gas station on the corner was out of Pepsi in its vending machines. They knew whether the plumbing supply store was meeting its payroll. What the local real estate market was like. Who was going to expand their business. What type of cars were selling well at the car dealer’s lot. The owners of businesses would come in and sit down at the manager’s desk and chat with him all day long. The tellers would gossip with every customer, and they often knew things that weren’t in the local newspaper. The loan officers in the main office would go golfing with their business customers, or take them out to lunch, and they always remembered a birthday or an important event in some customer’s life.
I was thinking about that recently when I went to my local bank, which has just been taken over by Wells Fargo, because I ran out of checks and needed some temporary checks to tide me over till I my new order came in.
“Sorry, Mr. McDonnell,” the teller said. “There’s now a charge for temporary checks.”
I was flabbergasted. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “There was never a charge for temporary checks.”
“Sorry, it’s a new policy,” she said, without the slightest note of apology in her voice.
That’s not the only new policy, either. I found to my dismay that if I temporarily overdraw my checking account, and Wells Fargo has to cover the overdraft with money from my money market account, they hit me with a fee for that. My previous bank, Wachovia, would do that little transaction for free.
Banks everywhere are tacking on more fees. Those ATM fees that were a minor inconvenience when banks started charging them a few years ago are rising steadily, till it’s now $3 and above for me to use an ATM machine that is not in my bank’s network.
At this rate I’m expecting the day when I’ll have to pay a fee just to walk into one of the bank’s branches. They’ll have a toll collector at the door, or maybe just a machine where you have to swipe a card to get in.
There were none of these fees when I worked in banking. In fact, when I was an assistant branch manager one of my jobs was to settle the checking accounts of old ladies who would come in all flustered because they bounced a check or two, and they’d dump a pile of bank statements on my desk and say, “Can you please help me, young man? I just don’t know how I got in this mess.” It would sometimes take me hours before I could sort out the problem, but we never charged a nickel for it. Imagine a bank doing that today.
We had customers back then who still had their first savings account book, and some of them dated back to the 1920s. They stayed loyal to us because we treated them with kindness, we remembered their names and took an interest in their lives, and we didn’t try to nickel and dime them with fees for every little transaction we performed for them.
I know the world has changed, but it hasn’t changed that much that people don’t care how you treat them when they do business with you. I’m sure Wells Fargo can give me lots of reasons why it’s essential for them to charge fees for things that banks used to do for free, and if the market will bear it then they’re welcome to do it.
But I’m also welcome to take my business elsewhere. I know I won’t find a bank anymore like that small town bank I used to work at, but maybe there’s one that will be just a little more concerned, a little more personal, and a little less prone to stick its hands in my wallet.

John McDonnell’s Smashwords Page

So we got Osama. I had almost forgotten about him; he had faded into irrelevance.

Almost.

When I drove to New York last summer and the skyline came into view across the river, there was that emptiness where the Twin Towers used to be. At times like that, or when the anniversary of 9/11 comes around each year, that’s when it all comes crashing back. I remember the pain, the horror, the desire for vengeance against this man who killed so many innocent people on that cloudless, brilliant day in September.

In the beginning I thought we’d get him fast. There was so much anger, so many people seemed willing to work around the clock to track him down, I thought they’d get him before Christmas. I expected he’d be shot dead in a firefight in some Afghan valley, probably running for his life from the soldiers bearing down on him.

It didn’t happen. Now, with the revelation that he was hiding out less than an hour’s drive from the capital of Pakistan, in a town where many retired Pakistani generals live, it seems likely that he got help from people in high places. I won’t be surprised if the computer files that were taken from his house have the names of high-ranking Pakistani officials on them. Somebody had to be protecting this man, whether because of ideology or payoffs, for him to avoid capture this long.

My religion tells me it’s not right to rejoice in the death of anyone, even someone as evil as Osama bin Laden, so I didn’t go out and celebrate when I heard the news. I was somber, thinking of all the families that were shattered by the deaths of loved ones on that September day. I thought of how our innocence was lost as a country, symbolized for me by the way my children acted when I picked them up from school that day. They ran out to the car and they kept looking up, afraid that a jet plane would fall out of the sky on them.

I thought of the people who have been working relentlessly for ten years to track down bin Laden and all of his cohorts, to bring a measure of justice to the victims of terror everywhere.

And I thought: Job well done. The mission is not finished, but still, job well done.

John McDonnell’s Smashwords Page

Parenting can be an exercise in trashing yourself. I’ve never done anything else in my life where I second-guess myself as much as parenting. From the time my children were babies I’ve always had a nagging voice in my head saying, “Maybe I should have done this or that differently.” It’s everything from, “Maybe I should have made sure they didn’t use a pacifier when they were babies,” to “Maybe I should have insisted they go to a different college.”

The “Maybe I should have” moments pile up with each year, till you could spend hours analyzing decisions you made when they were six years old and wondering if you screwed them up forever because of that. You lay awake at night and think, “Is he going to get diabetes some day because I let him eat all the chocolate candy he wanted when he was five years old?” Okay, I’m exaggerating — but not by much.

That’s why it’s such a pleasure when you have a moment when things go right, when you can bask in the glory of a decision well made. Last night my wife and I attended a voice recital at my daughter’s high school, and she sang a solo. She’s 16, and this is her fifth recital since she started at the school. She is a beautiful child, but shy. There’s nothing wrong with shyness — I was very shy as a child — but as a parent you want to see your children grow out of it and let their voice be heard as they enter adulthood. This daughter has always enjoyed singing, but she was afraid to get up and do it in front of an audience. When she went to the same high school as her older sister, we strongly suggested that she sign up for voice lessons, the same as her more extroverted older sister. She did what we asked, but when it came to recital time she was clearly nervous on stage, and her voice had no volume. “I don’t know how to relax and sing,” she told us after another performance where her voice sounded small and timid.

Well, last night it all changed. As we sat in amazement in the theater, she strode up to the microphone, sat down at a stool, and sang with power and spirit. Her solo was beautiful, moving, and loud — and it brought tears to our eyes. I tried to shoot a video with my camera, but I couldn’t focus because my eyes were wet and my hand was shaking too much.

I can’t take full credit for this, because one thing I’ve learned is that children can amaze you. You raise them from babies and you think you know everything about them, then they do something that you wouldn’t have predicted in a million years. I do take credit for putting her in a position to astound us with her voice. If my wife and I had not urged her to sign up for the voice program she may never have done it on her own.

So, I’m patting myself on the back. Anytime I can say, “I’m glad I did this,” rather than, “Maybe I should have,” it’s a good day.

John McDonnell’s Smashwords Page