Some prose is so beautiful that it almost seems like music. Garcia Marquez’s Nobel winning novel did that for me—maybe it helped I read Cien Años de Soledad in Spanish, a musical language to be sure—this book will soon become a video series instead of a single movie, which is more appropriate for the century it covers!.

In this article I’m writing about references to music in literature, though, or writers being inspired by music. Musicians take stories and turn them into musical theater and operas. Writers don’t often return the favor. In my free download, Mayhem, Murder, and Music, the individual stories are inspired by music, but that’s not the same as turning a musical piece into a story (see my web page “Free Stuff & Contests” for this and other free PDFs). Maybe some clever producers of audiobooks use a musical background (and sound effects like in those old radio shows?), but the plots aren’t stolen from musical pieces.

Why not? Writers, especially beginning ones, are often given plot ideas in writing groups. (In my third article this week, I’ll even provide some.) Why not the following then? Take Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—it’s the “Pastoral”—and steal its story, a day in the countryside. The thunderstorm movement could even be a harbinger of horror. Hmm. Maybe old Ludwig stole the idea from such a short story, sans horror? Musicologists can chime in, if any read this blog. I’ll refrain from going to Google this time. Or take Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and turn it into a story about witches and their victims. In the audiobook version, these pieces can be playing in the background.

It’s a stretch, I know. Mussorgsky did a double take by going from art pieces associated with various stories to a musical piece, Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel orchestrated the composer’s original piano work to make the piece a popular orchestral extravaganza and filler in concerts), but no writer I know of has done the opposite. Maybe the best we can do is to write stories inspired by musical pieces in a loose sense?

Will the future of publishing change this? I can imagine multimedia ebooks or audiobooks where the stories are inspired by music and/or speech and even contain odors (like the ones you might imagine for that Beethoven symphony right after the storm when the world smells fresh and spring-like). The possibilities are endless for mixing prose with audio, visual, tactile, and other senses. But will the music essentially be the story?

Probably not, but it can always suggest one. What would Star Wars’s evil Empire be without that stirring music in the background announcing Darth Vader on that battleship? And there’s the rub. As the medias mix, will the printed word play second fiddle to the movie? After all, that famous opening scroll in the original movie is the only prose the viewer sees—it’s more like a prologue to a book, but the movie is the story.

And it’s entirely possible that readership will disappear no matter how the stories are generated because the written word is no longer a medium for artistic expression. That would be sad.

***

Comments are always welcome!

Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. The post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans will soon be published by Black Opal Books and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers, and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). Coming March 30! Pre-orders now accepted on Amazon and Smashwords.

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

Some authors put plot before characterization; others reverse that. I always ask the question in my interviews with other authors. It’s a trick question, you see. You have character-driven plots and plots that aren’t. For the first, the author has to make sure the characters (even if there’s only one) are well-developed and interesting enough. Note that I didn’t add “…to support the plot.” Their development and the interest that generates among readers carries the plot forward, but it can work both ways—the plot must also nurture that development.

Plots that aren’t character-driven often occur in mystery, suspense, and thriller novel. Characterization is still important, but there are many characters covering a wide range of importance. These novels are often perfect for the minimalist writer (sometimes called the “hard-boiled style” in mystery and suspense). The characters’ descriptions are just enough for the reader to fill in details and thus participate in the creative process.

Character-driven plots often have a lot of narrative—description of the characters and their situations with readers often being able to get inside their heads to see what they see and what they think about what’s going on. The fiction usually has less action and more introspection, i.e. psychology plays a more fundamental role.

I often observe a mix in many novels that I read where the author uses the character-driven part as a respite from intense action or suspense, even in minimalist writing. The plot flows, but these quiet sections are eddies in the flowing waters and maybe dark pools as well, hiding the characters’ secret thoughts. Creating all this takes some skill, and how readers react to it widely varies.

Reading tastes are subjective. Likes and dislikes of readers are impossible to predict, so an author shouldn’t try. Her first audience is herself; she must write first in a way that her story is the kind she’d read, looking at it objectively, of course.

In that sense, there is no choice to make between plot and characterization. Authors can begin their novel-writing marathons by thinking about the main characters, or they can focus on the plot, which usually starts with a what-if, and add characters as needed. Whether there’s any emphasis after the novel is finished is merely a reflection about how the authors’ stories evolve. There’s really no choice to be made. Each story must contain themes, plot, characters, dialogue, narrative, settings, and other elements of good storytelling.

I suppose one point could be made for putting characters above plot, though. There are only so many plots, no matter the genre. The way the author evolves the plot makes it unique; but the many possible characters reflect the diversity of human beings, and those possibilities make it easier to make the plot unique.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Rembrandt’s Angel. What if Dame Agatha had brought together Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to solve a crime? She never did, but in this novel, Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone, from the Art and Antiques Division, and Bastiann van Coevorden, Interpol agent, become 21^st century versions of Christie’s famous characters. Esther becomes obsessed with recovering a Rembrandt the Nazis stole in World War Two. Bastiann has to rein her in at times. A romance blossoms between the two as the pursuit of the painting turns into a lot more. Available in ebook format at Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print format at Amazon and your local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

The sequel, Son of Thunder, will be out this year, also published by Penmore Press.

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

I write reviews all the time for other authors’ books, but I’m not very lucky in receiving them for my own books. Here’s a few for some recent books.

A reviewer of Goin’ the Extra Mile says…

“WOW! What an exciting story from Steven Moore.  A total page turner from the start.  There are no doubts who you cheer for and who you want to lose in this exciting espionage story.
BACKGROUND: While in the CIA [actually she’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms], Mary Jo was sent to reclaim two MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”) that were stolen from the CIA [a secret US government project] by Russian operatives. Instead, she freed them, then the three of them destroyed the laboratory and escaped to freedom. That was years ago and they have had no contact with each other since then.  But nobody believes Mary Jo. The Russians and CIA keep trying to find the MECHs and they still believe Mary Jo knows where they are.
CURRENT: Mary Jo is former Navy and now a former discredited/framed CIA agent [actually a security guard at the place with the MECHs project].  Her husband is a former FBI agent, [and] now all they want is to live the American dream of raising a family in peace.  But it appears the Chinese have different ideas for their future.
When Mary Jo’s husband and two children are kidnapped we start a rescue operation that jumps between France and America and ends up in Beijing. All kinds of alphabet agencies are involved, FBI, CIA, DSGI, DSGE, MSS, etc. [US, US, French, French, and Chinese agencies.]
Woven throughout the story are references of the Wall a previous President built, the disrespect of our leaders by the leaders of other countries, the decay of American values and freedoms, becoming more of a third-world country than a powerful leader of the world.  Unfortunately, this part of the story is partially true and just may be our actual future.
This story of political power desolving democracy and the free world deserves 5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.”

—Diana Raven, in an Amazon review

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Let’s take this clichéd weather phrase as segue to the following question: How important is weather in fiction? As usual, the answer is: It depends.

Sometimes apocalyptic weather is like a main character: tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, volcanoes raining down ash and pumace, and other dangerous events often become villains in thrillers. I still remember from my three-year-old book reading experiences a story about a little red fire engine who had to perform in the middle of an ice storm. Yeah, that’s not a novel (anyone remember the title?), but the story clearly resonated. Readers should realize that books their children read can have a lasting effect, and that’s why they offer such a good ROI for publishers.

Somewhat later I read Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other pioneers of British mysteries. Some Irish stories too. It wasn’t surprising that they often contained bad weather—that area of the world is known for it. Also Scotland, and its bad weather is common in Ian Rankin’s work—snow as well as rain. (We lucked out on our trip to Ireland—see the pics on my website—because we had sunshine every day except one for two weeks, an unusual occurrence that let us enjoy the emerald fields of the Emerald Isle along with the splendor of the wild surf along the western coast).

Some of those old British classics I love to hate (i.e. NOT the mysteries) have prose almost as bad as the cliché in the title. Weather is just part of the setting, so authors can overdo it sometimes. But how many times did Noye’s Fludde appear in those old English mystery plays? (There’s a great vocal piece featuring a kids’ choir with that title by Benjamin Britten—Noah’s Flood would be the modern translation.) Weather events are ubiquitous in literature, old and new.

Weather can set a mood too because many people react emotionally to weather—sadness, fear of impending danger, future promise indicated by a rainbow, and so forth. That’s why bad weather can be such a good villain and good weather can create romantic euphoria.

I’m a fan of using Goldilock’s Principle in using writing elements: never too much, never too little, but just enough. We can always use weather in our stories as long as we follow this principle. But we might want to change “It was a dark and stormy night…” to something minimalist like “A heavy rain fell…” or “There was fog on the Danube…” and then get on with the story!

***

Comments are always welcome.

Rembrandt’s Angel. What if Dame Agatha had brought together Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to solve a crime? She never did, but in this novel, Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone, from the Art and Antiques Division, and Bastiann van Coevorden, Interpol agent, become 21^st century versions of Christie’s famous characters. Esther becomes obsessed with recovering a Rembrandt the Nazis stole in World War Two. Bastiann has to rein her in at times. A romance blossoms between the two as the pursuit of the painting turns into a lot more. Available in ebook format at Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print format at Amazon and your local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

The sequel, Son of Thunder, will be out this year, also published by Penmore Press.

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

Readers often want to know how authors write those books they love. It’s a common question in interviews. In my list of questions for interviewees, I approach the question sideways and treat it indirectly. As both a reader and writer, though, I’m interested in the answers if only because I want to compare myself to other authors.

So writers, do you sit in Starbucks with your laptop and sip on a bad cup of coffee to do your writing? Do you have classical or rock music playing in the background from some iTunes playlist you’ve constructed? Or do you need absolute silence?

There are probably as many writing companions as there are writers. Writing isn’t rocket science, but it I intense, and many of us, myself included, have developed techniques to help us focus. These include choices of place, food and drink, and people around us.

Many authors have one special place to write. They might take notes out and about in many places, but there’s that one special place where they do their best work. In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about this, including how his desk is placed (that’s in the memoir part that you might not have read or remembered if you’re an author).

Food and drink? Maybe. I’m sure there are authors who have their Keurig in their study along with a bowl of pretzels, but I learned long ago that food and drink don’t play well with computers! For me, it’s my two morning mugs and then on to writing. So, be careful and backup your works in progress often if you need food and drink at hand.

People? Nowadays many stay-at-home moms and dads are internet commuters and rarely go into a physical workplace. Many consultants do this. It’s hard for stay-at-home writers to focus if they’re also chief cooks and babysitters—children must always take precedence, so if that’s your full-time day-job, your writing will be mostly limited to when the kids are in school or asleep.

Writing has always been a lonely job too. Maybe some writers need other humans around (a library comes to mind), but maybe others need absolute solitude. Each one of us has to choose what works best given the possibilities.

All these choices are our writing companions. It’s a wonder so many books are written because organizing a writing life isn’t easy. Each year, hundreds of thousands of books are published. Each one represents an author’s choice of writing companions—compromises, stolen moments, and so forth. I find that amazing.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is a forensic diver for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. She surfaces from a dive to find all her colleagues dead. She struggles to survive and then protect the family of other survivors she creates as gangs of feral humans and others threaten her. And then she helps a struggling US government. This post-apocalyptic thriller is coming soon from Black Opal Books.

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

These are two extremes. Plagiarism has a legal definition that’s changed over time, and the crime has been punished at different levels. But it’s at one end of a linear spectrum with inspiration at the other. Authors are often inspired by other authors and their books, but actually copying their prose seems infrequent.

But consider the case of Daniel Mallory (pseudonym A. J. Finn), the fellow who wrote the bestseller The Woman in the Window. The plot has similarities with Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Hitchcock’s Rear Window (apparently Mr. Mallory is a fan of Hitchcock). Calling these similarities plagiarism is probably extreme, and calling those creative works inspiration for the author more appropriate.

But there are other ramifications to this case that might make one pause. Mr. Mallory is addicted to lying. He lied about having brain cancer, and he lied about having a PhD from Oxford. But did he plagiarize? I haven’t read his book (I read the New Yorker article, though), and I’m no lawyer, but I doubt it.

Plagiarism occurs so infrequently among writers that it often become a scandal when it does. I pay attention to it because of my interest in scientific ethics, a similar concern. From my own experiences, I can state that creative activity in the arts and sciences is similar—there’s pressure on creatives to succeed, and some succumb to the temptation of plagiarizing others thoughts or “adjusting” data to prove a scientific theory.

This occurs at all levels. In high school, I saw students copy sections out of reference works and magazines to make a report—in those days, a teacher didn’t have software to detect plagiarism. I also saw students fudge data on their lab reports (I was in the track called “college prep,” and the pressure was intense).

One can argue that none of that amounted to much, but I often wondered if students doing it might do worse things as adults. Doctors fudging results on prescription drug trials, for example, because the new drug is made by a company sponsoring some of the doctors’ research. In general, researchers who fudge data can mislead other researchers into culs de sac, and that can have negative repercussions that, in the worse case, might harm people.

So back to writing. I’ve been inspired by other works. What writer hasn’t? The safe haven in Christopher’s No Blade of Grass inspired me to use Yosemite Valley as one in my new book The Last Humans. Both of these books are post-apocalyptic. I certainly didn’t plagiarize Christopher (I don’t even have a copy of his book, although I’ve been looking for one in used book stores for years). Christopher’s book also inspired my No Amber Waves of Grain in a sense, because long ago when I read No Blade of Grass (high school or earlier?), I wondered about what caused Christopher’s apocalypse and whether people could have stopped it. (Yeah, I kept those plot ideas around for a long time.)

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Writers often worry about them: how many words did I write today? How many books did I sell this month? How many reviews have my books received? Even, how many “likes” or retweets did I get on Twitter?

Science is all about numbers, and business now emphasizes them too. In a sense, econ 101 for publishing doesn’t differ from econ 101 in general. Metrics! Everything is about metrics these days.

I contend that this focus on numbers is antithetical to good writing. We writers shouldn’t worry about numbers, especially fiction writers. We should just tell our stories and be done with it. But can we do that?

Consider word count. Do you have a plot or character idea and just start writing? Or do you fret about writing at least a certain number of words each day? The number of words doesn’t matter. What you’re writing will either turn into a short story, novella, or novel. That word count is a metric to be used in the end game to decide which, so how many words you write each day is irrelevant. (I only keep word count in mind for blog posts, aiming for about 500, but I don’t fret much if I go over that.)

How many books you sell is another metric, but the more important one is: How many readers have you entertained with your fiction? That’s hard if not impossible to measure (do we count all those pirated books and readers sharing our books with family and friends, an acceptable type of pirating?). I just measure success for a book by saying if each one entertains at least one reader, it’s a success.

I have the luxury of doing so because I don’t have to make a living writing. I love to spin a good yarn, and I strive to make each one exciting and entertaining, but I know the chances that readers even know it exists are small (that’s another metric we don’t have access to). If you’re starting out, I don’t recommend that you think you’ll become rich with your writing—not financially, anyway. And, if you don’t think writing is its own reward, I wonder why you’re doing it!

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What do Melville, Orwell, Hemingway, Clancy, and Rowling have in common? You’re correct if you say they’re well known authors. But they’ve also been rejected by agents and publishers. Most of our lives are filled with good and bad events. Some of the latter correspond to rejection. For an author, rejections are especially painful.

According the NY Times, Melville was asked, “Does it have to be a whale?” Orwell’s essay on British cooking was rejected because someone didn’t like his recipe for orange marmalade. Hemingway was told his writing was “tedious and offensive.” Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Clancy’s Hunt for Red October were almost never published.

Authors have to live with rejection, of course. Even self-published authors are rejected by readers, and traditionally published authors have to run the gantlets created by agents and acquisitions editors even before their books reach readers. We must be thick-skinned about it.

Among my 1000+ rejections during the first years of this millennia—I’m counting both agents and acquisitions editors—I received the ubiquitous “Sorry, not for me” in many form emails where I probably outdid the X-Files’ “Cancer-Stick Man” (I’d stopped smoking long ago, though), yet I continued to write my stories. My old English professor at UCSB, Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, once said, “I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted.  Perseverance is a large part of writing.” That’s what I did. I experimented with self-publishing—first POD and then ebooks—and then added in some traditional publishing too, making myself into a mongrel. My thick skin is a bit pocked now, but I forge ahead.

Besides the form rejections, I had agents sit on manuscripts for months, only to say, “Sorry, not for me.” Sometimes their rejections were more complicated: “While your novel has promise, we have too much of a backlog right now.” One agent proved she didn’t understand that world building is essential narrative for sci-fi, saying, “There’s too much narrative in this manuscript.” (She sat on the manuscript for around six months.) Honestly, there were times I thought of throwing in the towel, but Momaday’s advice always lifted me up to try again.

Authors have to grin and bear rejections. They also have to recognize that reading tastes are subjective. This holds for agents and acquisitions editors as well as readers who do not work in the book business. For traditional publishing, a rejection is often just an expression of the book professionals’ tastes. They claim that their decision is based on marketability, but that’s often just used as an excuse for justifying their tastes. The famous cases I’ve mentioned show book professionals have no special talents they can use to predict a book’s success, i.e. its marketability. The other famous cases, and maybe all of them, also show they don’t know much about literary excellence.

There’s one other thing those famous writers have in common: they’re fiction writers. That’s also where many book professionals fail. They often can’t recognize good storytelling because they’ve rarely written a good story! Fortunately, there are many exceptions so that I have enough good books to read, but I always wonder about the good ones that didn’t make the cut.

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Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! It’s the day lovers celebrate…maybe book lovers? Enjoy it!

***

Writers should never stop experimenting. I don’t mean silliness like writing a crime story in reverse (Deaver) or a mystery where the ending comes first (Garcia Marquez). Or a horror story containing a monstrous clown who eats people (King)—OK, maybe that was fresh and new at the time, and played off on some people’s clown phobias. No, I just mean telling a story in a new way with new characters or old ones in new situations.

The opposite of experimentation is to put yourself in a rut: You’re enamored with one of your stories, so you write more like them. Writers of series often fall into that trap (it often seemed that Grafton just copied and pasted sections in going from A to whatever letter she ended on, but maybe I shouldn’t knock success?). Sometimes that’s no fault of the author; the publisher wants more books just like that first one, especially if that first one is successful.

Sci-fi might be the one genre where experimentation is essential. I might have shocked some readers with the experimental sex scenes in Rogue Planet, for example, but who knows how sexual mores will change in the future? And it’s all tame compared to Heinlein’s Friday and some of his other books, for example. (The old master became quite ribald in his later years.)

If space is the last frontier, sci-fi goes beyond that frontier and provides infinite possibilities for experimentation. But mysteries and thrillers also allow that; we just have to work a bit harder. For mysteries, how many ways can I kill a person? For thrillers, how many conspiracies can I create?

Aristocrats and Assassins was another experiment, for example. When I had the initial idea long ago and much later started the story, I thought I might be in legal trouble—most of the aristocrats are real ones! Outside of writing mode, I studied that legal problem a bit. It turns out that if we don’t say anything bad about persons, we can put them in our books. (The aristocrats in my book do some really great things.) I remembered that Clancy did that with Prince Charlie (Patriot Games), so I felt safe. That whole book was an experiment. Maybe some readers don’t think so, but I liked the result—Aristocrats and Assassins is my favorite Chen and Castilblanco book. (By the way, Bastiann van Coevorden from Rembrandt’s Angel first appears there in a cameo.)

Every Chen and Castilblanco book is an experiment, of course. They all start with a murder—the two cops are homicide detectives, after all. But I cheat: I don’t write about their boring and routine cases! I create new ones, experiments that often leave the NYC area to go national or even international, like Aristocrats and Assassins (that tale begins with Castilblanco and his wife on vacation in Europe—no NYC at all). Angels Need Not Apply is another example of that.

Is this the way to write a series? Maybe not for you, but it worked for me. Better still, as a reader, it seems to work for the fiction authors I read the most. They experiment, even within their series. Consider Clancy’s oeuvre. Every Jack Ryan book is an experiment, a refreshing, new story that entertained many people (Red Storm Rising is an exception). He might not have been a great writer, but he was an entertaining one because he experimented. Same for Heinlein. Every book in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is also an experiment.

The desire for experimentation might cause writer’s block, I suppose. If a writer has fallen into a rut, it’s hard to come up with something new and bold. It’s probably advisable to avoid those ruts. Publishers don’t often understand that; authors should.

So, readers, enjoy all the experiments in writing out there—they will keep you reading. And writers, sit down and write some experiments. Your readers will thank you.

***

Comments are always welcome!

The Last Humans. Ex-USN and LA County Sheriff’s diver Penny Castro surfaces from a forensic dive and finds the apocalypse. Can she survive the post-apocalypse? Follow Penny’s adventures as she creates a new family and then strives to protect them. This post-apocalyptic thriller is coming soon from Black Opal Books! A sequel is already in the works. (By the way, check out the Black Opal catalog. Lots of good reading there.)

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

Previously I’ve avoided them, putting them in the same class as contests. Most authors don’t have much money to spend, and most orgs and contests cost money! Besides, I’ve had an APS professional membership for years, and at least that membership includes Physics Today, a glossy pop-sci ‘zine that’s loaded with all sorts of science and technology info (name me one author org with a ‘zine like that!). (By the way, that ‘zine and Science News provides a lot of background material for my sci-fi oeuvre.) And forget Authors Guild that’s no union for authors–it’s just a front for the Big Five and its authors pretending to be a service organization.

All that said, I’ve now joined ITW, short for International Thriller Writers. Unlike other author orgs (and APS), ITW doesn’t charge any dues (they charge plenty for their events, though). As a result, I didn’t expect much from them—like the American Kennel Club, many of their members will look down on mongrels like me, an author who self- and traditionally publishes. No matter, I’m proud to be a mongrel, and I will have access to a lot of freebies where I might find some new ideas for marketing my books and so forth…as well as meet a few other mongrels…or authors in general?

Frankly, I have no idea why they accepted me. My new post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans is due out this year from Black Opal Books (we’re in final edits); hopefully Son of Thunder, the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel, will be available this year too. Or maybe they actually paid attention to all my mysteries and thrillers (most of my sci-fi stories even have thriller elements). Who knows?

In any case, I’m honored. I’ve been reading thrillers all my life (decades ago, they were called “adventures”—the term “thriller” is relatively recent), so it’s an honor to be in the same org as Baldacci, Child, Deaver, and so forth. I’m torn, though. One part of me says that I’ll be a lost soul like Ed Norton in the Raccoons Club; another part says that I should make the most of the honor and enjoy what ITW has to offer. But does such an org really help authors?

I decided it was best to look at this honor philosophically. In life, I’ve learned that you have to take advantage of what life offers. ITW will be painless—no dues—and a possible source for improving my writing life. (They also have a free newsletter The Big Thrill where members can hawk their books, among other things, but frankly trying to sell books to other authors doesn’t work too well—writers need to do that with readers, who are the ones who buy the books for the most part.)

I live close to NYC, the publishing capital of the world (ITW’s words—both my small press publishers are out west, though, and many publishers are not in NYC), so I can go to their events by train or by bus (if one of my books takes off so I can afford the events). Maybe my membership will validate me in the eyes of some readers too. Writers need recognition and validation—my bar is set low and comes from at least one reader being entertained by one of my books, so I’m not too concerned about ITW’s.

Author orgs can complement critique groups if an author is into that sort of thing. ITW might be the biggest critique group ever! Who knows? You can bet I’ll explore all the possibilities associated with my new ITW membership in any case. There must be something ITW offers that I can use, right? The answer to that question is postponed for now.

If you’re a reader, do you care about author orgs? Do you pay attention to “International Thriller Writers Member” listed by an author’s name? If you’re a writer, do you feel the need to belong to an author org? Being new at this, I’d like to put my membership in context, so let me know. I’ll still always take my membership in ITW as an honor, of course.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Ex-USN and LA County Sheriff’s diver Penny Castro surfaces from a forensic dive and finds the apocalypse. Can she survive the post-apocalypse? Follow Penny’s adventures as she creates a new family and then strives to protect them. This post-apocalyptic thriller is coming soon from Black Opal Books! A sequel is already in the works. (By the way, check out the Black Opal Books catalog. Lots of good reading there.)

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