By this question I mean whether readers like books independently of the author’s gender, and whether authors can write books independent of their gender? The second applies to any creative artist—indeed, it applies to any occupation. I have some progressive opinions about that. The first is subjective and might inspire some comments to this post.

Recently I heard that WNBA players are second-class citizens compared to NBA players (of course, I long suspected that). The former share 25% of the profits; the latter 50%. WNBA rookies start at about $44K. You can imagine what some NBA rookies start at!

This is common in many occupations. While CEOs now make 300 times what their average employees do (talk about earnings gap!), female employees make less than their male counterparts in general, CEOs included.

I’m an equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work fan. I don’t have stats on journalists, but I believe fiction reading is gender neutral. I think most readers are like me: we just like a good story, no matter who writes it. In fact, I pay no attention to the gender, religion, political proclivities, and so forth of the author as long as the story’s good.

In my book buying, I look for good stories. Although I market my own books, I’ll admit authors’ marketing efforts don’t have much effect on me. They might move me to look at the book’s page on Amazon for its blurb and “peek inside,” or do the same at a bookstore. If the author’s advertising has some serious review excerpts (hint: too many reviews are zero content, especially on Amazon), that might help the author’s cause, but it’s not likely.

You can see that my book purchases have nothing to do with the author’s gender, religion, politics, and so forth. Genre(s) and other keywords might influence me too (I don’t read fluff, which nixes bodice rippers, fifty shades of anything, and cat mysteries).

In fact, there are more female readers than male, so I wouldn’t be surprised that there are more female writers than male (the one doesn’t follow the other, of course). I certainly read more female writers than male writers (again, I’m not sure there’s any correlation, but it’s a personal fact).

There’s a tendency for protagonists to be male, but I think that gender bias is disappearing. After all, the male protagonist saving the damsel in distress from the clutches of the villain sounds like a silent movie, right? Yet Hollywood often still follows that model! My own stories tend to be a bit biased the other way. I have no problem with a smart, strong woman as protagonist because I’ve know quite a few who can serve as models for those kind of characters.

I don’t know if there are gender biases at publishing companies. Maybe at the top? I don’t know why there would be either, considering the last comments, but these companies might be similar to all the others. (I remember a stereotypical episode of Mike and Molly where Molly confronts a publishing editor…typical and hilarious!). I worked in scientific R&D where there was definitely gender bias. Some of that might be due to parents and teachers giving credence to the debunked theory that girls aren’t good STEM students. That’s malarkey, of course, and I never propagated that myth when I was a professor…or with my own kids.

Let me end this little essay by stating that your gender doesn’t affect your ability to write a good story. The three steps to good writing are create, edit, and persevere. Your gender doesn’t affect any of those steps. It might affect other things like choice of genre, but not that basic trinity. While I try to remember an author’s name whose books I like, that first choice of her or his books is independent of gender. I read for the story.

***

Rembrandt’s Angel. Mystery, thrills, and romance await the reader of this novel. Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone is trying to decide whether Interpol Agent Bastiann van Coevorden will become husband #4 as she becomes obsessed with recovering a Rembrandt painting stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. As the case morphs into an international conspiracy, the two become closer as they battle neo-Nazis, a drug cartel, and ISIS. Available in ebook format from Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers, as well as print format at Amazon or your local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it). Ideal for later summer and fall reading.

In libris libertas!

[Note from Steve: This blog post was written by A. B. Carolan.]

We Irish are a hardy lot. We needed that for centuries. Readers of Steve’s blog might wonder why the Irish diaspora is so vast. Cromwell has a lot of responsibility for that, separating children from parents, wives from husbands, and shipping all over God’s creation. He even stabled his army’s horses in our cathedrals, which is why they’re mostly Anglican now. Those who were left behind suffered through various potato famines. The lucky ones died.

Yes, a sad history indeed, but sadder still the wee ones had as they were growing up. Readers might have read about that in the true story Angela’s Ashes.  Childhood during the troubles wasn’t easy either.

That’s why I find coming-of-age stories so fascinating. Our Lord and Savior said “Suffer the little child…to come onto me,” and there are many who suffer, believe me (different meaning of “suffer,” of course, but the Good Lord will forgive me for the play on words, because children’s suffering is a reality in this world). Just the pain of growing into adults—innocence lost, if you will—is prevalent. We have to write about that as authors.  Mysteries, thrillers, paranormal adventures, romances, biopics—you can add your own genres.

The Harry Potter series is a coming-of-age series. Harry is a wizard, so they’re YA fantasy. Robert Heinlein, an eccentric author of many talents, wrote Podkayne of Mars, a YA sci-fi thriller. I prefer YA sci-fi mysteries. Sci-fi allows me to lift readers out of their current milieu, rising above their cultural hang-ups, as it were, to analyze coming-of-age under my microscope.

This is what happens in The Secret Lab. I rewrote and reedited Steven M. Moore’s first edition of this sci-fi mystery. Shashi and friends are growing up fast and get into big problems as they try to discover the origins of a mutant cat. They have growing pains, but they basically discover that adults can be duplicitous—they lose their innocence but rise up to confront their problems.

I took Steve’s short story “Marcello an Me” (it’s contained in his speculative fiction collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape) and used it as a starting point for the sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns. It’s a coming-of-age tale where the young protagonist learns about adults’ bigotry and hatred and does something about it. By setting this story in the distant future, I hope to take these issues out of the emotional context of our current political situations.

Coming-of-age tales often occur when young adults cannot understand their elders. This is the case in these novels. But adults cannot understand tweens and teenagers either. This might explain a lot of the interest in these kinds of stories. Of course, adults might also be looking to understand their own coming-of-age problems they had when growing up.

***

The Secret Lab. Mr. Paws, the mutant cat who loves mathematics, tells most of this tale set on the International Space Station in the future. Shashi Garcia and friends set out to discover his origins. Their sleuthing leads to a genetics conspiracy. Adventures await young adults and adults who are young-at-heart in this fast-paced sci-fi mystery. Set in the same universe as The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (last few days for 50% off at Smashwords), this novel is 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 B&N. Ideal for late summer and fall reading…and those book reports your children will have to write in school! For that, you should also check out the YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns, another novel by A. B. Carolan.

In libris libertas!

I saw in the news that Patrick Stewart is going to act in a new Star Trek series that will follow Captain Picard in his later years. I always thought he was the quintessential Starfleet captain, unlike Kirk, who was just a loose cannon most of the time. However, I just watched (how many times now?) Star Trek IV, arguably the best whale movie ever made (sure beats the hell out of Moby Dick, that boring and awful treatise on how to turn whale blubber into lamp oil). Kirk and his minions were a lot of fun in that Star Trek movie, and it speaks to one of my pet issues, species extinction caused by human beings.

The movie also contains the franchise’s version of time travel—something about going Warp 10 around the sun, playing on McCoy’s challenge to Spock to make a guess on how to control the target time (Sheldon’s not around to explain, physicist to ex-physicist, just how this works!). That gets the crew from the 23^rd century to the 20^th in a Klingon vessel that can cloak, which is convenient for their landing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Probably the best Star Trek movie made so far (the redux versions suffer from Hollywood thriller bloat, although they have their moments).

I’ve also finished the bio of Alan Turing, learning a bit more about his ideas for AI that were far ahead of his time. He was also associated with the Brits actually beating the Americans in making the first functional computer, although the Brits should be prouder of him and more indebted to him for saving their butts in WWII for breaking the Enigma code (Great Britain might be a Third Reich province otherwise). They unfairly rewarded him for that, if you can call what they did a reward, basically forcing him to commit suicide because he was gay (LGBT rights were a longtime coming to Great Britain).

At any rate, I was happy to see that my ideas about digitizing a human mind in Survivors of the Chaos (the second edition is now included in the bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection) might have appealed to the famous mathematician Alan Turing. Two characters’ minds become digitized, and they catch a ride aboard an ET starship, only to reappear in Sing a Zamba Galactica (#2 in the trilogy), where they become human beings again centuries later after they disappeared (they go on to play important roles in all that follows). That’s like a Star Trek transporter operating in slo-mo. (As a matter of fact, why transport the body with the mind when you can just digitize the mind?).

Besides my forced nexus between these two stories thanks to the Star Trek franchise, why in the world (or in the near-Earth regions of the Galaxy) would I consider these disparate tales? Simple! I’ve shied away from time travel in my sci-fi writing (OK, I have a few short stories about the subject, but no novels) because I avoid paradoxes. Time travel can lead to them—the story of the time traveler who steps on a butterfly and changes the future, or another fellow killing his grandfather before he or his father was born, are examples.

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We’ve all seen them—reviews for books, movies, restaurants, contractors, tourist spots, hotels, and so forth. To summarize the point I’ll be making here, they’re basically worthless. If you generally agree with that, you might not want to read any farther, but what I have to say about their oft-accompanying rankings might surprise you. I’ve considered this problem a lot, based on my previous experiences with statistics and sampling as a scientist. My conclusions are hard to put into words, but I’m going to try to do so. Smart, educated consumers demand better products, thus improving what we produce. That goes for authors as much as it does for Apple.

Does any reasonable person believe that a ranking system is useful? Amazon does, but they just want to accumulate votes to calculate stats on the products they sale, which aren’t mostly books anymore, so they treat books now just like any other product. And how they do all this is highly questionable. To be fair, how most retailers do it is highly questionable.

You can put the usual ranking systems in scholarly terms, A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2, and F = 1. In that case, 3 is an average performance, while 5 is excellent. While your professor or teacher might use a curve to assign grades to a large class, retailers do not. In fact, the author of a book, or the product manufacturer in general, has many “teachers” who subjectively assign an arbitrary grade based on an incorrect sampling process. Moreover, those teachers, while they might examine the performance of many “students,” pretend to have some absolute knowledge to define their ranking of many students. This is the first fatal flaw, but it only gets worse.

This subjectivity flaw is accompanied by natural biases. While some influences from cultural wars might come into play in these biases, let’s just concentrate on the mathematical biases. Who do you think writes product reviews? In particular, who reviews books? If you think that reviewers represent a cross-section of the buying public, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sale to you. You see, reviewers tend to the extremes: they either generally like or dislike the product. The middle rankings are depleted. And, because retailers like Amazon often weight negative reviews more than negative, the statistics are completely skewed and NEVER can become a normal distribution, something scholastic curves are based on and many people wrongly assume is the case when dealing with large numbers.

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I write fiction. I know my limitations, so I don’t write poetry very often. You might have enjoyed my “Ode to Cassini” on the home page of this website; it probably broke all the rules, although it was heartfelt.

That poem was my most recent one—I mean, it’s been several decades since I wrote the last one. I’ve included some old poems in The Collector (the poem there was written for my father, who was a landscape and still life artist who hated abstract art). The Last Humans (to be published by Black Opal Books in 2019) contains another early poem. And the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel will contain one too. All my ancient attempts to write poetry.

I find old stories and poems in basement boxes I’m just now unpacking from the last move. They all date from high school or college—not written on papyrus, but the paper’s often brittle and yellow.

All these futile attempts taught me that I have no real skill for writing poetry. Long ago, I didn’t even like to read it either, outside of a few limericks that made me laugh. That all changed at UC Santa Barbara when I attended N. Scott Momaday’s English class. Mind you, he’s more of a fiction writer too, but more about that later. Nevertheless, Professor Momaday taught me to love poetry.

Imagine if you will a man of average height, a bit portly, and with generally a happy face and twinkling eyes behind the lectern at times, or pacing the stage, with poetry book in hand, reading poems to about 250 students in a large lecture class. At least two-thirds of the students didn’t care what he was reading or saying about what he read; they just wanted to get through English without doing damage to their GPA. I must say my TA didn’t much care either. He gave everyone an A who found something Freudian to say in their analysis of a poem or short story. I did so. The TA taught me nothing; Professor Momaday taught me a lot.

On the other hand, I was mesmerized by the professor’s performance in every lecture. Most of the time he’d hardly look at the poem. He became the poet; he lived the poem. I wanted to be able to perform on stage like that, but I knew that the professor did it naturally. We disappeared from his mind; what he was reading took over.

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[In memory of Anthony Bourdain.]

Anthony Bourdain showed us the world of food. What’s more important, though, is that he showed us places and people there who ate that food. One can make the argument that anything we can do to help people learn that we’re all on spaceship Earth together, and, in spite of our differences, we’re all human beings with similar yet simple goals in life—a good job, good health, and a loving family—that’s a good thing. Bourdain could do that; so can authors when they write their stories.

In our stories, we can do what Bourdain did: visit other countries and their citizens, and portray the variety of our own country’s people and places. By learning about them, the world becomes smaller. We can do this with our research; we can do it through travel and observing what’s going on around us. There is one danger, though: we shouldn’t use stereotypes or write down our own prejudices. This is difficult to avoid in mysteries and thrillers. For example, a cartel leader can be bad because of the effect his upbringing or personal circumstances had on him, not because he’s Mexican.

This takes us into the controversial discussion about “cultural appropriation.” There are some people who say that an author can’t create a Latino character unless the author’s Latino. Worse, that the author can’t create a female character if he’s male (or vice versa, although the reverse isn’t criticized that much). There are many ways to refute this myopic stupidity, but here’s a new one: believing these claims doesn’t allow us to travel the world in our books. How can an author write a book set in country X without characters from country X in the book? Think about it: it’s absurd.

I hate to mention the word, but good books fight tribalism; they help us recognize that bigotry, hatred, and hostility toward others deny our common humanity. There is no genetic support for the concept of race. Supporting the strident calls against cultural appropriation does just the opposite; that supports tribalism.

On the other hand, can cultural differences be mentioned? Sure. We can even celebrate them, as Bourdain did. Although it sounds like a contradiction, by celebrating our small differences, we can see our common humanity clearer. Ignorance about others breeds intolerance.

Authors should accept the challenge of creating characters and putting themselves in their point-of-view. That makes our stories more interesting and universal and allows our readers to travel around the world and beyond. Indeed, sci-fi stories often contain ETs. Can I not write about ETs? My novella “Flight from Mother World,” found in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, contains NO humans. I must put myself into the POV of the characters nonetheless, and the main character is a female ET! In my new novel The Last Humans (scheduled to be published in 2019 by Black Opal Books), my main character is Penny Castro—she’s Hispanic and female, and I write in the first person! That’s not the first time I’ve done so. Mary Jo Melendez is Hispanic and female and speaks to readers in the first person (the third book in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” Goin’ the Extra Mile, will soon be published). Don’t listen to the raucous noise against cultural appropriation.

Most authors don’t worry about any of this. They just tell their wonderful stories. I don’t think readers pay much attention to cultural appropriation either. Authors can take their readers on wonderful adventures abroad and into the far reaches of the galaxy and forget about this nonsense. Those who don’t like it shouldn’t be reading fiction…or watch those amazing Anthony Bourdain reruns!

***

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This trilogy is my version of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Unlike the inimitable Isaac’s, my universe is replete with ETs. Starting with dystopia on Earth and in our solar system, the reader heads off to the stars to encounter ET cultures and some strange collective intelligences. Humans have their problems, and not just with ETs. Dystopian, militaristic, and paranormal sci-fi awaits you. (The trilogy’s first book in its second edition is included here; it might remind you of where humanity might be heading right now, which is why it’s dystopian, of course.) This bundle is on sale now at Smashwords—you’ll pay only $2.99 versus the $5.99 retail price during the month of August—just use the coupon code on checkout. (Of course, even $5.99 isn’t a bad price for three full novels of sci-fi adventures.) Great for summer reading!

In libris libertas!

They’re very similar but differ enough that I thought I’d go over the two concepts. A flashback is a short narrative where authors, often through one of their characters, thinks back to a previous situation. It’s short. It can be used anywhere in fiction, often to relieve tension, but it can be used in non-fiction too—for example, in a memoir. Back story is a longer narrative that authors often use when new characters are introduced, but again, chapters of it might be in a memoir.

Length is indeed the key determinant here. Think of back story as possibly being chapter length or more; flashbacks are often only a few paragraphs—maybe only one! As a minimalist writer, I like the latter more than the former. I like to break up back story into flashbacks because long narratives often interrupt the flow of a novel too much, which can have disastrous consequences.

Minimalist writing requires authors to write in such a manner that the reader must participate in the creative process. For example, in character description, the author writes just enough of it so the reader can develop his own image of what the character looks like and how the character thinks. As such, it’s part of the Goldilocks Principle: Not too much, not too little, but just right.

Minimalist writing techniques apply to both flashbacks and back stories, of course. But several flashbacks can be used to create back story, to help stitch together the history of characters and what their lives were like before.  Short stories and novellas don’t have much of either one, but novels tend to have flashbacks at least.  And, as I said, several flashbacks can be used to make one (or several) back stories.

They’re also necessary too. When you introduce a new character, you don’t want the reader to ask what that character has to do with the plot. You don’t need flashbacks or back story for each character, of course. Some characters are minor ones. In fact, a reader can often tell in a novel who the principal characters are: they’re the ones with flashbacks and/or back stories. But authors shouldn’t flood their novels with back story when introducing a character either. Like I said, you can create back story with several flashbacks that also serve the purpose of relieving tension—your character often needs a breather from a fast moving plot as much as your reader.

This skipping around on the timeline can be confusing, of course. I think writing schools over-emphasize the two techniques to the point that writers like ones in the TV series Lost get carried away with them, confusing the hell out of everyone (Lost even had flash forwards, which is absurd!). The golden rule for writing: keep most of your audience from getting lost (pardon the pun). If 90% of your audience is lost, you’re in trouble as an author. You can write in a complex fashion (I do) because that intrigues many readers who love complex stories (and who eschew all the fluff that’s published nowadays), but you want to ask yourself from time to time whether what you’re writing will lose your audience (that’s why characters’ POV is so important, but that’s another topic).

In the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel (I just finished the MS…phew! lots of research!), I used various flashbacks to build a back story about MC Esther Brookstone’s involvement in MI6 during the height of the Cold War. That back story can be considered a prequel within a sequel! (In all modesty, I consider that a new and interesting writing technique.) Early on I debated about whether to write a prequel or sequel first (I’d started both!), but, being a fellow who always looks forward, I decided on the sequel and used flashbacks to create a back story when stitched together.

Fiction writing is fun but not necessarily easy. Like most intellectual and artistic pursuits, it has its own back story: we have to learn the skills to pull it off. That learning process should never stop.

***

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This trilogy is my version of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Unlike the inimitable Isaac’s, my universe is replete with ETs. Starting with dystopia on Earth and in our solar system, the reader heads off to the stars to encounter ET cultures and some strange collective intelligences. Humans have their problems, and not just with ETs. Dystopian, militaristic, and paranormal sci-fi awaits you. (The second edition of the first book in the trilogy is included here; it might remind you of where humanity might be heading right now, which is why it’s dystopian, of course.) This bundle is on sale now at Smashwords—you’ll pay only $2.99 versus the $5.99 retail price during the month of August—just use the coupon code on checkout. (Of course, even $5.99 isn’t a bad price for three full novels of sci-fi adventure.) Great for summer reading!

In libris libertas!

What do I mean by this? Peruse the “Steve’s Bookshelf” webpage. You’ll see more non-fiction than fiction. I’m an avid fiction reader; I’m also a fiction writer. Shouldn’t there be more fiction in this list?

No, the list is reserved for books that really resonated with me. Consider Baldacci; his listed books aren’t his thrillers. Consider Deaver; Garden of Beasts and not the Lincoln Rhyme books is listed. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like their other books. While I’ll probably recognize the story if I picked up one of their books not listed that I’ve read, they don’t stick with me like the ones that are mentioned.

I read a lot of fiction, some for R&R, some in my official reviewing capacity at Bookpleasures.com, and some because somebody gives me the books as a gift. The latter source is where most of those non-fiction books come from.

In fact, if you analyze my reviews on Bookpleasures.com, you’ll see I’ve reviewed many non-fiction books. “Large” could refer to the fact that non-fiction books tend to be long—some are real “doorstops” as some readers like to call them. No, that’s not what “large” means. It refers to the “large” topics that are treated. Good fiction contains non-trivial themes that treat some of these large topics, but these themes weave around and through the plots, putting meat on the literary bones, as it were. King belittles themes in his On Writing, but he’s wrong. Fiction only has a chance for greatness when it contains large themes.

But non-fiction books focus on the large themes. I read non-fiction exposes about child porn and human trafficking; they appear as themes in The Collector. I read histories of how the Nazis stole artwork in World War Two, mostly from Jews, sometimes for Hitler and sometimes just to have collateral to finance their retirement after the war. Much of that provided themes in The Collector and Rembrandt’s Angel.

The Bible is a quandary. Whether you interpret it as non-fiction (many people in it ARE historical figures) or fiction (e.g. Ezekiel’s wheel, unless you believe in UFOs), it’s writ large. Along with the Quran and other religious texts, these are all-time bestsellers. (Some themes from the Bible will appear in Son of Thunder, the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel—that’s the only preview you’ll get for now.)

But finding themes for my fiction isn’t the exclusive reason why I read large. Good non-fiction books are as intriguing to me as fiction books. My interest in popular science books and biographies of scientists isn’t hard to understand—I’m an ex-scientist. Moreover, I was overly specialized, so I’m an ordinary layman outside my specialties. My interests in history, art, and religion have less obvious justifications. Both Segre and Hoerlin’s The Pope of Physics and Isaccson’s Leonardo Da Vinci (reviewed on Bookpleasures) are in “Steve’s Bookshelf.” I’m currently reading Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma; it will probably go on that list. I just finished Rhodes’s The Wold as It Is (also reviewed on Bookpleasures). You might see what connects all these: stories about real human beings who have had a tremendous impact on our lives. Their stories have to be writ large; they’re part of our legacy.

***

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This trilogy is my version of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Unlike the inimitable Isaac’s, my universe is replete with ETs. Starting with dystopia on Earth and in our solar system, the reader heads off to the stars to encounter ET cultures and some strange collective intelligences. Humans have their problems, and not just with ETs. Dystopian, militaristic, and paranormal sci-fi awaits you. (The first book in the trilogy is included here; it might remind you of where humanity might be heading right now, which is why it’s dystopian, of course.) This bundle is on sale now at Smashwords—you’ll pay only $2.99 versus the $5.99 retail price during the month of August—just use the coupon code on checkout. (Of course, even $5.99 isn’t a bad price for three full novels of sci-fi adventures.) Great for summer reading!

In libris libertas!

Readers often ask me, “What influenced my writing?” With the hot summer weather upon us, my thoughts often turn to my last high school summer jobs as a partial answer to that question. College costs are onerous for most parents and students now, and still rising, but we forget it’s always been so. Free college tuition at state and community college might alleviate that somewhat, but the incidental costs—food, housing, books, transportation, etc—can still be a hardship. Even when I was a college-bound student, I looked jealously across the pond at their more reasonable approach to higher education.

But there’s something to be said for teaching the young to have a solid work ethic. What might surprise some readers of this blog is that two summer jobs I had would influence a book I wrote decades later. I worked seven days per week to save for college. For five days, I was the foreman (only because I had my driving license) of a surveying crew that took measurements for a civil engineer. On the weekends, I washed road construction equipment—road graders, bulldozers, front-loaders, pickups, dump trucks, and big rigs used to carry the first three.

The job working for the civil engineer taught me about heat and hydration. Most of our work was in the southern San Joaquin Valley just north of Bakersfield. We often joked that that city just over the Grapevine from LA deserved its name. The temperature averaged about 115 degrees F, and sometimes it reached 125. Even if it’s dry heat, that’s hot! Part of my job was to fill up the containers with ice water every morning before heading out to site. Home at night I would take salt pills to replace the salt lost in perspiration. We’d drink a lot of water pounding stakes to mark fields for grading so that irrigation water would have maximum benefit.

Washing road construction equipment had its own challenges. They left the heavy equipment on the big rigs, semis with huge flat-bed trailers. That had its positives and negatives. One positive is that I only had to drive the big rig into position to wash cab, flat bed, and whatever heavy equipment was on the flat bed. One negative is that I sometimes had to back up that big rig from where it was parked before I could drive it into position to be washed. The first day I wasted a lot of time learning to do just that. With some guidance from the owner of the construction company, I managed.

So how did these jobs influence my novel? Some of The Last Humans (it will be published by Black Opal Books in 2019) takes place in that area of the San Joaquin Valley. First, that part of the Valley would be desert if it weren’t for irrigation. Second, with or without irrigation, it’s hot. Third, teamwork can make any job go faster—in fact, sometimes it can’t be done without it. The last is that part of work ethic that some people have trouble learning. Recognizing I couldn’t get that surveying job done without my team is something that many politicians haven’t learned. You can’t be a tyrant; you have to recognize the importance of teamwork. I respected my surveying crew; the owner of the construction company respected me.

All three themes play important roles in The Last Humans. I will forever value that experience obtained under the blazing California sun. The Last Humans isn’t my only book set in California (another one is Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By), but it’s the only book where my experiences as a college-bound eighteen-year-old play an important role. I hope you enjoy the book when it’s published.

***

The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel bridges between the “Detectives Chen and Castiblanco Series” and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.” The plot revolves around a government program that makes sure elderly ex-government employees don’t divulge national secrets. The main character is from the first series; the villain starts there as a nemesis of the detectives and does his dirty deeds in many of my tales, a modern Moriarty if you will. Mystery, suspense, thriller? You’ll have to decide. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc). Great summer reading!

In libris libertas!

If you happen to read the NY Times Book Review, you might notice a full page ad with lots of thumbnail cover images from various print-on-demand outfits (PODs)—iUniverse, Author House, Xlibris, etc. If you’re thinking about publishing your first book, you might say, “Geez, I should choose one of these PODs—they advertise in the NY Times Book Review.” Yes, they’ll do that for your book too. What’s in your wallet? In other words, get ready to take out a second mortgage if you’re lucky enough to own a house in this economic environment. And, by the way, these PODs are all associated with Author Solutions, which has a multiple class action lawsuits pending.

Times have changed for The Times. “All the news that’s fit to print” doesn’t necessarily apply to the ads that appear in the venerable paper; they’ll advertise just about anything because they need ad money to survive. Just recently a full-page ad for one of the drug companies named in a Sixty Minutes expose about companies who contribute to the opioid epidemic appeared (it was PR damage control with complicity from The Times, of course: “We’re fighting the opioid epidemic”).

CNN does this too, mimicking their right-wing brethren—you might have seen the ads for Page Publishing among the reverse mortgage and ambulance-chaser ads. If you wonder how a publisher can afford an ad on CNN, you’re not alone. Not even Big Five publishers have ads on CNN. Page Publishing is an old-fashioned vanity press: $295 gets your manuscript in the door, and, if they “accept” it, $3200 over ten months gets your book “published.” They might do a good job in giving you a polished product; I don’t want to find out. For my “indie” books (not vanity as much as Big Five authors and publishers say it), I never spend that much, counting cost centers like editing, formatting, and covert art, and even adding in PR and marketing.

Do The Times and CNN realize that they’re pushing false advertising? OK, “false” might be too strong a word; let’s use “misleading.” Authors starting out, or even seasoned ones wanting to try something different, often don’t realize that these services are too good to be true. “Misleading” means that they’re still dishonest and rank below places like Kirkus and BookBub who are completely honest about the exorbitant prices they’ll charge for their services.

What about that author’s “friend,” Amazon? Go to Smashwords to see CEO Mark Coker’s expose about egregious Amazon practices. Here’s an addendum: Amazon’s nasty little bots are eliminating book reviews, many of them obtained by authors in the internet trenches working hard to scrounge up a few. That’s becoming harder—hence my word “egregious.” (I recently sent out queries for a review of A. B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns to bookbloggers in the Indie View list—nary a bite so far.) I’ve lost reviews myself, and have had my own reviews rejected by Amazon because they’re too long (silly me to suppose a review that’s a bit more than the usual two- or three-line review that appears on their website). Many other authors have lost reviews. The replies from Amazon’s “help team” are classic examples of zero-content excuses.

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