Guest Blogger: Ed Lynskey, author of SMOKING ON MOUNT RUSHMORE

http://www.amazon.com/Smoking-on-Mount-Rushmore-ebook/dp/B00AY2VW1A/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1357863809&sr=1-1&keywords=smoking+on+mount+rushmore

Ed Lynskey is a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, essays, and critical reviews. Most of his fiction has been in the crime genre, although he's also dabbled in science fiction and speculative fiction. His most recent work is a collection of short stories entitled Smoking On Mount Rushmore. Here's Ed to tell you more about it:

For more than a decade, I worked primarily writing in the short fiction form. It was fun as well as educational for me.

Scores of e-zines published my short stories. Since then, many of them have disappeared from cyberspace along with my stories in them. I also appeared in the print venues, which gradually have also cut way back due the ease and cheapness of electronic publishing.

Back in the autumn, while my wife and I were shopping at Safeway on the produce aisle by the bananas kiosk, it occurred to me why not select the best of my short stories, brush them up, and publish them as an eBook? The more I thought about, the better I liked the idea.

That’s how Smoking on Mount Rushmore came to be.

Actually, the original title was taken from a short story titled “Striptease on Mount Rushmore” that I’d published in anthology. But my second thoughts figured such a title would match it to the erotica and porn listings by Google and other search engines. I’ve been told there’s good money to be made in those industries, but my short stories don’t really have much, if anything, to do with them.

So, I retitled my short story collection as Smoking which can be taken to have several meanings. I like it better.

Smoking on Mount Rushmore contains 16 stories I culled out from the bunch, making it almost a novel-length collection. I didn’t include any speculative fiction. Those stories will go in their own collection if I can ever get around to assembling it. The stories in Smoking on Mount Rushmore vary in tone from softboiled to hardboiled, so there’s something for everybody to read and enjoy.

My first novels to appear were the P.I. Frank Johnson books. I’d written dozens of short stories featuring him as the hardboiled protagonist. Some of those stories are gathered in a collection titled Out of Town a Few Days. His seventh novel, After the Big Noise, should appear sometime next year. I currently don’t have any immediate plans or any outlines to use and go on any further with the series. Don’t get me wrong. Frank and I are still on good terms, and we still like each other. So, as the old cliché goes, never say never. I hope we can get together again for more adventures.