Another freebie…this short story will introduce you to NYPD homicide detective Sgt. Rolando Castilblanco.  You might not have met him before.  This was written after Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, an anthology about some other cases he lived through with his partner, Dao-Ming Chen.  They are main characters in The Midas Bomb and Angels Need Not Apply.  They will also be featured in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan…coming soon!  A third yarn about Castilblanco helping Chen, who has been framed for murder, will add a true mystery tale to “The Detectives Chen and Castiblanco Series.”  (I’ve decided to not call that a trilogy, because I like these characters too much.)  Enjoy!

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Roles

Steven M. Moore

Copyright, 2012

Roles.  We all play them.  Some of us decide who we want to be and play that role.  Others decide for us and we just slip into those roles.

I looked like a homeless person.  I reeked of bad booze and bodily odors.  The old stained raincoat had an old brandy bottle corked with a paper towel in one pocket and a screw-top bourbon bottle with a few fingers left in the other.  They had wrapped my feet in rags and stuffed them into boots two sizes too big, along with the bottoms of the pants’ legs.

I was playing a role.  I was trying to become a victim.

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(Chris Angus, London Underground, Iguana Books, ISBN 978-1927403020)

As the Brits would say, this book is smashing fun and fiendishly clever.  How to categorize it?  It’s a sci-fi horror tale, a strange double romance, and a war story.  It’s an overseas adventure, at least for U.S. and Canadian readers—readers in Great Britain will have fun recognizing places in new and old London and possibly remembering the horrors of the V-2 bombings; readers in Norway will be pleased to see their country featured even if the narrative reminds them of the dark days under the traitor Quisling.

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Although I doubt any gun fanatic reads this blog, if you think you might be one, read the following characteristics.  Please note that I’m not talking about a gun enthusiast (simple hunter, skeet shooter, authentic target-range aficionado, etc.).  Again, if you don’t understand the difference between fanatic and enthusiast, read on.  For other people, some of the characteristics below might be amusing, others just plain sad…because there’s always truth in humor!

1) Go to a gun show and watch how a buyer picks up and caresses the weapon, whether he buys it or not.  If the gun seems to be just an extension of you-know-what, he’s a fanatic.  Don’t be surprised at the number of men you see doing this, even if their bathrooms aren’t loaded with porno pics.  Note that this doesn’t apply to women unless she has a particular kind of Freudian envy.  Or, she caresses the weapon while smiling at him.

2) If you’re out in the woods and run across a deer hunter—or any kind of hunter, for that matter—and he tries to convince you he needs an assault rifle to bring down his intended targets, you have a gun fanatic.  This definitely applies to women too.  By the way, what the hell are you doing in the woods during hunting season?  Hunters kill other people, even ones dressed in those loud orange clown suits they’re supposed to be wearing.  Without that suit, you’ll just look like game to them, even if the hunter you meet is like that sharpshooting GoDaddy CEO who’s out to kill an elephant.  Although most hunters, like Dick Cheney, can only hit the broad side of a judge, you can’t count on that!

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#227:  New sci-fi thriller goes into final editing.  The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, a novel starring DHS agent Ashley Scott, is in its final editing stages.  I hope to release it sometime in this first quarter of 2013.  Readers will recall that Agent Scott is a friend of NYPD detectives Chen and Castilblanco, but she has been hounding me to feature her in her very own novel.  As the title hints, this one is related to Boomers dealing with retirement.  I hope your retirements will be more peaceful and quiet than Virginia’s!

The story is set in the tri-state area, mostly eastern New Jersey.  I wrote most of the book before hurricane Sandy, so I had to make some fast changes to include references to that once-in-a-hundred-years event.  One of the subthemes is gun control.  Some of that material reflected a personal worry that became reality with the Newtown massacre.  How can I write about guns and death and be for gun control?  Ask a cop, especially first responders in Newtown.  They often live in real life events similar to what I write about in fiction.  Most cops are still for stricter gun controls.  Maybe they’ve seen too many innocent victims?

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How appropriate!  It snowed in the Middle East.  If that’s not symbolic of the Arab spring turning to the Arab winter, I don’t know what is.  Even if we don’t have confidence in nuclear power, solar energy, or natural gas (especially fracking), it’s imperative that the U.S. become energy independent in order to avoid all the turmoil in that part of the world.  The longer I live, the more I believe that the Middle East is a hopeless case, a patient who is terminally ill and better off dead.  If R.I.P. has a political meaning, we should apply it to these troubled lands.  The world needs to move on.

Ben Ghazi showed that Libyans can’t control their own people—or al Qaeda has corrupted the political process.  We now find out that Mohamed Morsi, current President of Egypt and wannabe dictator, is on record saying three years ago that Israelis are “blood-suckers, who attack Palestinians” and “warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”  Maybe he was just playing to his Islamic fundamentalist base, but this doesn’t bode well for future peace between Egypt and Israel.

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#224: Amazon’s new review policy.  I thought I’d see more action here.  Several writers have told me that they’ve lost reviews too—good legitimate reviews, not from family and friends.  My lost reviews correspond to writers reviewing and independent reviewers from online reviewing sites.  I guess Amazon can do what they want and the rest of the world caves.  I’ll have to admit—I don’t know what I can do about it either.

One irony here occurs when Amazon asks ME to review one of my OWN BOOKS.  I use Amazon’s easy gifting service to provide books for reviewers—and they count as book sales, of course.  But you’d think that they’d know enough not to ask the author of the book for a review.  Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

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September 11, 1973, a tragic day for Chile.  A CIA-engineered coup brought Augusto Pinochet to power.  Following in the steps of Nazi-lover Stroessner in Paraguay and blazing trails for Argentina’s military junta, the Generalisimo was evil incarnate.  His and his evil twins’ fascism in southern South America set a new standard for torture and killing.  If there is a Catholic hell, he is probably the Devil’s right-hand man.  As in Argentina, everyone that crossed his regime was declared a communist or Jewish terrorist, brought up before a military tribunal, if they were lucky, tortured in jail, and dumped into mass graves with other bullet-riddled corpses.

During most of the second half of the 20^th century, anti-communist paranoia reigned supreme in Washington D.C.  Starting with McCarthy, many politicians made their names by jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon.  Nixon made his name in trumped-up proceedings in Congress, playing his anti-pinko cards just right to eventually become president.  The Dulles brothers ruined the Middle East for years to come.  Reagan became famous by running actors out of the country and nearly destroying the University of California.  If you questioned American foreign policy, you were declared a puppet of Moscow or Peking.  Many progressives, myself included, learned to keep mouths shut and eyes watchful.  Anyone to the left of the Rotary Club was a bleeding-heart pinko communist.

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There are serious book reviewers.  There are jerks who simply give a book a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, as if a book were something like a pair of boots from L. L. Bean.  There’s everything in between.  When I ask, who qualifies as a reviewer, I really mean, who qualifies as a serious reviewer?

I’m talking about reviewing fiction.  Memoirs (too often close to fiction?), history, biography, technical, scientific, etc. are less likely to be questionable as long as the author of the review is objective.  Recently, a history of Jefferson was questionable and reviewers said so—some of those reviews might have been a bit subjective.  On the other hand, it’s hard to see how a book on quantum mechanics can be controversial (surprise, surprise! it can be, due to the philosophical underpinnings).

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[Note from Steve: Readers and writers here have the opportunity to meet Jim Kukral.  He has written eight books and his Author Marketing Club (AMC)  is a free resource for authors and readers to learn about book marketing and discover new books. Over 7500 people have connected with the club. You can join for free.  There are many ways his website can help you find your way around the complicated landscape of digital publishing.  I don’t usually write posts that might be construed as commercial, but Jim is also an author, so he knows a lot about the writing business.  Enjoy!]

Author’s bio: Jim Kukral is a 16-year Internet marketing professional who was recently named by Dun & Bradstreet as one of “The Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter.” Jim also serves as a Program Faculty Member for the University of San Francisco’s Internet Marketing Program where he teaches classes to students around the globe on the topics of internet marketing, web monetization and social media. In addition, SmallBizTrends.com chose Jim as one of 100 top small business influencers online.

Steve: Where do you think publishing is going?  Is traditional publishing doomed?  Are eBooks here to stay?

Jim: Traditional publishing will survive, but in a new form. The business model of “paper” is obviously going to go away. Not completely, but let’s be honest, the world is going digital. Yes, there will still be paper books, but far fewer than in the past. Traditional publishers will focus on books they know will sell and stop taking any chances on new authors. New authors will come from the indie crowd. They’ll prove themselves first, then the big publishers will try to swoop in and buy them up.

S: What about bookstores?  Libraries?  Can they keep up with the changing times?

J: I love the line from the Social Network movie. I’m paraphrasing here, where the character Shawn, played by Justin Timberlake, who was the Napster guy, says something like, “Are you interested in buying a Tower Records franchise today?” Same point here. Are you interested in buying a Barnes and Noble franchise today? Paper is on the way out. Libraries are already exploring e-lending programs and it’s great!

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Don’t get me wrong—I know Amazon is a business.  The management there has adopted policies they think will maximize their profits.  My complaint is that they also pretend they are helping indie publishers and indie authors.  I’m not saying that doesn’t happen some of the time, but they are certainly inconsistent.  They adapt policies and inconsistently apply them.  Reviews are a case in point, as we saw in Part One.

There is another aspect of their review policy—past, present, but hopefully not future—that is detrimental to all authors: treating books as just as another product, like shoes, clothing, appliances, toys, and so forth.  By doing so, a reviewer of a book becomes a reviewer of a product—all too often, a book reviewer also reviews other products, in fact, right on Amazon.  For product reviews, the buyer just looks at positives and negatives, perhaps disregarding the latter, if it seems to be just sour grapes or an isolated incident (yet, Amazon ranks that negative review higher than a positive one).

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