There’s a long tradition of fiction writers battling autocracy. From the seminal (and alarmingly prescient!) 1984 and Animal Farm of George Orwell (still obviously current, considering the despotic Pig Putin’s invasion of Ukraine!) and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to C. M. Kornbluth’s Not This August (his famous novella “The Marching Morons” does a good job of describing Trump’s followers or anti-vaxxers—those two groups overlap, of course), authors have been outspoken about the dangers of autocracy. Although my skills aren’t anywhere near the caliber of these literary giants, I’m doing my part.

While many of my novels have an anti-autocracy theme and are therefore “evergreen” books (novels as current as the day I finished their manuscripts), let me focus on a few recent ones. Three books from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Death on the Danube, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and Leonardo and the Quantum Code, focused on Putin and his psychotic dream of recreating the Soviet Union. Yes, autocracy vs. democracy is only one theme here, but it’s an important one, and the autocrats are shown to be thugs who are willing to kill innocent people.

My holiday gift to readers this last year was Defanging the Red Dragon, #6 in that series, and it went after Xi’s China. The Chinese and Russian governments try to censor such tales because they speak truth to autocratic power, so I couldn’t let Xi’s China escape my literary wrath. I had to go after them as well. Their attacks on democracy are more clever than crazy Putin and friends’. For example, the financial success of a Hollywood movie all too often now requires success in China, and this leads weak Hollywood moguls to dilute freedom of speech and expression, a core democratic value, and thus aid and abet Xi’s censors. As one pundit put it on CNN a while ago, “You can’t kill a Chinese spy anymore!” In the recent James Bond movie, for example, they edited out an entire scene where that occurred. That didn’t stop me from writing one in Defanging. Xi can go to hell!

So can Putin! I took a vacation from bashing autocracy in Intolerance, an important theme if only because autocrats know how to encourage that as a way of turning citizens in democratic societies against each other. But in The Klimt Connection, I’m back to blasting autocracy in general, and Putin in particular, spurred on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What makes fiction such a useful tool in battling autocracy, whether it takes the form of a sci-fi, mystery or thriller novel? The answer is simple: It’s a clear case of the good guys waging war against the bad. Autocracy has been much more prevalent in world history, so the good guys always have uphill battles. That makes for a good story, albeit sometimes depressing, a meaningful one that can hopefully spur readers on to join the battle.

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Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

I reacted badly to an article in the February 21st NY Times, “Writers Wonder Whether People Want to Curl Up with a Covid Novel.” The reason? The Times wants to label any novel dealing with a pandemic in this manner, which is completely moronic, of course.

Is Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain a Covid novel? What about my own More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and “The Last Humans” series? We can’t ask Michael his opinion, but I can tell you mine: I’ll verbally blast anyone who says my books are Covid novels (as I’m doing now to the editors of the Times!).

Many stories have been written with a pandemic theme. Strain and More than Human are both about ET viruses, but mine turn out to be a lot more benign than Michael’s. In “The Last Humans” series, I consider the plausible scenario where an enemy uses a bioengineered virus as a WMD. Clancy also did that in one of his novels—I can’t remember which one—but his hero stopped that attack whereas mine has the more difficult job of coping with the post-apocalyptic aftermath. (Of course, in the real world, we might want to blame Xi’s China of doing that with Covid…or maybe Trump?)

The WMD scenario is actually more plausible than the ET scenario, but both are examples where bioengineered viruses can lead to drastic upheavals and die-offs. It would be another case of tech coming back to might the foolish humans who create it, perhaps well-meaning but not too bright as they ignore their unintended consequences.

I prefer the benign consequences of More than Human to Strain‘s. And I don’t know why I continue to promote “The Last Humans” series. The traditional publisher of the first book in the series (Black Opal Books) really disappointed me, and then the Amazon bots confused both books. The series seems to be doomed whether the Times might call it a Covid book or not.

Right now, I suppose that most readers aren’t in the mood for any fiction involving pandemics. I can understand that. But readers’ complaints about vaccine and masking mandates enacted to protect us against Covid fall on my deaf ears when I think that people would have had ample warning about pandemics if they had only read more pre-pandemic literature.

Sci-fi, mystery, and thriller novels often provide useful warnings about threats humans could face. When we ignore them, there can be real and deadly consequences!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Around the World in 80 Days. (PBS Masterpiece Theater) Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a movie review. I haven’t been to a movie theater for two years. Covid put a hiatus in this traditionalist’s view of date-night being a good movie and dinner out. I’m still cautious and wear a mask (too many idiots out and about!). And most fare on TV and from Hollywood is drivel, so PBS comes to the rescue at times, as in this case.

The movie came in several weekly chapters like a good book, not nearly as long as the Jules Verne original, of course, but longer than the usual Hollywood two-hour schlock if put end to end. It was well done and entertaining. Creating a magnificent audiovisual experience out of Vernes’s marvelous story can’t be easy, but the production has moved any previous attempts to the dark recesses of my old memory cells. The principal actors, the English actor David Tennant as Phineas Fogg, the French actor Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout, and the German actress Leonie Benesch as Abigail Fortescue, were simply marvelous. For the racists out there (I don’t expect many racists read this blog), get your bigotry and hatred sensors turned on: Abigail and Passepartout have many romantic moments. Passepartout often saves the day too, so take that! (You’ll find bios of the cast at the PBS website. I enjoyed reading that Ms. Benesch had trouble keeping up with a running Tennant at times. Poor Fogg took a beating when he couldn’t run fast enough, though.)

By Jove, well done, I dare say! Although it differs from the novel (what movie doesn’t these days?), it’s a better story because it comes from one. This is a great adventure story without much sci-fi. (I suppose some would say it’s more fantasy than sci-fi too.) Jules Verne is often called the progenitor of all modern sci-fi, but that’s more true of Voyage to the Moon and his prescient 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (the Nautilus’s strange mode of locomotion was most certainly a nuclear reactor, don’t you know?) 80 Days is more like those other swashbuckling adventures I used to read as a kid;  novels by H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs are a few more examples.

You must really see this movie, either in streaming video or reruns. And I hope you won’t miss the nuanced next-to-last scene where reference is made to another Jules Verne classic.

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Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).

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

Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump. G. B. Trudeau, author (Universal Uclick). Relatives and friends know that I’m an avid reader and that my reading tastes range far and wide. This little gem was a recent gift. Like Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington, my review of this book is appropriate for both my writer’s blog and my political blog. So here goes!

Mr. Schiff’s book probed more serious matters (emphasis on Trump’s first impeachment) associated with the psychotic sociopath’ (a spot-on diagnosis from twenty+ mental health professionals, including his niece) and wannabe dictator and admirer of Vladimir Putin, Donald J. Trump, aka “The Donald,” Il Duce, and “f&%$ing moron.” The last quote is from ex-SecState Tillerson and provides a nice segue to Trudeau’s lampooning of the idiot who tortured sane people in the US and around the world for four years as POTUS until Mr. Biden pommeled him in the 2020 election. (Yes, it was a pommeling!)

One can learn a lot from reading (or should—Trump never does; he didn’t even read his national security briefings). And Trudeau’s cartoons are often such bold and profound lessons that many right-wing leaning newspapers place them on the editorial page, if they publish them at all. The cartoons speak truth to power and the Goebbels-like schlock the Good Ole Piranhas bombard us with almost every day.

I’ve always been fond of cartoons and comics. I learned to read and write somewhere around three-years-old by trying to design my own comic books. I needed to know what to put in those balloons! (Instead, I go after Trump, Putin, Xi, and all their ilk in words.) I never learned to draw very well—my father was the artist—but I’ve always admired those who can do everything, both draw the characters and fill in the balloons! Garry Trudeau is a genius for doing just that.

In this cartoon collection covering thirty years of the narcissistic conman’s life, I learned that I’d missed some great political satire during my sojourn in Colombia. I could argue that reading Gabo in Spanish might be more edifying—his composite of several Latin American dictators in Autumn of the Patriarch (Otoño del Patriarca) nicely covers Trump and his ilk as well, except that Trump didn’t invade a country like Putin and hasn’t poached an enemy’s head and served it to guests like Gabo’s composite dictator…yet. (He has threatened to walk down NYC’s Fifth Avenue, though, and shoot someone.)

I learned that Trump has been a butthead for a long time, mostly exploiting workers and evicting renters in the tristate area (for his followers, the “marching morons,” as described by C. M. Kornbluth in his famous sci-f novella, the tristate area is Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, those awful “blue states” he and you hate so much). In the process, he blew through $30 million his psycho daddy gave him, had several bankruptcies, and wrote the Art of the Deal (or his ghostwriter did?), as if those obvious failures qualified him as a business genius. (At least Putin, whom Trump greatly admires, earned his money the old-fashioned, autocratic way—by putting in the work to steal a country.)

As a historical document, Trudeau’s collection belongs in every serious university’s political science and business departments’ reference list. My only critique? Garry should branch out and cover Kim, Putin, and Xi. After all, Trump wants to be like them, a president-for-life so he can suppress and oppress all opposition to him and make Trudeau disappear. Let’s not give Il Duce that chance in 2024. (I wonder if Trump is such a moron—or is it just approaching senility?—that he confuses Garry with Justin. No matter. He hates them both.)

Even though we often laugh at the chaos of American democracy (that’s healthier than crying), it’s worth saving it from the destruction that Trump and his cronies want to happen as their march toward fascism continues on.

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Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).

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

While the Biden administration is worried about the traditional publishing behemoth Penguin Random House swallowing up Simon and Schuster in yet another monopolistic merger, questions about mergers might be occurring to self-published aka indie authors regarding the merger of Draft2Digital (D2D) and Smashwords (SW) ebook publishers. The first has a lot of hidden, sneakiness about it; the second is more open and is a non-cash merger, a joining of forces to promote self- and small press published authors and their books who use their aggregating features.

First, let me remind readers what D2D and SW are not: They’re not Amazon! That’s a very important detail. Amazon is just another possible retailer for D2D and SW. (I say that for SW only because, with the merger, they will use them that way, even though up until now they just sell .mobi formatted ebooks that are not available on Amazon…without DRM! I hate DRM, by the way. It’s Bezos channeling Jobs by trying to make their products incompatible with everyone else’s.) Moreover, Amazon does not distribute ebooks to anyone! (They only pretend to be traditional publishers using subsidiaries like Thomas Mercer Amazon is just a huge retailer, a shoddy Walmart on steroids, and only one of many retailers that sells books.)

What D2D and SW both do is distribute to other retailers. They provide self-published authors as well as small publishers an easy path to “go wide,” i.e., follow that tried-and-true retail advice that the more retail outlets a product appears in, the more sales that product will have! Both D2D and SW distribute to affiliated retailers (like B&N, Kobo, and so forth) as well as many well-known library and lending services. They are “aggregators” in the sense that they collect proceeds from the sales at these affiliates and send them to the book’s authors or publishers. Yes, they take their cut, but authors and small publishers would go nuts trying to do all that aggregation. (Their affiliates take a cut too, but nothing like Amazon does!)

There’s bound to be some growing pains with the D2D and SW merger, though. For example, will this affect D2D’s promised rollout of print book production? (It’s currently in beta-testing mode, but it’s been that way for far too long!) Will they offer some help to authors and small publishers with PR and marketing? (No publisher does much of that now.) Editing services? Book cover design?

Let’s wait and see how it all shakes out!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page.)

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” This series is seven novels strong now, and I’m working on the eighth novel, The Klimt Connection. (A short preview is found in book seven.) Novels in the series have different publishing histories. The first two, Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder, were published by Penmore Press. Book three, Death on the Danube, was released by Carrick Publishing. (These first three novels have ebook and print versions.) Novels four and five, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code, were released by Draft2Digital. Novels six and seven, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, are free PDF downloads found on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page, and book eight, The Klimt Connection, will probably be with Draft2Digital/Smashwords! Except for the free PDFs and book eight, you can find all these novels at all reliable online booksellers (that excludes Amazon in many cases). This series is perfect for binge-reading. Please don’t neglect Esther Brookstone, a 21^st century agile and less doddering incarnation of Christie’s Miss Marple. Her obsessions to right wrongs and look out for innocent victims will provide you with many reading adventures.

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

Let’s support the Ukrainian freedom fighters!

There’s a real possibility that Putin’s stormtroopers will overrun Ukraine. Whether that occurs or not, all people of good faith, especially Americans who pretend to be for freedom, despite Trump and his minions’ efforts, to be defenders of the free world, should make a solemn vow to support Ukraine’s freedom fighters. We know Ukrainians can fight. They ousted a Putin puppet, and they’re better prepared now than when Putin took Crimea.

Yes, Ukraine isn’t a NATO country yet, but so what? We must support the battle against Russia. If it comes to supporting resistance against Russian occupiers, though, that should still occur! We can turn Ukraine into another Chechnya for the Russians, only this time making Ukraine Putin’s Afghanistan.

If we don’t stop Putin now, he will move on to realize his dream of reconstituting the Soviet Union. The way Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland rejected the Soviet hegemony in the nineties still eats at Putin. He’s out for revenge, that’s clear, and he’s willing to ruin Mother Russia to get it. Let’s make sure he pays that price.

Sure, worldwide sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs and their finances are good—I proposed that to @POTUS and @SecretaryBlinken in a tweet—but they’re probably not enough. Putin laughs at them, although his inner circle might not. We must also stand up to all attacks on democratic countries and freedom everywhere they occur.

Let’s all take a solemn oath to do just that! We’re at a tipping point in world history not seen since the second world war, where we can either be smart and halt the march of fascism in the world, or we can surrender to it.

Where am I in my publishing career? By now, I’ve tried just about everything that there is to try, so I will state my conclusion at this point: I’ll never feel comfortable again recommending that an author try a traditional publisher and all that entails! While a small press (also called an indie publisher, not to be confused with an indie writer aka self-published author) can give an author some TLC that’s rarely found with one of the Big Five publishing conglomerate’s cadre of publishers, there’s just not enough of that TLC to make traditional publishing attractive compared to self-publishing. Authors have a choice, of course, and I give both options their due in my little course “Writing Fiction” (a free PDF download found on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), but my opinions have evolved along with that little course (now in its ninth revision).

Let’s start with traditional publishing’s agents and acquisition editors. The first are found mostly pandering to the Big Five, i.e. mostly pariahs that work for the big publishers, and they screen manuscripts for them that they’ve determined will sell well in book form. Neither they nor acquisition editors can predict a book’s success, though; many authors have proven that—Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling, E. L. James, and Mark Weir are only some examples of authors overlooked by these pariahs ab initio. A more critical assessment is needed, though: They don’t really favor literary art and look more for immediate profit, which is why readers see too much romance, erotica, and other fluff, political scandal, and pols and celebs’ bios about their escapades flooding the market, burying good storytelling and good non-fiction in a lot of noise.

I’ll admit my experience with these agents and acquisition editors hasn’t been a happy one, although I had no real complaints about the acquisition editors of my two small presses, Black Opal Books (the original acquisition editor!) and Penmore Press. (Emphasis on “small” here; ‘big” is bad.) Both of these companies were initially run by authors (Penmore still is) and had a strong catalog of interesting novels when I first approached them, so they seemed like a good home for my books, traditional publishers that would provide me a place to experiment a bit with traditional publishing.

However, bad things happen to good small presses that authors can’t predict early on. Wanting to have that full publishing experience, though, I first tried Penmore Press. I’d reviewed a book or two from them in my “official reviewing capacity” at Bookpleasures.com—let’s say they were in the mystery/thriller category, so I submitted the manuscript of my mystery/thriller Rembrandt’s Angel to them. From my point of view, that went well enough, and the book got some very nice reviews. I continued with Son of Thunder, also in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series (Penmore actually came up with the name of the series, which has grown on me), but that second novel didn’t go so well. The first editor loved the book, but a second one insisted on making excessive changes to the content in the first few chapters (always critical in a long novel) to the point that it was written in that editor’s style, not Steve Moore’s (that’s always a danger with editors!). The third book, Death on the Danube, was the straw that broke the camel’s back: Penmore told me that they were willing to make the series a trilogy only if I paid the upfront costs! One of the few advantages of going traditional and partially justifying that the publisher take the lion’s share of the royalties (generally 80 to 85 percent!) is that those upfront costs are paid by the publishers (just a good cover can be costly). I said goodbye to Penmore for the third book in the series and later ones (the series is now seven novels strong).

Black Opal Books was even a worse experience. The Last Humans was the first book in a planned post-apocalyptic trilogy. I couldn’t go with Penmore because they didn’t do sci-fi (post-apocalyptic is considered sci-fi), so Black Opal seemed a good substitute. Again I’d reviewed some of their books and they had an extensive catalog. The acquisition editor loved the novel, but again, the second editor, not so much. She pounded me with her rigid adherence to the Chicago Manual of Style, a rigid anachronism no author can afford to buy, a vicious attack on my prose that all but destroyed my voice (actually Penny Castro’s, since the novel is written in first person). And again, despite that editor’s attack, the book was moderately successful, with many good reviews and even a prize from Readers Favorite (a video trailer offer which I used to promote Death on the Danube, the third book in the “Esther Brookstone” series, because I didn’t want to waste that prize promoting a book for Black Opal for reasons I now mention–see the link on my “Home” page).

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you might watch my list of free PDF downloads (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website) for additions and revisions. I don’t know how many of you take advantage of the material listed there, but there are no gimmicks, no obligations, just free gifts for my readers.

In fact, let me emphasize “free”: You pay nothing for each PDF except the few seconds it takes you to make a few clicks. However, if you want to treat these files as open-source software (that’s what they are essentially), you might feel compelled to pay me something. Don’t do it. I’d much rather you donate to your favorite charity. Skip the PACs, pols, and the NRA please, and do something good with your money. Give something to your local community food kitchen, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and so forth (although we often treat human beings worse than other fauna and flora on Earth, the last two are favorites of mine).

So what’s new in the list? Let me first mention two complete novels, a first because before I limited it to short fiction. Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, books six and seven in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, await you. Yes, they are full novels! I hope you enjoy them.

There’s some new short fiction too. With Sleuthing, British-Style, Volume Three, I leave DI Patty and DS Logan, the protagonists from the first two volumes (the first is available wherever quality ebooks are sold while the second is also a free PDF download) to offer you a potpourri of eight novellas, a virtual tour, if you will, of policing throughout the UK (with a hint of the coming visit to Ireland in Intolerance). While some of these stories have been serialized in my blog (see the “Friday Fiction” archive), I collect them here together with a few new ones for your enjoyment.

Finally, and mostly for authors but also for readers curious about this crazy publishing business, I offer Revision 9 of my little course “Writing Fiction,” where I’ve continued to organize my thoughts on writing, preparation, and marketing fiction that I’ve developed since I started to think about “putting my fiction out there” as far back as 2001. Authors might find this material useful and often acerbic and brutally honest.

Of course, there are other free PDF downloads in that list you might have missed. Please peruse it and download at will.

And now a few technical comments: You can read PDFs on most any device. For example, they come to my Kindle as a document that I can read just like any .mobi file. (For some reason, my newest Kindle corrupts some of the files, taking off the “Sample” watermark and adding bold face in random places. Another slap in the face from Amazon? How I hate them! I’ve checked every download with my laptop, and they’re all okay.) I’m sure you can do the same even with your smart phone, but I don’t have one (and never will!), so I can’t test that. (Please let me know if you try that. Yes, people, especially commuters using public transportation, read on their smart phones as they travel to work. Don’t do it by putting your Tesla on autopilot, though!)

For these PDFs, you won’t get fancy covers, if any at all, and you won’t be underlining or have access to a dictionary (if your ereader has those features). I took notes for revising my little course “Writing Fiction” the old-fashioned way, on a legal pad, as I perused Revision 8. (I believe Revision 9 is much improved albeit more brutally honest.)

So…peruse the list and do your downloads!

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Comments are always welcome! (Please follow the rules on my “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Death on the Danube. Take a tour down the Danube with Esther Brookstone and new hubby Bastiann van Coevorden. This novel, Book Three in the series, is a tour de force in many ways, not just for the Danube tour. A strange passenger on their riverboat cruise is murdered, and Interpol agent Bastiann takes charge of the murder investigation. A twenty-first version of Christie’s Death on the Nile, this mystery/thriller has a lot more relation to current events and modern assassins in today’s world than the genre-setting Dame Agatha could ever have imagined. The ebook version is available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and the print version wherever you might find it (Amazon, B&N, or your local bookstore by request).

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

I’ve been lucky enough in my life to see a bit of the world. Some settings from those travels find their way into my stories, of course. For example, our last major trip was a riverboat cruise down the Danube. My novel Death on the Danube, the third book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series (see the ad below), was based on that trip (sans murders!). The novella “Fascist Tango,” found in the third volume of Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, a free PDF download, features places visited during much earlier travel around South America (the first volume is available on Amazon), and what Vladimir Kalinin flying into Bogotá in Soldiers of God was seen by me several times returning from the US to Colombia where I lived for many years.

My knowledge of the EU is second only to the US and South America. I’ve never lived in Europe, although I’ve spent a lot of time there as a conference participant, guest scientist, or tourist. The EU includes the Irish Republic, and we enjoyed a lengthy land tour there (basically the reverse of Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden’s at the beginning of Intolerance). On that tour, I met my collaborator A. B. Carolan at Blarney Castle [wink, wink]; he lives in Donegal and has a cameo in my novel Intolerance, Book Seven in the “Esther Brookstone” series (also a free PDF download).

With Google, Google Earth, along with travel websites, none of that matters much anymore. Authors can stay in the comfort of their homes and travel around the world with their laptops to make their storytelling seem more real. While real travel might help with some settings, virtual travel can provide just as much local color for readers who want to travel along.

Whether from real travels or virtual ones on a laptop, authors have to be careful. For example, suppose the principal character checks into hotel X in city Y. The author must remain neutral about X or, even better, compliment the hotel and its service to protect them legally as well as not upset those readers who have visited X and thought it was a damn good hotel!

With Death on the Danube, I was very careful to have Esther and Bastiann praise their honeymoon cruise on the riverboat, even though Bastiann has to run a murder investigation aboard the ship (don’t expect that on your riverboat tour!). In fact, I could imagine the cruise ship company, Amawaterways, using the novel in some way for advertising the services they offer (they probably don’t, though). That cruise for us was truly entertaining, educational, and interesting, and I hope I conveyed that well in the novel.

Some travelers diss tours. Both our Danube and Irish tours provided me with a lot of information I can still use in future stories. To refresh my memory or to visit places virtually, I can sit in front of my laptop and tour those places again and the rest of the world too. Modern authors never had it so good. Of course, whether real or virtual, your settings have to seem real. That’s true of all fiction.

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Comments are always welcome! (Please follow the rules listed on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Death on the Danube. Take a tour down the Danube with Esther Brookstone and new hubby Bastiann van Coevorden. This novel, Book Three in the series, is a tour de force in many ways, not just for the Danube tour. A strange passenger on their riverboat cruise is murdered, and Interpol agent Bastiann takes charge of the murder investigation. A twenty-first version of Christie’s Death on the Nile, this mystery/thriller has a lot more relation to current events and modern assassins in today’s world than the genre-setting Dame Agatha could ever have imagined. The ebook version is available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and the print version wherever you might find it (Amazon, B&N, or your local bookstore by request).

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

I laugh when I see PR and marketing gurus and other pundits’ blather and twaddle about the need for copyrights and registering them. I suppose one could argue that copyrights are the good face to the bad one of book piracy. Some authors register; I don’t The moment I slap a copyright statement on something I write, it’s supposed to be protected. Bollocks! There’s nothing like an unenforceable law to cause me mirth!

For example, on all my free PDF downloads, there’s a copyright statement. The most recent novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Intolerance, has a 2022 copyright. But knowing human beings like I do, I go ahead and state that the person who downloads one of those free PDFs can make copies and circulate it to family and friends as long as they “respect the copyright.” What the hell does that mean?

First, it means that I can’t do much if you don’t, whatever it means. You could sell multiple copies of that free PDF and make some extra spending money. Or you could use some software package to strip my name off the document and replace it with your own (good luck trying to convince someone you write like me!). Or you could take excerpts and claim they’re your own stories (my novels have flashbacks or back stories that could lend themselves to that scam as short fiction).

The first thing is key, though. A copyright doesn’t give any author any protection for their intellectual property! Stealing a book is like stealing a car: It’s against the law, folks, but it doesn’t guarantee that the victim can recover their car!

Some US authors register their work with the Library of Congress as well. I suppose there’s something similar in other countries. For many self-published authors (I’m a mongrel with both self- and traditionally published works), the fee for that costs more than the royalties they’re likely to receive for a book (fact of life!). How do you send an ebook to the Library of Congress anyway? It’s an archaic institution focused on print books! Most of my books have no print version.

For traditionally published authors, the publisher will sometimes perform that registration, but that’s another upfront cost small presses are now often passing on to their authors in their desperation to survive as an endangered species in a world of huge, predatory publishing conglomerates. I suppose the latter might pursue legal action if one of their old formulaic mares or stallions in their stables is pirated, but they won’t spend the money for a lawyer to protect lesser known authors (who often write better books!), especially newbies’ books that aren’t selling well (it’s all about that greedy bottom line, not art…and lawyers are expensive!).

No, that whole copyright thing is a joke in the publishing industry, just as it is for most intellectual property. Authors, publishers, and governments won’t prosecute violations in general. So you can find just about any book you want online for free. Those who do so are only punished by their guilty conscience, if they have one!

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“Clones and Mutants.” This series starts with my very first novel, Full Medical, as it paints a dystopian picture of what our healthcare system can become as greedy people get rich off innocent people’s health problems and unscrupulous politicians try to preserve their power. The clones here are also abused innocents. In Evil Agenda, the villain behind the conspiracy of the first novel, tries to give himself even more power; and, in No Amber Waves of Grain, he almost redeems himself by helping to thwart an even more insidious villain. These are “evergreen books,” as current and troubling sci-fi thrillers as the day I wrote them, and all three books in this trilogy are available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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