Early Writing: Six Bullets to Kill by Fred L. Taulbee Jr.

A free story. "Six Bullets to Kill."

One of my first publications and in a mag called Innisfree, a now defunct small press mag. 1993 was a great year with this publication and "The Last Tree" in Child Life Magazine. You can actually buy a copy of the latter online in places for about $4.95, but I don't receive any royalties for it, since I sold all rights to it, which is the way it is sometimes when you start publishing.

"Six Bullets to Kill" is an HTD story. HTD stands for Harry T. Dent, a character I created in college, but haven't done enough with yet. He makes a brief appearance in the novel House of the Matriarch, and he's a major character in XXXXX XX XXXXXX (not giving that title yet), which is in screenplay format and will be the next novel I write. He also stars in about six solid stories I need to work on and a good ten more ideas for stories.

However, I want to write the stories in order and together--the first person detective voice is important and takes some concentration. I might work on these short stories this summer along with the other novel. These stories are screaming to be written, as Bukowski says, "poems like gunslingers."

What I want is something like what Edward D. Hoch did. He had several mystery series which were short story series, not novels. But, Harry will be in novels too. The last time I saw the number of short stories Hoch (pronounced Hoke) had written it was around ... eight hundred. That's 8-zero-zero. That's all. Not intimidating to beginning writers at all.

I'm kind of glad I waited so long to write the HTD' stories because they deserve justice, and I'm a better writer now. He and House of the Matriarch are part of a larger mythos or world I would like to finally get down on paper. The HTD stories are mystery/horror stories. The first one will be called "Busy Little Death Factory."

Incidentally, I saved these from PDF files but had to do each page separately to save them as jpegs. Not really sure how to do that any easier. If someone knows please let me know. Thanks for reading.