When I was young, I loved to draw and write. (Obviously, I still love to do the latter!) But when I started to think about how I might make a living in my teens—what any responsible lass or lad should do—I chose to focus on what’s now called STEM, figuring that would give me a lot more opportunities for gainful employment than writing fiction. Not that I didn’t love science and math—I did, and it came easy for me, so it was easy enough for me to acquire the necessary skills—but I loved writing even more. As a consequence, my publishing career only started in 2006, while I still had a day-job (not uncommon for wannabe authors).

From the time of that teenage decision, and before that first novel, I always wondered what opportunities could be coming along for writing professionals (even with my number of novels, I still consider myself an amateur, not a pro). After a few novels, I wandered into LinkedIn, one of the reasons being to answer that question. My initial assessment of that website was what might be common among authors: What was it good for in my case? Initially, I played around in the discussion groups, but Microsoft ruined those when they took over that website (just like Amazon has ruined Goodreads). With so many LinkedIn connections, my question continued, and I often asked people who wanted to connect with me if they could answer it. (By the way, for those nice people who want to connect, I rarely turn anyone down, but I generally do batch-processing on the requests, so please be patient. And you might expect that question!)

Recently, though, I decided that LinkedIn might be a good place to answer the first question in a context far removed from the teenager who asked it long ago: What jobs are now available for writers? In particular, is it now easier to make a living as a writer? LinkedIn seemed to be the most readily available place to find answers to those questions.

I was surprised—maybe astounded is the better word! Almost everyday I receive between ten and twenty job postings, all involving writing. These aren’t job offers, of course, and I won’t be applying to any of them. (LinkedIn hasn’t discovered I’m scamming them, payback for destroying the discussion groups.) But most of them didn’t exist when I was thinking about a future career. I should add that LinkedIn focuses more on my writing skills, which I have, and not on my STEM skills, which frankly are a bit out of date now. (The latter leads to some technical writing jobs, of course.)

Some jobs are onsite, which I’d never take now; others are work-at-home positions; and still others are mixed onsite and remote. Most of them, if I’m honest, seem interesting—or they would have interested that teenager long ago. And I don’t think I even added more traditional writing jobs like journalism or editing to my “desired positions,” the former seeming a lot more interesting now except for the fact that newspapers are dying.

That’s all good news for any young person who wants a writing career. Young people can write their great American novel in off-hours away from their their day-jobs if they want that too, but they can definitely make a living writing now. Maybe the latter could even involve writing fiction, the latter ubiquitous in many politicians’ speeches! Want to be a speechwriter?

At any rate, I consider my experiment a success. Most of the jobs in the LinkedIn postings didn’t exist when I was a teen, thus reaffirming that my choice of STEM was the correct one at the time. It also showed me that writers are in demand more now than ever before. That has to be a good thing, right!

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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 like many people: I’d like more time to read. I have an excuse many readers don’t have, though: I’m often writing fiction, articles for my blog (like this one!), and answering email correspondence relevant to my writing life. And while my Kindle tells me I read a lot, about a book a week for fiction, but I want more reading time.

I often review books I read, unless I can’t say anything good about them. (If it seems that will be the end result for a book, I won’t review it.) Other endorsements can be found buried in these posts at times. But if you glance at all that or at the “Steve’s Bookshelf” webpage that features a list of only some books I’ve read and can recommend, though, you’ll see many are non-fiction. They take longer to read. But that’s time well spent too!

In fiction, I tend to read in the genres and subgenres I write in: mysteries, thrillers, suspense stories, crime novels, science fiction, and some historical fiction. While it’s hard to describe my own books with just one of those genres (my 99-cent sale this month features the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bundle of three novels that range from dystopian to first-contact stories and beyond, all with mystery and thriller elements—see below), I can go beyond them in my fiction reading.

In non-fiction, books that are bios, history, and politics chew up more of my reading time than fiction, as mentioned above, and I don’t write non-fiction. If I want more reading time, why don’t I just minimize my non-fiction reading?

The answer is complex, but the crux of the matter is simple: Reading non-fiction is important for my fiction writing! To paraphrase Tom Clancy (the exact quote is among those running across the top of this website): Good fiction must seem real. This applies to sci-fi as much as the other genres that describe my fiction. I can’t do a good job of writing about my fictional worlds, including ET ones, if I don’t at least partially understand the real world I live in.

Of course, this is even more of a truism for fiction set on planet Earth in the past, present, or near future; many of my novels fit under than umbrella too. A good knowledge of historical events is required to write about the past (historical fiction, a book like my Son of Thunder, for example); a good knowledge of present ones and reasonable extrapolations to predict future ones, especially in the sense of providing warnings that readers might want to heed (those about China and Russia in the later “Esther Brookstone” and more recent “Steve Morgan” books, for example), can turn a plot into a powerful statement.

Moreover, reality is often stranger than fiction, so when an erstwhile critic tells an author something occurring in a novel could never really happen, that author can counter with, “Actually, something similar has already occurred.”

In The Last Humans, someone who’d read the novel wondered if a worldwide pandemic was even possible, not the only thing that’s prescient about that novel unfortunately. Of course, Covid-19 was just that, a worldwide pandemic, and it’s still an unanswered question if the real virus was tweaked in a Chinese biowarfare lab in Wuhan and then let loose (if so, the Chinese have taken it on the chin). (The nation responsible in the novel was North Korea, but that doesn’t change the message.) The current drought and fire-scarred landscapes in SoCal are real manifestations of what was predicted in that novel too. In the case of writing this novel, I extrapolated from what I knew (even the desalination plants in the novel already existed, just not off the SoCal coast). Could I have written any of this without reading non-fiction? (Okay, the desalination plants came from reading Science News, but that’s also non-fiction!)

The Last Humans was pre-Covid but also one of my more recent works (2019 publication date, but written at least a year earlier—traditional publishing is slow!). Let’s go back a few years to 2006 and my first sci-fi thriller Full Medical (now the first book in the “Clones and Mutants” series): That novel is a sci-fi thriller, but its motivation came from non-fiction, in particular, from the very real cloned ewe Dolly! Yes, the novel told the tale of an evil application of cloning (results limited to the very rich—medical advances often are even now), but cloning was going on at the time I wrote the novel, and it still is. (I had to learn a bit about genetics and aging at the time I wrote the book.)

I firmly believe that all authors should read non-fiction as well as fiction. Both might spark creativity, but the first also often provides a foundation for that creativity. Fiction writers should never forget that!

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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.

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

Needless to say, this Yank who’s half-Irish feels a bit strange as I write this post about Queen Elizabeth II. With her death, the era determined by her monarchy ends. Or, did it already end even before? Princess Diana’s untimely death, the many scandals that have rocked the royal family, and the British people and media’s treatment of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex effectively ended that era. The monarchy had already shown its irrelevance in the modern world.

The Realm and Commonwealth will surely continue to suffer as it adjusts to a new prime minister and a new king. Northern Ireland is heating up again, mostly because of the the old PM’s Brexit; and Scotland and Wales also contain strong movements wanting independence, more the first than the second. Many nations in the Commonwealth have republican movements in the true sense of “republicanism,” i.e. that which gave birth to the US and will continue to do so for those who want to free and don’t wish to bow to a monarch.

On the other hand, the UK itself has internally much of the same divisive politics as its old colony, the US. Far-right and far-left extremists foment these divisions, and economic turmoil and failure of leadership is their willing accomplice. Such strife could tear the kingdom apart. Time will tell if democracy survives in the UK, let alone a kingdom.

Of course, Queen Elizabeth wasn’t and won’t be responsible for any of that. (Well, maybe a bit for Diana’s death, although that was more on the new King Charlie and his new Queen Consort.) The queen was everyone’s nana! When one’s nana passes on, one mourns and celebrates her life and the wisdom she offered to others, whether this occurs in a royal family or a working-class one. That’s what we do as human beings.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth!

[Note from Steve: Frank Drake, the father of the SETI program and much of radio astronomy, passed away last week at 92. He was director of the Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1981. Consider this post my feeble attempt to honor this great man.]

I felt sad when I read about the demise of the Arecibo radio telescope, and even sadder when I learned about Frank Drake’s passing. When I attended a conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez years ago (1970s)—it’s on the opposite side of the island from San Juan—we stopped on the way there to take a tour of that facility. It filled an entire valley and filled me with pride that human beings, scientists like me (at the time), could create such an awesome structure dedicated to exploring the Universe. At that time, Arecibo was a principal center for radio astronomy. Not only was it an important place for probing the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it was also the home of SETI, a program whose goal was to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, presumably originating in radio signals emitted by other civilizations in the cosmos.

Frank Drake and others began that search. Fermi, the last physicist who worked in both the theoretical and experimental sides of physics, once asked the taunting question, “Where are they?” He was referring to ETs, of course. SETI was designed to answer that question. With both Arecibo and SETI gone, one has to wonder who’s trying to answer it now, especially considering all the exoplanets that have been discovered since Arecibo was built.

Of course, searches for ET life with radio signals depend on ET civilizations existing “out there” that broadcast in that narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Drake’s famous equation enters into that argument: Depending on the values assigned to the terms in the equation, the likelihood of such a civilization existing can be estimated. I haven’t seen any scientists revisiting this equation and adjusting the terms according to how many exoplanets have been found. Perhaps they should?

Of course, there are other ways for such civilizations to signal us. In A. B. Carolan’s Origins, the ETs are here on Earth, and they are us. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, I considered the possibility of interstellar probes launched by such a civilization looking for a new home. In other words, the ETs came to us, an unusual “first contact.” In Sing a Zamba Galactica, #2 in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (see below), I assumed that we’d discover the ETs by traveling “out there.” (In that novel, the “first contact” was with friendly ETs. I also included the ubiquitous alien invasion later in the book!)

Sci-fi writers often avoid Fermi’s question completely. In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, found in the Foundation series, there are no ETs! There’s a lot of good sci-fi without ETs (rarely of the variety known as “space opera,” e.g. Star Wars, that invariably contains ETs), so one can’t really criticize Asimov.

I guess we won’t have an answer to Fermi’s question for a long time, if ever. Frank Drake tried to answer it with the tools he had available. As exciting as recent developments have been (exoplanets and black holes, Space-X and new NASA programs, and instrumentation advances like the Hubble and Webb telescopes), we’re probably centuries away from sending expeditions to even the nearest planetary systems. (Such expeditions were limited to nearby Sol-type stars in the first two novels of the “Chaos Chronicles,” where “nearby” still means tens of light-years!)

Of course, it’s always possible that ETs will visit us as they do in More than Human or Origins. In the first novel, we’re descended from them in a sense. In the second, they came without knowing Earth already had tenants. Then the answer to Fermi’s question is simple: They’re here!

In any case, his question could be unanswerable except via sci-fi. And whether they ever come to Earth or we go out there, only the ruins of civilizations might be found because they’ve destroyed themselves. Right now, it seems we might be headed that way ourselves!

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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.

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

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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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.

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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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.

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!

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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. (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!