Publishers Marketplace: Carolyn Burns Bass


	Still Life With Lovers, a short story by Carolyn Burns Bass. Direct download available from B&N and Amazon.

This writer is looking for an agent.

Indie Author Showcase in #LitChat: February 27-March 2

Twice a year #LitChat features authors who have taken their career into their own hands by publishing outside of traditional means. Digital and print on demand publishing is making it easier for authors to cut out the middleman—in this case, publishers, distributors, and bookstores—and going straight to the reading public with their work. This week we have Marjoire Gibson McCarthy, Jenny Gardiner and Dawn DeAnna Wilson joining us to share the reasons why they chose the route of self-publishing.

For more info about #LitChat, visit www.litchat.net.

Direct from MetroFiction, my short story, "Something's Different About Sheila," an excerpt from my yet-to-be-published novel, THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER.

My short story, "Still Life With Lovers," is now available as a direct download from Amazon and B&N.

"A century-old diary of a young woman’s frustrated marriage and infatuation with a wild painter named Vincent Van Gogh, gives a contemporary Parisian woman new insights into her own marriage in this short story by Carolyn Burns Bass."

Excerpt from THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER

October 1976

Lowenbrau light and dark flows from kegs iced on the patio of a grand house poised on a the edge of California. Wall to wall bodies vie for space on the deck, trailing down the steps to the beach, and onto the sand lit up by flood lights. Open parties like this draw an eclectic mix of people, undergrads from UCI trying to fit in with the locals, locals whose life in Laguna is an endless round of parties when not serving or cooking at one of the area restaurants, working construction, or trying to eek out a living in art.

Hotel California, the new album by the Eagles blares over the crowd while Tommie and I make our way inside. We spot a couple of friends and slip into a Maui Wowie circle. Within a couple of hits we are higher than the big waves on the North Shore. A tall, dark-haired guy across the room catches my eye and smiles. It takes me a few minutes to place his face, or at least the face of which he reminds me. Uncle Turk, the fire-eater from the Pike; my Dad’s best friend and the one who introduced him to the world of freaks.

Tommie elbows me and nods at the guy. “What a looker. A little too dark for me, but I bet he’d get your mind off Leroy in a heartbeat. Go for it.”

The looker across the room is the exact opposite of Leroy. Dark skinned, a black beard trimmed into a point below the hooked nose of an exotic. I wonder if he speaks with an accent.

While I pretend to listen to one of Tommie’s friends rattle on about his new short board, I extend my cannabis-quickened hearing toward The Turk. A French accent sweeps from his mouth, ensnaring me like a sexy saxophone riff. Drifting into the sound of his voice, I have no idea what he says. For all I know he could be saying, “The moon is a china plate from the Palace at Versailles,” and I would nod in agreement. When he looks my way, I put my eyes into a smile. A few moments later he is standing beside me. From his breast pocket he pulls out a tight little joint twisted blunt at both ends.

“May I interest you ladies in a French Connection?” He strokes the joint between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, gazing at me with dark bedroom eyes. The next day Tommie would swear he had been staring at her.

QUERY

Sheila Pace is a nowhere girl. The daughter of a sword swallower and a frustrated chanteuse, Sheila hides in the pain of her past after witnessing the death of her four-year-old sister the same night she was raped by her sister’s killer. Narrated by Sheila as a child and later as an adult in layered time lines spanning 1968 to 1993, THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER is a hard-love story between father and daughter, where love survives all.

Life is a carnival of confusion when your father is a sword swallower and your mother is a closet chanteuse. Layered between tragic events that shape Sheila Pace when she is nine years old and the adult years that follow, THE SWORD SWALLOWER’S DAUGHTER is an up-market story about becoming who you're meant to be in spite of the life you're given, and loving people beyond their fears, faults, or fetishes.

When Sheila Pace sees a man resembling her dead father swallowing swords at Venice Beach, her life takes on a bizarre twist that follows throughout her adult life. Beginning in the summer of 1976, when Sheila’s longtime boyfriend breaks up only weeks before college, Sheila storms into the Orange County party world, where drugs, dancing and promiscuity mask a sexual attack she endured as a child the night her younger sister, Candy, was violently killed. Despite her feral lifestyle, Sheila manages to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in English Literature, but slips into career obscurity while waiting tables at a Laguna Beach bar and grill. Layered within Sheila’s adult story are excerpts from the memoir she is writing about a year of murder, divorce, racism and devotion to her unconventional father, “Ripovi the Great,” a sword swallower at the legendary Long Beach Pike. A litany of broken relationships, the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, and a little-known genetic disease called Huntington’s, shape Sheila into a woman who transcends the reproach of being the sword swallower’s daughter.

THE SWORD SWALLOWER’S DAUGHTER is framed in layers between Sheila’s first person present adult life progressing from 1976 to 1993 with her past tense memoir set in 1968.

In addition to writing fiction, I am the founder and moderator of Twitter’s popular #litchat #LitChat. I have also published short fiction in several small journals and am a travel writer with numerous print and online credits.

If you’re interested in THE SWORD SWALLOWER’S DAUGHTER, please contact me at the email above and I’ll send a manuscript immediately.