I have written about “cancel culture” earlier in this blog. So far no one has gone after Allan Quatermain, thank God. I suppose those folks who practice cancel culture will eventually get around to Allan, given that they go after Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers for being slave owners, for example.

H. Rider Haggard’s Quatermain novels are the precursors of thrillers, especially of the Indian Jones-like variety—you can bet Steven Spielberg read them! (Or saw the movies based on them. He might not be much of a reader.) And, from the cancel-culture folks’ perspective, Spielberg probably went to great trouble to clean them up—sort of (the African people are generally replaced by Arabs, Asians, and Native Americans in the Indy movies, so they might yet be boycotted).

In my early reading (pre-high school), Haggard’s books kept me company, along with Christie’s mysteries and Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein’s sci-fi stories. I often read these classics under the covers with a flashlight (my definition of “classic” is a lot more general compared to snooty literary critics’, who ignore a lot of good fiction, of course). They provide a foundation for my own writing.

I’m sure many scenes similar to ones from Quatermain novels pop up in my oeuvre.

The “buried alive” scene in King Solomon’s Mines has been copied by so many authors and screenplay writers that one can hardly call it plagiarism. It’s similar to a scene in my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. I have a good excuse: that scene takes place on Mars!

The battle scenes in my Rogue Planet might resemble ones in Haggard’s novels too—they’re certainly examples of face-to-face warfare—but I can’t pin those memories down to one Haggard book. (Topic for a future thesis in the future? Go for it, MFA students!)

No matter. There’s no doubt Haggard influenced me. I suppose he and his character Quatermain will be perceived as scurrilous in their racism as George Washington is for the cancel-culture folk. Both the author and his character are representatives of British racist colonialism. But hell, Quatermain’s adventures over his lifespan of many decades are interesting and entertaining, and they’re probably a lot more interesting than Indy’s (which are also racist).

I’m willing to wager that the cancel-culture folk will eventually attack both Allan and Indy. They haven’t attacked Quatermain yet because they don’t watch old movies or read old books (if they read at all). I don’t know why they’re taking so long with Indiana Jones! Most people have watched Spielberg’s movie and enjoyed them. (Maybe that’s why they don’t attack Indy?)

So, please, let’s keep Allan Quatermain’s secret to ourselves. The cancel-culture folks are liable to attack him on any jerk’s say-so, as they blather away on Facebook or Twitter. That’s their brand of culture, banning books or movies without even reading them. And I certainly wouldn’t want them to enjoy a good book. They don’t deserve it! (That’s why I only mentioned one Allan Quatermain book!)

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Comments are always welcome!

Hard sci-fi, anyone? The bargain bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection contains three “evergreen” sci-fi novels (i.e. as current and entertaining as the day I finished the manuscripts) that span thousands of years of future history, including the founding of ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) featured in A.B. Carolan’s novels, Rogue Planet, and other stories. In the novel Survivors of the Chaos, readers discover a dystopian Earth where powerful international corporations rule and exploit the planet and the rest of the solar system, even hiding the greatest discovery Humans could ever make, an ET ship that crash-landed on a moon of Saturn. In spite of the chaos, three starships are launched to colonize planets orbiting Sol-type stars. In Sing a Zamba Galactica, readers can follow two colonies’ struggles to survive an ET invasion in near-Earth space; the colonists aren’t alone because new ET friends are there to help. The reader will also  meet new ETs, including Swarm, that strange collective intelligence so important in ITUIP history. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, readers will see how a mad industrialist, akin to ones Humans fled decades earlier, plots to rule all of near-Earth peace and end the peace in that corner of the galaxy so dearly won. Three novels for the price of one ebook—a veritable smorgasbord of sci-fi! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first edition of Survivors of the Chaos is also available in print from another publisher.)

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

From the Fifty Shades books to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal’s reporting about Gov. Cuomo, we have ample evidence for this truism. Scandal is the opium of the masses today, not religion. Better said, scandal as reported in the media has become the new religion for most people, and they can’t seem to get enough of it. Where there’s a demand, there’s a supplier, and publishers, writers, and media outlets have jumped on the bandwagon and are shoveling the SOS out by the truckful.

We can’t really blame sleaze-meisters like Ronan Farrell or Pierce Morgan, or even Fox News or MSNBC pundits, who are out to shock their viewers. People love their doses of scandal, and others feed that addiction for profit. Blame the media outlets’ producers and writers. The sleaze-meisters are just their toadies.

There’s absolutely no concern for the people who might be hurt unfairly by scandalous accusations for the simple reason that they are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Even when proof of innocence is available—i.e. the scandal doesn’t just reduce to an X-said-Y-said, as in the case of Cuomo (you don’t thing a high percentage of politicos didn’t favor their families with Covid testing or vaccinations?)—the public only remembers the initial claims of scandal and never the proof that there was no scandal, or it was often simply an attack generated by a few disgruntled people with an agenda (Cosby’s case was a classic, because the AG was running for office; in Cuomo’s case, you have a new generation  of pols aching for a chance at power—his first accuser is also running for office and the twenty-years-old story of abuse came from a de Blasio supporter—guess which Dem in NY state is Cuomo’s biggest enemy!).

Often the person accused of scandal has to face a lynch mob spurred on by the likes of Morgan and Farrell, who become judge and jury for the lynching—this group includes such “fair and honest” news media stars as Jake Tapper. The media know scandal sells, there’d demand for it, and they supply it.

This is all exacerbated by the speed of communications nowadays, mostly social media, where bandwagons for scandal abound. Some of us rush to keep up with the scandal; others (I’m one) are more logical and reasonable and say they’ll withhold judgement until all the facts are in (i.e. due process takes place, and the scandal is proven to be true or false in absolute terms, not a storm in a teacup). But most people are scandal mongers—they buy, sell, and consume scandal.

The scandal’s often not there, folks! Some social media sites even create it out of thin air, leading to all those conspiracy theories that seem impossible to debunk.

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Cancel culture is yet another current fad that smacks of censorship—in fact, just another but less common name for it in the publishing world, in fact. Like the anti-cultural appropriation movement, it inhibits free speech and an author’s right to self-expression. I know I’ll get into trouble for saying this, but go ahead and boycott me! I don’t sell many books anyway (probably more pirated than legal sales, because I favor ebooks), so, unlike that emcee of ABC’s “The Bachelor,” my livelihood won’t be affected. And what I have to say doesn’t compare with the fantastic lies and conspiracy theories that have created on both the far-right and far-left.

From cancelling Pepe Le Pew to George Washington, this so-called cancel culture begins in absurdity-land and ends in tyrannical censorship-Hades. You can’t change facts by trying to erase them! Yes, Pepe was a hilarious cad, a pursuer of women (and more a French stereotype), but he was a far cry from Donald J. Trump (have you already forgotten that “Access Hollywood” tape and his 16+ victims?). Yes, George Washington and a few other Founding Fathers of our great nation owned slaves—Blacks weren’t even counted as humans in the original Constitution! And Chris Harrison is correct: We are viewing our current culture with a lens that differs from the ones of 1776, 1945, or even from just a few years back.

Slavery was outlawed with Lincoln, it continued in Brazil until 1888, and the Brits exploited Blacks to clean up their country after World War II, but under those earlier lenses, all these were an accepted practices. Many other persons, not just the Founding Fathers, were racists. Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary (or was it PM?), tried to send them back, saying they weren’t British citizens, yet another example of the racism today’s UK inherited from its colonial past (remember, Southern plantations in the US were originally British!).

And poor Pepe! He’s a victim of LeBron James and other questionable censors who wrap themselves in the cloak of good intentions but should know better. (I’m not knocking him for being a Yankees fan who bought shares that make him a partial owner of the Red Sox.) But going after Pepe is just wrong! Next thing you know, Speedy Gonzales (Mexican stereotype?) and Bugs Bunny (“Hey, Mr. A-rab!”) will be targets. What about Daffy and Sylvester? Or Porky? (We make fun of them because of their speech impediments, you know.) Or the Big Bad Wolf? (That’s making fun of people with asthma or COPD, right?)

Censorship is alive and well in the US and elsewhere. In the US, it has a new name: cancel culture. But giving something a new name doesn’t make it right. It’s still wrong, and it has always played footsie with fascism. Admit it: No one would know how absurd that QAnon movement is if we cancelled those absurd spiels that led to its beginning in the first place. If only to help people stupid enough to believe it, we can’t cancel that from our national discourse.

A lot of cancel-culture folks scream, “But it was wrong!” about George, Pepe, and others they’ve aimed their guns of political correctness at. That “was” is an example of cultural transference, not cultural appropriation. What’s wrong now was not wrong then. It’s possible the cancelers haven’t studied history enough to realize that? In any case, consciously or otherwise, they’re indicting everyone back than for crimes they believe were committed, crimes defined by their beliefs at this much later time. Those “transgressors” lived within their cultural context; no one living now has the right to apply their cultural mores to them other than saying, “It was wrong but acceptable back then.” And there are unfair equivalences drawn in the process, which are often absurd; Slavery was terrible; the Nazis’ Final Solution was worse. Human beings were crucified, drawn and quartered, burned alive, drowned, electrocuted, hanged, and beheaded; Pepe just got laughs. Yes, human beings’ predilection for treating other human beings horribly is always wrong, but, to mimic Animal Farm, some evils are more evil than other evils.

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I published my first novel, the sci-fi thriller Full Medical, in 2006 (it now has an ebook second edition). I usually publish two or three novels per year, so you can do the math. (A. B. Carolan allows me to count his—wink, wink.)

Some novels are long; some are short, but they’re not novellas. Some I spend a lot of time writing, especially one I did with a small press. (Generally speaking, they’re usually responsible for publication delays, not the writers.) Generally speaking, time from start to published book isn’t all in the writing. Even for a long book, though, the writing time can be very short. I call those “quick books”; mine also are all “evergreen” now (i.e. as current and entertaining as the day I finished their manuscripts), but that could change.

Perhaps it’s the hounding by my muses (“banshees with Tasers” is a better description—they seem to know how many stories I have left in me!), or characters just taking over to tell their own stories, but I remember these quick books well. Writing them was akin to the Iguazu Falls at the corner of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, with the words gushing forth to form giant artistic cataracts from my thoughts.

The first quick book, and still the winner, is The Midas Bomb (now with a second edition in both ebook and print format—forget that old Infinity Publishing POD!). Here I introduce detectives Chen and Castilblanco. The latter has just lost two young partners, so he’s leery about teaming up with another one, namely Chen. (He actually met her as a patrolwoman during his first homicide case—see “The Case of the Carriageless Horse” in the collection World Enough and Crime. Donna Carrick reads that short story on her podcast—see my “Home Page” at this website for details.) The Midas Bomb is a mystery/thriller, not sci-fi, and has the sleuths chasing several smart criminals. (The title is also one of my best, hinting at two parallel crimes that are related.)

My second best quick book is Rogue Planet. I don’t know why this hard sci-fi novel, with Game-of-Thrones and Star-Wars flavors, didn’t resonate more with readers. Like most sci-fi, it will always be evergreen, and it serves as a bridge book for my extended “Future History” timeline between the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and A. B. Carolan’s young adult sci-fi mysteries, especially the last one. Maybe readers would have preferred a Disney-like princess as protagonist instead of a rakish prince? I’m currently thinking about a sequel that would also be a sequel to A.B.’s Mind Games—that might be hard to pull off, but I always like a challenge. (Della from A.B.’s book isn’t a princess, but Prince Kaushal in Rogue Planet is one, and he married his princess Anju.)

My third quick book of note is Son of Thunder, #2 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series (also part of that “Future History,” come to think of it). It’s the only one mentioned so far that’s traditionally published, which proves the point that writing time spent differs greatly from publishing time waiting. (#3, Death on the Danube, had so many delays just to get a response to a query, possibly because of COVID, that I ended up publishing it myself. Its writing went fast too. It would compete with The Last Humans or its sequel, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, for the fourth spot on the quick-books list, proving yet another point—writing time doesn’t correlate well with book length, at least in my case.)

Readers might be surprised that Son of Thunder is #3 on my list of quick books because the novel is very complex, following three independent stories about St. John (biblical times), Boticelli (Renaissance), and Esther (near future), and then bringing everything together. It’s not only complex, it’s my deepest book, considering the themes treated, which, of course, adds to the complexity, so it surprised even me that its writing went so fast. (Oh yes, it also required finding the most background material out of the three!) Not even with COVID, did I write so much so quickly. (I submitted it to the publisher long before it was published in 2019.)

Is there a difference in quality between these three quick books and the rest of my oeuvre? I doubt it. They might just be better, though, because of a phenomenon known better to artists when they are painting: The more they work on a painting, the muddier the colors can often become! Those first strokes on the canvas and those first words that come streaming out of a writer’s head to land on the page are often the best. I believe most authors will tell you that some novels come easier than others, which means the same thing. And that doesn’t mean the quality is less; it might be better.

One thing is certain: I didn’t choose to write these novels quickly. It just happened. I don’t recommend that any author establish a time limit for writing a novel. That’s silly. And any agent or publisher who tries to impose such a constraint might just receive a manuscript of poor quality, what neither they nor readers want.

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Comments are always welcome.

New books. Like I said above, A.B. and I usually publish two or three new books per year. Two novels’ manuscripts are now waiting offstage: A.B. Carolan will start a new trilogy with Origins, a sci-fi mystery that goes far back into prehistory as well as into the near future. Its protagonist is a young STEM girl. Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, #4 in the Brookstone series, finds Esther and new hubby Bastiann back home in London but still getting into trouble. It all takes place in merry old England and Scotland. Watch for them. (Both were written fast because of COVID.)

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

A.B. Carolan’s new young adult sci-fi mystery/thriller Origins (enough genres for you?) will contain a lot of history, from the dawn of human civilization to Argentina’s Dirty War (this book will be published some time in April if all goes as planned). Combining past and future is common in sci-fi. As a young lad, I read Chad Oliver’s The Winds of Time, for example, and it really impressed me.

Of course, the past often plays a role in fiction that isn’t sci-fi, maybe even more so. Son of Thunder, #2 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series is loaded with history, from the time of Christ to the Renaissance and the near future. In fact, sci-fi or not, and unlike Son of Thunder, a novel can be set in the past completely, and it’s called historical fiction, an extremely nebulous categorization. Is Alex Gerlis’s The Best of Our Spies historical fiction or a spy story? (Spyfi addicts know the answer.) Can Son of Thunder be called historical fiction or is it just a mystery/thriller.

I could use this confusion to argue my point that genres are just key words one can use to describe a book, but my focus here is the following: When does history in fiction become historical fiction? Is there a natural boundary? And should writers care? Readers might be surprised to know that, contrary to perceived evidence in Origins and Son of Thunder, A.B. and I look more forward than backward. We want to question where human beings are going more than where they’ve been. While the past (and past settings) can be interesting, the claim that familiarization with past errors will help us avoid them in the future seems all too often false, primarily because our educational system focuses on past glories and not past problems and their solutions, or simply lies to students by creating a past that didn’t happen at all. (US states in the South, as well as autocratic governments around the world, like to do that in their textbooks, thus lying about a lot of things! And, as with you-know-who, people believe those lies because they’re all they hear and read.)

Black History Month deserves a lot of credit for bringing to our attention many Blacks who contributed a lot without getting credit for it. As an ex-scientist, I knew about a lot of Black scientists in history, and worked with them as well, but I just learned that one Black inventor,  Granville T. Woods, had 60+ patents—Thomas Edison even tried to steal one but lost the case! (Imagine, a white guy stealing from a Black guy! Edison was an ass, of course—just ask Tesla.) But, for the most part, celebrations of Black history, Hispanic history, Irish history—ethnic histories in general—cater to human beings’ nostalgia about their past and ethnic origins. In spite of their database limitations, especially for Asians and Blacks, websites like ancestry.com can make a lot of money providing this service too, although their ties with Big Pharma are definitely suspect. (But maybe that’s just part of the general problem where, because of narcissism, people make their personal information public.)

History’s propensity for awarding the conquerors and oppressors, i.e. the winners and not the losers (I hope that works for the Big Loser, you-know-who) is a good justification for including history in fiction to at least make readers wonder, what’s the real story? Who knows? Maybe my attempt to add details about St. John’s life between the Crucifixion and the disciple’s death (his was a long life) will motivate some young reader to study archeology or Christian history, i.e. what really happened? (And put their own spin on it?)

But I don’t really put a lot of history in my books. I’m not out to rectify all those lies in those Texas textbooks either. Some of my stories have historical flashbacks, or even historical and parallel developments, as in Son of Thunder, but I don’t write historical fiction novels. I might read them (the spy stories of Gerlis come to mind, as well as those British-style mysteries set in the nineteenth century, or even those mysteries by June Trop set in ancient Cairo), but I don’t write them. My stories are set in the future, albeit sometimes the near future. (The Midas Bomb, when it first was published in 2010, was set in 2014, so clearly events overtook that “future” and made it into an alternate history!)

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse perhaps best exemplifies my style. Because of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, physicist Gail and her techie Jeff’s time machine, which can only move forward in time (no paradoxes are possible), takes them sometimes into what can be considered parallel or alternate pasts on some of their time translations. Lessons are learned about our possible futures, though, because those parallel pasts provide perspective about where we might be going as well (and events we’ve been lucky to avoid!).

Should authors stop using historical settings in their novels? I’m the last person you should ask that, but I’ll still try to answer: Above all, fiction writers should write good stories, period, ones with powerful themes interwoven through the plots and great characters. Where authors’ imaginations take them should never be constrained by the consumers, the readers, or by agents, acquisition editors, and others who scream about marketability. And here I’ll end with a favorite quote from famous sci-fi author Robert Heinlein: “…maybe I should study the market and try like hell to tailor something which fits current styles. But…if I am to turn out work of fairly permanent value, my own taste…is what I must follow.”

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Comments are always welcome.

Ebook sales. I only offer them via Smashwords in my email newsletter. You can sign up for the latter using my contact page at this website. This month the “evergreen books” in the “Clones & Mutants” series are all on sale: You meet the clones in my very first book Full Medical (2006, but now with a second ebook edition); you meet the mutants in Evil Agenda; and they combine forces in No Amber Waves of Grain. These ebooks are part of my extended “Future History”–which all contains the “Detectives Chen & Castiblanco” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collectdion” plus several bridge books. All my ebooks have reasonable retail prices (even those published by small presses), but they’re a real bargain in these sales. (Subscribers to the newsletter just use the supplied promo codes.)

I can’t offer these sales on Amazon; I stopped exclusively publishing on Amazon years ago, which is their criterion. I wouldn’t offer them there anyway. That ravenous T-Rex of online marketing is no longer a friend of authors or readers, so much so that, as of March 1, no new books of mine will be offered for purchase on Amazon. This is my small blow to help bring down the T-Rex!

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

We have left the days of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys far behind. Today’s young adult readers are more sophisticated and have a lot more on their plates than their parents and grandparents had at the same age. Although tween and teen angst have also morphed a bit, it’s only the names that have changed—that angst has always been present in one form or another. The same can be said for fads and cultural heroes.

The Harry Potter series started out as fantasy fiction focused on tweens and grew to be directed to older readers as the main characters grew. (The villains remained constant, though, discounting Draco Malfoy, who was but a carbon copy of his nefarious father, an adult.) The last Potter books are dark battles between good and evil. Although more verbose than a Stephen King work, those books are on a par with that Kingsian horror/fantasy genre—Carrie, for example. (King isn’t considered a YA author, but many of his books are YA. It is yet another example.)

The twelve-to-eighteen age group is now reading just about anything (if they read at all and avoid social media, computer games, and streaming video), so does “young adult literature” even make sense? Given that adults who are young at heart also enjoy such targeted books, I have to wonder. My alter-ego A.B. Carolan has adopted a different point of view: the only distinguishing characteristic of young adult novels today should be that their main characters are young adults in that age group worrying a lot about things appropriate to that group! By the very definition of good characterization in a novel, young adults will identify with those characters. That revolution was started with Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, and A.B. Carolan continues it.

In that sense, “young adult” isn’t even a genre. It’s only a descriptor indicating the age of the main characters. Thus you have YA romance, YA mysteries, and so forth. A.B. writes YA sci-fi mysteries a la Asimov’s Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, but, in A.B.’s books, the main characters are young adults (if memory serves, I think old Asimov tried that at the beginning of Second Foundation). Adults can love reading them as well because they were once young adults and can identify with all those YA interests and angsts. I reread Podkayne not long ago and even got more from it than when I read it as a kid. And it has staying power far beyond those Potter fantasies.

A.B. could have written a series that starts with a tween and ends up with an eighteen-year-old just like Rowling. Instead he opted for a different focus: his main characters are different in each book, going from tweens in The Secret Lab to older teens in The Secret of the Urns and Mind Games. These books form a series only because all the books are part of what’s called the “ABC YA Sci-Fi Mysteries”—they occur centuries apart in the same future depicted in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”

I know many YA authors will probably disagree with me on these points. For those who do, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Young adult literature is no longer the same as those Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Denying that change makes no sense and might only upset current readers of that type of books.

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Comments are always welcome.

“ABC YA Sci-Fi Mysteries.” This evergreen series contains A. B. Carolan’s three books, The Secret Lab, The Secret of the Urns, and Mind Games. They are full of sci-fi adventure and suspense as three different young heroines solve out-of-this world mysteries. They can be found in print and ebook format on Amazon and in ebook format on Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Oveerdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardners, etc.). Hint for tweens and teens, and their school teachers and librarians: Reading these is fun…and can serve as easy book reports! And a new book from A.B. is coming soon!

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

Like most authors, I have all my books listed on Amazon. The retail giant has never done much for me (besides giving me agita), and  I realized years ago that being exclusive on Amazon was a bad business decision. That’s a requirement for various benefits the company offers to authors. Those benefits just aren’t worth it if authors are savvy enough to follow this marketing maxim applied to publishing: An author maximizes her or his sales by using more retailers. In the business world of products to buyers, that’s usually hard to do because shipping costs to retailers have to be figured in. In publishing, that doesn’t apply, especially for ebooks.

Amazon distributes to no other retailers because they think they’re the center of the commercial universe. Authors should realize that this perceived monopoly on Amazon’s part is prejudicial to their interests. They shouldn’t be exclusive on Amazon. Doing so isn’t being a smart author. Even most traditional publishers are savvy enough to realize this (they fight with Amazon about other abuses too).

Like I said, some years ago I got smart—I realized that being exclusive on Amazon was hurting me. My sales numbers have never been great (probably because I can’t afford lavish marketing campaigns—which books should I choose?); yet those meager numbers increased once I added retailers besides Amazon. How did I do this? No one has the time to approach every retailer, so one uses book aggregators who not only publish the ebook but distribute to all those retailers! So far, I have used Smashwords and Draft2Digital, which seem to have what I need as affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Gardners, etc.).

For my self-published works, I’d do away with Amazon completely if it weren’t for a few free conveniences: My author page serves as another website where all my books are listed, and each book has its own book page offering a blurb, cover image, a “peek inside,” details about the book (many not found on my website), and some (but not all) of the reviews. That author page is more unique among book retailers; that Amazon book page not so much, and it offers browsing readers something akin to physical bookstore and library browsing. Imagine my panic when these two conveniences were recently attacked by Amazon.

First, some history. As many of my readers know, there is now a “Last Humans” series: The first book in the series, The Last Humans (see the cover image at the top of this web page), was published by Black Opal Books in 2019; the second book, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, was published by Draft2Digital late in 2020 (the reasons for the delay have appeared in previous blog posts). I continue to promote both books (see the bottom of this page), believing the book is all important, not the publisher. (Really, how many readers choose a book because of its publisher? Maybe I’m naïve, but my browsing and previous experiences with an author’s books give me a good idea about whether the book interests me—I don’t care how it was published!)

How did this all lead to my continued Amazon wars? Here’s an itemized list of my new problems caused by Amazon:

– The second book in the series, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, no longer appears in my Amazon Author Central listing, but it appears on my Amazon author page (the first supposedly controls the second, but this is evidence that it doesn’t).

– The first book in the series, The Last Humans, appears in my Amazon Author Central listing, but it no longer appears on my Amazon author page.

– Reviews for the first book now appear for the second book, i.e. all reviews for the two books have been aggregated together.

– The second book has no print version, but its book page says it does. And when you click on that, the first book comes up, showing both ebook and print versions.

This is complete chaos! Whoever’s responsible (maybe a gang of bots?) have done nothing. I’ve written to customer service many times, and the best response reduces to passing the buck and pointing the finger. Admittedly this is a complex snafu…but I didn’t create it! And with all this going on, I naturally wondered if this website’s links to both books still work—they do!

This whole adventure makes no sense. The problems were probably created by Amazon’s bots—no human could screw things up so badly. (I’ve always thought that the real Jeff Bezos is some body-less form in a cryogenics tank, swimming with the real Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and those Google guys, while the one who attacks authors is a bot.) Whoever’s responsible, Amazon is guilty until proven innocent. So far they’ve done nothing. Apparently they only listen to high-priced lawyers and ignore lowly authors they’ve screwed!

My advice to other authors? Don’t use Amazon exclusively for your books! And, in any case, beware of them–they can make your lives miserable.

My Amazon wars continue. Stay tuned.

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Comments are always welcome!

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. In the first book in this series, Penny Castro survived the bio-warfare apocalypse and created a family. In this sequel, her post-apocalyptic idyll on their citrus ranch in California is interrupted by the US government’s plan to stop another attack…and get some revenge. Penny and husband Alex, along with others, are drafted to carry out the plan—in their case, forced to do so by the government’s kidnapping of their young children. But the enemy has surprises awaiting them when a submarine delivers them to that foreign shore. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, even on Amazon (but not on Smashwords). And rest assured, the first book is still available, in both ebook and print formats.

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

Unlike science, technology often seems to have a mind of its own. Betamax was better than VHS, but the latter won (in the US); now both are dead. No OS today is more stable than that old DEC OS, but even the company DEC is gone with its 100K+ employees. New cars full of chips have a lot more things that can go wrong with them than my old 52 Pontiac, and I’m no longer able to fix anything in the former because of their complexity.

Publishing technology moves at a slower pace because readers are often traditionalists, so they’re loathe to try new media. Readership demographics is more a determinant about how fast the march of technology influences publishing, of course. The spectrum going from young to old readers correlates well with the spectrum of preferences for reading media: older readers tend to prefer print format; younger ones ebooks. (Audiobooks apparently have their own spectrum, and it likely correlates well with commuting times and not so much with demographics.)

Disposable income factors in too: print versions cost more than ebooks, at least for self-publishing. (Traditional publishers attempt to skew those stats, charging almost as much for the ebook version of a blockbuster as the print version, although they’ve been attacking self-publishing by selling “evergreen versions” of old blockbusters at competitive prices compared to recently self-published ebooks.)

Many older readers won’t read ebooks or listen to audiobooks; they prefer print formats. I was thinking about this as I struggled to read President Obama’s A Promised Land, a weighty gift and not only for its prose—it probably weighs ten times what my Kindle weighs! It’s an epic book, to be sure, but it would lose nothing in ebook format. Yet gift-givers are traditionalists too—and maybe with good reason? It’s hard to wrap an ebook!

So publishing technology changes slowly, but it changes. That said, what exists on the future horizon for publishing?

The first obvious change will have less to do with media and more with those who produce it. Self-publishing, whether 100% DIY or partial, will be the asteroid that turns traditional publishing into a dinosaur except for coffee-table books non-readers proudly display as home decorations. That’s inevitable as more and more authors become fed up with traditional publishing’s delays, sycophantic agents and irascible, prejudiced editors, and, above all, royalties that are laughable. (Forget the advances. Few traditionally published authors besides the old and privileged mares and stallions in the big conglomerates stables receive them.)

That will be the catalyst for the second change (or it might be the other way around): Traditional publishers dependence on print will hasten their demise. We know brick-and-mortar bookstores are hurting: When was the last time you spent hours in one browsing among the stacks, elbow to elbow with other book lovers? Like everything else, people are now buying books online, even before COVID, and that’s a lot easier to do with ebooks. Print versions require shipping infrastructure, from the USPS, which no longer is dependable, thanks to you-know-who, or some other shipper. At the very least, that represents a significant delay compared to simply downloading an ebook. Waiting is so 20^th century; instant gratification is demanded in the 21^st.

Another format that will kill traditional publishing is the audiobook format. Anyone can make them. Sure, traditional publishers might have the advantage now because they can pay for the expensive narrators, those famous voices taking time from making cartoons to make some big bucks reading some big books, but how long can traditional publishers keep doing that? I’ll bet that self-publishers will find new and better voices—you don’t have to be a Hollywood star (or should I say a streaming-video hack?) to own a pleasant reading voice. And these new voices will get their opportunity as traditional publishing’s control of the book business shrinks to nothing.

This evolution will be slow, but will it be good or bad? The march of technology is neither per se—it’s indifferent. And it is what consumers want in the end, no matter how much traditional publishers try to mold readers’ attitudes and scam them with expensive advertising and other hype. Maybe robocalls in the future?

And it’s also possible that storytelling will die along with books, bookstores, and traditional publishers, because readership will dwindle to nothing. I’d hate to see storytelling reduced to the drivel found in streaming video, but I won’t have to suffer with that. I’ll be long gone before that happens. You and I might be more worried for our children and grandchildren, though. If human beings lose the art of good storytelling, can they really be called Homo sapiens, emphasis on sapiens? In a thousand years, that question probably won’t matter. In 2050, it might be more important—just think of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as autocrats strive to control us even more, telling us what we can say…and read.

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Comments are always welcome.

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. I like to think of this sci-fi rom-com as Douglas Adams’ guide done right. At least time travel is done right and might just be possible. And the time-traveler’s wife is the kick-ass physicist who invents the process! If you missed my guide, you’ll want to rectify that situation, as applied physicist Gail and her techie Jeff develop a process that allows them to jump around various universes in the Multiverse. Robots, ETs, dystopias, and apocalypses await the reader on this incredibly far-out roller coaster ride. Also available at Smashwords and wherever quality ebooks are sold (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.).

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

Both positive and negative events in our modern everyday lives can be used to make our stories more relevant. A hassled and hurried commuter handing a McDonald’s breakfast meal (sandwich and coffee) to a homeless person; an unthinking neighbor letting their mongrel pee on garbage bags without thinking of the essential workers, the garbage collectors, who have to collect those bags; and so forth. These observations can make our prose come alive.

Of course, authors have to observe these events and record them in some way—either using an excellent memory or a napkin or scrap of paper. In short, authors must observe humanity and remember those observations to be able to write about it.

As I pointed out, an author doesn’t have to observe earthshaking events. Little things here and there can add spice to prose. Once, in a day-trip for my old day-job, I saw a thick winter coat get stuck in one of those sliding doors at the airport. There were several openings and closings because the door’s electronic eye detected something there and bounced open again. I imagined that heavy coat as a body. That observation turned into a scene in The Last Humans.

Seemingly mundane observations in your prose can carry readers right into your settings, whether they’re some place on Earth or on a faraway planet. Of course, observing much more drastic events can too. An author can include details that a reader might not know or could not imagine. That works for dialogue as well as narrative. The author needs to create a balanced mix of both and certainly doesn’t want to pad either with uninteresting verbosity, but snippets of details add spice and reality to make a drab meal in fiction into a gourmet treat.

More might be obtained by reacting to an observation. You might be tempted to do something similar for a homeless person and then striking up a conversation to understand their plight. Or you might give the owner of that peeing dog a piece of your mind to see how he reacts, standing up for those essential workers in the process. (I try to salute or wave to them.)

Unless we’re in a rock concert (rare now) or protest march (a legitimate one hopefully, without violence or vandalism) or some other massive event, we usually don’t remember that many people outside our day-jobs and neighborhoods, but we shouldn’t pass up the chance to observe human nature. It’s wonderfully diverse and complex, and fiction that illustrates that is more interesting than fiction that doesn’t. Characterization benefits from observations. Without it, we are led to create two-dimensional characters, cardboard cutouts of humanity.

Plot ideas can also originate in observations. My whole novel Death on the Danube owes its existence to observations. It’s not a memoir of a journey, but I couldn’t have written it without making observations on that riverboat. Rembrandt’s Angel, the first novel in that same series, builds on observations made on trips to South America and Europe. Much of The Last Humans and its sequel, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, is filled with observations I made about my native California years ago—settings, people, and an economy so dependent on agriculture and the water necessary to sustain it.

Is it possible that what gurus call “writing you know” is a misdirect? Maybe they’re really talking about how necessary observations are. Clearly I can’t know what living on a planet in the 82 Eridani system is like (see Sing a Zamba Galactica in the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection), but I can create pioneer-spirited characters from my observations of real human beings—my own parents, for example, were pioneers during the Depression in the sense that they packed all their belongings in a Model T and traveled from Kansas to California. By observing them, I could extrapolate to those bold star-faring pioneers!

Yes, observations are necessary for good storytelling. Go out and make some…and then use them!

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Comments are always welcome.

Death on the Danube. Ex-Scotland Yard inspector and ex-MI6 agent Esther Brookstone begins her honeymoon voyage down history’s famous river with Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden when a murder occurs. Because the river is international waters, he takes over the murder investigation, with Esther helping him out. As they float along with the murder scene, they become embroiled in international intrigue. Available on Amazon in ebook and print versions and in ebook versions on Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending services (Scribd, Gardners, etc.). #3 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” Series.

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

The NY Times article (1/1/2021) about Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel The Prophets described this self-motivation for the author’s writing. I’ve been doing just that for years! I’ve always shared that mantra for my own writing even before I published my first novel, Full Medical (2006). I’m an avid reader, but I’d found a lot of the fiction I was reading lacking in its treatment of important themes and universal truths about the human condition—the good, bad, and ugly of human existence, if you will. I appreciate fiction that weaves such themes in and around the plots. That’s why genres like space opera, fantasy, and romance aren’t high on my reading priorities. Because modern fiction, especially that from traditional publishers, emphasizes fluff, especially those genres I indicated, which are the epitome of escapism, I decided to create my own alternative, writing what I like to read.

I often stop reading when I realize there’s too much fluff. I had no preconceived notions about Brit-style mysteries—most of them are fluff, but they helped me maintain my sanity during the COVID pandemic. I stopped reading Connelly long ago because, while his books are interesting police procedurals like those Brit-style mysteries, they’re basically escapist literature too without serious themes. It’s easy to make a list of the fluff masters: Baldacci, Child, Grafton, King, Patterson, and so forth write fluff in the sense considered here. Their books can be entertaining, a notch above video games and streaming videos, but I lose interest in them quickly.

Agents and editors, especially those indentured servants of the big publishing houses, encourage authors to write “marketable books.” (Of course, these people can’t really define what this means until after the fact—i.e., only by looking at sales figures—and are completely unable to predict which books might gain the attention of readers because very few books they publish become bestsellers.) Here’s a translation that corresponds to their rejection practices: They mean fluff that avoids all controversial themes. That’s their necessary condition (they have no sufficient conditions—nobody has). We live in a world of controversy, though, so Clancy’s dictum—“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”—has an obvious corollary: “…and that’s the way readers can understand reality.”

Perhaps such “controversial books,” i.e. those that aren’t fluff, don’t sell well, so the troglodytes of traditional publishing have a point if literature is only about getting rich off readers. Their exorbitant prices certainly indicate that’s part of their business model. The people who have controlled what’s published for so many years don’t want to lose control of that process or authors. They’d be the first to tar and feather Tina Fey for saying, “Do your own thing and don’t care if they like it.” And they’ve been successful making sure authors accept those creative chains for years. Maybe authors like me are butting our heads against the crumbling walls of the establishment by not volunteering to put on those chains, but I have to write the kinds of books I like to read. That means none of the fluff the troglodytes love because they’re so damn afraid some readers will be upset.

I’ve always been encouraged by a Heinlein quote (basically Fey’s idea expressed in language even troglodytes might understand): “…maybe I should study the market and try like hell to tailor something which fits current styles. But…if I am to turn out work of fairly permanent value, my own taste…is what I must follow.” There are two important concepts here. First, there’s the idea of literary independence: Authors should write the kind of books they love to read and break the traditional publishing establishment’s chains. Second, there’s the possibility that doing so will allow an authors’ literary output to have permanent value, while fluff can never do that.

Both Clancy and Heinlein support Heinlein’s advice. Both wrote in an era when traditional publishing was king. Clancy’s Hunt for Red October almost wasn’t published (the troglodytes almost succeeded); a small, coffee-table book publisher accepted it, and the rest is history. Heinlein, an astronomer, became the second most famous sci-fi writer (Asimov is the most famous, but some of his fame is due to his popular science works), and his books, like Clancy’s, will live on too.

I think I write quality fiction, but my hubris doesn’t take me so far that I believe my works will have “fairly permanent value” like Clancy’s or Heinlein’s, but there’s another corollary to all this discussion: By writing stories with important themes, I can enjoy my writing life free from those artificial chains created by those who worry about a book’s market value. I’m only a slave to my desire to write books like those I love to read, old-fashioned and meaningful stories from an old Irish storyteller.

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Comments are always welcome.

When fluff isn’t enough….the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” Series. Seven novels with important themes woven around mystery, thriller, and police-procedural plots as current as the day I wrote them: The Midas Bomb treats foreign terrorism in NYC. Angels Need Not Apply considers cartels, domestic and foreign terrorism, and right-wing militias. Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder finds the detectives fighting the illegal arms trade and domestic terrorism. In Aristocrats and Assassins, Castilblanco’s vacation in Europe is interrupted by a terrorist group out to supply themselves with nukes. The Collector considers art theft, human trafficking, and child porn. Family Affairs primarily depicts a battle against domestic terrorism. And Gaia and the Goliaths studies the extent that international energy conglomerates might go to as they battle environmental activists. In this series, the detectives often start locally in NYC but move beyond to national and international action. Lots of interesting and entertaining reading here for you to binge on, folks! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. Note: Subscribers to my email newsletter have a January and February sale for these novels, but the books’ retail prices are also reasonable.

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