I often experiment with my fiction writing…and that’s not just true for sci-fi (see this Friday’s article that’s a homage to Frank Drake). The main reason is to avoid becoming formulaic like so many old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables. Experimentation keeps my storytelling fresh, unlike most of the novels those stables produce. It also justifiably sticks the thumb in the eye of any so-called expert in the publishing business who tells authors to write for the market—again, those are people who grovel to the Big Five: pariah agents, many acquisition editors, and PR and marketing people. While there are other reasons, I’ll finish with one more: Good storytelling is always about experimentation because every tale, even for formulaic Big Five authors, must be at least a bit different to maintain readers’ interests. That’s part of the creative process: New ideas lead to new stories, unless an author has writer’s block.

If you need examples from other authors, let’s consider Deaver and Marquez. Jeffery wrote one novel in reverse—an experiment that was a complete failure (maybe not for him but for me…and maybe his publisher?). It wasn’t formulaic, at least not in the same way that his “Lincoln Rhyme” series became formulaic. (His best book so far was an early one, Garden of Beasts, by the way, a stand-alone.) Gabby basically wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold in reverse as well—a murder occurs and then that ex-journalist proceeds to show how the murder was solved. While that remind you of almost good old Christie mystery (yes, there were bad ones), it was something new in Gabo’s milieu, Latin American literature. (His best work, by the way, isn’t One Hundred Years of Solitude but Autumn of the Patriarch, a creepy, scary portrayal of a dictator who’s an amalgam of similar tyrants—I even see DJT in him!)

Major “best-selling” authors usually don’t experiment until they’re well-established; agents and publishers, not wanting to rock the boat, discourage experimentation even when they are. I’m not a major best-selling author, but I’m established and confident enough in my storytelling that I feel free to experiment. I’ve been doing that for a while, in fact. Rogue Planet, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, and A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse are all experiments in sci-fi writing; Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder were experiments in mystery/thriller writing (both surprisingly picked up by a traditional publisher—actually you can consider every novel in the “Esther Brookstone” series an experiment). Much of my short fiction is experimental as well. (See the published collections and free offerings on the “Books & Short Stories” webpage.)

The last novels in the “Esther Brookstone” series and two of the three in the “Steve Morgan” series are also experiments in the sense that the thriller aspects are modified to include not only crime but politics—better said, crimes committed in the political arena. Some of these books might even be called political thrillers!

There’s a new variation on that political theme, though. The “Steve Morgan” trilogy (if that’s what it remains—the first book has already been published) will be like an Oreo cookie: #1, Legacy of Evil was about Russian fascism; #3, Fear the Asian Evil, will be about Chinese fascism; and in between will be #2, Cult of Evil, that will have more the flavor a conventional crime story, albeit a bit grittier than anything Christie ever wrote. China and Russia have already been dissed in “Esther Brookstone” #6, Defanging the Red Dragon (a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests: webpage); and #9, Celtic Chronicles; and in many of my other mystery/thriller novels. But in “Steve Morgan” the focus is new where the war against fascism is a major theme (fascism is a worldwide problem!).

But there’s more to my experiment contained in the “Steve Morgan” trilogy of evil: I’ve basically written these novels as one grand saga in order to maintain the flow, content editing in one novel influencing the one before or after. It’s a mental challenge as well as an experiment to write what’s basically a mega-novel in three parts where each part will be separately published. (Don’t worry. You’ll still be able to read each novel independently of the others.) I hope some readers will respond positively to my experiment and enjoy the novels. I certainly enjoyed writing them. (The second two will be released in 2022, but I can’t guarantee when.)

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I call all the books in my “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone Art Detective,” and “Inspector Steve Morgan” series mystery/thriller novels because they’re not exactly novels in the classic sense—readers often learn a bit about the crimes as the stories move along. They’re not exactly thrillers either—there’s not that much heart-pounding and intense action, the literary equivalent of the audiovisual pyrotechnics overload Hollywood pumps out for the addicts who demand that fix. These stories will appeal more to readers who prefer a complex and cerebral spy or crime story, something Hollywood seems incapable of producing these days.

John Le Carre and P. D. James would have a tough time nowadays to achieve the fame they enjoyed in their long careers before streaming video and Hollywood blockbusters ruined readership.

Hollywood has destroyed good stories in many ways. Just compare the Bond movies based on Ian Fleming’s books to the latest entries in the franchise. There’s no comparison! Today’s screenwriters are incompetent hacks compared to Fleming, Le Carre, and James; or maybe it’s just that Hollywood’s producers and directors force them to write schlock now? A cerebral Bond, Smiley, or Dalgliesh (yeah, I count James Bond as cerebral—he has to be going up against smart super-villains like Auric Goldfinger) doesn’t turn modern viewers on, and they have made readers expect the same kind of main character, a two-dimensional cardboard cutout from Hollywood. Those old characters were interesting ones for this reader, though, and I hope my own characters also interest the old traditional readers who expect more than what Hollywood gives.

Read the rest of this entry »

A fiction writer creates characters, so this is a natural question to ask such an author. I guess my answer if asked it would be ambivalent: Maybe.

Probably every author puts a bit of themselves into some characters they create, but most authors are observers of human nature and are more likely to use what they see and hear into their characters. (Observations of ETs are a bit more difficult, but they might have some human-like characteristics.)

A secondary but related question is: Which of your characters do you identify with? That has an obvious answer if an author has cameo appearances in his prose. (I have several, most of them as an owner of a bookstore.) But the answer might also suggest what kind of person an author might want to be or become.

Readers often ask these questions at book events or in a lecture’s Q & A session at the end. (I regret that the video of my presentation of Rembrandt’s Angel available on YouTube doesn’t contain the lively Q & A session corresponding to that lecture.)

My answers to all these questions has become more complicated over time: My novels are complex, and each one has many characters. Maybe the better question to direct to me is: How do I make every character distinct? It’s more of a challenge now.

I struggled with Steve Morgan in the new “Trilogy of Evil” that my new work-in-progress. (Legacy of Evil, the first novel in that trilogy, has already been published.) Inspector Morgan has a similar background to NYPD homicide detective Castilblanco of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series, not because I identify with that background but because Castilblanco has many admirable qualities (and a few flaws). A lot of Morgan’s similarity was unconscious creation, believe me. Castilblanco is to author Moore like Bosch is to author Connelly. Only in my case, in order to avoid becoming formulaic, I decided to move on to a new detective, Steve Morgan. Castilblanco and Morgan are variations on a theme, though, and I admire them both. I hope you do too.

But Castilblanco and Morgan are only two of my many characters. What about the others? In particular, what about the female characters? Can a male author create a believable female character with traits he can admire, and vice versa? I would respond with an emphatic yes! Again, the male author has to be an observer of females’ behavior, and vice versa. Human nature is comprised of both a fortiori, so observing human nature involves both. There are elements of behavior common to both sexes, and there are differences, so a good author observes the commonalities and differences to get the full picture. I’ve even been so bold as to create a female main character and write in the first person! I felt up to this challenge because I’ve observed a lot of strong and clever women whom I can admire, a lot more than just my mother who was one.

The bottom line here is that if authors aren’t good observers of human nature, they cannot create realistic characters. The author is only one person to use in their analysis; a larger statistical set of human beings is necessary. That might be hard for an introverted author to manage, but it is a necessary condition for creating believable characters.

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’m a fast reader, but I know I have to pay attention to details because I don’t waste my time reading trivia (most fantasies, romances, and cozy mysteries are in that category). That’s because, as a writer, I know an author I’m reading can add things that aren’t obvious but provide hints and clues about characters and their motivations, attitudes, and hang-ups, not to mention complexities of plot or unusual settings.

In ads, these hints and clues are often subliminal, although some think of that term as only applying to something that flashes by so fast that you don’t realize your mind recorded it. That can happen in prose too, but I use the term more generally. For whatever reason, neither ads nor authors want to make things all that obvious.

I recall a bike commercial that’s typically subliminal, using my wider definition: A woman on a nice-looking bike negotiates all kinds of traffic and makes her way effortlessly. Only at the end does one see the trademark: Van Moof. (I’m not pushing that product, by the way. I rarely do that in this blog for any product.) Another example is NEOM. That did the job in getting me so curious that I looked it up. You can too…and see why I hate the Saudi Arabian government so much.

In fiction, there often aren’t anything like trademarks in subliminal messages or some evil MBS’s plan, so maybe those examples are flawed. Also, in TV-land, the visual can pack more of a subliminal message than the words (like those two examples). In our stories, words have to carry the subliminal messages, and they will if the reader is paying attention. They do that in many different ways.

One important technique is through body language. Reading that is as subtle in real life as it is in fiction. Just as a good detective uses body language to determine what a witness or perp actually means, the written words describing body language often tell what a character in the story really means. It can be a powerful tool, and I can admire an author who uses it effectively.

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at expressing body language in my writing—that’s one thing I continue to work on. I use dialogue more, both direct and internal. And I know where the root of my problem lies: I observe people a lot; I always have. Maybe like a good detective? In those observations, where dialogue is often imagined, I’ve already translated the body language, so my notes about character traits become rather cryptic. I suppose a psychiatrist or psychologist does the same thing in an interview. Or an FBI profiler? In any case, going from those notes to the words in my story is a double translation, so things get lost in the translation in both directions.

Yet I fully recognize the importance of body language and other subliminal messages in my prose and in the prose I read. I don’t like to miss them as a reader, and I’d like to include more of them as a writer. You might think that this is only important in mysteries or crime stories and not other fiction, but I believe it’s important in all fiction, even in biographies and non-biographies. I’m not a romance writer, but I can imagine a lot of body language going on there! Moreover, an author can make dialogue come alive with body language, or even have a character’s body contradict what they’re saying.

The possibilities are endless…and that’s what makes writing fiction so much fun!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills. (Use the promo code PQ32A at checkout if the sale price doesn’t appear with the book.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I had a chuckle when I saw a new Prevagen commercial not long ago. (Yeah, I watch network TV, mainly because I don’t have streaming video and no streaming-video service has all the programs I want, often excluding some network TV shows I enjoy.) A woman in the commercial starts things off by saying she’s written three novels. I guess the viewer is supposed to think that the memory supplement allowed her to do that? Or, it cured her writer’s block? Not likely. Studies have shown that it’s no better than a placebo. I immediately wondered if I could get a nice juicy contract from the OTC supplement’s manufacturers (OTC because in that way there are no FDA controls, of course) because I’ve written more than three novels. (You can count the number if you have nothing better to do—see the “Books & Short Stories” web page. Like the number of words in a manuscript, the number of my stories isn’t something I worry about. As long as I can feed my addiction to storytelling, numbers are irrelevant.)

I wouldn’t sign that contract, of course. Unlike old movie stars and ancient athletes out to scam seniors on TV with offers for life insurance, Medicare Advantage plans, Prevagen and similar supplements like ED or testosterone pills (that’s mostly cable), I’ll not push any product, especially if I don’t use it. (You’ll find some services and retailers mentioned on my web pages here. They are places I’ve used to buy things or services who’ve helped me, so I can give them a recommendation as a satisfied customer, but it’s only a recommendation.) And, although I might resemble an old silverback (I don’t drag my knuckles like some politicians, though), I won’t pound my chest to celebrate how many novels I’ve written.

I still ask myself, though, how did this happen? Sue Grafton never made it to Z; and Harper Lee only wrote one novel, as far as I’m concerned. Lee’s will probably be remembered longer than any of Grafton’s formulaic novels (I might have stopped at B or C—I can’t remember—and I certainly don’t remember the subject matter of those first novels). In any case, the number’s not important, right? Lasting quality might be, but even Lee’s masterpiece won’t be remembered after a few more decades except by erudite professors of literature. While quantity and fame are ephemeral, and the number of copies sold is important to publishers and authors wanting to make a living writing, I look at book publishing more selfishly: I write novels because I love storytelling!

Of course, that doesn’t answer the title’s question without some qualification: Storytelling is such a turn-on that I’m completely addicted to it now. Publishing my stories is more an afterthought relative to the writing, and I’ve taken the easy way out to do it: Most of my novels have been self-published. (See my earlier article “Is traditional publishing for you?” for more about that choice—or my little course “Writing Fiction,” available as a free PDF download.) Hell, two of my novels are free (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for all these free PDF downloads), so publishing them wasn’t even an afterthought! I just had to save the MS Word manuscripts as PDFs.

While not even Grafton has my number of novels, I’d like to believe that she and Harper Lee shared my obsession with storytelling. I also have no way of knowing whether either author had more stories squirreled away that didn’t see the light of day. If they did, more power to them. I do too. For example, my first novel written the summer I turned thirteen ended up in the trash can when I went off to college, and I’ve never publicly offered many of my stories.

So, you now know how I produced all those novels. I’m always writing now, not because I want to make money but because I love storytelling. Hopefully I can keep doing it for a long time!

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills. (Use the promo code PQ32A at checkout if the sale price doesn’t appear with the book.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Stephen King crawled out of his Northeast Dracula’s castle long enough to testify against the Simon & Schuster – Penguin/Random House merger. In other words, he supported the government and Simon & Schuster’s anti-trust arguments designed to prevent the Big Five publishing conglomerates becoming the Big Four, with the combined behemoth becoming the T. Rex of the industry.

Publishing is generally a gentrified and global gentlemen’s club (how’s that for alliteration?) except in cases where someone like John Bolton or Andrew Cuomo do battle against Trump and other fascists to get a tell-all non-fiction [sic?] book published. (Actually, it’s the industry is more like a rich country club because women participate, if only as agents—like real estate agents, most literary agents are female pariahs and very similar to those you might find in rich country clubs).

It’s interesting to ponder about what King’s real motives might be. I’m not a great fan (Misery is his only good novel), and I worked hard to complement and correct his On Writing in my little course “Writing Fiction” (a free PDF download available on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page); his treatise, beyond being an obit for him and all other old and formulaic mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables, needed modernizing, to say the least, because it’s mostly an expression of his ignorance about today’s publishing scene.

Of course, S & S share their spokesperson’s ignorance. Hey guys, ninety-nine percent of today’s authors who produce really good stuff do not worry about traditional contracts with $250k or more advances! (Cuomo’s was around five million.) They’re not celebs with scandalous stories to tell like Bolton (or not to tell, in the case of Cuomo), or a formulaic mare or stallion whose books are bought because readers buy books like they buy a smart TV, i.e., for the brand not the quality.

I bet the only reason King testified for S & S is that most of King’s millions in book royalties come from them, so he might want that small publishing house (small relative to the other behemoths, Penguin/Random House among them), to remain independent so he can remain the resident author emeritus. (The latter in academia is reserved for an old mare or stallion put out to pasture who has at least contributed to the education of young women and me, so maybe I shouldn’t use it to describe King, who hasn’t educated anyone!)

I’m now almost a 100% DIY self-published author (after experimenting a bit with traditional publishing), so I, like many other self-published authors, don’t give a rat’s ass about what King and the other old mares and stallions do, and I don’t care whether it’s the Big Four or Five because their prehistoric business model will go the way of the dinosaurs because self-publishing will be their asteroid.

But back to your motives, Stephen. Somehow I suspect that S & S’s and your motives might be a bit more profound. Maybe all this is a plot against Amazon, that infamous and insidious retail site that hs made everyone in the publishing business nuts. The big Bezos bot and his little bots are bad for everyone, all readers, any kind of author, and all publishers. Amazon was the worst thing to happen to book publishing!

If that’s your hidden agenda, Stephen, I’m with you, man! My fellow self-publishing authors and I are not the greatest danger—yeah, we’re formidable, but not your worst nemesis—the greatest danger is a shared one. Amazon! We can never get along, self-publishing and traditional publishing, until the rogue elephant in the publishing industry is put into chains and locked away!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment will be considered spam.)

Come globe-trot with me! Your last chance to get a bargain-buy of three evergreen novels from three different series that will take you, the reader, to many different countries. Aristocrats and Assassins (UN52Q) finds Detective Castilblanco and his wife on an European vacation that becomes deadly. Why is a terrorist kidnapping Europe’s royals? In Death on the Danube (AR72S), you’ll cruise down that famous river along with Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden on their honeymoon voyage…right into danger, as the two sleuths try to find a murderer. And in Muddlin’ Through (TV85M), you can go along on a dangerous tour with Mary Jo Melendez around Europe and South America as she tries to prove she was framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murder and tries to save the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). All these globe-trotting adventures that will leave you breathless and asking for more are on sale now at Smashwords for only 99 cents. (Use the indicated promo codes if you don’t see that price.) Sale ends August 31. Bon voyage!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’ll explain the title of this article in a bit. First, let me say I’ve been meaning to write one about book banning, either for here at my author’s blog, or at pubprogressive.com, my political blog. It was going to be a general article about the dangers associated with such practices that I consider an insidious influence on authors and publishers and the antithesis of freedom of expression. It’s curious, for example, how America’s far-right rails against government intrusion when they’re all for controlling what people can read. Of course, no sane person should ever look for logical behavior from America’s far-right, or from their evil lord and master Donald J. Trump, who has shown how illogical one person can be, among other things too despicable to put in an article about writing and publishing.

Book banning in general is bad. Fahrenheit 451 shows how it’s tied to fascism. Freedom of expression is the opposite of book banning, to put it simply. Censorship should always be questioned in any society that pretends to be democratic. You might not want to read Fifty Shades of Grey (I don’t either), but I have no right to stop you if you do. No person or group should be allowed to do that.

And you don’t have to use fictional extremes like Bradbury’s famous novel to see the dangers either, real dangers. Banning of works like Huckleberry Finn, or of any other tale about minorities, by the anti-cultural appropriation nuts is just plain wrong. Mark Twain could write about Jim because he’d observed how black men and women were treated in Missouri—they still are treated badly, because it’s a rock-solid member of the FSA—see the meaning of that acronym at pubprogressive.com. And my own inclusion of Asian, Black, and Hispanic characters in my novels is also justified by own observations made everywhere I’ve lived and traveled.

Okay, so much for generalities. What America’s far-right is doing with book banning is dangerously close to what far-right regimes do in the rest of the world. It’s another reason why America is looking like 1930s Nazi Germany right now. And it’s akin to how Iran’s evil theocracy treats freedom of expression because America’s far-right book-banners are often radical religious fanatics as well. Hopefully America’s far-right will come to its sense and stop this insane emulation of Iran, which has reached an acme of persecution with its thirty-year fatwa against Salman Rushdie. What happened to that man shouldn’t be the fate of any author. Or, is that what America’s far-right wants? Murdering an author goes far beyond banning his books!

But what about the title of “Origins Redux” for this article? Last week I wrote about the origins of some of my books. The attack on Rushdie made me ask myself, “Will I be attacked by rabid Catholics because I had my character Declan O’Hara write a historical novel about St. Brendan? Will they attack me for writing one myself about St. John?” “Absurd!” you might say. But isn’t that similar to what Rushdie did? You don’t think Catholics can have far-right sentiments? You just have to look at SCOTUS to see far-right Catholic fanatics in powerful positions in the US government! I’m willing to bet if a book-banning case come before them, they’ll vote against the author or publisher!

If you say that no one will come after me because I don’t sell many books, you’re correct. But authors freedom of expression must be protected no matter how well their books sell. All authors and publishers are adversely affected by book banning. One banned book anywhere can make every author and publisher constrain what they put into words. I rebel against constraints!

Iran provides an evil and extreme example of how far-right censorship in America could go. And it’s so absurd! Readers are always free to choose not to read materials they find offensive. They shouldn’t try to force their reading preferences and prejudices on anyone, though. That lead to fatwahs like Iran’s against Rushdie. ‘Nough said.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment will be considered spam.)

Come globe-trot with me! Your last chance to get a bargain-buy of three evergreen novels from three different series that will take you, the reader, to many different countries. Aristocrats and Assassins (UN52Q) finds Detective Castilblanco and his wife on an European vacation that becomes deadly. Why is a terrorist kidnapping Europe’s royals? In Death on the Danube (AR72S), you’ll cruise down that famous river along with Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden on their honeymoon voyage…right into danger, as the two sleuths try to find a murderer. And in Muddlin’ Through (TV85M), you can go along on a dangerous tour with Mary Jo Melendez around Europe and South America as she tries to prove she was framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murder and tries to save the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). All these globe-trotting adventures that will leave you breathless and asking for more are on sale now at Smashwords for only 99 cents. (Use the indicated promo codes if you don’t see that price.) Sale ends August 31. Bon voyage!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The Brits must hate me. Despite their parasitic royal family, I’ve loved them since I read Dame Agatha’s mysteries as a young lad, but, like other writers before her and during her time, diversity, if present, was a bit skewed in her novels, to say the least. I also noticed this in the H. Rider Haggard stories. In fact, non-white men and women were often cast as either servants or villains as they were in real life in the old British Empire.

It was difficult to reconcile all that with the diversity I saw growing up in California. I didn’t consider African, Asian, and Hispanic Americans as separate groups. They were just my fellow Americans—neighbors, business owners, community leaders, and family friends or relatives. I’d wager that California’s diversity still leads all the states today and is what made the great state’s economic engine the best in the US (and ranked high in the world compared to entire countries).

While it might be contrary to what the anti-cultural-appropriation folks would like, I’ve always included diversity in my novels. That came naturally. I’ve never said to myself, “Steve, you need to add some diversity.” I say, “In my experience, what does a character’s background have to be to make the best story?”

Thus my NYPD homicide detectives are a Chinese-American and Puerto Rican (the latter are already Americans), intentionally playing counter to the Irish-cop stereotype (even though I have Irish blood). Castilblanco’s dancing ability mirrors two fellow students I knew in college; Chen’s stoic demeanor mirrors a Chinese girl I knew in high school (like Chen, there were moments when the stoicism took a break). They often work with a big black ME modeled after Vince Wilfork, the ex-Patriots nose tackle, who I admired more than the prima donna, Tom Brady.

I first intentionally added diversity, though, when I started the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series with Rembrandt’s Angel. While Esther and Bastiann are twenty-first century versions of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, putting Christie’s two famous detectives together like I’d wanted to do since I’d read her novels, I added diversity where it seemed appropriate in what’s traditionally been a lily-white England. Admittedly, most of this is achieved with immigrants from ex-British colonies—India, Jamaica, and Hong Kong, in particular—and featuring Ambreesh Singh, the brilliant MI5 techie; Harry James, a member of Esther’s art gallery staff and accomplished musician; and three accomplished Chinese artists who are Hong Kong refugees.

That still didn’t satisfy me, so when I introduced Inspector Steve Morgan in Book Eight, The Klimt Connection, I thought it was logical to give him a black girlfriend, the athletic Kanzi Kimachu, whose family origins are in Kenya. Her immediate family members now are as British as the royal family, although even the latter has added some diversity recently, despite some of their obvious resistance.

This might make you wonder: Why bother with a character’s family history or origins? I’m not championing Ancestry.com here! (This blog and website are commercial-free.) But, like it or not, family history and origins can influence how people act in real life. Because fiction has to seem real, it must contain diversity.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment will be considered spam.)

Come globe-trot with me! Three evergreen novels from three different series will take you, the reader, to many different countries. Aristocrats and Assassins (UN52Q) finds Detective Castilblanco and his wife on an European vacation that becomes deadly. Why is a terrorist kidnapping Europe’s royals? In Death on the Danube (AR72S), you’ll cruise down that famous river along with Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden on their honeymoon voyage…right into danger, as the two sleuths try to find a murderer. And in Muddlin’ Through (TV85M), you can go along on a dangerous tour with Mary Jo Melendez around Europe and South America as she tries to prove she was framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murder and tries to save the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). All these globe-trotting adventures that will leave you breathless and asking for more are on sale now at Smashwords for only 99 cents. (Use the indicated promo codes if you don’t see that price.) Sale ends August 31. Bon voyage!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

No, I’m not writing about that first book in A. B. Carolan’s “The Denisovan Trilogy” (he still has to write numbers two and three). Instead, I’d like to discuss how some of my novels originated. In most of my novels, I include endnotes titled “Notes, Disclaimers, and Acknowledgements” where I often discuss the novel’s origins. For the novels I consider here, I’ll add a bit to their correponding endnotes.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. There’s a short sci-fi story (I forget the title—maybe a reader can help me here) where some future astronauts encounter a group of ETs and turn them into mindless dolts by vaccinating them against a virus they’d detected in all of them. (That obviously predates Covid where mindless dolts refuse to vaccinate and a chief mindless dolt recommended injections of disinfectant.) You see, the virus was responsible for making the ETs smart! (Our earthly chief mindless dolt needs that virus!) This is an extreme case of positive symbiosis.

With hindsight, I think that story might have been the real origin of this novel. The virus in my novel is from the stars and is designed to make Earth more hospitable for ETs on their way to colonize it. (Like in our own exoplanet studies, those ETs have no way of knowing whether intelligent life already exists here, although, as you’ll see in the book, it’s questionable how intelligent life really is here, especially if you consider all the aforementioned Earthly mindless dolts.) Instead, the virus creates Homo Sapiens 2.0, arguably a smarter version.

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. I was never comfortable writing about time travel—most of the stories about it don’t even try to avoid the paradoxes (for example, The Time Traveler’s Wife and that stupid TV series—was it on Starz?). While I enjoyed Heinlein’s Door into Summer, with hindsight I believe that my problems with reading it as a kid made me want to “do time travel right.” This novel is the result. My scientific background made it possible: “The Many Words of Quantum Mechanics” is front and center in this novel, and it was the tool that allowed me to avoid the paradoxes, but the characters provided all the fun.

Rogue Planet. While I promoted this book as a hard sci-fi version of Game of Thrones, which of course is pure fantasy, I believe the book’s true origin lies with my negative reaction to the first Star Wars movie seen so long ago that I never imagined I’d be writing anything other than scientific papers. (I believe I took my little daughter to see it—she’s a lot older now! It probably affected her a lot differently than it did me.) ILM’s creation is also pure fantasy, not hard sci-fi. Light sabers? C’mon! The Force? Please! I had to create an answer to all that nonsense by writing a novel that did things right. I did…after quite a few years.

Of course, there are no dragons in this novel a la Game of Thrones nor any real magic, just an evil theocracy modeled after the worst evil theocracy this world has ever seen, Iran, with some ISIS flavor added. (I wrote it before MBS reached puberty—has he ever managed that?—so I couldn’t use that murdering SOB as a model for the evil leader of the theocracy. Of course, in the eyes of Allah, MBS is the equivalent of dog feces.)

Rembrandt’s Angel. The origins for this novel hark back to my long stay in the Beantown area. I doubt that many readers have visited the Isabel Stuart Gardner Museum where that huge art heist occurred. (The FBI has never been able to solve that case.) Long before the film Monuments Men (probably a good book as well—I need to read it), this student of history knew that the Nazis had stolen many paintings during WWII, a lot of them from Jews—and you know where most of those paintings were sent! Some have been recovered and returned to the surviving relatives (if there are any). The Rembrandt painting in the novel is real, and it’s never been recovered, so never returned, as mentioned in the novel’s endnotes.

My wondering as a lad about why Dame Agatha had never put Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot together to solve a complex case was also a motivation…and led to the novel, again after a long wait. But that Beantown art heist left an impression on me and taught me plenty about the scurrilous people who steal art and sell it to rich collectors who take pride in having something no one else can see and enjoy.

Do you read endnotes? Do you even care about a book’s origins? I reluctantly accept “no” as an answer to both questions. You don’t need the origins to enjoy the stories, but maybe you’d enjoy them more if you did!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment will be considered spam.)

Come globe-trot with me! Three evergreen novels from three different series will take you, the reader, to many different countries. Aristocrats and Assassins (UN52Q) finds Detective Castilblanco and his wife on an European vacation that becomes deadly. Why is a terrorist kidnapping Europe’s royals? In Death on the Danube (AR72S), you’ll cruise down that famous river along with Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden on their honeymoon voyage…right into danger, as the two sleuths try to find a murderer. And in Muddlin’ Through (TV85M), you can go along on a dangerous tour with Mary Jo Melendez around Europe and South America as she tries to prove she was framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murder and tries to save the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). All these globe-trotting adventures that will leave you breathless and asking for more are on sale now at Smashwords for only 99 cents. (Use the indicated promo codes if you don’t see that price.) Sale ends August 31. Bon voyage!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The settings in my novels are a bit more varied than those of my life, but they often reflect my wanderlust, some travels done for work (around the US, South America, and Europe), others as a tourist. About half the novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series start in New York City near where I now live (the pair are NYPD homicide detectives) but go elsewhere. The books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series often take place in the main character’s England but also in other places around Europe and South America. The novels in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series have settings in the US, South America, Europe, and China.

I’ve visited some of those places during my wander-years, living and traveling. For others, Google and Google maps as well as travel websites have been my tour guides. (Hopefully the reader can’t tell the difference!) I loved to directly experience diverse cultures and different places, though, my traveling now regrettably reduced to zero by Covid and old age, and believe readers will too, if only in their reading. After all, reading fiction is always about adventure!

I hope readers will help celebrate my wanderlust by traveling with me in novels I’ve written. To make your travels economical ones, all the month of August I offer three “travel guides” on sale at Smashwords, each only ninety-nine (99) cents! (See below for details.) For whatever reason—crazy air travel delays, a new Covid variant, economic insecurity, gas prices—you might not want to travel this summer. But you can…with me! With these three novels, you can travel a lot for only 99 cents!

In Aristocrats and Assassins, Castilblanco takes a rare vacation with his wife. A terrorist, an old nemesis of the ex-SEAL, is kidnapping European aristocrats. To find out why, you’ll have to travel along with Mr. C with me as your tour guide. (By the way, Mr. C’s vacation is such a bust, his wife takes advantage of her husband’s business trip to see London in Defanging the Red Dragon, a complete novel that’s a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.)

In Death on the Danube, I got about as close as I ever have (at that time) to writing a romance novel, because Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden celebrate their marriage with a honeymoon cruise down that favorite river. (My wife and I took a similar cruise—see the end notes of the novel for details. I surpassed the romance in this novel with the sci-fi rom-com A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, which takes you on quite a different voyage!) The trip becomes similar to Dame Agatha’s Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express as Bastiann investigates a murder that has a moving crime scene.

The third novel that could be considered a travel guide is Muddlin’ Through. Ex-Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez is framed for the murder of her sister and brother-in-law and spends the rest of the tale traveling to various countries in an effort to clear her name. It turns out Russia has stolen the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans,” battle-field cyborgs par excellence) from the US government, and a secretive CIA-like organization will do anything to get them back, including killing Mary Jo.

Of course, these novels are more than travel guides! I’m particularly fond of the stories. They’re all mystery/thriller novels where I can proudly say, “I wrote’em!” Let me know whether you like them too.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment will be considered spam.)

Come globe-trot with me! Three evergreen novels from three different series will take you, the reader, to many different countries. Aristocrats and Assassins (UN52Q) finds Detective Castilblanco and his wife on an European vacation that becomes deadly. Why is a terrorist kidnapping Europe’s royals? In Death on the Danube (AR72S), you’ll cruise down that famous river along with Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden on their honeymoon voyage…right into danger, as the two sleuths try to find a murderer. And in Muddlin’ Through (TV85M), you can go along on a dangerous tour with Mary Jo Melendez around Europe and South America as she tries to prove she was framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murder and tries to save the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). All these globe-trotting adventures that will leave you breathless and asking for more are on sale now at Smashwords for only 99 cents. (Use the indicated promo codes if you don’t see that price.) Bon voyage!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!