Baldacci, Connelly, and other old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables ready for the glue factory have teamed up with Authors Guild to sue the distributors/inventors of this “AI program.” Let me begin with two important points here: First, that program is so far from being HAL that I can’t bring myself to call it AI. Second, all it does is surf the internet, a lot faster than a human, to be sure, “reads” all that it encounters (including those authors’ formalistic drivel), and then produces a story in the novelistic style of one of these authors. I can only give a shrug of indifference because I’ve stopped reading their works! (Many more entertaining and original stories are available!)

That said, is the use of ChatGPT legally or morally correct? First, the legal establishment is still slogging through 20^th-century internet and programming evils, trying to catch up and control them. It can’t keep up: Most techies, legal or otherwise, are far more clever than any judge, jury, lawyer, or politician. (We know from recent events that the latter are especially stupid! And most techies are young and dumb enough to realize that ChatGPT can’t compare with HAL! The name AI isn’t an appropriate description of this software.)

Morally, and for authors and publishers, this debate is akin to the one about book piracy, especially ebook piracy. The latter is more common than authors and publishers like to admit, especially for ebooks because they’re just electronic files. That’s all ChatGPT does: Digest electronic files, manipulate their content, and produce ones in a similar style. If a result looks like Baldacci wrote it, is that any different than some book pirate taking one of his ebooks, turning it back into a Word file, stripping off David’s name and other ID markers, and republishing it? There are websites who sell these knockoffs. (I know because they even sell mine…under my own name.) In other words, ChatGPT is just another way to scam authors and publishers, so morality shouldn’t play any different role with ChatGPT than it does for book piracy, which is more rampant.

Of course, these “famous authors” have more to lose, and the Guild represents them and their greedy publishers a lot better than authors who self-publish (they’re never represented!) or those published by small presses (maybe the presses but not their authors?).

This problem with modern law enforcement is more general: Some activity can be banned easily enough (book piracy, including ChatGPT’s, for example), but the rules are irrelevant because the enforcement part is mostly missing. When that activity is ubiquitous, there just aren’t enough cops on the block. Not even Connelly’s cop hero Harry Bosch can do a damn thing about it!

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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” and “Steve Morgan” series of novels, and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” series; i.e., it’s part of my “Future History” series that covers thousands of years of alternate history. DHS Agent Ashley Scott witnesses a murder. Investigating it leads her to a conspiracy with multiple insidious and surprising threads that keep her and readers guessing. Retirees might become extremely worried as well, especially if they’re privy to government secrets! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).

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

The general public often misunderstands the progress of science, at best buying into the standard explanation that a theory is constructed to explain a lot of data and then tested over time as more data accumulates to prove the theory right or wrong, ad infinitum. That’s the so-called “scientific method,” and any child in a basic science course might hear or read that much without really experiencing it or understand what it means.

I suppose that explanation is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t consider the role of imagination, even among scientists—children are brainwashed to believe that advances just flow from cold, experimental facts, if that. The reality is that a theory originates because one or more imaginative people look at data and say, “How do I explain this?”, and then go about imagining an explanation. (Some people polish that up by calling it “creative thinking,” but imagination is the better word!) Same for new data especially if it contradicts aspects of an old theory.

We should perhaps consider sci-fi as an important way to use imagination as an effective tool to stimulate all creative thinking, a filter for determining what might be possible, which is why so many scientists (or ex-scientists who are still thinking like scientists) read (and even write) good sci-fi. Extrapolation of current science, often far into the future, is what makes that tool so effective. (I’m excluding fantasy and space-opera authors here, especially screenwriters, who rarely worry about contradicting even current science: “Full stop, Mr. Sulu!” or “Warp 9, Mr. Sulu!” are examples of their foolishness; ninja-like warriors fighting with light sabers are others; time-travel romances and cannibalistic ETs; etc., etc. In fact, most of what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction” is excluded!) The sci-fi author has to be prepared to win a few and lose a few, though. (Phasers were very much like today’s smart phones; but the transporter is beyond the impossible, albeit necessary for screenwriting purposes in Star Trek.)

I began writing the “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy, my version of Asimov’s Foundation  trilogy, long before my first novel Full Medical was published. (All three novels of that trilogy are bundled now—see below.) Unlike my hero Asimov, who basically swept FTL-travel and ETs under the rug (the first simply is accomplished by “jumps through hyperspace” and is never explained beyond that; the lack of the second is eventually explained in the extended Foundation series as a trick performed by the time-travelers in End of Eternity, but time travel is never explained), as a physicist I worked harder on my extrapolations than Asimov the biochemist wanted to do, at least for the FTL-travel and certainly for ETs. (The ETs might eventually be explained by congressional inquiries actually studying UFO phenomena! One should probably ignore the “mummified ETs” in Peru that excite the Mexican government, and certainly all the tales of abduction and seduction UFO nuts prattle about.)

A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote an obit for an old professor of mine, James Hartle. (No, he wasn’t any more an ET than I am, but he sure was a hell of lot more intelligent.) Some of his work was with Hawking, and that motivated me when writing my sci-fi trilogy to consider what’s now called the multiverse, the idea that our Universe is only one among many quantum states of an infinite collection of universes. (Much later, this was the basis for my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a sci-fi rom-com.) I also knew something about zero-point energy. In standard quantum electrodynamics, that’s what allows a froth of virtual photons to give spin to the electron, for example, and the idea has been extended to the entire zoo of elementary particles, including the mysterious Higgs particle, that are, after all, just quantum states themselves (perhaps of only one particle?). In other words, there could be virtual universes as well.

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Recent attacks on Amazon by the Authors’ Guild and by traditional publishers and their authors are too little too late. Many lament that Amazon controls 60% of book sales, but no one does much about it. In fact, so-called gurus offering advice to authors about self-publishing mislead them as well, recommending Amazon for both self-publishing and PR and marketing. (One recent article I read made no mention of other services that are much better for many reasons, Draft2Digital being the best—see my PDF “Writing Fiction” available as a free download on my “Free Stuff and Contests” web page that considers these options and much more.)

Of course, book sales alone didn’t make the big Bezos bot and all his little evil bots into the monstrous scourge of online merchandising, but that portion of their business has never suffered a boycott from the publishing industry or book authors. Maybe it’s time that it should?

A personal peeve provides me with an excellent example of Amazon’s nefarious influence. I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to British-style mysteries, police procedurals, and other crime stories set in the UK. Unfortunately, the major publishers of these mysteries and crime stories—for example, Joffe and its subsidiaries—use only Amazon to sell their UK ebooks in the US. They’re great bargains! No complaint there. I can often purchase a three-to-six volume bundle of their “evergreen books” (books like most of mine that are as exciting and entertaining as the day the authors finished their manuscripts) for only $0.99! That’s a lot of reading enjoyment for a low price! (Twenty of them for the price of a Big Five paperback, twelve for a Big Five ebook, and great reading compared to most of the schlock the Big Five publishes!) Those UK publishers and Amazon make their money by selling large quantities at a low price, operating more like a supermarket and their suppliers at those stores: Quantity over quality, one might be tempted to say, although the books and their authors’ quality are much better than a supermarket’s fresh produce, at least in the US—better than most Big Five schlock, as I said.

Of course, their authors are the ones who get scammed because Amazon dominates book sales and is only interested in sales figures, and publishers, both self- and traditional publishers, bow to the hideous Bezos beast. Authors are always at the hyenas’ end of the food chain while the lions who publish and sell their books make out like bandits. Very few authors today can make a living writing their stories! But Bezos et al don’t give a rat’s ass because their present greed for immediate profits overpowers any thoughts about future planning when great storytellers throw in the towel.

Readers of this blog might wonder if the Authors’ Guild is like a union that protects authors. They’re not, so stop wondering! The Guild is in the pockets of traditional publishers (that might be better than complete slaves to Amazon, but not much) and their famous authors, those old boring mares and stallions ready for the glue factory in the Big Five publishing conglomerates’ stables, so the Guild does everything it can to put down lesser known authors, especially self-published ones, who have zero representation in the Guild. (My traditionally published novels were sold by two small presses, so I escaped the pain of being lost among the many uncoddled Big Five authors, and small press got me into International Thriller Writers; both the latter and those small presses are much better than any Big Five publisher or their toady, the Guild!)

But the bottom line is the following: As long as Amazon sells books, most authors will suffer the consequences. Readers who want to support authors of small presses and self-published authors should avoid buying books from Amazon. Period. There are many other online book dealers. Let’s stop Amazon!

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“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” This nine-book series goes from traditional publishing (the small company Penmore Press) to self-publishing (using Draft2Digital). Two novels (see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page) are free PDF downloads. The main character is ex-MI6 spy (Cold War era) and Scotland Yard inspector Esther Brooksone. Together with Interpol agent (and later husband) Bastiann van Coevorden, they represent 21^st century versions of Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot (although Bastiann only looks like the actor who often portrayed Poirot). The crimes occur in the UK, Europe, and farther abroad (Son of Thunder takes place mostly in Turkey). Follow the adventures of Esther and Bastiann for many hours of reading enjoyment. (The last few novels are available only where quality ebooks are sold, i.e., not on Amazon!)

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

Yes, this is the title of three short-fiction collections, one published (even appearing on Amazon!) and two free PDF downloads (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” for these and other freebies). Here though, I’m referring to the necessary ingredients a British-style mystery, crime story, or police procedural must have (perhaps seasoned with a bit of dry Irish humor?).

A body. One might not be necessary, but it’s helpful. It might not appear early on either, depending on whether the victim is a toff or common yob (for the terms, see the above collections), i.e., how it appears might have a lot to do with how the author wants you to feel about the victim. Does the victim deserve their fate? If that’s the author’s intention, they’re still expecting the reader to stick with the investigation long enough to find the culprit and send him to the gallows (older mysteries) or life in the king’s boarding houses (AKA gaol in modern Britain).

A new type of crime? This is difficult. Human beings are inventive, and criminals aren’t as dumb as the police would like them to be, but the most types have been around for a while. The new wrinkle might result when a common but lesser crime, not murder, occurs, or from the various classic motivations of greed or jealousy going out of control. Of course, the new wrinkle might also be found in the person committing the crime, not the crime itself.

The investigation. This is where the detective brilliantly (with ups and downs, of course) battles wits with the culprit or culprits. The investigation is most of the plot, of course, and it might have many twists and turns, all to challenge the detective. They might be an amateur, like Miss Marple—mostly in cozies nowadays—or shrewd professionals who are more clever and inventive than any mathematician because they’re practical and understand human failures.

The interrogation. This is the ubiquitous battle of wits that has mostly replaced the classic Christie-style denouement where all the details of the crime come to light. As such, it’s a lot more interesting. The main character can lose the case or cleverly win it. (The first often occurs a few times as the author presents several attempts by the detective to trap the criminal, catching them in some contradiction or lie. It also provides a great opportunity for witnesses, good or bad, to mislead the detective in the wrong direction!)

American mystery writers’ creations often fail in comparison to British-style mysteries simply because they’re more dependent on action scenes than witty confrontations. One exception is an author who’s better known for his sci-fi than for mysteries: Isaac Asimov was a fan of cerebral mysteries and wrote a few. His main character, Earthman Elijah Bailey, is a futuristic Poirot, a master in trapping the criminal with clever interrogations. Asimov created the subgenre of sci-fi mystery, and no since can compare with his creations in that subgenre.

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Dr. Carlos, Chief Medical Officer. This free PDF download collects together most of my short stories involving Carlos Obregon. While some are standard sci-fi thrillers, there are sci-fi mysteries too. (I also have a few other sci-fi mysteries, and I’m working on a full novel.) The reader may consider all these tales as homages to Isaac Asimov. (I read his The Naked Sun before any of his other novels!)

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

In my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a physicist and her technician “time travel” by hopping from one universe in the multiverse to another, thus allowing me to avoid the paradoxes associated with so many flawed time-travel tales. After one of these “jumps,” they find themselves on an Earth where only androids remain, a version of the completely robotic world envisioned by Aurora’s Spacers in Isaac Asimov’s Robots of Dawn, the third novel in his robot series. (The first two are Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. All three are classic sci-fi mysteries that I can highly recommend to anyone who truly loves quality sci-fi, not the schmaltzy space operas like Star Wars.)

I probably didn’t do Asimov’s creation any justice, so I must apologize…to his family now, since the master’s gone. The flavor of my portrayal is correct, but one short fiction episode of my novel can’t begin to describe the completely android world the evil Auroran roboticists of his novel desired. They did have a point, though. The puny explorations of our own solar system have largely been made using robots—primitive ones, to be sure, but robots all the same. Why endanger human lives when robots, especially those so advanced as Aurora’s, can be used to colonize faraway solar systems?

Of course, there’s a twist in that episode of my novel that helps answer that question: The main characters, both human, teach the robots something. While my novel is more a sci-fi rom-com and not a standard mystery disguised as sci-fi, Asimov’s answer is more complete if only because he uses a whole novel to support it…or not! (My novel has more fables to offer the reader and therefore more morals as if I were a modern-day Aesop.)

In fact, the meat of my apology to Dr. Asimov is more inspired by the fact that I didn’t put the discussion of this blog post in the end notes of my novel. While some of its sections (“fables”) refer specifically either to historical events (the demise of Hitler’s A-bomb effort, for example) or fictional settings (the android world, for example), I perhaps should have mentioned that the android world was inspired by Asimov’s third novel and not his first two. (Although one could argue that the “moon colony” section was inspired by Caves of Steel.)

Many of the “classic writers” of mysteries, adventure stories (now called thrillers), and sci-fi novels have influenced my stories. Isaac Asimov is probably the most important one. I can only hope that he’d have forgiven me. I did make him almost a god for that android society, after all. (He becomes Sir Isaac Asimov, the “master creator,” along with Hugh Everett III. You don’t know who the latter bloke is? Look him up. He’s important for explaining all the time travel techniques!)

You might wonder if AI, all the rage right now, is mentioned in my novel. Robots and androids are AIs, after all. Yes, an even larger and smarter AI is in my book, but only towards the end. There I might have to apologize to Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick, but my AI isn’t named HAL.

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. An applied physicist uses quantum mechanics to create a practical way to do time travel. Aided by her very intelligent technician, the pair take romantic trips to various universes in the multiverse as they explore alternative spaces and times, running into a lot of trouble in the process. This sci-fi rom-com makes sappy and trite adventures like The Time Traveler’s Wife more like fluffy fantasies. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).

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

From the Church’s persecution of Galileo Galilei to McCarthy’s persecution of Oppenheimer and the Good Ole Piranhas’ (GOP’s) persecution of climate scientists later, conservative idiots and fascist politicians have tried to score points and foment hatred by blaming scientists. Politics vs. science has existed for so long that it’s a miracle that any scientific and technological progress beyond that made in weaponry has been made. It’s been an eternal struggle.

I saw some of this on a more personal level during the Vietnam War era. I was lucky enough to be able to take two related graduate level courses at UC Santa Barbara, general relativity and topology—small seminars of five students each with a lot of personal attention provided by two very smart young professors. The physics professor left a considerable impression on me, in particular (although the math professor recognized I had an advantage because I knew physics).

Professor James Hartle, that young physics prof, spent a good part of his academic life trying to unite quantum theory and gravitational theory to obtain a theory of quantum gravity, often working with Hawking. One of his later students once said, “He so easily could have tried to grab some of that limelight that shown on Stephen [Hawking]. He never did.”

As a Cal Tech graduate student, Hartle worked on particle physics with Gell-Mann, though, not general relativity (Gell-Mann discovered the particle classification scheme, known as the “eightfold way,” that is based on the SU(3) symmetry group that has eight generators). But the first thing I learned about him was that he was the graduate student who’d drawn many of the diagrams found in the original second volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics where Feynman introduced general relativity principles using a linearized theory (in an introductory physics course, mind you!). In my UCSB seminar, we used those lectures as an introduction to meatier material. (It focused more on some classic texts, including Weinberg’s Gravitation.)

At that time, our professor and we students in that seminar had other worries: the Vietnam War was turning UC campuses into hotbeds of protest, mostly peaceful. When we weren’t holding hands in silent protest against the war during lunch hours, the undergraduates among us were worried about being drafted out of graduate school. Professor Hartle had similar worries: He was only an assistant professor at the time, and the US government wanted to draft him! Fortunately, the university went to bat for him: He didn’t have to go. I went on to graduate school and lost contact with this very intelligent fellow, but I later ended up at many scientific events where “everybody knew his name”: Kip Thorne and John Wheeler in New Orleans, Richard Feynman in Bloomington, and so forth. I even tried to keep up with his work on quantizing gravity that he did with Stephen Hawking—mission impossible! I couldn’t spend the the time on it to achieve any real understanding because I was working on other research and teaching.

Professor Hartle was one of the exceptions, a scientist who was lucky enough to get help in doing battle against an uncaring officialdom. Perhaps we can say that he fell “through the cracks”—fascist politicians had a lot of people they could pursue, so Hartle escaped their clutches—but the world of scientific research was made better and greatly improved by his escape, if only for his students that he guided during his long life.

James Hartle died on May 17 in Switzerland. He was 83. He wouldn’t have remembered me, but I will never forget him.

I occasionally review movies in this blog (obviously fewer during the pandemic). I’ve often said that the best ones are based on books (the best of them all is undoubtedly The Lord of the Rings trilogy). But there are inherent limitations found in that transfer of media from the written word to audiovisual film. The mere fact that a movie is usually between two and three hours long means it can’t possibly contain all the nuances found in a novel. Hollywood cuts, edits, and rewrites often damage the novelistic adventure when transferred to the silver screen as well.

But a recent very successful movie shows how Hollywood can even fail miserably at original storytelling—in fact, is more likely to do so because screenwriters aren’t novelists. In this case, not a flop at the box office—lots of moviegoers jumped on the bandwagon!—but in creating anything worthwhile for novel readers who expect a lot more. I’m writing about Barbie, of course. It has convinced me that I never want Hollywood to make a movie based on any of my stories!

This isn’t idle speculation about what I’d do if some producer or anyone else from Hollywood approached me. It’s a raging denial of Hollywood’s storytelling capabilities! You can savor a novel; it’s the product of a creative and inventive artist who is following the age-old tradition of storytelling. Hollywood can’t make anything that can compare with that personal relationship between reader and author because Hollywood is too mass-market; yet most moviegoers don’t read books so their expectations are low, playing into Hollywood’s hands—so when a movie is a flop, it’s really a disaster.

This isn’t idle speculation about any reaction I might have in the sense that some readers have told me that a particular title from my oeuvre would make a good movie. We’ve even discussed who would play whom at times, in particular for Detectives Castilblanco and Brookstone. (The mysteries and thrillers might receive better treatment from Hollywood, but my sci-fi would be far beyond the movie industry!) This is all a frivolous waste of time, of course. Hollywood could never do justice to even the shortest “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” novel! And the complex intertwining of historical periods found in Son of Thunder (second book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series), arguably my best and most profound novel, would undoubtedly defeat the best Hollywood screenwriters!

In other words, I don’t want Hollywood to even try! And they won’t either, because they must appeal to a largely illiterate and audio-visually dependent yet passive audience that make few demands on quality but are great believers in hype (as in the case of Barbie).

I’ll make a prediction in this post: Hollywood and audiovisual media will destroy storytelling. Even now, the reading population is biased toward older generations. Younger people have the attention spans, so they passively watch streaming video, mesmerized by an audiovisual experience that’s superficial and far from being profound. It’s only a matter of time until the novel becomes an ancient artifact studied in some halls of social scientists. Thankfully I won’t live to see that occur, but it will happen. The process has begun.

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Son of Thunder. Three storylines come together in this mystery/thriller novel with historical fiction elements about the lives of St. John the Divine and the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli and how Esther Brookstone is affected by them. Perhaps this is the novel Dan Brown should have written instead of The DaVinci Code because the history here is fact-based inasmuch as it can be (of course, his isn’t). In any case, you will find Esther’s adventures described here taking her back through centuries of history as you the reader join her on an armchair journey. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold…and also in print!

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

So you’ve written what you believe is the great American novel, penned the biography of your family relative and war hero, or created a theory of everything, and you want to self-publish it. There’s a lot of bad advice out there from marketing gurus to scam artists, all willing to share their secrets if you’re only willing to pay them.

Who can you trust? You might say to yourself, “Well, this fellow is associated with X, normally a reputable source, so their advice must be good.” Wrong! If X is some fellow whose gig on the side is selling his marketing books to would-be authors, don’t use him. If X is any POD publisher (POD = “publish on demand,” the oldest form of self-publishing beyond vanity presses) that advertises on cable channels, don’t use them! If X is any ancient and struggling POD that’s traveling along the road to oblivion (you can determine that by the number of books published recently…if they’ll tell you!), avoid them. If X is any of the tech giants (Amazon, Apple, or Google), run like hell away! And if X is the venerable NY Times, rest assured that they don’t give a rat’s ass about self-published authors!

Most of the advice on how to self-publish a book out there now is bad advice. Here’s a recent example: In the NY Times’s article “A Story to Tell? Self-Publish Your E-Book,” J. D. Biersdorfer uses a half-page of the 8/3/2023 business section to spew forth bad advice about self-publishing. He obviously knows very little about it. He recommends Apple and Google (bad advice), DIY covers (really bad advice), and generally guarantees that your self-published book will be a flop. While that might occur no matter how it is (“gurus” like Biersdorfer never tell authors that there are absolutely no guarantees for making your book into a bestseller, traditionally or self-published), following his bad advice will only hasten the demise of your book. (Generally speaking, the NY Times will have nothing worthwhile about self-publishing to offer authors interested in it.)

Many reporters worldwide know well that if they want to report on what war is like, they must talk to those who are participating in it. The same goes for self-publishing. J. D. Biersdorfer’s qualifications don’t meet that test. He writes computer manuals, maybe even good ones, but he’s not self-published a single book, at least none displayed on Amazon. And most of his manuals are about Apple products (which is why he mostly supports self-publishing with Apple, I suppose). Obviously reporter Biersdorfer has no good advice to offer any aspiring self-publishing author; indeed, one has to wonder about the Times’s editor’s moral underpinnings in allowing such an article, a completely biased travesty, to appear in the Times!

While Mr. Biersdorfer more than mentions Apple and Google, he doesn’t tell you that they’re not aggregators. What’s that mean? It means that neither service distributes the ebooks they publish! Your ebook only appears at the Apple or Google online store! (Amazon operates in exactly the same way.) While you can become your own aggregator, why bother? If you use an aggregating service (Draft2Digital/Smashwords is the easiest to use), your ebook, will be distributed automatically to many online sites selling ebooks around the world. You must pay a bit in royalties for this service, but it’s nothing like traditional publishers take for publishing your ebooks. Either Mr. Biersdorfer doesn’t know about aggregators, or he’s coddling Apple and Google. In either case, forget about Mr. Biersdorfer’s bad advice (here a lack of any useful advice!).

Here’s the best advice I can give authors who are considering self-publishing: If there’s a charge for the advice (in the case of the Times, you’re paying an exorbitant cost for that paper), be wary and take all advice offered with a grain of salt. There are ways to self-publish that are efficient, easy-to-use, and produce a quality product. Do your homework, though. Too many people out there are waiting to steal your money! Once you have a manuscript properly prepared, formatting, publishing, and distributing your ebook is a lot easier than what Biersdorfer says. In fact, once you’ve written and edited a manuscript, most of your work is done. Why do more?

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Good advice (or a lot better than the NY Times’s Biersdorfer, at least). My advice for authors thinking about self-publishing is free! Go to the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page and download my short course Writing Fiction. (The parts containing self-publishing advice are generally applicable to book publishing in general, not just fiction books.) My qualifications? I’ve traditionally and self-published (from old PODs to ebooks) since 2006, producing a number of titles that I’m proud to call mine, including those traditionally published ones. Unlike the Times reporter mentioned above, I’ve done it all, so my advice and opinions are based on hard-earned experience. Because I receive absolutely zero benefit for this course beyond offering authors a helpful hand, this little course provides a better launch pad than the NY Times or any how-to article or book on the subject that charges you for the advice! Peruse my advice and please let me know what you think of the course.

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

I haven’t been publishing my stories that long compared to some authors (my first published novel, Full Medical, also #1 in the “Clones and Mutants” series, was published in 2006), but there were many more things that concerned me at that time than the so-called “culture wars” (Saudis’ support of 9/11 the terrorists, the Iraq War, a POTUS from the Good Ole Piranhas who now looks good in comparison to the one who lost hugely in 2020, etc.). Nevertheless, from first book to my last one (so far), a celebration of diversity and its importance in our great country and the world can generally found in my prose, so much so that it’s something of a meta-theme. Certain people would now say that prose supports “woke,” a recent addition to American slang that confuses everyone across the political spectrum.

If so, I wear that label “wokeness” with pride. My parents from Kansas went to California during the Great Depression and were always celebrating the diversity found there in that greatest of great American states. (Actually, they celebrated it in their native Kansas as well—their best friend was a Mexican national who went to the same business school in Topeka.) From food to friends, my childhood was defined by my parents’ celebration of the state’s diversity, so it should be no surprise that I also celebrated it as an adult. In my California hometown, my parents’ best friends were an Armenian couple from whom I learned all about the Ottoman Empire’s attempt at ethnic cleansing; the main road in my college town just off-campus was Embarcadero del Norte; my best friend at grad school on the East Coast was a good-natured black fellow from the Dominican Republic, who married a nice Jewish girl—I read one of my poems at their wedding; and through him I met my first wife, a fantastic Colombian lady who passed on far too soon; etc., etc.

I’ve celebrated diversity all my life for so long and considered it such an important part of our American culture that I was surprised that certain scurrilous politicians now use this new term to focus their hatred, racism, and nationalist, isolationist tendencies on their enemies: “woke” recognizes the importance of diversity; “anti-woke” implies that such hatred, racism, and nationalist, isolationist tendencies should be used against any group whose members aren’t far-right white Christian women and men. In other words, anti-woke signifies a desire to have forced apartheid in our society; woke means freedom and respect for all and a celebration of all human diversity.

When Ron DeSantis or any other far-right wannabe dictator (“there were good people on both sides” one said to excuse his bigotry) says that the state or country he’s running in is where “woke comes to die,” he’s channeling Hitler and his use of Jews, homosexuals, and others—anyone considered to be an enemy—as scapegoats to be attacked, imprisoned, and executed…and will do exactly that if ever given the chance! The lesser extremes all too often lead to terrible events too. I can’t watch this going on and not think of the Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Rohingya, Uighur and other genocides that have appeared throughout the world. I can’t watch these occurring and not worry that too many politicians are following those same horrific plans made by the monsters of history to use any people perceived as different as scapegoats. It’s terribly sad that we continue to let this occur over and over again. That says a lot about humanity in general and a specific challenge for any democracy. Are we up to the latter? Or will “anti-woke” become the new norm in our sad world?

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Intolerance. This seventh novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series shows that anti-woke can take many forms and isn’t restricted only to the US. Three separate cases challenge Esther and friends here: One involves a whole town’s intolerant treatment of an atheist family; another shows how jealousy turns an old British soldier into a rabid hater of the Irish; and a third describes a right-wing domestic terrorist group’s hatred of refugees and migrants who have come from foreign lands to the UK to escape economic catostrophes and persecution in their homeland. Some of these themes will continue in the following novels in the series, but this one is a free PDF download available on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. The novel is a great introduction to the entire series. Enjoy.

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

Nine Black Robes. Joan Biskupic (2023). “No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”—Dissenting opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thus begins and ends this excellent expose of the fascist takeover of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) written by CNN commentator and SCOTUS expert Biskupic.

Yes, fascist SCOTUS! Unlike the author, I’ll call a spade a spade, and the SCOTUS’s new majority are rabid fascists who conspire with the Good Ole Piranhas, which include fanatical evangelicals and Catholics, Putin lovers, racists, and bigots, along with many other far-right elements in government. And they are out to destroy democracy in America by whittling away at individual rights, enabling mad-dog gun enthusiasts, etc. by arguing that’s what the Founding Fathers wanted!

Too strong? If you believe that, read this excellent book, and then let’s talk. (Probably too much to ask of MAGA maniacs that they actually read something worthwhile of course. Their fuehrer doesn’t like to read.) It’s a toss-up which group in America represents the most existential problem for American democracy, the climate-change deniers (let them die in the three-digit heat waves and other extreme climate events that will continue to plague the country and the world!) or the idiots out to destroy America by other means. (Of course, these groups have a lot of members in common!)

Here the author knows the law, SCOTUS history, and the ins and outs of the legal issues. She presents the story of how Trump, McConnell, McCann, and other fascists over decades created today’s fascist majority in the court…and she does it well. Although the story is comparable to how Mein Kampf led to Hitler’s takeover, it’s been a much slower one in America compared to Germany, aided and abetted by every conservative president since Reagan. (Of course, “conservative” morphed into “fascist” during that process in American government and elsewhere!)

Today we have the following in that SCOTUS fascist majority: Thomas, who’d be welcome in the Ku Klux Klan; Alito, who’s more fascist than Scalia ever was (and that’s saying a lot); Chief Justice Roberts, who has turned hypocrisy into a fine art; and the two new lackeys of the far right, Comey Bryant and Kavanaugh—all of them rabid Catholic fundamentalists except for Thomas. (Beyond fascism, he just goes along with his colleagues fundamentalism, but you can bet he’d never receive the support of the BLM or #MeToo movement.) These fascist judges will be around a long time, and they’re out to ruin American democracy by legislating from the bench.

The author doesn’t dwell on the obvious solutions required to weaken these fascists’ powers: age and term limits plus increasing the number of judges. The Dems had better control both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2024 so these solutions can be implemented. Of course, the way things are going (SCOTUS doesn’t protect the integrity of elections!), maybe the Dems will never win another election in America if they can prevent it!

So, in brief, this book is a good portrayal of the current SCOTUS, doesn’t use the appropriate word “fascist” to describe the six judges who form the junta basically in charge of the country now, and doesn’t consider the obvious solutions. Perhaps it needs a second volume to do that? Or the author simply accepts that American democracy is dying and doomed, and we can do nothing about it? In this sense, this book is a depressing yet very informative read.

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The Klimt Connection. I don’t write legal thrillers. The nearest I’ve come is this eighth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series where Esther backs an old Austrian Jewish man who is conned into selling his Klimt painting, complete with trial. There are a lot of other things going on, including the introduction of readers to Inspector Steve Morgan who has a secondment with MI5 to bring down a far-right terrorist group. (He soon has his own series!) This is a complex mystery/thriller that has Esther in a case that harks back to her days in Scotland Yard’s “Art and Antiques” Division. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon). Enjoy.

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