The Executioner's Store

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The Executioner's Store

By Mark Gelbart
Jun. 18, 2007

Alfred Hitchcock movies fascinate me. A few years will pass, and I'll think five viewings of Spellbound are enough, yet my channel surfing stops on Turner Classic. The interaction between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman hypnotizes me, I'm feeling suspense even though I well remember the climax--the close up of the gun turning on its own user. My favorite Hitchcock movie is Vertigo which features an even more dreamlike relationship, this time between Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. A strength of Hitchcock movies is the unexpected plot twist. The weak victim survives the assassin sent by her husband and goes to prison in Dial M for Murder. The real killer is shockingly unveiled in the end of Psycho. I had Alfred Hitchcock in mind when I wrote "The Executioner's Store."

I originally sent this story to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine but was afraid the subject matter which includes bondage, a crooked politician, the death penalty, and revenge was too racy and too political. They did reject it though someone wrote a date on my cover letter indicating they held it for ten months. I studied the 2007 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market and found the choice of likely alternatives pretty slim. I submitted it to amazon shorts and they accepted it.

Amazon shorts offers a terrible contract for writers. I'd already considered and rejected submitting a story to them before, but I felt like there was no other option. Amazon shorts sells the stories for fourty-nine cents and the writer gets twenty cents for each sale. Here's the rub: Amazon doesn't pay until ten dollars worth of sales have accumulated. Let's say my story sells fourty-nine times. Amazon gets about twenty-five dollars and I get nothing. Amazon shorts does nothing to promote the story, plus it's hard to link to. When I tried promoting the story on message boards I couldn't even set up a direct link and was forced to write: go to amazon.com, type in amazon shorts, and type in Mark Gelbart.

As far as I know, I haven't sold one which is unfortunate because I think it's a good story with several unexpected plot twists like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Furthermore, It's an original idea. Other suspense stories I've written are usually based on a pre-existing structure. There's no shame in this--Stephen King rips off "Flowers from Algernon" and it's made into a TNT movie, so I don't feel dishonest when I steal the structure from Joe Landsdale's "Incident off and on a Mountain Road" or write my version of Brian DePalma's "Dressed to Kill." It's hard to create a completely original concept and I kind of regret giving up mine so cheaply.

I've spent the last year writing short stories while unsuccessfully trying to find an agent for my second novel--Lord Madoc. The paying short fiction market is dead; people would rather watch television or play on the computer. The market for new novel writers isn't particularly good but at least there is one. I wrote approximately twenty short stories during the aforementioned time span, and I'll continue to submit them, mostly to non-paying magazines in the hopes of getting a publishing credit that'll impress some reputable agent somewhere. I think it's time I started writing a novel again--this time with the market in mind. I'll write noir because I love those old black and white film noirs from the fifties. I'll study James Cain, author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Rings Twice. Then maybe I'll come up with a completely original idea and avoid the cheap sell out.

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About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser.

http://www.authorsden.com/marksgelbart

Email: agelbart@aol.com

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