Until I went to Colombia to live for a while (a majority of my life in academia, in fact), I thought soap operas were an American institution (they’re called telenovelas there and elsewhere in Latin America). I’m not a fan. I can’t imagine being a writer for one either. That would be my vision of hell. Most of them are a never-ending story, and their plots are stereotypical, trite, and plodding.

Truth be told, I haven’s watched many of them. In Colombia, they even occurred in the evenings, maybe like Dallas or Knot’s Landing—yeah, I know some names, and about Larrry Hagman’s dream, which seemed to have everyone talking—but you could say that most of our sitcoms are really soap operas too. I run into General Hospital (I think that’s what it’s called) before I hop over from ABC to CNN’s Jake Tapper, but that’s only because the remote’s still on ABC after watching the first half hour of GMA (there’s nothing more interesting on GMA after that—they’ve even got poor George doing pop bits).

I don’t write this to blather on about something I know little about, TV soap operas, so why are they in this blog post? Because I hate soap operas that pretend to be books! What follows is from the perspective of an avid reader, but it affects my writing as well.

Other authors’ sins in writing books that are soap operas come in two forms, both occurring more with the ebook revolution: serialization of a novel and book series. You’ll see the first just by looking at the equivalent number of pages. Some authors think it’s a clever way to maximize their royalties by parceling out a few chapters of a novel at a time. Even Hugh Howey did this with Wool. I didn’t buy his soap-opera episodes until he put it all together in the final novel. Unfortunately, you can still see the seams, which almost ruined the novel for me—it still looks like soap opera scripts stitched together.

One obvious way to detect the second is to use the “Peek Inside” feature on that same book page that has the page count, and go to the end of the ebook. If you see something like “See how Pauline reacts to this new peril in the next book in this series,” don’t buy the book even if it has a novel’s page count—it’s really just one episode from a soap opera. It’s okay for an author to add the first few chapters of the next book at the end. It’s not okay to leave Pauline hanging on a cliff. (Um, maybe that’s why it’s called a “cliffhanger”?) Each book in a series, except for some of the same characters, should stand alone. The author can provide little tidbits from previous books to reward fans, but the story should be a complete one.

How does this affect my writing? Simple: I avoid both sins mentioned above. I avoid serialization completely. Once I serialized a novel, but as blog posts—Evil Agenda eventually became #2 in the “Clones & Mutants Trilogy”—but I rewrote the whole novel instead of just stitching things together; I defy you to detect the seams. (And the serialization is in the dead archives on my laptop, not my blog.) I’ve never repeated that experiment. It was a painful experience and hurt like the Dickens. (Pun for avid readers?)

I was surprised when a reviewer failed to write a review of Son of Thunder only because he hadn’t realized it was #2 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective Series.” I suppose I could have told him that #1 and #2 are very different books; what’s more, they can be read independently. (The same will happen for #3 and subsequent books.) That’s easy enough to achieve in a mystery series: each book only considers one or two of the detectives’ cases (the “hook” is often about the detectives finishing up a case, but not the one from the previous novel). Thriller and sci-fi series are a bit more difficult, but quite doable. Or perhaps that reviewer didn’t like those little tidbits related to previous books that I leave for fans following the series? Or he might not be a fan of series, period. (I once had a reviewer say I should give a course on how to write a book in a series, so some reviewers are a bit more open-minded, but it’s all subjective.)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve binged on some series. None of them were soap operas. Good authors know how to reward fans with tidbits while still satisfying readers who jump into a series in the middle for a theme that attracts them, or who simply want to avoid committing to an entire series. It’s not that hard to write books in a series that are independent. Or maybe it is, and authors should worry about it more?

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Comments are always welcome!

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. In my other life in academia, I had the pleasure of meeting Hartle, Feynman, Mandelbrot, Salam, Wheeler, Dirac, Lederman, Feynman, Mandelbrot, and Enrico Fermi’s last student—some in courses, others in scientific meetings, and all characters, but none like physicist Gail Hoff. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse on a wacky road trip far beyond any in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Time-Traveler’s Wife, never to return to her little lab in a small college outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out sightseeing journey filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Once upon a time I was in academia and R&D, but about the only thing I do well now is write. I’ve never had any pretensions while doing so. I know anything I write won’t be considered the “great American novel” by critics, but I think I’ve spun some good yarns that have entertained a few people. I’m also an avid reader (okay, I do that well too), so I know what good storytelling is, and I have plenty of books and authors to inspire my own storytelling (strange as it might seem to many people, few of the latter are in the Big Five stables of formulaic old mares and stallions). Of course, my reading life doesn’t entertain anyone but myself. In that respect, I’m like that silent majority of people who eschew streaming video and computer games to read a good book. For ROI (return on investment, not Louis XVI, who didn’t lose his head in a good book) on entertainment investments, you can’t beat books.

So…let me help you, readers of this blog, fill your hours of reading entertainment. (You can tell anyone else about this cultural aid too.) I offer free reading material. Not full novels yet (although recently I’ve been sorely tempted—long story), but short fiction. This material is found in the following trio:

Steve’s Shorts. This blog archive contains mostly short stories and a few serialized novellas—sci-fi, mystery, and thriller stories. They’re stories I’m proud of, but they just didn’t make it to novel length. (Although some have led to novels.) I don’t offer up my short fiction to ‘zine editors anymore, online or otherwise—that’s as much work as I do for full novels, and for little gain in audience or royalties (usually pennies per word). These stories are free and good introductions to my writing for readers everywhere.

ABC Shorts. My Irish collaborator writes short fiction too. Perhaps you know him better for the “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries,” novels written for young adults and those adults who are young at heart. His short stories usually feature a young adult too, one in some kind of trouble. Like his novels, the short fiction isn’t something you want to read to your five-year-old at bed time, but your tween or teen would probably get a kick out of them—and maybe you as well.

Free PDF downloads. There’s a lot of short fiction here—short stories, novellas, sometimes in collections, although the novellas are often free-standing. Both A.B. and I participate (wink, wink). These PDFs are also free and once you download one, you can copy and distribute it to family and friends as long as the copyright is respected. To see the entire list, visit the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website. I often update this list. For example, I recently added Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, Volume Three; it’s a collection of short fiction (much of it first appearing in “Steve’s Shorts” or “ABC Shorts”) like its predecessor (Volume One is for sale on Amazon).

Email newsletter. Other than those free PDFs, I don’t offer anything for free. You see, all my ebooks are reasonably priced, as are most of my print versions (books from the two small-press publishers are an exception, but I don’t control either their print or ebook prices). However, to loyal followers who subscribe to my email newsletter, there are monthly ebook sales. You can subscribe to that newsletter using the contact page at this website. If you’re not a Smashwords customer, you should join. It’s free, and you’ll have thousands of ebooks to choose from, not just mine.

To summarize…. If I were a cook, I’d be offering some free recipes; if I were a musician, I’d be offering some free online concerts. I’m not much of anything anymore except for being a fiction writer, so I can only offer you free fiction and limited sales. I hope it helps you fill your entertainment hours. Some ad-man came up with the phrase “Read a Movie!” What he neglected to say is that good stories allow you to create your own mental picture and enter exciting worlds far better than any movie—you’re the creator; the author is just your guide.

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Comments are always welcome.

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. In my other life in academia, I had the pleasure of meeting Hartle, Feynman, Mandelbrot, Salam, Wheeler, Dirac, Lederman, Feynman, Mandelbrot, and Enrico Fermi’s last student—some in courses, others in scientific meetings, and all characters, but none like physicist Gail Hoff. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse on a wacky road trip far beyond any in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Time-Traveler’s Wife, never to return to her little lab in a small college outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out sightseeing journey filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

I have a love-hate relationship with the NY Times Book Review: I’d love to see an author I know and respect be featured in it, and I hate that I don’t! Of course, I don’t need the Times to validate my reading choices either, so I just hate that they try to tell me what to read in their usual biased manner, neglecting to consider about 90% of the books published. Am I to believe the 10% they do consider are better than that 90%? No! My reading experience says otherwise.

Some non-fiction books deserve their exalted place in those biased pages so famous (infamous?) in the American literary scene. I haven’t seen any fiction book that does. In any case, I don’t read those fiction books recommended by the Times’s editors and critics who favor the formulaic gruel ladled out by the old mares and stallions in the Big Five publishing conglomerates’ stables, those pampered old horses hobbling along in their race to the glue factory. James Patterson Inc. (his staff of co-authors) produces gruel in all genres now, as seen in last Wednesday’s full-page Times ad. Stephen King hasn’t written anything worth reading since Misery (interesting if only because it shows there’s a fine line between an author’s fans and critics, although the protagonist was most certainly a Big Five author, so you can hardly blame the ex-nurse). I stopped reading Sue Grafton’s alphabet series after B, thank the Lord! Same for Jeffery Deaver’s after one Lincoln Rhyme book, whose best novel, Garden of Beasts, isn’t part of his forensic series (one can shuffle Sue and Jeff’s books like a pack of cards—and there might just be 52 formulaic tales between the two of them—and not know which book belongs to whom).

Although one of my mental roadblocks against the Big Five’s fiction offerings championed by the Times’s editors and critics are the exorbitant prices (an entire series of British mysteries costs less than one Baldacci book, which might be okay but not four times better), price isn’t the major one (in this time of economic fallout from the pandemic, though, frugality is an issue in my reading choices). Another major issue I have is that they all have at least one flaw (in plot, characterization, dialogue, etc.), and often more; in other words, all those hyped books are by authors who haven’t yet mastered the basic writing skills! (Of course, that probably means that the Times’s editors and critics don’t know what they are either. Maybe they all need visits to the eye doctor? They don’t see what I see.) But even if a Big Five novel passes the smell test of acceptable writing praxis, my major complaint is that the stories are boring, formulaic, and politically correct pulp for the masses, insulting no one by treating no important themes that interest me. Thinking readers deserve more.

Yet I’ll still peruse the Book Review’s pages, hoping to find readable fiction. At the end, I’d use them in a bird case if I had birds, but a short perusal does sometimes benefit me: They tell me what not to read! I’m a browser who makes my own reading choices—either in a bookstore, library, or online, but not in the Book Review—and I don’t need anyone, especially the Times’s erudite and stodgy editors and book critics, to tell me what to read, or even make suggestions.

Perhaps the Times should save some forests by eliminating the Review and firing their book editors and critics.? Any news from them is certainly not fit to print!

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Comments are always welcome.

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. In my other life in academia, I had the pleasure of meeting Hartle, Feynman, Mandelbrot, Salam, Wheeler, Dirac, Lederman, Feynman, Mandelbrot, and Enrico Fermi’s last student—some in courses, others in scientific meetings, and all characters, but none like physicist Gail Hoff. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse on a wacky road trip far beyond any in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Time-Traveler’s Wife, never to return to her little lab in a small college outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out sightseeing journey filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

I get tired of the writing advice “Show, don’t tell.” After all, what I do is storytelling, not story-showing. Writing classes and guides wind newbie writers around the axle with this advice; older writers too. Authors get so wound up that they write some awful prose as they try to “follow the rules.”

An application of this rule (or, just a dictum people who can’t write blather about) is something like a corollary: Avoid –ing words. Sorry, there can be a lot of zing in –ing: In action scenes, for example. Gerunds have all sorts of uses, of course, and they allow a writer to create compact prose that flows rather than stagnates.

Some MFA profs with nothing better to do will tell their students never to use something like “He was pounding a stake into the ground,” saying that “pounding” is an –ing word. What they probably mean (I’m trying to make them sound less stupid—after all, they’re usually academics) is that “was” isn’t a strong verb, but that’s patently wrong too. The writer of that phrase is only emphasizing that the action was continuous. “He pounded…” means the pounding was only done a few times and then it’s all over with. (At least that’s my take.)

This point is clearer to many speakers of some foreign languages. “Pegó  la estaca…” isn’t equivalent to “Pegaba la estaca….” in Spanish. Russian resolves the same problem by using two or more different verbs (action verbs sometimes come in triplets). And so on…. (Both Spanish and Russian often eliminate pronouns too when they’re obvious. English also probably should, and does so in hard-boiled or minimalist writing. Tricky! In any case, Russian, Spanish, and other foreign language speakers are more aware of the difference between limited action and continuous action. In the English phrase, that “was” with the gerund “pounding” indicates continuous action. There’s no other way to write it if the author wants to emphasize the continuity of the action.

Loose gerunds are a bit trickier. They have to be attached in some logical way. “Harry spotted the beach chair walking to the store…” still emphasizes the action, but the chair doesn’t do the walking! A correct usage would be “Walking to the store, Harry spotted…,” a bit clumsy but grammatically correct (unless the character is a young magician named Harry who made the chair walk!). The author could also use “As he was walking to the store, Harry spotted…” or “As he walked to the store, Harry spotted…” (the latter is okay because presumably Harry only came upon the chair once, not many times).

And, to end on a more conciliatory note offered to all those writing gurus out there, let’s consider this ribald church bulletin notice full of some different zing and misuse of –ing words: “This evening at 7 pm there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.” (Apparently church bulletins have no good editors.)

Be smart…and stay safe.

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Comments are always welcome.

Soldiers of God. This is a bridge novel between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” An FBI agent and a priest are out to stop a fanatical religious group’s terrorist attack plans. In the background, a maniacal industrialist is pulling the strings, using religion to further his agenda. Will they succeed? This is one of my evergreen books, and it’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

While COVID-19 and unrest over policing excesses has certainly affected readership and publishing, the Big Five publishing conglomerates have been struggling for a while. The reason? The digital revolution. In a couple of articles, the NY Times analyzed those struggles (7/16/2020 and 7/17). The first article can be summarized as women beginning to take over higher positions; the second is more about black women’s struggles to enter the Big Five publishing hierarchy. While these articles portray the biases in the old white boys’ environment of major publishers, something that needs to change, they barely mention the ongoing digital revolution.

The Times isn’t immune to that journalistic publishing disease of emphasizing scandal and sloppy reporting, of course. They’re part of the NYC publishing establishment, after all. Readers might think the latter is healthy. Simon and Schuster is making millions off Bolton’s and Trump’s tell-all books (that’s Mary Trump, the president’s niece, for those who haven’t been paying attention). Like many scandal and celeb books, I’ll ignore those as a reader. (I have some better non-fiction to read, and lots of good fiction too, none of the latter from the Big Five.)

To be fair, the Times’s articles are okay as far as they go—I’ll celebrate tearing down the old white boys’ institutions whenever it occurs, from Church leaders to publishers—and they do mention audiobooks (my, aren’t those Times’s writers twentieth-century tech whizzes?), as if they were going to save the Big Five. But if memory serves, only once do they mention “digital revolution.” And that just doesn’t mean ebooks, folks. The whole process is becoming digitized now, from editing to final product and beyond. Software is used to format books, be it Amazon, Smashwords, or Ingram’s, and once that template is made, POD can and often does take over. Why should a publisher endure warehousing costs for print versions when they can be printed as orders come in? Only doorstops like Bolton’s and Trump’s books are warehoused now. Ingram, the quintessential predatory dinosaur of the Big Five dinosaurs, won’t even warehouse small book runs anymore, so traditional publishers are warehousing with Amazon, if they warehouse at all. They do this even though they do POD with Ingram’s Lightning Source, what many small publishers are using to remain somewhat competitive.

In short, traditional publishing in general and the Big Five in particular, are dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid to fall! That’s the real news the Times should report. Their articles only report on the scrambling they’re doing because they see the approaching asteroid. Print won’t survive—even with POD, it’s too costly and caters to older people who still like print (we can call them the tree-killers), but they’re dying off; younger people read ebooks if they read books at all (ebooks are bargains, unless publishers artificially inflate their prices to make print versions more attractive); and the very young are illiterate and addicted to streaming video and computer games, so they don’t even know what a book is, except in their academic studies. (Educational publishing is changing too—when a syllabus requires only certain chapters, students buy only those chapters.) In brief, readership is down (in spite of COVID) and it will continue to go down.

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Last week you read some of the physics background for my new sci-fi rom-com. In this article, I consider some other reasons for writing it.

Maybe I’m too serious, but I have trouble writing humor. There’s some in my novels—humor is part of the human experience, after all. And I can be ironic, biting, wry, and cynical, from short stories to novels, but it’s hard for me to sustain a long, humorous story. There are no novels with a comedic flavor, only some short fiction…until now.

They say humor is the hardest thing to do on stage. If it’s like writing a humorous novel, I can understand that. Maybe my problem is I don’t want or like slapstick, food fights, or absurd, sexual situations. I want a story with a serious foundation with a frothy, humorous coating, something like a serious cup of Colombian coffee with a dash of Jameson whiskey and a whipped cream smiley on top.

Author Hiaasen seems to have mastered this kind of story. In Skinny Dip, for example, a husband tries to murder his wife by pushing her overboard on an ocean cruise. Not funny per se, but the wife’s revenge is funny as hell. That combines humor (maybe black humor?) with mystery—or call it a humorous thriller. I like Hiaasen’s writing all the more because I can’t do it! At least not for mysteries and crime stories. The latter are serious business.

So I thought I might try some humorous sci-fi. The characters in my short story “The Apprentice” were good ones. (You can find it in “Steve’s Shorts” category of this blog, or in the collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, Volume Two—see the list of free PDF downloads on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page of my website.) I first had to figure out more of the science—that old dentist’s chair was a bit too limited, considering where the short story ended. I needed to make the male protagonist a better foil for the female too. Then came the critical question: Can I sustain the humor?

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I have many complaints about the Star Wars and Star Trek movies. For the first, I’ve mentioned before in this blog that it’s really fantasy, although many fans and critics call it sci-fi. But let’s forget about that glaring disconnect and focus on something that Dr. Asimov would probably have liked cleared up: ‘Droids vs. robots.

“Robot” is the more general term. It wasn’t created by the inimitable Isaac but by Karel Capek in his 1920 play RUR (for Rossum’s Universal Robots, the English subtitle), yet sci-fi master Asimov made the term famous in his robot novels (Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are also excellent mysteries), books which can now be included in his extended Foundation series. I insist that the term should be used for any device, stationary or otherwise, that can replace human functions. (Just ask UAW for some examples.)

R2-D2 is a robot running on wheels (many do). C-3PiO is also a robot (I prefer that rendering of its name because the P is Pi in Star Wars, a vocal error mixing Greek with English—P in Greek is “rho”). Neither one is an “android” like Isaac’s Daneel Olivaw, although I can’t remember if Isaac uses that word. An android is a much more complicated robot designed to act and look like a human. And the word “’droids” is basically Star Wars slang (hence the single quote) used incorrectly for both (although I suspect that George Lucas stole it from the sci-fi literature like he did many other things—the Foundation and Jedi warriors among them).

R2-D2 can follow humans around like an intelligent waste-basket shaped Roomba or canister vacuum cleaner, and it might be more sophisticated than your laptop. It’s used to add fire control to Luke’s Starfighter, but it’s still a primitive robot inre its human qualities. C-3PiO is very much like a drunken human, staggering around looking for people who need some translations done, but that robot is not an android either.

An android is an artificial human, a specialized machine like Daneel or Star Trek’s Data. As I stated above, I have trouble with that last series too, but at least Roddenberry outdid Lucas when it comes to androids. Roddenberry’s plot devices weren’t stolen from Asimov and Burroughs like Lucas’s, but they were mostly created to make things easier for the producer/director. The transporter, for example, smacks of magic, and it’s just used to beam personnel up and down from planets. So why do they need shuttles then (definitely in the realm of possibility—NASA used to have them) and a shuttle bay aboard the Enterprise? And while communicators are the harbingers of cellphones, they can do so much more in the series that it’s a fantasy gizmo too, something akin to Harry’s wand.

If you’re looking for honest-to-gosh androids in movies, you can forget about Will Smith’s movie version of I, Robot too. Except for a few names, it has nothing to do with Asimov’s robot novels, although the bad guys are indeed robots, not androids. But there are a few movies that stand out when it comes to androids AKA artificial humans: The androids in Alien and Aliens and those in Blade Runner exhibit both humans’ good and bad qualities (yes, Deckard was an android—Ridley Scott directed both Blade Runner and Alien).

Neither androids nor robots are ubiquitous in my sci-fi. The latter have some cameo appearances (Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! starts with a robot-bar, and one also appears in Soldiers of God as a hotel greeter and information center), and, if you look closely, you might find a Daneel-type that’s a main character in Rogue Planet. A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games has a few android armies. That’s about it.

My general opinion is that robots are better than androids, though. Humans are just too complicated to copy. Clones are cheaper. (See the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.”)

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Comments are always welcome!

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She wants to travel through time but discovers she can only go forward. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. (And, if you’re looking for androids, there’s a whole world of them here—but no humans until Gail and Jeff drop by.)

Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars!

“In the beginning, all the universes in the multiverse were only bubbles in the multiverse’s froth…if there was a beginning. Did God see it all and call it good but play a grand joke on us mortals just for kicks? Maybe the bubbles keep coming? I’ll never know the answer to that question, of course. No mere mortal can know. But there is a multiverse, and it’s filled with universes, quantum states of a unique universe, and mostly filled with stars…and delightful and dangerous weirdness.”

That’s physicist Gail Huff writing, and it’s how my new sci-fi novel A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse begins (brought to you by Carrick Publishing). It’s a mishmash of hard sci-fi, mystery, romance, and humor that can be labeled a sci-fi rom-com. The romance and humor represent an experiment, a trek into genre terrain I haven’t visited before in my novels. The hard sci-fi is like all my science fiction, an extrapolation of known science into the future, getting weirder the farther it goes (in this case, multiple futures corresponding to multiple universes).

The major scientific theme, though, is quantum mechanics, not time travel, in particular the “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” You see, quantum mechanics even today is still an elaborate cookbook of collected algorithms used to explain the invisible world of atoms, particles, and fields. It’s a witch’s brew without any satisfying interpretation of how it works. You pick an algorithm for each particular system, turn the crank, and presto gizmo—you have the quantum states. No one knows why it works, but it does…and is very accurate. Of course, most of the systems are sufficiently complex that we solve the associated problems with a computer, making it all the more algorithmic. (Like everything else in physics these days, the easy problems have already been solved!)

Most physicists don’t spend any time on the problem of interpreting the quantum algorithms—they just turn the cranks like the monkeys writing Shakespeare. It’s easier laziness or an admission of defeat, because these physicists say it’s a waste of time to look for a sound interpretation of this mysterious theory. To be fair, some have spent time on making the cranks easier to turn. (Feynman’s approach to quantum electrodynamics is a famous example, although its accuracy achieved by throwing out the right infinities just adds to the mystery.) However, most practicing physicists are like prehistoric shamans chanting the quantum rules in the hope that their mumbo-jumbo bears fruit in their calculations.

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I haven’t been on Twitter very long. (Frankly I resisted it because of Trump and other bigots, racists, and haters.) As a newbie, I’m still getting used to it. The number of my followers climbed steadily at first but now has tapered off. I can’t remember that number, though (it can’t compare with Trump’s), because I never much cared—I was surprised that it grew. I can remember to whom I tweet, mostly the #readingcommunity and #writingcommunity, but also to my genial authors’ group #WolfPackAurhors (they have two anthologies now, royalties going to a good cause). And I often retweet when I see something that I want my followers to know about. (My Twitter handle is scattered around this website with more important information for readers and writers.)

I sometimes even tweet to @realDonaldTrump (Twitter fills all these long names in for me), but I don’t view Twitter as an effective political tool. (If you use it for that, it’s like shouting on the Little Prince’s planet—only his rose might hear you.) In fact, my tweeting has also plateaued; I mostly use it just to announce the week’s blog posts now. (Maybe that’s why the number of my followers has plateaued?)

What Twitter is really good for is teaching authors to minimalist writing. Many have problems writing blurbs for their books, for example—maybe not marketing objects per se, but blurbs should be short, literate, logical, legal, and to the point. (You-know-who usually fails miserably in satisfying that literate, logical, and legal criteria…unless someone writes the tweet for him.)

Twitter teaches minimalist writing because it’s always better to get what you have to say said in one tweet. Even I often go over my tweets and have to edit them to complete my minimalist mission. So it teaches editing as well, albeit towards minimalist writing.

Of course, you can argue that not much information is contained in a tweet. (In the case of you-know-who, it’s often disinformation.) But tweets require economical prose, just like blurbs and longer text, and that goal is a good one for any writer. It’s more about maximizing the information in a minimal number of words. Lean writing is a plus; verbose writing turns everyone off. You can’t use big words either (Trump doesn’t know any); the leanness also implies using a vocabulary anyone can understand (even Trump—he responds to me now…or some staff member does).

Does Twitter help authors sell books? I doubt it. It’s social media, after all, a way to socialize, in my case, with readers and other authors. (Not my goal, of course, when I tweet at you-know-who.) Like Facebook, it was originally created to keep tabs on relatives and friends. Its use and abuse has gone far beyond that, but I still think that’s its most important use.

But readers won’t find novels on Twitter. And when you do find one to read suggested to you by a tweet, be assured it won’t look like a collection of tweets (unless it is a collection of tweets like a recent Washington Post book). Maybe a blurb about the book will grab you, but tweeting doesn’t even qualify as flash fiction (unless the tweet is a Trump lie).

Twitter generally isn’t good for much except for that socializing aspect, as is most social media—useless in the sense that the only thing it accomplishes is to permit people many time zones apart to chin wag, as the Brits would say. That sense might be a good thing in these days of pandemic, of course, where virtual conversations are the norm. Before the internet, people were isolated. With social media, we’re part of a worldwide community. (Unfortunately that Twitter community also includes @realDonaldTrump.)

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Comments are always welcome.

Binge-reading #3. While I’m binge-reading other authors’ series, you’re welcome to binge on mine. In the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Esther, a Scotland Yard inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, obsesses with recovering a Rembrandt stolen by the Nazis in WWII (Rembrandt’s Angel) and with finding St. John the Divine’s before others do (Son of Thunder). Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden tries to keep her on an even keel. You might not consider this series binge-worthy—there are only two books so far (#3 is in the works)—but there’s a lot of fun reading here. Available on Amazon and at the publisher’s website, as well as on Smashwords and at its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardners, etc.). Enjoy!

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

Sometimes real life creates mysteries too. I’ll describe one that remains unsolved. No, I’m not an UFO junkie reporting on some mysterious events occurring at Area 51. There’s just one real-life mystery, and it would even stump Dame Agatha.

An author-friend’s husband—a fellow ex-physicist too, by the way, so there was a lot of scientific prowess applied to solving the mystery—was interested in one of Harlan Coben’s many tales, so he queried “Harlan Coben” on his smart TV system. Up came my novel The Last Humans, and Alexa started reading it. He repeated this experiment several times, as scientists are prone to do: different chapters, same book…and not Harlan’s! He was understandably bothered by this, so much so that his wife asked me what was going on.

Given my general lack of knowledge about how all this smart TV/streaming video/internet stuff works (we have neither a smart TV nor any streaming video service—I’d rather read a book), I haven’t been able to solve this mystery completely. Admittedly I was only a consultant and chronicler, a Dr. Watson for the true sleuths, my author-friend and her husband. They were the detectives at the scene of the crime, and they haven’t completely solved the mystery either.

Considering that my ebooks have been pirated before, my knee-jerk reaction was to think that was the problem, in which case all hope was lost. The only thing I could personally have done was to inform Amazon, Black Opal Books (my publisher, not Harlan’s, because mine would be the one worried about piracy), and whomever else might be affected. (Probably all ineffectual—book pirates are hard to bring to justice.)

But then my author-friend informed me she’d discovered that, if one buys an ebook (they bought the .mobi or Kindle formatted version from Amazon), one can ask Siri to read it—you can find the details here. Imagine. An audiobook version made from an ebook without the extra production cost of an audiobook! Who knew? Maybe some readers can try this with other ebooks—I have neither the hardware nor software to confirm this, nor any predilection for purchasing Apple products (Siri is that monotonous iPhone gal) that often only work with other Apple products, but I have no reason to doubt my author-friend, who writes excellent mysteries. Let me know if this works.

That solves part of the mystery. Two ex-physicists are stumped, as well as my author-friend and I, about this part: The real mystery just might be why Harlan Coben’s name was the trigger! I had some email correspondence years ago with Harlan after I started to publish my novels. He was patient with my impatience, saying it took a few books to gain some name recognition (the Myron Bolitar series is still my favorite in his opus, so he already had my attention). In hindsight, that email exchange only amounted to a pep talk, because what he suggested would happen hasn’t (i.e. name recognition—ebooks didn’t exist back then). Shortly after that exchange, his email address disappeared—he’d become too famous, I guess. (I don’t save email addresses anyway, just to protect people’s privacy, the exception being addresses of subscribers to my newsletter.) No further communication with the reclusive Harlan has occurred.

Maybe Harlan is the culprit behind all this? Nah! That’s hard to believe. But thank you, Harlan Coben, for showing me how I can avoid production costs for an ebook. A lot more thanks are due my author-friend and her husband for showing how the tech elves can help authors without the authors doing anything. I wrote a post not long ago about the new trend of adding an audiobook at a reduced price when a reader buys an ebook. Readers, it looks like there’s no need for you to do that as long as you buy iBooks, which means, authors, it’s not such an effective marketing tool to offer that. Of course, readers will have Siri reading the ebook in that case, not James Earl Jones.

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Comments are always welcome.

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Readers of this blog know I don’t write romance or erotica, but I’ve met those popular genres halfway with this sci-fi rom-com—that’s sci-fi romantic comedy. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this novel a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—those and more await the reader who rides along. An excellent distraction from the pandemic that’s coming soon!

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