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.)

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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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!

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!

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!

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).

(more…)

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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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!