I don’t dwell on either food or drink in my stories, but I can have some fun with them. In a sense, they both come under the writing category “settings” because what people dine on and imbibe is characteristic of the general area where the story takes place.

But is tikka masala or baklava characteristic of London? Yes, first because my character Esther Brookstone loves both, and second because London is a cosmopolitan city—Indian food is prevalent (London’s Brick Lane is famous) because India was part of Britain’s colonial past; and Britain, despite Brexit, is still part of Europe, so European cuisine is well represented (baklava is widespread in eastern Mediterranean countries and specifically in Greece).

Many big cities are cosmopolitan—I had my first curry in Boston and my first baklava in Bogota, Colombia—that’s the nature of large cities. When I write about dining in these cities, I worry about yielding to cliches; it’s natural to do that following the adage “When in Rome…” and motivated by the desire to provide local color. Readers presume the best pulled pork might be found in Savannah, the best clam chowder in Boston, and the best dim sung in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Those typical, regional and ethnic dishes also allow an author to play against stereotype as well. A character invites someone out for a fancy dinner and says about the target restaurant, “I’ve found that X serves Y as good as any you can find in Z!” In fact, that might just impress the invitee even more because the inviter has found X.

Of course, beverages can play a similar role. I probably go overboard with teatime in my British-style mysteries (the “Esther Brookstone” novels have become more British as the series progresses), but teatime is still very much a part of British (and Irish!) life. And frankly, the real reason is that I like tea almost as much as I like coffee! (My fav tea is Earl Grey. And, living in Colombia 10+ years addicted me to the world’s best coffee.)

So…use the Goldilocks Principle: Just enough about food and drink, not too much, not too little…and have some fun with both!

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. Failure to do so sends your comment to the spam folder.)

The Klimt Connection. Did you miss this “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series addition, Book Eight in the series? It’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon). Better yet: Have a binge-read! Novels #6 and #7 are free PDF downloads. See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page where you will find other free fiction as well.

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

Authors have a variety of tools and using them throughout a story can make it more interesting. I’m better at dialogue than body language, but maybe that’s because I think the first is more effective than the second. But the second can be effective in a mystery, though, because it might contradict the first…and that’s one positive for using a variety of tools.

A good detective, for example, learns to read body language, especially in interrogations, because there are tells there that contradict a suspect’s words. I’m certain that most readers don’t have that ability; I certainly don’t. So, even if I describe some body language in a story, assuming I do it correctly, I have to ask myself  whether a reader will recognize “what’s being said” without me explaining. That goes against my general minimalist writing philosophy, where I like to give the reader just enough information so they can participate in the creative process. Moreover, it interrupts the flow of the fiction.

I suppose the use of body language can be considered an example of “show, don’t tell,” but “don’t tell” is referring more to excess narrative. Using body language is generally short narrative, but its overuse could be excessive and boring.

In the abstract, dialogue is better than body language, and, whether “writing experts” like it or not, that’s how human beings communicate. Your pet uses body language because it’s not human. Maybe some animals’ innate languages (chimps, dolphins, etc.) are mostly a mix of sounds and body language, but dialogue is more important for us simply because we are human. Writers are human; so are readers.

Perhaps what’s more important are the words used to describe body language and dialogue, direct or indirect. I’ve seen -ly adverbs overused for both, for example. The flow in the prose determines the quality of both body language and dialogue. If the use of either one hinders that flow, that’s not good. Even within a flashback or backstory segment, the flow must move forward. Flow isn’t a tool; it’s a process that’s supported by an author’s toolbox and much more important than any single tool.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. Failure to do so sends your comment to the spam folder.)

The Klimt Connection. Did you miss this “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series addition, Book Eight in the series? It’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon). Better yet: Have a binge-read! Novels #6 and #7 are free PDF downloads. See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page where you will find other free fiction as well.

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

Draft2Digital (D2D) is the best way to self-publish because a lot can be DIY and they distribute your ebooks for you. I’ve done five ebooks with them now (the last, The Klimt Connection, Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, was published March 18, maybe with the added motivation from two red ales on draft to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day?). I learn a bit each time I use D2D, so I’d like to pass on some advice I’ve developed while doing this.

First, let me state that I saw no references to the D2D-Smashwords merger when I published The Klimt Connection. I expected to see something, but the whole process was the same, and it’s easy. About Smashwords, nada, rien, zilch. (I suspect they’re still in beta-testing. They’ve been beta-testing a print option forever (so don’t use D2D if you want print!).

How smoothly the process goes depends a lot on how well you prepare and what choices you make, though. So…let me offer some free advice:

Cover. Yeah, I know, it’s the last thing authors usually think about. (I doubt the Big Five publishing conglomerates think enough about covers—some of the worst covers I’ve seen recently, not much more than PowerPoint slides, are on their books.) I’ve found it’s best to get into the writing a bit and take breathers once and a while to think about a cover. Even if you purchase a ready-made, inexpensive, but unique cover (bookcoverdesigner.com is a good source), getting a good cover takes some thought. That can be stimulated by sorting through samples. There are many prices to choose from, but don’t assume a higher price implies a better cover, because frankly many covers are over-priced (it’s a buyers’ market!). An ebook cover is just one .jpeg file from a graphics artist hungry to make some extra bucks, after all. The artist will put your title, subtitle (if any), and author’s name in suitable fonts and suitable colors for the background. Take the final result and store it in the same folder as your manuscript (MS).

Manuscript prep. Your MS must be tailored to D2D’s formatting engine. This isn’t hard to do, but your MS file won’t look like anything you might release as a free PDF either (which I do a lot). Don’t use page breaks; use four or five carriage returns instead. Don’t use tabs; set your overall indenting to automatic on the first line of a paragraph, and kill that indenting only for chapter headings and so forth, centering the latter after the four or five page returns, if appropriate (chapter breaks but not section breaks). You don’t need a title page or copyright page—the formatting software can do that for you—but you can also include your own instead. Same for front and end material. I pay special attention to the latter—mine’s complicated, and I try to make all my ebooks look similar. (I only let D2D do the title page, if that. After all, the title’s on the cover.)

Begin the formatting process. First, upload your cover, then upload your MS.

D2D formats your ebook. That begins with the previous uploads. You’ll see a preview appear in the D2D preview window. Now you have some choices to make. I just choose their standard ebook formatting. That’s fine for me, and I suspect some of the fancy options can cause problems because I won’t like the look. (A book is a book, so why all that genre-specific crap?) There are some options you might consider, though: Do you want a title page? Copyright page? Clickable table of contents? In The Klimt Connection, I ignored the title page, put in my own copyright page, and ignored the contents page.

(more…)

I’ve often mentioned that I’ve never had writer’s block. I’m a full-time writer, so there’s always something that I want to write! That’s not writer’s block. (Choosing what to write is another matter.)

I believe I’ve also mentioned that in the last few years, I’ve been having more problems remembering the precise word—I know it exists, and it comes to me on my content-editing passes. That’s not writer’s block either.

But is lack of motivation writer’s block? I suppose it is if an author can’t write anything, but the lack of motivation hits me with respect to books I’d planned to write, usually the next book in a series. For example, you have two free PDFs for the sixth and seventh book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. (Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance are in the list found on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) They exist because I was ambivalent about continuing the series. (I published #8, The Klimt Connection, on March 18 with D2D—inspired in part by the two red ales I quaffed on St. Paddy’s Day?)  I was motivated to write all three of those novels, and I did so in four months! Motivation is important.

My problem with extending a series isn’t completely due to the fact that the so-called “book marketing experts” don’t want to promote, or don’t even know how to promote, a series. That’s but one way to kill my motivation.

You’ll remember that I had problems with the second book in “The Last Humans” series, the first with the publisher of the first book, Black Opal Books, and then with Amazon for the second book. (That was the final nail in Amazon’s coffin for me. No recent books of mine appear on Amazon!) A. B. Carolan and I had plans to continue “The Denisovan Trilogy” (only the first book is out, and not on Amazon), but a lukewarm reception of the first novel, Origins, has dampened our enthusiasm. I also had plans to turn More than Human: The Mensa Contagion into two separate novels (that would require some expansion, mostly in the part about the Mars colony) and then write a third, but again a luke-warm reception of that book dampened my enthusiasm.

Of course, motivation can be lacking for a specific project simply because I find other projects more appealing! I was clearly motivated to write the last three “Esther Brookstone” novels that can be considered a sub-trilogy of political thrillers (with relevance to current politics at that!). The free PDFs for #6 and #7 were easy to produce,. and the D2D ebook was too (more about that on Friday), so most of my time was spent on finishing the manuscripts. (Maybe doing the latter was more obsession than motivation? Same difference, of course.)

I recognize that I’m lucky. Nothing in what I’ve experienced and described above can be considered writer’s block, but I believe that authors will have similar experiences as their careers progress. In a sense, it’s not about sitting down and doing the writing, it’s about satisfying a yen to get some specific thing written. My advice? It’s the same I have for life in general: Just roll with the punches and do the best you can with what you love to do.

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The Klimt Connection. Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series finds Esther and husband hustled away to an MI5 safehouse after their flat in London is bombed. They cope, along with others who are threatened by the bomber and his accomplices, and the hunt for the domestic terrorists is UK- and EU-wide. It leads to the discovery of a nationwide conspiracy, all financed by the far right and designed to purge the UK of perceived invaders, migrants and refugees who are accused of wanting to “replace” the white majority. This novel is now available at all quality ebook retailers and lending services (but not on Amazon). You will enjoy this book about Esther’s new adventures.

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

The Klimt Connection, Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, is now published. If not already available at all of Draft2Digital’s affiliated quality ebook retailers, it soon will be (I don’t include Amazon in that list, by the way). It will also be available at their affiliated lending services.

This is no “April Fools” post! You will be able to read about more of Esther’s unusual adventures. I had many distractions while writing this novel, though. First, let me offer you a summary:

After a bomb destroys their flat, Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard Inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, and Bastiann van Coevorden, her husband, ex-Interpol agent, and current MI5 consultant, are forced to stay in an MI5 safehouse along with others who are threatened by the bomber and his accomplices. The hunt for the domestic terrorists is UK- and EU-wide and leads to the discovery of a nationwide conspiracy, all financed by the far right and designed to purge the UK of perceived invaders, migrants and refugees who are accused of wanting to “replace” the white majority.

While writing this novel, I experienced several distractions:

Covid. Yeah, that pandemic has been going on a while; it looks like it will continue with new variants arising. It hasn’t affected either my reading or writing—I have a lot more free time to do both—but what it does do is continuously tick me off when so many morons refuse to be considerate of others by not masking and not vaccinating. Those morons just don’t understand democracy.

January 6 commission. A clearer picture is being developed to replace the blurry one, and that process is showing how vast and perfidious the attempt to overthrow democracy in America really was, both at the domestic and foreign levels. That process had solidified my hatred of fascists.

Putin’s evil war against Ukraine. If domestic terrorists in America solidified my hatred for fascists, Putin’s atrocities reminded me that the war against fascism is worldwide. We are all Ukrainians in that sense, battling on the various fronts of a world war democracy must wage against autocracy. Slava Ukrayna!

It’s probably obvious that all of these distractions were also motivations. The Klimt Connection is really about democracy’s war against fascism. Anti-vaxxing isn’t freedom of expression, it’s about morons following fascist conspiracy theories, people who are willing to murder their fellow human beings. The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys aren’t freedom fighters, they’re fascists out to destroy American democracy. And clearly the Ukrainian war is all about a fascist monster, Vladimir Putin, committing genocide against a freedom-loving, innocent population.

Is The Klimt Connection my most political novel? Maybe. It’s certainly a complex one because the war of democracy versus fascism is fought on so many fronts. If fascists can read (how well they’re educated is always doubtful!), they probably won’t like this new novel. Tough. I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for all the rest of us who believe that democratic ideals and institutions are worth fighting for. Maybe it’s my War and Peace, albeit much shorter, but I thought that talking about that existential war in fiction was worth it. ‘Nough said.

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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.)

The Klimt Connection. Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series finds Esther and husband hustled to an MI5 safehouse after their flat in London is bombed. They cope, along with others who are threatened by the bomber and his accomplices, and the hunt for the domestic terrorists is UK- and EU-wide. It leads to the discovery of a nationwide conspiracy, all financed by the far right and designed to purge the UK of perceived invaders, migrants and refugees who are accused of wanting to “replace” the white majority. This novel is now available at all quality ebook retailers and lending services (but not on Amazon). You will enjoy Esther’s additional adventures.

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

One thing I learned during the Covid pandemic (beyond staying alive!) was how important book series are! Forget about streaming video and computer games! The only TV series I watched were on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater, most recently Around the World in Eighty Days (highly recommended, by the way). I spent most of my time binge-reading book series and maintained my sanity in the process. (They helped me stay alive!)

It’s amazing how many good series there are. Most of them are “evergreen” in the sense that they’re as good as when the author wrote them. I’m well into a new one (new for me), and I know I can find many others. You can find lists of many British-style mystery series, for example, in my own collections, Sleuthing, British-Style (three of them, the last two free PDF downloads, and the first on Amazon), I keep adding to that list with every collection).

Series exist in many genres (I hate that word “genre,” but it’s a bit useful here). Sometime in the future I’ll binge-read all the Harry Potter books, one right after another. Um, that might be a bit masochistic because that series is a lesson in padding out a manuscript with a lot of superfluous verbosity. Maybe I’ll just do that with A. B. Carolan’s “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries” instead, because A.B.’s young adult heroes are a lot more believable than Harry and his friends!

But that’s the key for readers: The best series are well-established or finished because you can binge-read them, one right after another. But for authors, there’s a problem with series: Most of the so-called “book marketing experts” out there either don’t know how to promote a series, or won’t, because they want to charge for each book’s promotion! Is there a conspiracy going on? I suspect the real reason is the first, but they have no desire to remedy the problem because of the second.

So what can authors do to promote their series? The only thing I can suggest now is to make a personal appeal to readers. Although those book marketing experts don’t often say it, I will: The best marketing tool is often word-of-mouth. So I’ll make this plea to readers of this blog: Please binge-read series (I have several myself—see below), and then tell your relatives and friends about those you like. Do this for as many as you can, please. As avid readers, you know other readers. Please help authors fight the book marketing experts who won’t promote a series!

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My series. I have a few. I’ll just list them here. You can find out more about them by perusing the “Books & Short Stories” web page. Welcome to binge-reading of series! Here’s the list:

“Detectives Chen & Castilblanco”—eight novels*

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective”—eight novels*

“Clones & Mutants”—a trilogy

“The Chaos Chronicles”—a trilogy**

“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries”—a trilogy

“The Last Humans”—two novels

“ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries”—four novels***

*”Chen & Castilblanco” #8 and “Esther Brookstone” #6 are one and the same, because that novel is a crossover between two series

**Available in one ebook bundle

***A series for young adults and adults who are young-at-heart—the first three are set in my usual sci-fi universe, the fourth begins “The Denisovan Trilogy,” and all are by A. B. Carolan

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

In these days of pandemic (yes, it’s still going on, with 1000+ Americans still dying every day and another surge in Europe occurring, an omen for one here), I’m not doing any book events. So I was thinking about questions interviews or readers have never asked me. Just for fun, here’s a list along with my answers:

Is Moore your real surname? I understand the question. Many authors use pseudonyms. But Steven M. Moore is on my birth certificate (the middle initial is written out there, but I keep that secret). There are many Moores around, from a famous heavyweight champion (Archie Moore, my father’s favorite boxer) to a famous actor (Dudley Moore) and many others. That surname is almost as common as Smith, especially if you add the Irish original, O’Moore.

Why do you only self-publish? I’ve tried traditional publishing with Penmore Press (the first two “Esther Brookstone” novels) and Black Opal Books (the first novel in “The Last Humans” series). As you probably conclude by the fact that I didn’t continue with those two publishers, there were potholes in that traditional-publishing road. When I started putting my fiction out there, I tried the traditional route forced on every writer at the time by the now Big Five publishing conglomerates, a term that indicates a major problem in publishing today: Even a small press, if successful, often disappears into the maws of these T-Rexes of book publishing. I won’t play the game by their onerous rules.

Why do you write in multiple genres? Amazon and even legitimate booksellers continue to insist on traditional genre classification schemes dictated by the Big Five, so I’m forced to use them for marketing purposes even though they’re nothing more than key words. Mystery, thriller, or sci-fi, or even crime, suspense, or romance are just words that can describe qualities of my stories. Readers can classify them any way they like; I don’t care much about that. I just tell the damn story and leave its classification to others. Hopefully the descriptor “entertaining” dominates those classifications.

Do you ever have writer’s block? As I get older, the “blocks” appear more in knowing there’s a perfect word for a given situation, but I can’t remember it at the moment. I put an X there, hoping that in the content editing process, I’ll remember what X should be. Otherwise, I’ve never experienced any block of any kind, and I don’t expect I ever will. When I pass on, I suspect it will be with another story idea in my mind!

Of course, I could answer more questions than these. (You might find some of yours answered on the preceding web pages.) Hopefully live book events will return so that readers can ask them in person!

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Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. Hey readers, want free novels? You have two to choose from here, #6 and #7 from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. (See the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) I’ll be publishing #8, The Klimt Connection, very soon, but maybe you have some catching up to do? Of course, the first five novels are available in ebook format wherever quality ebooks are sold, and the first three novels also have print versions. Lots of Esther’s adventures to choose from!

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

While my novels have plenty of action scenes, I’ve never tried to compete with Hollywood’s. Forget the soundtracks, special effects, and other audiovisual aspects of Hollywood movies. I’m analyzing something both books and movies can offer—many do in fact—fast and furious action over action, over and over again. As a writer, I prefer to build tension leading to those action scenes being the climax of that tension, not the be-all and end-all of the story.

This is evident even in my sci-fi novels (Rogue Planet is a prime example), but it’s also seen a lot in my mystery and thriller novels. For example, in Intolerance (a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), the tension builds ss the three cases involving Esther Brookstone evolve and culminate in action scenes.

The fundamental question is whether a reader savors more the buildup than the action scene itself. This reader does! In fact, I also prefer movies that do that too. I only saw “Fast and Furious” movies in previews, but that was enough for me to decide they weren’t for me. Likewise, I’m turned off by any book that tries to emulate an action flick.

I suppose one could argue that movies’ audiovisual media lends itself more to action, but I think that’s just a cop out. A famous director said he liked to blow up things. I prefer to know why someone wants to blow up things, and how good people can step forward and try to stop it.

For writers, this is a question of style. For readers, it’s more about a preference for complexity—real life is complex, so complexity in fiction mimics real life, a prerequisite for any good novel. It’s a question of preferring depth to shallowness.

It’s still a free country, so both sets of readers are free to follow their own preferences. I  hope I’ve made mine clear. They’re reflected in my fiction, for better or worse. I never do shallow, not even in a short story!

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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 goes into the spam bin.)

Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. Hey readers, want free novels? You have two to choose from here, #6 and #7 from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. (See the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) I’ll be publishing #8, The Klimt Connection, very soon, but maybe you have some catching up to do? Of course, the first five novels are available in ebook format wherever quality ebooks are sold, and the first three novels also have print versions. Lots of Esther’s adventures to choose from!

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

Have you ever read a Dean Koontz novel? He generally writes better horror stories than Stephen King, his main competitor, although he slipped a bit with his Frankenstein series. He’s like me, though, in the sense that he’s written enough books that he feels he can experiment a bit, so I’ll give hm a pass. Like King, Koontz thinks his stories are sci-fi. Who gave those guys that idea? Like King’s, Koontz’s stories are firmly entrenched in the horror/fantasy category. Even so, I’ve read more Koontz than King, because Koontz’s stories are a lot better (I even read the first Frankenstein book, which was enough to turn me off from that series).

One thing about most Koontz stories is that they often feature a dog. I get it. He loves dogs, especially golden retrievers. Including one as a character isn’t a bad idea if an author wants to appeal to dog lovers.

Animals are ubiquitous in modern literature. J. K. Rowling must like owls, for example. Every Hogwarts brat has one, and Harry Potter’s often plays an important role. Jack London probably wrote the best dog book, Call of the Wild. Then there’s Dumbo, definitely a main character if a bit freaky (maybe that is sci-fi because that elephant is a mutant). But Rudolph, who creeped into the Santa fable, didn’t make the cut for cousin Clement Clarke Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” (that might be sci-fi too, with the sled being the UFO?), and he probably was just a reindeer with a bad cold from all the frigid weather.

As much as I love animals, both tame ones and wild, they don’t often play a role in my stories. By prodding the old memory cells a bit, I remember an early short story that features a dog taken over by an ET (now that is sci-fi, and it’s found in my collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape—I can’t remember the story’s title, though). Another short story revisits a rather famous cat (it takes place around Saturn—see the blog archive “ABC Shorts”). Perhaps I should say something more about that cat so dogs don’t dominate this article?

Mr. Paws is undoubtedly my most important animal character, and The Secret Lab is my only novel to feature an animal as a main character. A. B. Carolan rewrote that novel to start his “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries” series for young adults (now four novels strong—A. B. has a cameo appearance in my novel Intolerance). In the novel, Mr. Paws lives on the ISS in the future; he’s the intelligent mutant cat who helps four tweens expose a conspiracy. It’s a good cat story, but it’s more than that.

Why don’t animals appear more in my stories? You might already know. Animals are more interesting when they almost appear human! (Walt Disney made a fortune making that happen.) My Mr. Paws beats Koontz’s dogs and Rowling’s owls, precisely because he’s more like a human! In other words, humans are more interesting than animals to write about. And there are many humans that I don’t like who can be model villains, while there are few animals that I don’t like. You must have both the bad and the good in your fiction. Take that, Ms. Rowling and Mr. Koontz!

By the way, for those of you who miss having an animal in my stories, you might like that cat Boris in The Klimt Connection (coming soon!) where there’s both a cat and dog. They don’t have very important roles, though, although the dog’s presence is symbolic. (The cat’s more there to annoy an MI5 agent detested by Esther Brookstone!)

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The Secret Lab. A. B. Carolan’s rewrite of this sci-fi mystery improved this novel about a mutant cat and his four human pals on the International Space Station far in the future. The four tweens want to discover Mr. Paws’ origins, but they end up uncovering an old conspiracy. This novel for young adults and adults who are young at heart (especially cat lovers!) is available wherever quality books are sold in both ebook and print.

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

While there’s a litigation trial in my upcoming novel The Klimt Connection, Vladimir Putin can’t sue me in any court of the free world. First, he’s a monster who’s been ostracized by more than 140 nations—only a handful of Russian puppet countries voted against the resolution in  the UN’s General Assembly. Second, no country would let the man headed to the Hague for war crimes besmirch their courtrooms. And third, I write nothing about the megalomaniac that’s false and not readily available to the general public. at least outside Russia’s oppressive censorship.

I will focus on the third point. (This article is about writing, after all.) Generally speaking, good authors still collect background material that will infuse their fiction with realism. Even writers if cozy mysteries and romance novels do that, (Fantasy writers might be an exception, but even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and his wizarding friends are often among the Muggles at times.) To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the best fiction has to seem possible and real. The process of collecting this background material is often incorrectly called “research,” but today it’s more just trawling the waters of the internet, although I will often use real physical reference works from my bookshelf.

In particular, I’ve been collecting background material on Vladimir Putin for years, and I can categorically state that all facts in The Klimt Connection, beyond the ubiquitous vitriolic adjectives uttered by my characters, are absolutely true. No UK barrister or US lawyer would ever represent Putin if he decided to sue me for libel or slander.

The general advice writers read all the time is that one can use real persons as characters if what is said about them, real facts or otherwise, is complimentary. I followed that advice in my novel Aristocrats and Assassins (where Esther Brookstone’s current husband, Bastiann van Coevorden had a cameo appearance, by the way). But I have nothing complimentary to say about Putin, so I stick to the facts. Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday used to say. (Guys will probably enjoy the novel too, of course.)

Putin isn’t even a major character in the novel, though; he’s such a worthless piece of human garbage, he doesn’t even deserve to be a secondary one. And the major theme of the novel only involves him in his role of bad actor trying to destabilize western democracies. (It’s interesting that the invasion of Ukraine has served to unify the world against him.) No, the major theme of the novel can be summarized in this Thomas Paine quote: “Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight against, are within ”

As I explain in the end notes of the novel (I’ve always included them, by the way, and I hope people read them), I wrote much of The Klimt Connection as the ex-KGB madman from St. Petersburg waged war on Ukraine, but I’ve often gone after Vladimir Putin before. Even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates that other Vladimir and probably celebrates the Ukrainian Zelenskyy’s ability to motivate his countrymen to fight the real Russian monster.

Of course, there’s also an art theme in the novel. After all, Esther Brookstone is the “art detective”! Please look for this novel that will be available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reputable retailers (that excludes Amazon). You will enjoy Esther’s new adventures…and the Putin bashing. And there’s an easy way to catch up on some of her previous adventures you might have missed: Download Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. They’re free. (See the list of available free PDFs on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for these and other free fiction.)