Howdy!

I’m looking for new recommendations. I just had a blast reading Jeff Strand’s Cemetery Closing (Everything Must Go), his latest Andrew Mayhem book, then dove into Lawrence Block’s Dead Girl Blues. The latter of which gave me interesting dreams.

I remember, roughly 20 years ago, reading a bunch of Jeff Strand’s books for free. Maybe he was published by Tor? Or Baen? I think both of those publishers were offering free ebooks at one time or another. The idea was to discover what that did to print sales. It increased them…the lesson from that was probably something along the lines of obscurity being worse than piracy. Obviously context-dependent. Anyway, I had Strand’s books in a .lit format that probably doesn’t exist anymore on a PDA running Windows CE. And I’d never heard of him. So, 20 years later, here I am loving his stuff. Buying it whenever something new comes out. I guess it worked.

Some of Strand’s stories are a bit more involved. A bit more bizarre. And with, you know, believable characters. That’s not what he does with Andrew Mayhem. This latest had pirates, cannibals, macabre death, and tons of humor: par for the course. As I said, I had a blast. (Strand often plays with a mix of horror and humor…sometimes supernatural stuff, sometimes not, but generally I love it.)

Then, the same day (yesterday) I finally started Lawrence Block’s latest. Oh boy. I want to say a lot about it…but what I really want is to converse about it. It is, in a word, dark. No fantasy/supernatural stuff here, as that’s not what LB does.

Okay, two things I guess I can say without worrying about spoilers, but if you’re not interested in occasionally reading really, really dark stuff maybe you should just skip this paragraph: (1) It reminded me, as far as “feel”/mood, of Donald Westlake’s The Ax, which was a very good book I may never reread, and (2) LB himself dropped this into his newsletter prior to publication…um…in the first chapter, the protagonist rapes and kills an innocent woman. And not in that order.

Hey. I said it was dark.

Anyway, the book is hard to talk about. I guess it’s safe to say it explores the limits of forgiveness and redemption. And left me thinking about just how much more disturbing a sociopath can be, once it becomes clear that he/she/they/it can actually love others. Some others. Clearly a limited offer there.

Still. LB wrote it. I’ll read anything he writes. And it was fun. In its own thoroughly disturbing way.

On the writing front, I’m making some progress. Lots of things have come up and redirected me in the last couple of weeks. Normal, I guess. More of that today, and tomorrow too (going to the river with the kids!). But, still, some progress. Trying some new stuff. More about all that later on.

I’m serious about looking for new authors/books to try out. I tend to read everything by anyone who can hold my interest–something that’s apparently more difficult as I’ve aged. I like to think it means I’m more discerning, but whom do I kid here? My capacity for paying attention has fractured into pretty focus-shards, good for a moment’s diversion but possibly not making me a good candidate for directing traffic. Especially not airplanes.

Ooh! I could write a story about airplanes….

Well, you see what I mean. Let me know if you have any ideas/books/authors to pass along?

And have fun out there!

Hey y’all!

I played around with the website design yesterday. Most of you get these posts via either RSS or email, but if you want to see a pic of me smoking a cigar and looking ridiculous from last Thanksgiving? You can. It’d be more fun to have included more of the pic–there was this glass of whiskey next to me, my brother in law on the left, a gayish-half-transgendered teen couple on the right, and I think it’d be amusing. But I guess I shouldn’t use the rest of that image without asking permission. So I haven’t. Yet.

Actually I should probably mess with a little bit of code so that image only shows up on the home page anyway. It kind of gets in the way. And there are other changes to the site, including a larger font. What the hell, it was time for something different.

Okay…I’m trying to blog lots more often. I’d love to post more book reviews, and I could do that pretty much forever, just talking about my favorites from the last 40+ years of intensive reading. But it’d be more fun to semi-specialize in indie-published books.

I don’t plan to publish the reviews anywhere but my blog. I don’t mind if other people quote them or distribute them in any way. But I don’t want to deal with things like ever-shifting Amazon review policies. That said? You could still post excerpts, at least, under “editorial reviews” on Amazon if you want to.

As for what sort of books? I have to tell you, I read all sorts of things. Probably not cookbooks. But fiction, especially if it’s somewhere in the SF-fantasy-crime-mystery-thriller spectrum that I typically read, is a possibility. So is narrative nonfiction. Bonus points for puns.

I have no idea whether this will be helpful to anybody. I don’t know how often I’ll post the reviews. Probably at least one a week? So there might be a bit of a backlog, too.

You got that part, right? No promises? FWIW, I see no point in posting a review of a book I don’t love. If I hate a book, or worse (don’t ask!), I figure lots of people out there can legitimately disagree with me. I’m not interested in trying to police other people’s reading in any way. I am interested in trying to share wonderful books with wonderful people (if you read my posts, that makes you wonderful–congrats!).

So. New-fiction word-count for today: 1485, net. There were more new words, split between Projects I and II, but I decided Project I was going in a dumb direction. So I dropped back and started over.

It’s a nice day outside. I think I’ll go sit in the sunshine and drink coffee. Hope you’re having fun out there…

UPDATE: Just occurred to me that guest posts might be fun too. If they have something to do with indie publishing, and I like ’em, I might post ’em. No guarantees of anything there either.

Just so you know, this post is fairly ridiculous. I’m reviewing a book that was published in 1984. It is now quite thoroughly out of print. Quaint, yes? And as far as I know, there is no (official) ebook version. But this novel affected me strongly when I read it way back when…so much so that I’ve never read the sequel. I’m saving it, you know? For the end times, or something.

Which…well, it’s a post-apocalyptic YA SF sort of book, so that might happen. Right?

This one, like Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, has just stuck with me. I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating a plucky, brave, smart, but vulnerable hero-child for quite a while. Which is where I’m going with Destiny’s Dance, by the way. It’s expanding…to at least a novel. Maybe a trilogy.

So, what happens in Emergence? Lots. This novel predates the USSR breakup, which might make it a bit difficult for younger readers. But anyway, most people die. Candidia Smith-Foster and her parrot Terry don’t. For reasons that (I swear!) seem believable, they happen to be in a bomb shelter as hostilities break out. Missiles fly. Stuff happens.

At least they don’t die at first, right? No spoilers here. Candy, it turns out, is a special sort of person, a probably-improved sort of human. She’s not vulnerable to the disease that’s killed off most of humanity. She doesn’t know any of this, so when she finds out…well, where are the others like her? Did they survive? If so, where? How come nobody ever told her anything?

Being a plucky adventurella, she sets out to Make Things Right.

This is one of the few paper-type books, out of thousands, that I still own. If that means anything to you. I read it again recently, to inspire myself to write something of my own.

So far I think it’s going well. A very different heroine, a very different dystopia. But the stories are tied together in my mind…if nowhere else.

Interested? Go buy a copy. And if you happen to know David R. Palmer, who for all I know is still out in the world somewhere, tell him to get off his ass and write more books. Please?

Also! The new-fiction count for today, all on PROJECT II (about which you know little, in theory), was 2782. Not bad. I’m hoping for better.

So. Have fun out there?

I know. It doesn’t seem as if it should be hard to qualify for this. After all, how many books do I read in a week? (Probably 10 or so, if you’re actually curious and not just criticizing my post’s title for fun.) But I’m actually pretty damn picky about which books those are. I don’t keep reading if I’m bored…

Regardless, this one was truly exceptionally cool. I don’t want to spoil it for you…but it surprised me. Several times.

Disclaimer: I’ve been a Lawrence Block fan for years. Decades, even. I went to a book signing of his about 20 years back, and I can report that his self-deprecating humor was exactly what you’d expect…

More than that? I’ve benefited enormously from his books on writing. I’ve even used his “Write for Your Life” affirmations…meaning, yes, I had them playing over and over while I wrote and slept. (I’d probably do that still, but I lost the copies I downloaded. Might invest ten bucks in re-acquiring them at some point.)

So, all that said? I hate to say this next bit…but I’m a much bigger fan of his more recent work. By “more recent” I generally mean the books he’s published in the last…oh, I don’t know…30 years or so. Ariel is older than that.

But it’s amazing, in spite of my probably-stupid generalization above. Ariel is…well, it doesn’t easily fit into any sort of genre boundaries. In fact accurately fitting it into a genre would ruin much of the suspense. Occult? Crime? Coming of age? Maybe!

It doesn’t hurt, given my own recent interest in foster parenting, that the story involves an adopted child…but maybe that won’t matter much to most of you who read this. It’s astoundingly (why am I so surprised, again?) well-written. It kept me up late. I’d like to share it with you.

Want something different? I don’t care what you’ve been reading; this one’s different.

Truly a wonderful book. Go buy it if you’ve a mind (heh), or get it via Kindle Unlimited. Since it is in Kindle Unlimited, you’ll have to get the ebook from Amazon. Print versions are likely more generally available.

I thought about posting a review on Amazon. But, as an author myself, I have to be at least slightly careful about that. The ‘Zon’s review policy is, at best, a confusing mess. So I’ll just post this here, and maybe I’ll do a bit more of this reviewing-stuff in the future while I’m at it.

Hey, do you folks have favorite books you think I might want to read? I’d love to hear about them. In spite of all the fiction available, my Kindle still runs dry…

We’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, have fun out there!