Reading Outside the Crimes

We all have favorite sub-genres in crime fiction, but do you venture beyond them in your personal (ie. not research) reading? If so, what do you read that’s not necessarily your usual cup of tea, and why?

Happy Easter weekend, everyone. Brenda Chapman blogging today.

There was a time that all I read was crime fiction but over the years I’ve belonged to a number book clubs that have served to widen my horizons. The club that I’m in now has been meeting for the past three years and we’ve read a wide variety of novels, including:

The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

Little Fires Everywhere – Celest Ng
Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

Educated - Tara Westover

Becoming - Michelle Obama

Starlight - Richard Wagameese

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
Warlight - Michael Ondaatje
An American Marriage - Tayari Jones
Precious Cargo - Craig Davidson

It seems we've been choosing recently published novels, many of which are on the bestseller lists. I've enjoyed every read, some more than others, but every book has broadened my knowledge and given me more writing styles and story arcs to study. The books tend to be standalones and of the literary bent with a few biographies thrown in. Next month, we're discussing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, both of which I finished reading a few days ago. They're brilliant, cautionary tales with Atwood's trademark evocative writing.

With limited reading time, I've barely read any crime fiction in this same time period and must say that I'm ready to delve back into the genre, particularly during this stay-at-home time of social isolation.

The last crime fiction book that I read was Conviction by Denise Mina and I highly recommend it for its plot and originality and terrific writing. I've also managed to squeeze in some books by Adrian McGinty and Stuart McBride, both outstanding writers from the British Isles, and my Canadian friends Rick Mofina and Barbara Fradkin, whose work you should put on your reading lists.

Yesterday, I placed an order for five mysteries from my independent bookseller, which will be delivered to my door. Consider ordering books in this time of social isolation, not only for the enjoyment they'll provide but also to help keep the book industry, including booksellers, alive and flourishing. 

www.brendachapman.ca

Twitter: brendaAchapman

Facebook: BrendaChapmanAuthor

A Tip of the Fedora

The next book you write will be published, under whatever name you choose (yours, or a nom de plume). What will you write? Why?

by Paul D. Marks

The question is very prescient as the next book is already written and will be published on June 1st. It’s already available for pre-order (see end of this piece or click here). So, can I go for a walk with Buster now? No. I guess I better finish the post then. So, as to the why:

The Blues Don’t Care is a little different for me in that it’s set in Los Angeles during the 1940s in the heat of World War II. I’ve written things set in the past before—White Heat and Broken Windows (set in the 1990s) and even some stories set in the 1940s. There’s also a new unpublished but accounted for story set in the 60s. But Blues is my first full-length novel set in what for some might seem like ancient times—the war ended three quarters of a century ago.

But, of course, I wasn’t there, though playing army or war with the neighborhood kids I was there in spirit. And I guess I have a fascination for the era. I think that mostly comes from the music and movies from that time, as well as the general history. So maybe it’s not so far-fetched that I’d want to write a mystery-thriller set during that time.

And, as many people know I have a fascination with L.A. and its history. One of the aspects that fascinates me is the nightlife on Central Avenue, at that time, the heart of black life in L.A. It was a time when African-Americans weren’t allowed to stay in most hotels so black entertainers and dignitaries stayed at the Dunbar Hotel on Central. And next door to the Dunbar was the Club Alabam, the most famous of the many clubs on Central.

The Dunbar Hotel

In The Blues Don’t Care, one of young piano player Bobby Saxon’s greatest desires is to get a gig with the house band at the Alabam, but in order to do so he must first solve the murder one of the band members is accused of. If he gets the gig he’ll be the only white member in the band. And that’s just the beginning of his problems.

Duke Ellington

Let me tell you, doing the research for the music of that time was torture. Having to listen to the likes of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Having to watch old movies to get the flavor of the time. Torture. Pure torture. (For those who are humor-impaired, I’m joking here.) Not everything was great back then, that’s for sure. But there is that music and those movies.

I would want it published under my own name because my pen name Art Vandelay is in litigation with George Costanza through my lawyer Jackie Chiles. And Robert Galbraith was already taken.

So, put on your bobby sox, your fedora and your zoot suit and time travel back to the L.A. of the 1940s with Bobby Saxon, at least for a little while.

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Coming June 1st from Down & Out Books - The Blues Don't Care:

 “Paul D. Marks finds new gold in 40s’ L.A. noir while exploring prejudices in race, culture, and sexual identity. He is one helluva writer.”
                                                               —Michael Sears, author of the Jason Stafford series

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my website  www.PaulDMarks.com

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First plant your herb garden or window-box and wait a year . . . By Catriona

Craft: The next book you write will be published, under whatever name you choose (yours, or a nom de plume). What will you write? Why?

This question has shown my extreme good fortune to me like no other could - I already write the books I want to write.

Back in the dim past, I did write three picture books: one for my dad, about two plucky buckets who saved the farm where they live in the dairy; one in honour of my cat Spud, about his experiences with a bad injury (it had thrilling scenes in the vet's waiting room); and one . . . can't remember why, but it was about a little girl's moving to a new school.

It's an interesting challenge to write a story in thirty-two pages, with fewer than two-hundred words in total. It's fun to work out which bits to let the pictures tell and which bits need language. I was sorry to discover what an intensely tough world picture-book publishing is and have to let all three go.

Hey, if anyone's mad enough to be contemplating a new venture in the costly production of all-colour, large, sturdy books for the under-fives, rights for The Plucky Buckets, That Ginger Cat, and Call Me Annie are available . . .

But the only thing I'd love to write that I know I couldn't get published in a thousand year's is a cookery book. Why, I can claim the honour of having a recipe turned down by the MWA cookbook, don't you know? It couldn't have come with better crime credentials either, being the pie I made to say thank you to Val McDermid when she bent the rules a bit to let me on a panel at Harrogate. (She shared it with her neighbours and reported that I got a standing proposal of marriage from one of them.)

Everyone who watches the Great British Bake Off / Baking Show will immediately recognise this as a raised, hot-water-crust pie.These are typically filled with game or - as here - pork and they include savoury jelly round the meat. That was one of the problems for the MWA cookbook, I reckon. One of the ingredients was pigs' trotters. Also, you cook it over three days.

And maybe that's why my cookbook will remain a dream. (I even offered a recipe on Facebook only yesterday and there were no takers.)  I think I cook really easy food - yesterday's recipe was a prime example - but what makes food easy, for me, is "if you stick to the method it never goes wrong". What other people seem to think makes food easy is "it's quick and it doesn't make much mess".

I can see eyes glazing over when someone asks for the recipe of what they're eating and I start to tell them. It's like me when I ask directions and the person says "Go north for a hundred metres . . ."

Since my cookery book will never be published, I'm going to go right ahead and offer that one recipe right here.  You decide.

Butter (Lima? Fava? Lima, I think) Bean and Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

For the stock: some carrots, some celery, a large onion, some parsley with stalks, some garlic cloves, some peppercorns, two fresh bay leaves, a little olive oil.

For the soup: a lot of butter beans, eight big tomatoes, butter, two very large onions, salt and pepper.

Method:

Day 1. soak the butter beans in a big bowl of water.

Day 2. Scrub the carrots and celery and roughly chop lengthwise. Roughly chop the unpeeled onion (the peel adds colour). Heat the olive oil in a big pan. Add the unpeeled garlic cloves, carrots, celery, and onion and brown briefly. Add the parsley, pepper and bay leaves and cover with water. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer gently until the carrots are soft and the stock tastes rich when you add a few grains of salt to a spoonful. Discard the boiled vegetables.

Drain and rinse the butter beans. (You can use all this water in the garden, by the way.) Add the beans to the stock, bring to the boil, boil for ten minutes and then simmer until the beans are tender. This depends on how fresh your beans are and how long you soaked them. It could be forty minutes or it could be an hour.

Peel and thinly slice the two remaining onions and fry very gently in butter until soft but still pale. Meanwhile put the tomatoes in a large bowl and pour on boiling water. After a minute, start to fish them out one at a time, to cut in half and slip off the loosened skins. Then chop them, being careful to conserve all the juice.

When the beans are tender, add the buttery onions, the chopped tomatoes, and salt and pepper. Bring back to the boil, simmer for fifteen minutes, check the seasoning and serve. You can adjust the amount of stock to the weight of beans depending on how thick you like your soup. For me, if it's flat on top, I failed. (see pic.)

This will keep in the fridge for a week and freezes well too.

Easy! And unbelievably delicious, but it must be the dish I have most often started to tell people about only to have their eyes glaze over.  And what's worse: once someone "made" it, with tinned beans, tinned tomatoes, oil instead of butter, dried bay leaves and a stock cube and then said it was no good. I ask you! 

Grrrrr. My cookbook would be so bossy I'd make Nigella Lawson look like Gandhi. 

 

"Dream" writing... by Cathy Ace

Craft: The next book you write will be published, under whatever name you choose (yours, or a nom de plume). What will you write? Why?

Answering this question in times like this is proving to be good for me, because it’s allowing me to imagine an alternative reality…something I dare say quite a lot of people are doing at the moment.

Everything I’ve ever written has a LOT of me in it, but not all of me; there are bits of me that are missing. That’s for lots of reasons. I’m (possibly surprisingly, to some) a very private person; I know what I’m prepared to share, and what I’m not. Throughout my life I have compartmentalized, and I find that useful in retaining a sense of control, and sanity.

If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written you’ll probably know I am fascinated by history and the impact it has on the lives we lead today. But I’ve never written a historical novel. Why not? Dialogue is critically important to me and my storytelling, and I have never been convinced I would be able to “speak” through historical voices with any conviction that I’ve done it right, because I’d be working from secondary sources all the time and I am too much of a fiddle-faddle perfectionist to ever feel I’d done a good enough job. 

So the book I’d like to have published next (but, see below...) would be the one in my head that recounts how a particular religious sect came into being, has existed, survived, and secretly thrives even today in many countries...and why that matters. I have a title. I have the story, which begins in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, moves through the early days of Christianity in Europe, into the well-named Dark Ages, through the Renaissance, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and into modern times. I know the main characters who would tell this tale in their own voices, and from their own vantage points. I know why the tale needs to be told, and how it should be told. I even know the ending…but I fear I don’t have the years it would take me to write! Given that I really do have my plate full with planned books for the next few years – as well as something going on that I can’t tell you about at all at the moment (I promise I shall, when I can!) I just cannot see me getting to it. Not even given the fact that I am not making a lot of the trips I was due to make this year. 

I think I would ask for it to be published under my own name because – well, why not? And the title? “SOFIA” (see above, for various versions of this name). I know, that doesn’t really tell you much, does it? But the book? Oh, it would be fun to write it – if only I could convince myself about that historically accurate dialogue problem! 

If - given I'm unlikely to get to write the book I've just described - you'd like to try something I have written already, please CLICK HERE.

And, if you're all up to date with these books, maybe you'd like to consider pre-ordering the 9th Cait Morgan Mystery NOW! It will be published on 29th June this year, and you can find out more by clicking HERE.

Out of the Cupboard and Onto the Burner

The next book you write will be published, under whatever name you choose (yours, or a nom de plume). What will you write? Why?

-From Frank

What a great question. Such a great question deserves two answers, don't you think?

I say that because there really are two answers. Two in the cupboard projects that are forcing their way to the counter and the back burner, with an eye on that desired front burner.

The first is a fantasy novel. I grew up reading fantasy. I've always wanted to delve into that genre, and I'm slowly inching toward that goal. I've written a short story that was published in an anthology last year, and that story is essential chapter one of the first part/book of this fantasy novel. I've even commissioned some art work from the talented Zach McCain, who drew the five major characters for me (you can see the rest of his work and learn a little more here (though it is fairly bare bones at the moment). 

The project I want to share with you, though, is something entirely different - a family saga. 

The idea formed in 2013 when my wife and I went on a month-long trip to Italy with my parents. My family on the paternal side hails from there, thanks to my great-grandfather, Saverio. I learned a lot about him during that time, as my dad shared stories of his crazy journey from Calabria to America. I started thinking about how his adventure would only require a little adaptation to make for compelling fiction. 

I mean, the guy left a wife and kids in Italy to go to South America to make enough money to bring his family to America (not the typical way to do it). He fought in barely legal bare knuckle bouts to earn extra cash. Tragically, his wife and their children died of disease while he was away. He returned home, eventually marrying his wife's sister and starting a second family. This time, when he left them, he was able to earn enough to bring them to this country, and that is how my family's story in America began. He became a grocer in Richmond, California, eventually owning his own store.

What I also learned was that his son (my grandfather) not only hated working at the store, but also wasn't too keen on embracing his Italian heritage. Like a lot of first generation immigrants during that time period, he aggressively assimilated to American culture. My dad said this caused some friction between the two.

Friction between fathers and sons? What a rare thing, huh? It's not like Bruce Springsteen ever wrote a dozen songs about this or anything...

Over the course of that month in Italy, the idea of a fictional, generational family saga coalesced in my mind. One that starts with a character very loosely based on my great-grandfather, with the rest of the characters wholly fictional. The story would be about the different journeys each generation took, but the focus would be on father-son relationships (although lately, I've been thinking the most recent generation's representative should be a daughter, for a variety of reasons). All of this happens against the backdrop of social and generational changes during the time period. Sound nebulous? Well, imagine this:

• an early-20th century Italian immigrant shopkeeper...
• followed by a first generation son who experiences the Great Depression and serves in WWII... 
• followed by a son who comes of age in the Vietnam era (and who either refuses to serve or becomes opposed to the war after serving)...
• followed by a son/daughter in the 90s-ish who goes into law enforcement... 
• followed at last by someone at the end of the book who's nature and path not yet defined.

In addition to the normal points of conflict that exist between fathers and sons, many of these historical events both shape these characters and their separate reactions create another nexus for additional conflict between them. However, as my father took great pains to point out to me as we discussed this book in Italia, even when a parent and child are estranged, there is still a bond and a love there.

In terms of format, the story will be told in one volume, but divided into four novellas (as well as a short prologue and epilogue featuring that fifth generation child). Each novella has a single character's point-of-view (third person) for that time period, before moving onto the next generation in the following novella. Thus, the reader will see the main characters first from their own perspective, and then from that of their child and/or grandchild.

Because this is more mainstream and not crime fiction (although I won't be able to resist having crime elements in some of the events within...), and because it is an homage to my own family's history, I'll write it under my real name, Frank Scalise (yes, if you're unaware, Frank Zafiro is actually my pen name for crime fiction!). It's not the first thing I've written under my own name.

The folder and notes for this project all bear the working title For Honor, Four Sons, which is more description than title. While honor is a theme - how each character/generation defines it and tries to abide by it - this won't do as an actual eventual title. So if the coolest title in the world occurs to you, let me know. I'll put you in the acknowledgements and name a (good) character after you!

Where's this book now? Well, the fantasy project I mentioned has wormed its way out onto the counter or maybe even to a back burner that is warming up. This one, alas, still sits in the cupboard, where I occasionally look at it longingly. Part of that is due to another element to this book that differs from a lot of what I write - this one will require far more research in terms of historical content. I look forward to that process (I was a history major, after all), but it is a time commitment, too. That means I'll need to really shift gears and lean into this one when the time comes. For that reason, I do have a feeling that it is one of those projects that when it gets pulled out, will go straight to the front burner.

And then this family saga will be the title I am blatantly self-promoting to you....

******************************

Did Someone Say Blatant Self-Promotion? 

Oh, that was me. 

Well, guess what? 

My latest book is In the Cut, the second in my SpoCompton series, from Down and Out Books. You can read about it if you click the link.

Thoughts of a Sometimes Gloomy Writer in Isolation

Q: The next book you write will be published, under whatever name you choose (yours, or a nom de plume). What will you write? Why?

- from Susan

After talking about and around it for almost two years, I’m deep into a novel that I hope to send to my agent for her feedback in a month. I don’t want to say much about it, in part because I talked about it too much early on. Describing it verbally to enthusiastic colleagues was so much easier than sitting at the computer and actually doing the work. If I’m lucky enough to have my agent’s enthusiastic support, and if she sells it, then we’ll see if it comes out under my name or if, since it’s not in my regular genre, an editor demands a nom de plume. I’ve never had one – it would be kind of exciting. 

Victoria de la Rose? Rebecca Sunshine? Helena Darling? No, they all sound like romance writers or strippers.

S.C. Roberts? J.N. Anderson? P.Q. O’Ryan? No, a rather worn way to disguise it was written by a – gasp – woman.

I’d probably waste so much time trying to come up with a pen name that I could have written a sequel by then. 

[A couple of (supposedly) public domain illustrations of, oh, I don’t know, something vaguely exotic to suggest romance? I started a search for stripper images, but OMG.]

I am tempted to write another Dani O’Rourke because I know and like her and have been wondering what she, her colleagues in the museum world, her ex-husband, and current (if he still is) boyfriend are up to.  Or to visit Katherine and Michael in Burgundy. After all, he was beginning an American tour as the opening act for a huge rock band that he used to be part of (ouch) and she’s still wandering amiably around Reigny, sniffing for trouble and freshly based pain chocolat. Since I was in the neighborhood only a few months ago, taking pictures and storing up details, I could close my eyes and be there easily. But – and what a big “but” this is – I have no contracts for either of these series, quel dommage. 

Lots to think about during this time of self-isolation, some of it energizing, some less so. 

Who knows if the annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference will happen at the end of July? But if it does, I hope I’ll be refreshed by working with authors and with would-be authors building their post-pandemic successes, and maybe have something positive to say about my own next book(s). Until then, stay safe, stay healthy, and stay home!

Stuck

By Abir

These are extraordinary times. How has the business of being an author changed, for you, in this new reality? 

Welcome to Friday.

Another week in this new reality draws to a close, not that there seems to be much of difference between a weekday and the weekend anymore. I hope you’re all hunkered down, safe and sound, looking after your loved ones and have a plentiful supply of life’s essentials: tea, toilet paper and a shed load of good books to read.

So this week’s question: How has the business of being an author changed in this brave new world?

I suppose the first thing to say is that my productivity has plummeted. It’s not just declined, it’s fallen through the floor and heading for the subway. I’m not the only author who seems to have been affected in this way, but that’s cold comfort. 

Too often I find myself staring at a blank screen for what feels like hours. When the words come, they come as a trickle and they’re bad…really bad. Like grade school bad. I can feel my characters staring up at me and saying, ‘What the hell, mate? What sort of words are these? You know we talk more goodly than this, right?’

I mouth them an apology and blame it on the fact that since the schools closed and the kids have been at home, my routine has gone out of the window. But the truth is deeper than that. I haven’t been able to focus for almost a month now. 

I’m trying to write two books at the moment: the fifth book in the Wyndham and Banerjee series, and my first non-India set book: one which is based mainly in present-day USA. Unfortunately both are floundering at the moment.

I was intrigued to read yesterday that Jim is writing a book set in India – I can’t wait to read it! 

Each morning I get up and tell myself, ‘Today I will break the impasse. Today the words will start flowing,’ and then I’ll spend the best part of the morning arsing around doing admin and e mails and all the other stuff rather than concentrating on the writing. Things have gotten so bad that I’ve even made a start on my taxes rather than write words.

I’m counting my blessings, though. The family are all safe and well. Even my stubborn old mum who’s in her seventies but acts like she’s twenty-five, has taken heed of the advice I and my sister have shouted at her and has been self-isolating. And as an author, used to having months with little cash coming in, I’m aware at just how lucky I am that my livelihood, so far, hasn’t been damaged to any great degree. 

What has been hit are the events and book festivals I was scheduled to attend. These are being cancelled across the world. In one fortnight alone, I was supposed to be in Belfast, Glasgow and Lyon in France, and missing these hurts, as meeting people at events are my favourite, but what hurts most is the cancellation of the Edgars in New York. I love my trips to the US, and I was hoping to tack on a week or two for research. That plan has now gone out of the window. 

Throughout the summer, I was scheduled to attend festivals from the north of Scotland to India. All have been cancelled, and while there’s a revenue hit – in the UK authors are generally paid to appear at festivals - that’s minimal inconvenience compared to the what the hard working organisers go through.

In terms of book launches, I’ve been quite fortunate. I had fa ew launches of my books scheduled in different countries during this period, but most have been pushed back. To be honest my biggest concern is Italy – not for my books, but for my wonderful publishers there who have always treated me like family. They are fantastic people and I worry for them. For the moment they are all well, but it’s been difficult.

The final part of the picture, I suppose, is book sales. I receive my UK sales figures on a weekly basis, and after the first week of lock down I saw a 30% rise (albeit from a low base!) in sales across all formats and books. This seems to be in keeping with the market as a whole, which saw a 30% to 35% rise that week. But then last week the bookshops closed and Amazon have stopped shipping physical books, so who knows what this week’s sales will look like.

So that’s it. My writing life has slowed and feels like plodding through treacle. I fill the time by doing taxes, pretending to teach the kids, shouting at my mum to stay indoors and, in turn am being shouted at by my wife, who thinks that if I so much as look outside, I’m going to catch Covid-19. I keep telling her I’m invincible but she doesn’t listen. But as long as that’s the sum of my worries, it really isn’t so bad.

Take care, folks. Look after yourselves and your families and hopefully we’ll get through this soon.

Abir

I Wrote a Book about a Quarantine in an Italian Villa and I Don’t Know How to Promote It from James W. Ziskin

These are extraordinary times. How has the business of being an author changed, for you, in this new reality?

From Jim

There’s a remarkable irony, or coincidence, in this time of social distancing and self-isolation. To wit, I wrote a book about a quarantine that came out the day after the first U.S. case of Coronavirus was diagnosed. More on that in a bit. First, here’s what I’ve been doing under quarantine.

I don’t spend as much time in the car, running errands. I drink more than usual, which makes me feel like a true writer. My wife and I are cooking more often, trying new dishes, and treating this isolation as a gift of time to spend together, even if we’re both doing our different work.

Funny, though. Writing is no easier. Despite the luxury of time, it’s still a slog. Most days, at least. I’ve written a short story, “The Twenty-Five-Year Engagement,” that will appear in an anthology this fall. I wrestled with some far-out ideas (Caveman Detective, for one); there were no limitations on what kind of story we could write. But, in the end, I decided to take a stab at a traditional Holmesian story with Watson narrating. The challenges were many. The voice had to be right, which presented vocabulary and grammatical difficulties. I had a couple of tricks up my sleeve to be sure the words and phrases I used were in currency in 1883 London. First, a concordance of the complete works of A. Conan Doyle. If the word I was looking for could be found there, obviously it was okay for my story. Another great resource is Google’s Ngram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams. It’s not foolproof, but it saved me from several terms that I’d assumed were fine to use but were not. Some were Americanisms not used in England at that time. Others were simply more modern. The experience was an entertaining one. I hope you’ll order the book.

In League with Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon (December 1, 2020) edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

Click to buy

I’ve also begun working on a new novel. Taking a short break from my Ellie Stone series. Tentatively titled ARTICLE 352, it’s set in India during the eighteen-month Emergency. From June 1975 to January 1977, Indira Gandhi ruled by decree, suspended many civil liberties, censored the press, and jailed her political opponents. (ARTICLE 352 refers to the provision in the Indian Constitution that grants the president the power to declare a national emergency.) And though I have plenty of time to work on this book these days, the research is a bear. I hope to get back to India later this year to do essential on-site digging.

NOW, ABOUT MY QUARANTINE BOOK
By far the biggest change in the business of being an author is the ability to promote. As I mentioned above, my latest Ellie Stone mystery, TURN TO STONE, came out January 21, 2020, exactly one day after the first Covid-19 case in the U.S. was diagnosed. I was able to schedule only two signings before it became clear that this was a crisis and public gatherings were canceled. So, along with so many other writers—all writers, really—I’m faced with the prospect of promoting a book without leaving the house. And I confess that I have not figured it out yet. And do I really need to point out that TURN TO STONE is a book that’s actually about a quarantine in an Italian villa in 1963?

Click to buy

I considered posting some videos or photos of me preparing some of the delicious Tuscan dishes that appear in my book, but there’s a problem. A lot—most—of the recipes call for ingredients not easily found here. Rigatoni al sugo di capriolo, for example, calls for roebuck. But it’s a challenge to find venison these days. Veal shanks, too, are not always available and, given the current pandemic, I’m feeling less than inspired to traipse around town to hunt them down.

DISTANCE READING
Another idea that some authors—our own Catriona McPherson included—have done is to read chapters from their books on Facebook. I’d love to try that, but there is the snag of my narrator’s being a twenty-seven-year-old woman... Still, I might just do it and shock/bemuse the world.

Here’s the shocked/bemused world reacting to my reading Ellie Stone:

(Photo removed)

AND SPEAKING OF DISTANCE READING
Last year, I wrote a story for LOW DOWN DIRTY VOTE Vol. 1, an anthology aimed at preventing voter suppression. Recently, David Hagerty, one of the talented authors featured in the collection, suggested we read our stories one by one on Facebook. Lucky for me, Mysti Berry generously offered to read my story, “Who Is Stuart Bridge,” which again has a first-person female narrator. Here’s the schedule. If you miss it, we’ll be posting the recordings on Facebook once the live readings are complete. The FB links are in blue.

Sunday April 5 - David Hagerty reading "Chicago Style"
Monday April 6 - Catriona McPherson "Twelve, Angry"
Tuesday April 7 - Travis Richardson "Another Statistic"
Wednesday April 8 Mysti (Berry Content) reading for James Ziskin's "Who Is Stuart Bridge?"
Thursday April 9 Dale Berry (Berry Content) reading for Camille Minichino's "Civic Duty"
Friday April 10 Ann Parker "A Clean Sweep"
Saturday April 11 Kris E Calvin "Operation Fair Vote"

Click to buy

So that’s what’s different today for me. I wish you all a safe quarantine. Read some books, write more, or just listen to some great authors tell their stories. And I would welcome any and all suggestions on how to promote this book at this time. Mille grazie! 

Up around the bend

The world, and the way we live in it, has changed. These are extraordinary times. How has the business of being an author changed, for you, in this new reality?

by Dietrich

These are extraordinary times, and the world keeps revolving and evolving and many of the events going on around us keep us on the edge of our seats. And in order for me to get any decent writing done, I sometimes feel I need to extract myself from what’s going on in the real world, tune it all out, sit at my desk and get my head into the imaginary world that my characters live in.

As far as the publishing industry goes, in the years that I’ve been an author a lot has happened. Digital print-on-demand has become a great option to traditional offset printing. And we’ve bounced from print books to books-on-tape, to ebooks on disc to ebooks online, and back to print again. And audiobooks have come along, and they continue to be a growing segment of the industry. And self-publishing has evolved and continues to offer another avenue for authors as well as for readers. Platforms like Smashwords and CreateSpace allow indie authors to upload and market their work. 

While there has been a recent decline for the big-box book stores, it seems that many indie bookstores are starting to pick up and thrive once more. And Amazon’s book sales just keep jumping and showing stronger numbers every year. Social media, blogs and podcasts have become popular ways for published authors as well as those who are self-published to get noticed and promote their work online. And more literary festivals, conventions and special events keep popping up. 

Whatever the format, print books, ebooks, audiobooks, traditionally published or self-published, the good news is people continue to read, and they’re not just looking for the latest books, they’re also interested in backlists too.

And there are great blog sites like this one where an author can join in with other authors and be heard, and if they’re crafty, they can sneak in a little self-promotion. For example:

Cradle of the Deep 

Getting into bed with the wrong guy can get you killed.

Wanting to free herself from her boyfriend, aging gangster ‘Maddog’ Palmieri, Bobbi Ricci concocts a misguided plan with Denny, Maddog’s ex-driver, a guy who’s bent on getting even with the gangster for the humiliating way in which he was sacked.

Helping themselves to the gangster’s secret money stash, along with his Cadillac, Bobbi and Denny slip out of town, expecting to lay low for a while before enjoying the spoils.

Realizing he’s been betrayed, an enraged Maddog calls in stone-cold killer Lee Trane. As Trane picks up their trail, plans quickly change for Bobbi and Denny, who now find themselves on a wild chase of misadventure through northern British Columbia and into Alaska.

Time is running out for them once they find out that Trane’s been sent to do away with them, or worse, bring them back – either way, Maddog will make them pay.

It comes out November 3rd, and can be preordered from my publisher ECW Press here.