Let’s consider The Last Humans: A New Dawn, #2 in “The Last Humans” series. Or #1 in that same series, or #3 in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series. All the openings tell readers there are some thrills to be had. I then go on using back stories and flashbacks to continue the plots, often alternating between these story elements and dialogue and character development that normally will entertain at least a few readers.

This isn’t “traditional storytelling,” by which I mean that ancient oral tradition associated with members of the tribe gathered around campfires in prehistoric times listening to a storyteller. As much as modern storytelling owes to this oral tradition, the written word, especially in more recent fiction after Gutenberg cast into print form, is much more complex. I’m amused when reviewers complain about my novels’ complexity and ask myself, “Are they stuck in medieval times?” Of course, they might think simplicity is what’s needed—many readers love cozy mysteries and bodice rippers, for example, that are just parodies of the human condition with cardboard cutouts for characters. I generally ignore reviews of my books, though, except for promo purposes (excerpts from them). Reviewers are entitled to their opinions, of course, but reading preferences are so subjective that I know I can’t please everyone.

The opening is sometimes called “the hook,” a bit insulting to readers because they’re being compared to fish. Hmm, are books just bait then? All three novels I mentioned above open with action. Other novels might open with psychological stress, using the internal dialogue of a main character. The purpose is the same: Get the reader interested. That’s necessary at the beginning of the novel-writing marathon.

Even with psychological stress, back story (e.g. why the character is stressed) or flashbacks (a quick remembering of the stressful situation) can be used with character description to construct a solid opening. Authors must grab the readers’ attentions, but they also must also explain why it’s important to do so.

I probably do better when opening with action than I do describing a person’s stress. That might seem to be a contradiction to the complexity I desire, but personal thoughts might lead to meandering, which is deadly at the start of the literary marathon. In Celtic Chronicles, I start with Bastiann’s thoughts about Esther’s plans for them to volunteer to help at an archaeological dig. Banter accompanied those thoughts, though, something akin to action, and I kept things simple.

In other words, an author can combine the two, mixing thoughts with action. The fundamental goal is to begin with something that’s happening. The why can come later when the reader needs a breather, unless it’s not that complicated. Critics often say a story is like a rollercoaster ride (an overused description to the extent that it has become a cliché), but that’s what an author wants to achieve—the ups and downs of his marathon race (more like the Boston course than the NYC one) that the readers can run with him. At the beginning of the race, though, the author might want to put the reader at the top of the rollercoaster so the downhill thrill comes right away. Future uphill climbs are then akin to back story and flashbacks.

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Celtic Chronicles. This ninth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Esther and Bastiann volunteer to work at an archaeological dig near their modest castle outside Edinburgh. A student also working there is murdered. Police Scotland finds a Russian oligarch’s number on the lad’s call-list. That Russian is on his yacht anchored off the Scottish coast. As the investigation continues, everything becomes more complex, other characters come into play, and the intrigue and suspense increase. Published 5/23 by Draft2Digital, this ebook will soon be available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon). Note that #6 and #7 are free PDF downloads (see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for those novels and other free fiction).

On pubprogressive.com tomorrow: “Why we might need a civil war…”.

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

Using the first person in storytelling has its pros and cons like most writing techniques. Using it means both readers and the author can become a character. A reader might be uncomfortable “being” a criminal, of course, but what a way to get inside a criminal’s mind…if it’s done well. Same goes for good and noble characters, of course.

First person is not point of view (POV). POV is about who’s the center of attention in a section or chapter; the reader is observing what’s going on using one character’s senses and mind. First person is already in one character’s POV, hence the confusion. Authors generally tell a story in  one third-person POV that might shift from section to section or chapter to chapter, all in the past tense. But both first-person past and present and third-person present are common as well. (Complicated? Not really. Read on.)

First-person storytelling works well when one character has a lot of internal dialogue, i.e., narrative that represents personal reflections on what has happened, is happening, or will happen. Using it exclusively means you can’t get into another character’s head, but that can help an author to not give anything away, like a detective considering the significance of clues or evidence and others’ mannerisms and actions. (That can also be done in third person, of course.) Sometimes this gets clumsy, though. I wrote the first novel in “The Last Humans” series all in first person—the story is about how Penny Castro copes with being one of the few survivors of a worldwide pandemic—but in the second novel, I had to alternate between first person (Penny) and third person (other characters). I’d had practice doing that, though, because the “Chen & Castilblanco” novels, all seven of them, were written in that style.

I first saw alternating first- and third-person storytelling in Patterson’s early Alex Cross novels. (I don’t know if he kept that up. I stopped reading Patterson. Like many old mares in stallions in the Big Five’s stables, Patterson soon became boring and formulaic.) Many readers don’t like that mix. I can’t understand that. It’s no different than changing third-person POV from section to section or chapter to chapter. Maybe the negative opinions stem from the fact that the third-person POV is more common? (I must have really upset readers of The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse where I alternate between first-person Gail and first-person Jeff, the two main characters.)

First-person storytelling isn’t as new as some writers or readers might think either. H. Rider Haggard used it in King Solomon’s Mines, for example (published in 1885!), writing as if he were Alan Quatermain. That novel is a saga, and I’d venture to state that first-person storytelling is perfect for sagas. (“The Last Humans” and Time Traveler’s Guide novels can be considered sagas, even though the third book is a bit tongue-in-cheek.) Melville used first-person storytelling in Moby Dick.(1851). Would that novel be the same without that famous opening first line, “They call me Ishmael”?

I just can’t envision Ugh the Caveman sitting by a flickering fire and telling his stories to his comrades in anything but first person in order to make those comrades feel like participants in the story. That was how storytelling originated. Modern writing techniques have come a long way, and writers can experiment with them. I’m not sure I’m ready for second-person present-tense storytelling, though. I’d like to read your opinions, reader or writer.

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$0.99 cent sale! It’s the last week! The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” are now both on sale at Smashwords. The first series contains the mystery/thriller novels Muddlin’ Through (QS68B), Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (SH53M), and Goin’ the Extra Mile (VX88P). The second contains Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! (all three novels are contained in an ebook bundle, GF69F). All four ebooks are only $0.99 each. (If the promo codes don’t appear, you see them here and can use them to get the sale price.) Enjoy!

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

It’s bad enough that celebs produce more hyped and ludicrous books than most other authors (the books are often written by ghostwriters, of course), but they also freely advertise each others’ books along with a lot of other formulaic and fluffy fiction from the Big Five publishing conglomerates. First there was Oprah’s Book Club, then CNN’s and other talk shows’ hosts pimping their guests’ Big Five books (does Jake Tapper read all those books he prattles on about?), and now Charlie Gibson has dusted off the mothballs to create a book-club podcast with his daughter. I doubt any of the mentioned celebs read ten per cent of the books they pimp, assigning that reading to staff to get a synopsis (although old Charlie might make his daughter take a peek—what’s her name again?).

Most celebs can’t write (hence the boon for ghostwriters), and it’s doubtful they can read when one listens to their zero-content reviews. And you have to wonder if the Big Five gives them a cut of the royalties if their clubs discuss a Big Five book. The NYC publishing industry is an incestuous group at best, from the Authors Guild to the NY Times “critics” and the huge Big Five conglomerates. Greed and power beat the crap out of quality and creativity.

Of course, you’ll never see any self-published books or authors discussed by these celebs’ book clubs! You won’t even see small press publications. And you’ll only hear “critiques” like “This book is taking the reading world by storm” or “Bookstores can’t keep this book on the shelves” because the celebs really can’t say anything more intelligent and only serve as PR and marketing services for the Big Five.

None of these celebs’ “opinions” should impress any serious reader. 9In general, celebs don’t impress me, period! That Johnny Depp lawsuit is a farce. C’mon! Both plaintiff and accused are actors. Why would anyone expect actors to tell the truth on the stand? They’re acting!) The only Big Five books I read now are non-fiction tomes that people give me. I won’t pay Big Five prices, especially for fiction that’s drivel and not interesting nor entertaining. That’s more because I’m an avid and discerning reader who looks for quality. (For that reason, I pay no attention to Amazon’s book recommendations either! The Bezos bots’ recommendations are worse than the celebs.) I also react negatively to anyone who tells me “You really must read this book!” Especially if that person read the book because it was recommended by a celeb!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, you comment will go into the spam folder.)

$0.99 cent sale! It’s the last week! The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” are now both on sale at Smashwords. The first series contains the mystery/thriller novels Muddlin’ Through (QS68B), Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (SH53M), and Goin’ the Extra Mile (VX88P). The second contains Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! (all three novels are contained in an ebook bundle, GF69F). All four ebooks are only $0.99 each. (If the promo codes don’t appear, you see them here and can use them to get the sale price.) Enjoy!

Tomorrow on PubProgressive.com. “The 2022 Midteerms.”

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

I’m probably considered an outlier in that wide statistical distribution of author types, and for many reasons. But an important one is that I don’t have to make a living from my writing, so I can just enjoy it and be satisfied that a few readers will also be entertained by the stories I produce. It annoys me to no end, however, that I never can know how many readers I actually have. There are delays in reporting those numbers because I go wide; multiple retail sites mean more exposure for my books, but these sites are slow to report sales to my traditional publishers and to my book aggregators Draft2Digital and Smashwords. But I will never know how many of my books have been pirated!

I can look at this website’s stats and see how many visitors I have, eventually I might learn how many books people legally purchase (I’d never trust Amazon’s numbers, of course), and I know how many copies I’ve sent to friends and others for promo purposes. But I can never know the amount of royalties lost to book pirates.

Book piracy is frustrating. It’s one reason I decided to give away Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, #6 and #7 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Publishing a book does not solve the piracy problem. If anything, it exacerbates it. Ebooks are just computer software. People buy pirated copies of the latter all the time, no matter the security. Ebooks are worse, though, because they have no security. Amazon’s DRM is a joke and just an inconvenience for readers who want to share books with other members of the family (which I’m OK with because that’s done with paper versions all the time). Smashwords’s Mark Coker just pretends book piracy doesn’t exist. I don’t know about Draft2Digital, but their recent merger with Smashwords will probably encourage them to ignore book pirates as well.

How do the Big Five publishing conglomerates handle this problem? Their tactic is to encourage the purchase of expensive print versions by making their ebooks almost as expensive, but that’s a stupid policy. An expensive ebook is more expensive software that can be stolen and sold for more profit by the pirates. And pirating print versions, while rarer now, still exist. Maybe the Big Five have lawyers on retainer ready to pounce on major pirating enterprises? That’s a vicious circle, though, because that just makes their formulaic and fluffy fiction books more expensive.

I’ve never seen any author’s organization (the Authors Guild only represents the interest of the Big Five and the old mares and stallions in their stables but has no antipiracy efforts) or government legal task force worry about book piracy. Maybe they should declare it a felony? And maybe major pirates in other countries should be pursued by the FBI and Interpol, especially in those countries like China, India, and Russia where piracy is rampant? I suppose I’ll be dead before that ever occurs…or books will no longer exist as frivolous streaming video and Hollywood blockbusters kill all the worthwhile entertainment found in books.

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$0.99 cent sale! The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” are now both on sale at Smashwords. The first series contains the mystery/thriller novels Muddlin’ Through (QS68B), Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (SH53M), and Goin’ the Extra Mile (VX88P). The second contains Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! (all three novels are contained in an ebook bundle, GF69F). All four ebooks are only $0.99 each. (If the promo codes don’t appear, you see them here and can use them to get the sale price.) Enjoy!

At PubProgressive.com yesterday: “Five Old Men Taking Away Rights!”

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

While I’ve never been to many places you’ll travel to in my novels—the English woman Esther Broookstone travels to Turkey in Son of Thunder, for example—I’ve avoided autocratic states like the plague (China makes a habit of producing real ones). Although I speak some Russian, I never had any desire to visit the USSR (when that language was most fresh in my mind—along with Esther, East Berlin was as far as I got), and Putin’s paradise always seemed less attractive than the USSR. From Mao to Xi, I had much less desire to visit Communist China because the problem of distance, language, and opportunity were added to the above.

If you’ve read enough of my novels, though, you’ll know that some of them take place in China. Mary Jo Melendez goes there in Goin’ the Extra Mile (nice segue, “goes” to “goin,” right?), followed by the MECHs (“mechanically enhanced cybernetic humans”), who try to return the favor of saving her. (That novel, along with the first two in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series, are now on sale now at Smashwords for $0.99—in the first one, Muddlin’ Through, an extreme travel story, she also visits both Russia and Ukraine as she and the MECHs flee Moscow and arrive in Poland). My search for background material while writing Goin’ went beyond my usual internet trawling (which often includes travel websites and Google Maps). Two other novels helped me in that search.

The most important book was The First Excellence by Donna Carrick. Another was Ludlum’s third Bourne novel (which had nothing to do with the third Matt Damon movie except for the title). Both novels, but especially the first, gave me a peek inside China that few Westerners can have, even if they take a state-organized tour to ooh and aah about the Great Wall. (This peek inside is probably dated considering when the books were published, but China has only become worse under Xi, even without considering Covid.)

You might not care about my searches to provide realism for my settings, but hopefully this post helps explain why I do this: I believe that readers can enjoy their travels to places like China, England, Korea, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine when reading a novel. Other authors and I are those readers’ travel guides. Other readers, perhaps you, and most certainly I can enjoy trips around the world and to the stars without ever leaving our comfy armchairs, and we all, readers and authors alike, find more variety and get more enjoyment than any streaming video or other Hollywood drama can provide.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, you comment will go into the spam folder.)

$0.99 cent sale! The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” are now both on sale at Smashwords. The first series contains the mystery/thriller novels Muddlin’ Through (QS68B), Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (SH53M), and Goin’ the Extra Mile (VX88P). The second contains Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! (all three novels are contained in an ebook bundle, GF69F). All four ebooks are only $0.99 each. (If the promo codes don’t appear, you see them here and can use them to get the sale price.) Enjoy!

At PubProgressive.com tomorrow: “Five Old Men Taking Away Rights!”

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

Compared to most other animal species, human beings have long lives, although the verdict is still out whether elephants and whales can compete with us (studying them in captivity can bias things one way or the other). But aging and death is the bane of all creatures, great and small, both going hand in hand with evolution because Mother Nature doesn’t depend on species’ dying or the old and infirm weaned out in predator-prey systems or violence and conflict. It’s not surprising that aging is a theme in much of literature, sci-fi in particular, as well as its opposite, longevity.

Modern science has extended lives (artificially perhaps?) to the point where people often live longer than Mother Nature ever intended. In medieval times, lifespans were more like forty years, not seventy or eighty, and cancer wasn’t even in the medical taxonomy because people wrote it off as “death by natural causes.” In brief, we were probably “designed” by evolution (to pacify those “intelligent design” idiots) to have shorter lifespans, but modern medicine has pushed the limits.

So sci-fi often asks the obvious question: Can our lifespans be extended even further?

This question must be asked in some sci-fi stories simply because the distances between stars, even between the planets in our own solar system, are so great. Brian Aldiss and others answered that question with “generation ships” that just took our earthly lifespan limitations and put them onboard these long-haul starships, an obvious cop-out. A similar alternative is to employ long-term hibernation techniques, yet to be discovered. A more reasonable variation (because the science is already there) considered by James Hogan and others had these same long-haul ships run by androids taking care of frozen ova, sperm, and embryos until the end of the journey (an improvement to be sure because that requires less space for human beings and allows more room for supplies and equipment)—the last two options are also cop-outs because the humans at the end of the journey still have the same lifespan limitations.

Of course, FTL is another literary alternative, from Isaac Asimov’s “jumps” to Star Trek‘s warp drives. The idea always comes down to avoiding those vast distances in some mathematical and physical manner (wild tech bordering on the impossible even if wormholes really exist). All the FTL variations allow sci-fi authors to get beyond the aging and distance limitations and on with their stories, effectively minimizing the actual journeys.

So…we have two extremes: For Aldiss and Hogan, we might say that the journey is the story, or an important part of it; for Asimov and others, the story is still planet bound. Of course, sci-fi stories don’t necessarily fit on the linear spectrum running between the two extremes. Hugh Howey’s Wool, for example, takes place on a future Earth! (As do many dystopian and post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories. Howey certainly wasn’t the first!)

Looking over my own sci-fi oeuvre, I can state that I’ve covered that entire spectrum, though, and more. “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” for example, goes from Aldiss to Asimov. “The Last Humans” novels take place on Earth, as do the novels in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.” The first novel in the last series, though, focuses on another solution to aging in a sense, and that solution all starts with the arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin.

Ordered by publication dates, Vladimir first appears in The Midas Bomb, the first novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series; and he works his way into more of those novels, the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (a transition novel) and “The Phantom Harvester,” the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” and Soldiers of God (also a transition novel, to the “Chaos Chronicles:). He’s my most long-lived character, and the reason for that is his perfection and use of cloning. (That only becomes fully apparent in Full Medical, my very first novel). I can only hint at his strategy as I finish the “Esther Brookstone” series that takes place decades earlier. Of course, he’s such a complex character that his long life is less about that strategy than what he does with longevity. That strategy, though, is a lot more medically possible than the ones previously mentioned.  “The Chaos Chronicles” continues that extended “future history” timeline, by the way, but apparently human beings at that time weren’t willing to use cloning. The third novel in that series does revisit the concept, though, as part of a madman’s dream of having identical soldiers with ESP powers!

And that is the fundamental question, isn’t it? How ethical is it to want to live forever? So far in real life, not sci-fi, we don’t have to answer that question, although that need might be right around the corner!

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A Time Traveler’s Guide Through the Multiverse. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along.

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

Or maybe not? A new movie considers “Everything, Everywhere, All the Time” (that’s the title!), and the article “Workings of the Multiverse (Latest Version)” by Dennis Overbye in the “Science Times” section of the NY Times (Tuesday, April 26) is essentially a movie review. I might be wrong, but that movie sounds like my sci-fi rom-com A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse.

My novel began as a just-for-fun short story I wrote (that essentially became the first two chapters of the novel, if memory serves), but both hark back to my academic career. (For that reason, I sent a copy of the novel to the fellow I sold an A/C unit to years ago when we were both grad students—he’s now chancellor at an important university. I hope he had fun reading the novel and remembering our shared experiences in a quantum mechanics class!)

Note that both that Times reporter and I used the term “multiverse,” not “metaverse.” Lord knows why Zuckerberg chose the latter as his new trademark. “Meta” is short for the latter that conjures up metaphysics, ESP, and all that, while “multiverse” appropriately conjures up “The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics,” a consistent interpretation of the foundations of the theory created by Hugh Everett III about the same time Richard Feynman invented quantum electrodynamics (both were students of John Wheeler at Princeton). (If it conjures up Dr. Strange’s new movie, you’re too much in the Marvel Universe, which is pure fantasy!)

One of my motivations for my short story and novel was to avoid the paradoxes of time travel (that might be a motivation for the reviewed movie as well?). My two time travelers jump from universe to universe within the multiverse, but some universes have events similar to our own past while others have ones that could be a peek into our own future.

And why is the novel a rom-com? The “com” part is easy: The story doesn’t take itself too seriously (a lot more serious than Dr. Strange’s, though), puts the principal characters in humorous albeit dangerous situations, and pokes fun at our past, present, and possible futures. The “rom”? None of that schmaltzy crap like in The Time Traveler’s Wife! There’s romance brewing between the two protagonists, although it’s a bit bawdy at times (a la Benny Hill, if you’re not too young to remember that British import, i.e. funny and bawdy, with some pokes at spy thrillers because protagonist Gail is not only a genius but also a female James Bond). Sci-fi and be both romantic and comedic, although my more serious works usually don’t emphasize either one. (You can think of the novel as a sci-fi version of Skinny Dipping.)

I experimented with the novel more than the short story. I wanted to see if I could carry tongue-in-cheek humor throughout the run of the novelistic marathon. I also wanted to give the two main characters equal parts—Gail, the sexy scientist, and Jeff, her more serious Black techie. (Of course, that latter is an experiment itself. Most literature, even comedy, is misogynistic, so I purposely reversed the roles!) To help accomplish that, I alternate between first-person Gail and first-person Jeff. (That might be as confusing as those jumps between universes, I suppose, but, in the spirit of Gail’s “time machine,” the novel was a literary experiment.)

I had a lot of fun writing the novel. I hope you have as much fun reading it. (I don’t know about the movie.)

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A Time Traveler’s Guide Through the Multiverse. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along.

At PubProgressive.com tomorrow: “Do we trust Elon Musk?”

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

[Note from Steve: You can consider this article a follow-up to my 4/22 post. Like my novels, the two articles can be read independently!]

Thank God for books! Even before Covid, I was watching less and less TV. Frankly, it sucks now! Except for PBS and few news programs on CNN (OK, ABC News offers some entertainment value as I count how many times David Muir says “of course”), there’s not much network TV has to offer. Cable is worse and has more ads than the traditional networks, and ads are soon coming to streaming video (Netflix saw its stock plummet after announcing that, and Disney+ soon will too if De Santis doesn’t kill the company first—how’s that lawsuit against that Florida fascist coming along?).

I’ve stopped watching sitcoms completely except for Bob [Hearts] Abishola. At least that one’s funny sometimes; all the others are forgettable drivel or just old. (You can still watch reruns of Mash, All in the Family, and Two and a Half Men. Those episodes are still funny, but really? How many times can you repeat them?)

Sitcoms are still better than game shows or contests. Although classics like Jeopardy and Wheel might have some medical benefit by keeping contestants and elderly people’s minds sharp, none of the first’s aging viewers could ever have the reflexes needed; in fact, most normal people don’t spend their lives remembering trivia that the show’s production team dredges up. (As an author, I often do have to dredge up some historical trivia for my stories, but Google is my friend…sometimes.) And the elderly would be better off doing crossword puzzles instead of watching Wheel. Other game shows are just gimmicky and stupid. Contests have also become drivel, with The Masked Singer probably the worst I’ve ever seen, recently stooping so low to have Giuliani as a contestant. I also would have walked off the stage in disgust along with Dr. Ken but that’s Fox for you, the channel I’ve always boycotted ever since they cancelled that show about time travel and dinosaurs!

In general, dramas have been the most damaged by ads and new and incompetent screenwriters, though, maybe more so than Fox. I’ll admit that an hour of a dramatic episode isn’t enough to develop a good plot, especially when you consider that time’s reduced to forty minutes or less when you account for tine spent on those inane ads. And a series might start out OK—for example, FBI looked promising—but then the new crop of screenwriters quickly run out of ideas and become formulaic (like Big Five authors!)—the plots become unoriginal, trivial, cliched, and irrelevant; and the characters become two-dimensional caricatures of real human beings, just icons and avatars of banality. The directors (do they deserve that name?) often try to solve this problem with “crossover episodes” (three FBI episodes in a row is a bit too much torture, though), a “solution” that turns a drama into a soap opera.

Of course (David Muir, are you smiling?), this is all just a trickle-down effect from Hollywood movies to TV. They’re all embracing the incompetent screenwriting from “blockbuster movies” (that usually means they’re bombs, like Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story) to rom-coms (“rom” all too often translates to unrealistic erotica or even porn, and “com” becomes bawdy behavior and bodily humor which appeals to no one who’s even half sane).

I’ll admit that Hollywood directors and producers, their screenwriters, and their actors are probably just trying to meet public demand, which summarizes a lot of negative things about the viewing public and the flaws of modern society. Huxley was wrong about soma in Brave New World: The public’s drug is TV. (Modern viewers probably don’t even know who Huxley was or why his book is important.) Of course (get out of here, David Muir), they might be watching TV drunk and stoned out of their minds, so it probably doesn’t matter much what they watch as long as it keeps them awake enough for the next drink or the hit.

Read a good book lately? Congratulations! I have too. Lots in fact. (That damned Amazon keeps count on my Kindle…maybe revenge for boycotting them when publishing my books?) Keep reading, my friends. It’s a lot better than what you’ll find on TV!

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Have I convinced you? Are you ready for some binge-reading? People often binge-watch an entire season of sit-coms or dramas. Ugh! It’s much more entertaining to binge-read the entire “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series of novels. Follow Esther’s many dangerous adventures, often driven by her desire to find justice for innocent victims and the exploited, obsessions often putting herself and her Dutchman, Bastiann van Coevorden, in peril. The two are twenty-first century versions of Christie’s Marple and Poirot, with Esther a bit more active and agile than the former and Bastiann just as cerebral but less pretentious than the latter. In Rembrandt’s Angel, Esther pursues a painting stolen by the Nazis in World War II; in Son of Thunder, she’s in a race to find the tomb of St. John the Divine; in Death on the Danube, she helps Bastiann run a murder investigation on their honeymoon cruise; in Palettes, Patriots, and Pillocks, she defends an American artist; in Leonardo and the Quantum Code, she struggles to protect an old friend whose code for quantum computers is pursued by three major powers; Defanging the Red Dragon is about China’s desire to steal software and hardware upgrades for nuclear subs; Intolerance begins a fight against right-wing terrorists whose mission is to purge migrants and refugees from Britain; and The Klimt Connection continues that battle against extremists after the couple’s flat is bombed. To binge-read this exciting series, you’ll have to do a bit of sleuthing of your own: The ebook versions are available wherever quality ebooks are solid (the above link takes you to them on B&N), but Dragon and Intolerance are only available in PDF format as free downloads on this website. The first three novels have print versions (seen in the illustration) brought to you by Penmore Press and Carrick Publishing. Numbers four, five, and eight are published by Draft2Digital and not available on Amazon. Enjoy!

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

“Inspector Ravenscroft” Series. Kerry Tombs, author (10 novels from Joffe Books). Many of my readers know that my “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels (see below)  have progressively become more in the British style as the series progresses. Maybe not so well known are my short fiction collections of tales written in the British style. (There are four: The first three are titled Sleuthing, British-Style and the fourth is simply titled The Detectives. See the “Books & Short Stories” web page.) I’ve binge-read entire series of British-style mystery novels as well and have become quite the fan.

Consider all that an homage to Agatha Christie whose seminal novels in the genre entertained me for many hours as a young reader, which led me to wonder why she never put her two famous sleuths, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, together in a novel. (I rectified that. Esther Brookstone is a twenty-first century and more agile version of Miss Marple while paramour and later husband, Bastiann van Coevorden, looks like David Suchet in his role of Poirot.)

One thing that makes this Ravenscroft series unique is that the novels are set in nineteenth century England, in contrast to my twenty-first century Brookstone novels; to be specific, this is the Victorian era. Let me warn you: If you’re expecting romantic nostalgia, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead, you’ll see the British Empire and the world for what it truly was back then—gritty, often deadly, and with crime occurring at all levels of society. Most of the series takes place in England, but one novel has Ravenscroft traveling to New York City, so the reader can see the international aspects of the squalor hiding below the surface of genteel societies of the time.

The main character, Detective Inspector Ravenscroft, comes from Whitechapel in London, an area of poverty and crime, leaving his post at Scotland Yard just before the series of murders committed by Jack the Ripper, to become a gifted and respected crime-solver in Worcestershire.

In his very first case, he partners with Constable Crabb, who accompanies and aids him throughout many cases. He also meets his future wife, Lucy; she even participates in a few cases later in the series.

I hesitantly approached this series initially—I’m not nostalgic for nineteenth-century life. But the series grew on me. I sailed through the novels, the epitome of entertaining and clever mystery “page-turners.” I felt a great sense of loss whin I finished the tenth and last novel, appropriately titled Ravenscroft’s Last Case. I hope that one day I might be able to thank the author for the many hours of reading entertainment provided.

And readers of this blog, please note the name of the publishing house that I also profusely thank: I’d wager that half the British-style mystery novels I’ve binge-read are from that publisher. They’ve been consistently good. (You will find a list of British-style mystery novels, many in a series, that I’ve updated with successive publications of Sleuthing, British-Style. If I offer another collection, I will surely add the Ravenscroft series to that list!)

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

More binge-reading? You have the opportunity to do just that with the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Follow Esther’s many dangerous adventures in these eight novels (three are pictured), often driven by her desire to find justice for innocent victims and the exploited, obsessions often putting herself and her Dutchman, Bastiann van Coevorden, in peril. The two are twenty-first century versions of Christie’s Marple and Poirot, with Esther a bit more active and agile than the former and Bastiann just as cerebral but less pretentious than the latter. In Rembrandt’s Angel, Esther pursues a painting stolen by the Nazis in World War II; in Son of Thunder, she’s in a race to find the tomb of St. John the Divine; in Death on the Danube, she helps Bastiann run a murder investigation on their honeymoon cruise; in Palettes, Patriots, and Pillocks, she defends an American artist; in Leonardo and the Quantum Code, she struggles to protect an old friend whose code for quantum computers is pursued by three major powers; Defanging the Red Dragon is about China’s desire to steal software and hardware upgrades for nuclear subs; Intolerance begins a fight against right-wing terrorists whose mission is to purge migrants and refugees from Britain; and The Klimt Connection continues that battle against extremists after the couple’s flat is bombed. To binge-read this exciting series, you’ll have to do a bit of sleuthing of your own: The ebook versions are available wherever quality ebooks are solid (the link above takes you to them on B&N), but Dragon and Intolerance are only available in PDF format as free downloads on this website. The first three novels (pictured) have print versions brought to you by Penmore Press and Carrick Publishing. Numbers four, five, and eight are published by Draft2Digital and not available on Amazon. Enjoy!

At PubProgressive.com tomorrow: “Hey, Russians, who’s gonna pay for Putin’s War?”

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

Amazon charged third-party vendors $103 billion in fees in 2021, which represents 22% of the company’s revenues. Guess what! Every self-published author and every traditional publisher (even the Big Five) are third-party vendors. This hurts everyone in the publishing business, more self-published authors and small presses than the Big Five publishing conglomerates that just shrug it off as the cost of doing business.

Of course, Amazon has been sticking it to the publishing industry for a long time. They make it out like it’s a “big deal” that they only take 30% royalties (if your ebook is priced at $2.99 or more). That’s the self-published author’s third-party vendors fee. The only thing good about that is the charge is per unit sold, not a one-time fee. (Third-party vendors of toilet plungers and Big Five books probably have an overall fee added to that per unit fee to make up that N%.) Otherwise, authors don’t get many services for that 30% rip-off, nothing worthwhile beyond a place to sell books. Every vendor on Amazon, which includes book vendors, has to pay for ads. (I wonder what percentage of Amazon’s revenue comes from that!)

Amazon is a danger to sellers and consumers for two major reasons: Not only do they make far too much money in third-party fees without offering any useful services, they’re becoming a huge monopoly. The A in USA might become Amazon if present trends continue as far as consumerism goes.

And think about this: Amazon enforces lower prices so that vendors end up paying even more! Consumers might love that, but vendors have to sell more units to stay afloat. This can seem attractive at first for the vendor as well, simply because Amazon’s reach goes far beyond most local distributors, but if the product is a specialized one, i.e. having only a small niche market to begin with, they would be better off creating their own website and selling their products there.

Authors don’t even have access to the meager services Amazon offers them unless they’re exclusive to Amazon. Most would be far better off “going wide,” i.e. avoid Amazon exclusivity and distributing to multiple book retailers and library and lending services (the latter lend books for the price of membership and often have a “to buy” offer if the reader wants to keep the ebook). Multiple retail sites usually imply more product sales in general. This tactic also applies to other product vendors who believe that the Amazon octopus will do so much for their sales that they forget about other retail outlets. Even selling products from a company website can do more than Amazon!

Amazon’s tactic is clear: They’re out to eliminate all competition. It’s a tactic that many big corporations have in this era of multinationals’ excesses and monopolistic attitudes. Giving them free rein to do this cannot be good for the US or the world!

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

New freebies available. If you need lead-ins to The Klimt Connection, #8 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, there are #6 and #7 in the series. There’s also the new collection The Detectives and the newest revision of my little course “Writing Fiction.” All these free PDF downloasds can be found on my “Free Stuff & Contersts” web page. Happy downloading!

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