[Note from Steve: If you’ve downloaded “Mayhem, Murder, and Music,” the free collection of short crime fiction—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page if you haven’t—you know that music often inspires me. It’s always been part of my life. I even attempted once to write a Broadway-style musical based on Huxley’s Ape and Essence. (It’s now shredded—I didn’t get much further than a rousing march, “Seventy-Six Trombones” in an apocalyptic setting). This series of posts was also inspired by music. I might even repeat some of the songs from that collection! Enjoy.]

Like Neil Diamond’s existential song of the title (I love the version where a 70-piece orchestra accompanies him—it was recorded along with other famous songs on the CD at the famous Abbey Road Studios), this post is an ode to the loneliness of the artist. Whether writer, musician, painter, potter, or sculpturer, creating art is often a lonely pursuit, at least in the creative part. Diamond might have received inspiration from NYC streets for “Beautiful Noise” (also on that CD), but I’ll wager he was alone in his NYC apartment when he composed both the songs mentioned here. (Ironically, cities are often very lonely places.)

Writers of fiction, even as they mirror the romance, comedy, and tragedy of human existence in their prose, must go it alone. Patterson might have 300+ novels to his name, but his “co-authors,” who wrote a lot of them, still worked alone, as he did in his first books. Like a painter with his brushes, palette, and easel (my father was one), the writer paints with words within the solitary confinement of his story, reaching out to readers as if to slice away at that loneliness.

It’s a big decision for any creative to take: Choose loneliness in order to create. Most people can’t do it; or they don’t want to do it, thinking that creating art just creates more loneliness. There’s some truth to the latter, but creating art also is a cure for loneliness, medicine that with the proper dosage kills the ennui of disconnection.

Or maybe it’s not a decision but an addiction? Some people must create; they can’t help themselves. They’ve decided the loneliness of the creator is an obstacle they’re willing to jump over in order to be creative. And whether other people can benefit from and admire those creations or not, the creatives can still revel in their creations. That satisfaction relieves the loneliness.

I suppose there’s also the satisfaction that some creations might live on after we leave this “mortal coil.” This is one reason I include end notes in every novel. I think every author should. While it might be possible to piece together a writer’s creative life  just using her or his novels, the reason for writing them has some importance, if only as a last blow against loneliness. In my case, someone could patch together a decent biography of my life, but I suspect no one will! Yet my novels will live on, at least for a time, as evidence of my creative life…and my loneliness.

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Comments are always welcome.

Rogue Planet. Perhaps you’re familiar with my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Did you know several stories are set in that same sci-fi universe, including the Dr. Carlos tales and A. B. Carolan’s first three YA sci-fi mysteries? Rogue Planet is another one, and it has some Game-of-Throne aspects while still being hard sci-fi. A young prince’s planet is ruled by an oppressive theocracy that has led to a quarantine by ITUIP (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets). He strives to defeat the theocracy’s leader and bring the planet back from the galaxy’s Dark Ages.

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

Authors like to talk about their works-in-progress (WIPs). I’d rather call them writing projects. Most of writing is DIY, up to a certain point (unless you’re James Patterson using co-authors to keep his book assembly line going). An author assembles a story like a DIY home construction project, without instructions or blueprints, of course.

I usually forget about how I assemble each of my stories—the process and the motivations. (No, I’m not going senile. I’ve just written a lot of stories!) Remodeling a kitchen or bathroom is a project that needs some kind of plan. A story, especially a novel, is no different, even if you’re a seat-of-pants writer like me, creating the story as I go with only a general plot and themes in mind. This is why my novels have end notes, a commentary that’s as useful and interesting for me to jog my memory later as it might be for readers who have finished the book. Unlike most authors, I include them in almost every book. As a reader, I appreciate it when other authors do the same.

Also unlike most authors, I often have several projects ongoing. That helps my writing because I come back to a manuscript fresh each time. (I suppose blogging can accomplish the same thing, but a blog post usually isn’t a story.) Multiple projects also help me do the content editing for each one.

So what are my current projects?

“Friday Fiction.” When I start a story, it can become short fiction (a short story or novella) or a novel, more often the former now (dashes are over more quickly than marathons). I now give away my short fiction, either in some blog posts or as free downloads (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this site for a list). You’ve seen the beginning of the novella “The Prodigal Son” (archived in “Friday Fiction,” of course). This will be followed by “Poetic Justice” and “The Conference,” two more British-style mystery novellas.

The Denisovan Trilogy, Books Two and Three. Book One is already published, so these two are projects. I want to know what happens to Kayla Jones as much as some readers do. For me and them, A.B. Carolan needs to get his butt in gear! These novels, unlike the first, will take place “out there somewhere,” not on Earth—stories about the descendants of ancient hominins in space, if you will.

The Last Humans: Long Days (tentative title). Readers of the first two novels probably realized there might be another novel in the making to complete the trilogy. Penny Castro has more battles to fight, this time with what remains of the Russian government. (Because of Amazon’s error made by confusing the first two books, my motivation here is a bit low. Unlike the second, you can bet I won’t put this third novel for sale on Amazon!)

More than Human: The Complete and Unabridged History. This is a big project. I want to expand and continue the saga of Homo sapiens 2.0 and their Mensan buddies found in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. We left it with humans and Mensans in a starship heading for a star near Sol yet not visible to the unaided eye. As with Kayla Jones, I want to know what happens with Captain Kensha, her XO Sara, and the starship’s crew. Maybe you do too.

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” You now have five novels in this British-style mystery and thriller series. In the middle one, Death on the Danube, principal characters Esther and Bastiann got married, but they even had a mystery to solve on their honeymoon cruise down the Danube. I didn’t stop there. Two more books involve crimes on Esther’s home turf. I have some tentative ideas for more novels; we’ll see if they gel. These novels are my longest to date, so the next one would be long too…a real marathon I’d have to run again.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to complete any of these projects. I might even lose interest in some of them. I hope readers will be understanding. After all, I haven’t signed a contract with a traditional publisher to deliver a finished manuscript for any of these future stories. (I’ve experimented with traditional publishing, but I shall not repeat that experiment. I’ve been burned twice now.)

In this post, I just wanted to let readers know that I’m working on several projects. My addiction to storytelling continues, at least for now. (Amazon and other bad players make my motivation more difficult to come by with time, though.) I’m sure that I’ll leave this “mortal coil” with projects uncompleted. That’s inevitable…and the curse of any storyteller.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Rogue Planet. Perhaps you’re familiar with my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Did you know several stories are set in that same sci-fi universe, including the Dr. Carlos tales and A. B. Carolan’s first three YA sci-fi mysteries? Rogue Planet is another one, and it has some Game-of-Throne aspects while still being hard sci-fi. A young prince’s planet is ruled by an oppressive theocracy that has led to a quarantine by ITUIP (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets). He strives to defeat the theocracy’s leader and bring the planet back from the galaxy’s Dark Ages.

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

Most readers of this blog and my recent works know that I’m surviving the Covid pandemic by reading a lot, in particular, binge-reading entire series of British-style mysteries. I published a list at the end of my little collection, Sleuthing, British-style, written in honor of Dame Agatha, who started that story tradition. So here are some additions to that list (in alphabetical order, which coincidentally corresponds to the order of light-to-serious themes), the best of my recent binge-reading:

A. G. Barnett’s “Mary Blake” series. Interesting concept: The subtitle’s character is an aging actor who has lost her series role and her career; she discovers she has talents as an amateur sleuth. A bit of stretch for the reader’s imagination, especially concerning the patience of the inspector she often annoys (she’s a younger, meddling Miss Marple), but entertaining stories nonetheless.

M. S. Morris’s “Bridget Hart” series. The subtitle’s character is a single mom who struggles to make her mark as a DI in and around the hallowed halls of Oxford University’s colleges. There are many secondary characters readers will find interesting.

Gretta Mulrooney’s “Tyrone Swift” series. Here the subtitle’s character is a PI who has good creds—he’s no amateur sleuth because of past service with the Met and Interpol. He also has problems with the women in his life. These novels are a bit darker about their treatment of more modern and serious themes than those above. The main character harks back to hard-boiled, tenacious PIs of yore.

If you use a Kindle, it’s amazingly easy to sail through these series, one book after another. I found each novel is far more entertaining than the summer’s offering of droll telly shows, whether “new” game shows or reality crap or reruns. Sorry. Streaming video doesn’t appeal to me either, nor do computer games. Each novel is good for two to three nights of reading (they’re short).

Modesty aside, I’ll not refrain from mentioning Books Four and Five in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Palettes, Patriots and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code. The influence of all that binge-reading is obvious as Esther and Bastiann return to her home turf after their honeymoon only to run into more trouble on UK soil. The glossary in my collection mentioned above is extended in these novels as I continue to adopt the British vernacular if not the spelling, (The entire series represents ripe fruit for binge-reading, of course, but the novels are longish and hardly readable in two or three nights. Maybe the five in total equal fifteen of the above?)

I can only wish for other extended series in the sci-fi and thriller genres (besides my own, of course). The last one I read in the first genre was Asimov’s extended Foundation series, and that was years ago! Clancy’s “Jack Ryan” series is also too dated (not that it has the caliber of any of the books I’ve mentioned). (If anyone shouts back “Fifty Shades,” I might become violent. The “thrills” there are sicker than a story about a serial killer!) The fact that there are so many British-style mysteries shows they’re popular and a blessing for avid readers who still prefer books to streaming video and computer games.

In all these British-style mysteries, including mine, American readers have a chance to learn a lot about their English cousins…and sometimes those cousins will have a chance to learn a bit about us, the crazy Yanks!

***

Comments are always welcome.

A. B. Carolan’s Origins. You can’t say A. B.’s novels are British-style mysteries; he’s Irish, and he writes sci-fi mysteries for young adults. In this one, Kayla Jones has dreams she can’t understand. Her future seems determined as the brilliant STEM student who looks forward to a research career, but her past gets in the way. As if the chaos afflicting the world and leading to her adopted father’s death wasn’t enough, killers begin to pursue her. With some friends who come to her aid, she’s on her way to discover a conspiracy that can be traced to prehistoric battles waged by hominins bent on conquest of a primitive Earth.

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

I used to like motorcycles. Even back in my tweens and teens, my mother would say, “Any motorcycle rider should be forced to sign up to be an organ donor.” She worried about the danger; I yearned to have enough money to buy one. I was a frustrated kid, seeing other boys having fun on their motorcycles yet knowing that I didn’t even have the money for a scooter. So I was relegated to being the guy on the back, a position useful for a drive-by assassin maybe, but never the fun ride one has up front. I suppose riding a horse might be a similar experience—wind in your hair, reveling in the sensation of speed—but even back then a horse cost more than a cycle.

Motorcycles don’t make many appearances in my stories, though. The terrorist’s night ride in Angels Need Not Apply provided a quiet and sinister hook—I hoped the reader would be wondering, “Who is this guy?” (they might have guessed if they’d read The Midas Bomb). Penny Castro’s brief ride along a post-apocalyptic LA freeway even made it to the cover of The Last Humans, and I hope the Hungarian assassin’s final ride in Leonardo and the Quantum Code provides an interesting climax for readers. Those reflect more my pubescent interest than any desire to make a cycle a main character, and I’d never want to encourage the risky, outrageous behavior seen in Sturgis, South Dakota, each year, Covid or no Covid.

Motorcars, or simply “motors,” is Brit-speak for automobiles, or “autos” (although the Brits say “car park” for “parking lot,” that usually have spaces for cycles too). My fascination with them isn’t so juvenile as the one with motorcycles and doesn’t compare with that or my brother’s strange predilection for unusual cars. He started with a ’52 Pontiac (a “blue bomb” that I inherited to use during high school) and went on to a pink Cadillac (a model with shark fins he bought from a Las Vegas gambler), the kind you saw in that famous X-Files episode; his last unusual purchase was a classic Porsche, the one with wooden floorboards, in which he carried grandfather’s guns to me from Ohio to Massachusetts. (I sold them to a gun collector—our kids were too young at the time to have guns around, especially antiques, and I didn’t want to deal with any NRA members.)

Maybe the little sportscar in Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By and Esther’s Jag in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series (her insurance pays for a new one in Palettes, Patriots, and Prats) are the cars I remember best from my novels, maybe because they’re the most recent; but a ’67 Vette plays a key role in one early short story “The Bridge.” (It’s my first and only zombie story and first appeared in eFiction, an ezine that’s now defunct, I believe, and also in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, Volume One—Volumes Two and Three can be found in the list of free downloads on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.)

Curiously enough in my prose, I’ve avoided the stereotype that male characters ride motorcycles and female ones drive motorcars, as you can see by some of the examples I’ve mentioned. The same is true about horses: A female character in The Collector frequents a stable in that story, while Survivors of the Chaos (see The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection) opens with a solitary male rider. Horses as a ubiquitous mode of transportation even make a comeback in the post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans: A New Dawn (Penny Castro’s cycle is long gone by this second novel). NYPD detective Castilblanco (that’s NYC, in case you didn’t know!) even befriends a horse in the short story “The Case of Carriageless Horse” (found in the anthology World Enough and Crime—it’s the young cop’s first homicide case).

Horses have the longest history as a means of transportation for human beings, of course. Maybe I should feature them even more? After that fiasco at this year’s Kentucky Derby, one can imagine a murder mystery with a racetrack setting. We’ll see….

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Comments are welcome.

Sleuthing, British-Style. My binge-reading of British-style mysteries during the Covid pandemic has influenced the later novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, in particular Death on the Danube, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and Leonardo and the Quantum Code. I’ve also written short fiction to honor and celebrate Dame Agatha’s seminal work in this subgenre. Some examples are found in the little collection indicated here of six novellas, which also contains a glossary of words and phrases from the UK’s rich lexicon of dialects as well a list of British-style novels that I read and enjoyed. The collection is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Smashwords). A second volume is available as a free download (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website).

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

[This post is a bit repetitive with one back in 2020. Consider it an encore for the detectives. They deserve it. And today you get a two-fer, this post plus the following book review. Enjoy.]

I have a few series (at last count six; or seven, if you count A. B. Carolan’s “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries”), so every once and a while I pause and take stock of that part of my oeuvre. None of my series are as long as Sue Grafton’s; I stopped reading hers at “C,” I believe, and she never made it to “Z.” It’s not that I tire of writing a series and end it. Okay, maybe a bit, but the end of a series for me, if it truly ends, is more determined by the way I write. When I start a story, I don’t even know whether it will be a dash (short story or novella) or a marathon (novel). The same goes for a series, where I sometimes decide the main characters deserve more stories because they’re so interesting as human beings (I sometimes describe that as a collaboration between them and my muses, who are really banshees with Tasers, all encouraging me to write more). Plots, themes, and settings change from story to story and novel to novel; series’ books are just independent stories with the same main characters.

The “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series is my longest so far (seven books), and its main characters have become dear and respected friends. I don’t know if there’ll be an eighth, and, in a sense the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series of five novels, the novella :”The Phantom Harvester” (available as a free download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), and the novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan all represent continuations of Chen and Castilblanco’s series with the detectives just having cameos.

Diversity is a key theme in all the C&C novels. The detectives’ cases start in NYC; some stay there while others explode to have national and international proportions. NYC is often considered the capital of the world, and it’s very diversity adds to that fame—more than eight hundred languages are spoken there. C&C reflect that diversity. Chen is a Chinese-American from Long Island; she’s a true conservative (not like today’s fascist Good Ole Piranhas) driven to pursue criminal elements and set things right for their victims. Castilblanco is Puerto Rican; he’s a progressive whose motivations echo Chen’s, if not more so. Chen is a stoic who shows her emotions from time to time, her thin smiles leading Castilblanco to call her his Asian Mona Lisa; he is more excitable and often stressed (he’s addicted to Tums to ward off ulcers), but he’s also cerebral, going beyond his Catholicism to become a Buddhist.

Politics also play a role in these novels, but in a good sense: Contrary to our current national political chaos, I intended to show in the very first novel, The Midas Bomb, how a conservative and progressive can work together to better the human condition. That goes beyond the fluff of the good guys vanquishing the bad guys so prevalent in today’s mystery and crime stories.

There are causes too. For example, environmental ones in the last novel, Gaia and the Goliaths, where I try to show that the solution to global warming is reducing fossil-fuel usage with Castilblanco insisting that nuclear power is part of that solution. He reflects more my views; Chen better reflects the extremist view in this case, that of environmental activists who are rabidly anti-nuclear as well. (This discussion, appropriately enough, is never resolved in the novel.)

The final series item I’d like to mention is our shared humanity. We need more of C&C’s empathy towards their fellow human beings. Both detectives would wear masks and get vaccinated, for example (I wrote the last novel before Covid), to protect others as well as themselves and their families. There’s no doubt about that. They’ve shown concern for their fellow human beings in spades throughout their cases in the series. We need more people like that.

Of course, this article is more a presentation of the themes this series considers. They’ll be transparent to most readers and reviewers who will just enjoy these mystery/thriller crime stories. Maybe it’s time for you to try one?

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Comments are always welcome.

“Detectives Chen and Castilblanco.” Binge-reading who-dun-its with enough action, suspense, and twists to entertain and educate any reader, most of these two NYPD homicide detectives’ cases start in NYC, but they often expand to national and international proportions. Castilblanco is the gentle Puerto Rican progressive who lives on antacids and becomes a Buddhist; Chen is the serious Chinese lady with that Asian Mona Lisa smile. Together the two make a great crime-fighting team. These novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Keeping with this Monday’s weather theme, let me discuss some consequences of global warming I’ve been worried about for a while, ever since I pounded stakes and did other menial and brain-numbing chores for a civil engineer in the San Joaquin Valley in California. Arriving home to tank up on water and take salt pills, my thoughts would start this way: It wouldn’t take much drought to turn my agricultural home turf into a barren no-man’s land.

While we tend to focus on extreme weather events as indicators of climate change and global warming, another related enemy for human civilization is water shortages. We’re finally seeing them mentioned more in relation to apocalyptic news about wildfires and forest fires—drought caused by global warming makes those fires all the more deadly because it’s hard to combat them with diminishing levels in lakes and reservoirs.

Burns, denuded hillsides, and water shortages play important roles in Book One of “The Last Humans” series. Because the primary “villain” in this first novel is a bio-engineered virus that travels around the world on prevailing winds even though the attack was aimed at the US West Coast, I don’t think the book, or the series, for that matter, has had as many readers as it might have had. Who wants to read about a fictional worldwide pandemic when we’re trying to survive a real one?!

Yet this novel represents much more than the tale about the survivors of a pandemic’s aftermath. This post-apocalyptic story (the second book is more a standard thriller) is more focused on global warming and water shortages, not the viral pandemic. The burn scars and dry conditions in Penny Castro’s apocalyptic landscape exist even before that virus turns Penny into a lonely survivor. And steps also have already been taken to alleviate the water shortage before the biowarfare attack: In the novel, offshore desalination platforms once pumped fresh water to thirsty Californians and crops. This technology is well-known today and constantly improved upon (see the notes at the end of the novel). More will be needed in the future.

(more…)

It’s always amusing when certain authors’ antics prove how weird members of our group can be. I suppose I shouldn’t find those antics strange; after all, we work at our craft alone. This solitary confinement could make anyone become a weird recluse, conspiracy theorist, or paranoid suffering from agoraphobia. I have to leave the house and observe human beings once and a while to recalibrate at times (something that was less likely at the height of the Covid pandemic, of course). But I’d be incorrect to judge typical human behavior by observing how authors behave! That’s often stranger than fiction, considering what occurs in reality.

My first example is a serious one: Did Andrew Cuomo abuse his position to land that juicy book contract? His critics claim that. If aides gathered data and information about Covid and its management to put in his book, shouldn’t they be considered coauthors? That might satisfy those attacking his book, but it’s unlikely. And I think his alleged sin is more akin to what any celeb does by “authoring” a book using a ghostwriter without giving that person credit. Happens all the time. But maybe being governor of the great state of New York makes those antics worse?

On a lighter (and sexier?) note, consider the antics of author E. L. James and her “Fifty Shades” brand. Wine, lingerie, floggers, vibrators, handcuffs, etc. are being sold by Ms. James with her “Fifty Shades’ trademark. And here I thought even selling T-shirts at a book event was tacky!

Another author who’s displayed some interesting antics is James Patterson. His writing isn’t  nearly as sexy as Ms. James’s (although one can argue that both are formulaic), but this astute businessperson invented the literary assembly line that churns out novels for all age groups. He went beyond the frontier of authors’ antics by augmenting his stable of exploited coauthors to include old Bill Clinton! It would have been more interesting if that sexiest of all ex-presidents (Hillary might disagree) had teamed up with Ms. James to add some reality to her presentation of the man’s view in her new trilogy. That way James could avoid any charges of cultural appropriation. Of course, Mr. Patterson would have then missed all those chats about Bill’s many affairs. (Did he take notes?)

To wind this up, please don’t ask what my antics are or my secret life is about. You really wouldn’t be interested. My antics don’t have the shock value of those above. The spice in my life is mostly obtained from reading…or from the occasional forage for Indian food; that’s what’s public (the private is none of your damn business). I just want to keep on being a reclusive author, writing my novels and laughing at the antics of some of my fellow authors. There’s plenty of the latter to help keep me entertained.

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Comments are always welcome.

“The Last Humans”—a series about biowarfare and its consequences. In Book One, The Last Humans, Penny Castro, forensics diver for the LA County Sheriff’s Department, finds a body on a dive but a lethal pandemic when she surfaces. What follows is a struggle to survive, but she also finds love and hope. In Book Two, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, she and her new hubby are forcefully conscripted by a struggling US government to take revenge against the virus makers. The government wants the pair’s skills badly enough to kidnap their children. Both novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (But I don’t recommend Amazon, because they confused the two ebooks and won’t correct their error!)

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

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a famous British mathematician known for creating the “Turing machine” concept and using it to prove the “halting problem” for these machines was undecidable, the Gödel’s theorem of computer science. Because of a fairly recent movie, he justifiably is now considered a national and world hero for breaking the Enigma code by extending the deciphering capabilities of the “Polish bombe,” a mechanical technique used against the Nazi U-boats’ damaging offense launched against freighters crossing the Atlantic during World War II. Like Oscar Wilde and many others, he was treated terribly by the British, basically forced to commit suicide. (The Brits didn’t decriminalize homosexuality until 2008 when what is now known as “Turing’s law” was passed.)

Ever since Turing, and maybe even before, coding has always been good employment for mathematicians or other people with mathematical skills. Of course, here I mean coding to be encryption and decryption of messages, not designing iPhone and Android apps! The goal is always to create unbreakable codes, and these techniques are used by many people, not just spies and the military. There are simple codes your kids can use (for parents reading this post, I’ve taken pity on you and won’t mention specifics), and more complex ones that need large primes. Most of the latter could be broken by a quantum computers.

Turing is also considered the father of artificial intelligence (the machine algorithm that bears his name is considered a test for that). Sci-fi stories seem to care more about AI systems, especially those used to guide starships and give robots more human characteristics. (Asimov, however, was too early to consider either one!) Few authors care about quantum encryption/decryption, and “quantum computers” have almost become a cliche like “FTL drives,” with few worrying about the nuts and bolts involved.

Consequently, the real purpose of this post is to emphasized that my new Esther Brookstone novel, Leonardo and the Quantum Code, is only partially about quantum encryption/decryption and certainly not sci-fi. It’s a mystery/thriller novel, like the pervious novels in the series, where coding algorithms are inspired by Da Vinci’s work in an unknown notebook of his. (It’s estimated that there are 50+ such novels.) An old mathematician friend of Esther’s, Donald Townes, is working on these algorithms, and someone wants to steal his results. There’s a trio of villains, in fact: Russian spies, American spies, and a strange man named Vladimir Kalinin, a Russian ex-pat.

Turing is briefly mentioned in the book; he’s also mentioned in Death on the Danube for his gayness and the Brits’ crime. He’s a tragic character, but Townes is too, for his wife has just been murdered. He begins to turn his life around by the end of the book, though, unlike Turing. While I wanted to show scientists are human beings and can exhibit the whole spectrum of human behavior, I rewrote the novel so that he doesn’t suffer as much as Turing.

In fact, the novel is a bit light-hearted at times, in keeping with the title. Saucy Esther, of course, helps keep it from taking itself too seriously, unlike Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, which is mostly serious. The theme of cyber security, is deadly serious, which is enough.

I’ve tried to strike a good balance between Moliere and Le Carre. The coppers aren’t quite “Keystone Cops”; and the spy-vs-spy antics aren’t as tongue-in-cheek as Mad Magazine’s or as noir as Le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl. The mystery-novel aspects aren’t as fluffy as a cozy’s or serious as a psychological thriller either.

I’m proud of this novel. It just might be my best so far. Above all, I think I managed to write another entertaining and educational book in the series. You’ll have to read it to see if you agree.

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Comments are always welcome.

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” Esther takes you around merry olde England, Europe, the Middle East, and South America in her five-book series. Esther’s main characteristic is becoming obsessed with righting wrongs, from searching for a missing Rembrandt in the first book to risking her life to help a friend in the last. And this saucy ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard inspector acts on those obsessions! Her novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The last two are not on Amazon, though.)

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

He’s back! He’s a psycho; a power-hungry, greedy devil; and a bad-ass villain who sometimes manages to do some good. That more or less sums up his appearance in Leonardo and the Quantum Code, Book Five of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series.

I needed a foil for both Janos Rakoczy, Hungarian assassin extraordinaire and the true villain in that tale; and Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard inspector, who’s the saucy main character. And there he was, waiting in the wings, smiling like the Cheshire cat, who also alternates between visibility and invisibility. (Alice and her friends are even mentioned a few times in the novel because Esther’s second husband and close friends from her Oxford days are also featured; Alice’s stories started in Oxford!)

Kalinin’s appearance in this novel is logical: He’s at the beginning of my fictional timeline in The Midas Bomb and goes all the way to Soldiers of God, the bridge book between “The Clones & Mutants Trilogy” and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In fact, his actions have an influence on everything on that timeline even beyond Soldiers of God! He appears off and on in the various novels, this Cheshire cat, throughout the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series and dominating the “Clones & Mutants Trilogy.” He even appears in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan and the novella “The Phantom Harvester” (available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page).

At the end of Gaia and the Goliaths (#7 in the detective series), you already saw some of his DIY skills, even though his constant companion, old Irish bombmaker Sean Cassidy, is often there to help. (He might have been unstoppable if he’d had more people like Sean; too many he hired failed him.) But we also learn more abut his hatred for the Russian leaders who made him flee his homeland, including Putin.

He shows some good human qualities in No Amber Waves of Grain (#3 in the “Clones & Mutants Trilogy”), and there are many glimpses of this in manty of the stories where he appears (I still love that rose scene at the end of The Midas Bomb). I’ve never appreciated cardboard-like two-dimensional characters in my reading—most human beings are complex—so I try to make my characters truly human in all my stories I write (ETs are an exception, of course). Because Kalinin appears so often in them, readers can see that in spades with him.

Kalinin is a survivor and self-made man. He’s suave, sophisticated, and very lethal .He’s the James Bond of villains. I hope you enjoy seeing him in action once again in Leonardo and the Quantum Code.

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Comments are always welcome.

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” Binge-reading plus a treasure hunt: What’s not to like? Esther Brookstone takes you around merry olde England, Europe, the Middle East, and South America in her five-book series that also travels through three publishers. You start with saucy Esther, an ex-MI6 spy and Scotland Yard inspector, and her paramour Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent; you move on to their exciting honeymoon cruise on the Danube; and you then return to Esther’s home turf where the old married couple’s adventures continue. The two sleuths are 21^st-century versions of Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Esther’s novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (Palettes, Patriots, and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code are recent additions to this series, and the last two are not on Amazon.)

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

Happy Bastille Day to all my French readers! Vive la France!

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When I started polishing my stories at the beginning of the third millennia (that sounds better than turn of the century), thinking about publishing them, I already had computers to help me. The internet was still in its infancy, but word publishing software wasn’t (in fact, MS Word was probably better then because it wasn’t so bloated).

There are three types of editing: content, copy, and proofing. Copy editing is the last thing you do before formatting, mostly spelling and grammar checking (I’ll admit MS Word’s new “Editor” does a better job of that now, although it still doesn’t like my hard-boiled, minimalist style). Proofing is the first thing you do after formatting and before publication.

In this post, though, I’ll focus on how I content edit. My method requires word processing software, and always has. It will sound chaotic, but it’s entirely logical.

I content edit as I go. My first draft is my last before copy editing. But “as I go” might be a bit confusing to some people. I get a manuscript (MS) going good, leave it for a bit, and create snippets of prose I add to it the next day. I might cut out a paragraph or an entire chapter, putting them elsewhere in the MS, or sticking them in an auxiliary file for possible future use…maybe with changes, maybe not, and maybe even in another story!

Perhaps I should call this creative chaos organic growth in a large sense, and not content editing? Planting, weeding, transplanting, pruning, etc. Growing up in California’s Central Valley, I could have become a farmer who does exactly that. As a writer, I’m that farmer who’s tending to a different crop, growing novels.

This is not a linear process! Some readers might think I just sit down and write until I have a first draft. That’s not how I write. (I wonder if anyone writes that way.) I might even write the ending several times—nothing wrong with that because Beethoven did it with his Fifth Symphony—each of my endings requiring more content editing, and each one possibly done before the novel is finished.

While I often discuss storytelling in terms of bards of yore spinning their yarns beside some prehistoric campfires, I couldn’t do that. They were the better storytellers, I suppose, at least in using a completely linear process (although they often repeated the same stories again and again, I suspect, embellishing sometimes, which is content editing).

I find this writing technique effective and efficient, even though it might seem to other writers and readers to be chaotic. It allows me to return to a story days or weeks later, or keep two or more MSs going at the same time. How do I keep the stories straight? Simple. They’re there in the computer with all the related noted, patiently waiting for further additions…and content editing.

Now you know how I produce all those novels…and are probably thinking that it’s better to have the final polished product in hand!

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Comments are always welcome.

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” Up for some binge-reading? Here’s a series that should delight all US and UK readers! It starts with ex-MI6 spy Esther Brookstone as an inspector in Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit. Her paramour and Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden accompanies her on many adventures, eventually becoming Esther’s fourth husband. He tries to control her obsessive desire to fight crime and bring criminals to justice, keeping her focused and out of trouble, but she’s an active and headstrong woman. Wags in the yard have nicknamed Esther Miss Marple and Bastiann Hercule Poirot, but they’re 21^st century sleuths who are more than a match for today’s criminal elements. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, including the new Book Five.

. Around the world and to the stars!