Most of my indie ebooks are $2.99. Considering that the Sunday Times is $6 now, and I spend far more time producing a book than the Times does in writing that newspaper (I’m discounting ad copy, which I ignore), I hereby announce that all new ebooks in the future will either be $3.99 and up, depending on word count. That means they’ll still be a bargain, of course.  (There’s almost zero entertaining and meaningful fiction in the Times, so maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges?)

I don’t have control of pricing for my traditionally published ebooks (the ebook version of Rembrandt’s Angel, $5.50, still beats the cost of the Times, though). Same goes for all my print books. The indie ones have the lowest prices that Amazon’s Create Space allows; the traditional ones, like the traditionally published ebooks, have prices set by the publishers.

For readers who want free ebooks or ebooks on sale, forget about it! I long ago decided not to give away my hard work, no matter how much Amazon, book promo sites, and readers want me to do so. Marketing gurus advise authors to make the first book in a series free. I find at least two problems with that marketing strategy: (1) I spend at least as much time and effort writing that first book as any other book in the series, or any other book, for that matter (some books, like Rembrandt’s Angel,  require a lot of research, for example); and (2) that marketing tactic is unfair to readers and authors alike because it assumes that readers have to read a series sequentially, when a true series should have the property that each book can be read independently—if the latter’s not true, the series is just a soap opera!  (That was Howey’s installments of Wool until he combined them together, that soap-opera flavor affecting the total—still a good read, though.)

If you want free, and insist on it, I provide that option in abundance with short stories in these blog posts from my colleague A. B. Carolan and me, and I also offer free short fiction as downloads (short story collections and novellas—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” webpage for the list and the easy directions for downloading).  Of course, reviewers can receive a free copy of a book in exchange for an honest review (habitual reviewers often receive bonus ebooks of their choice too). That’s it for free!  Nada mas!

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I’m a music addict. Like my reading, I dabble in many genres—a lot of classical (wasn’t that nineteen-year-old cellist Sheku Kannah-Mason great in the Meghan-Harry wedding?), folk, jazz, some rock, some C&W, and other pop. I even have a short-story collection where the stories are all inspired by musical pieces (see “Mayhem, Murder, and Music” in my list of free PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” webpage—just follow the directions for downloading).

I was reading and storytelling a bit before I also became a music addict, but they have all accompanied me for a long time on my journey through life. My parents couldn’t afford a piano so I started on the trombone, working up to some Dixieland band participation (my favorite jazz subgenre). When I learned the piano at age 40+, it was difficult: my teacher fought with me to make both my hands independent instruments. I almost got it, but I’ve regressed to melody in the right hand and chords in the left—I call it “noodling” (don’t know what other people would call it).

Music is more mathematical than storytelling. Sure, writers must put logical structure into their novels, but that structure is a lot more flexible than in pop songs, and even modern symphony and chamber music often adheres to structures set up in the 18^th century (it’s getting a bit out of control now because a lot of it is written by academics to “impress” other academics and not for the general population like Beethoven and Mozart pieces were).

There’s some crossover now too.  Dylan received the Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrics (modern poetry, really).  Kendrick Lamar received a Pulitzer for his rap. I don’t have an example for a writer receiving a music prize (comment if you know of one), but I’m sure that other writers, like me, have been inspired by music.

Stories and musical compositions have one thing in common: they are (or should be) entertaining. That’s where the crossover lies. I guess I’m old-fashioned: my ideal entertaining evening is to plop into my recliner in front of the fire, read a good book, and have light classical music playing. Guess what? There’s rarely anything to watch on TV (I won’t do streaming video or video games, the competing entertainment sources for millions), so I often flip to the cable channel that continuously runs light classical. (I have tons of CDs, and still many treasured LPs, all for serious listening, but the TV remote is right beside that recliner.) Our cable also has jazz, C&W, and pop, but I’m very selective about that, so their programming choices are often annoying and distracting. (No folk that I can tell either.)

Here’s a question I sometimes receive in book events: Do I write with music? Sometimes, but not usually. That harks back to the logical structure a novel needs. I make that happen with self-criticism and by content editing as I go, all requiring analytic thought. I even do a bit of copy editing, but most of that occurs after the manuscript is complete, and at that point I’ll put some nice music on. I’ll also do that when I proofread. Just something relaxing to mimic how I read for R&R.  (All my storytelling goes through multiple editing steps, so I can’t figure out how some errors escape us—but there always are a few that remain.)

Every story in that free PDF was inspired by music, but has a complete novel been inspired by a piece of music? Not one that I can remember reading. My novel Rembrandt’s Angel was inspired by a missing Rembrandt, though. But that’s another story, if you’ll pardon the pun.

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Did you miss Rembrandt’s Angel? Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, has to manage Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone’s obsession with recovering a Rembrandt, “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. Esther’s mission becomes deadlier and different from her usual cases in the Art and Antiques Division of the Yard. The duo takes readers on a wild tour of Europe and South America before the story reaches its climax, as they find out what the stolen paintings are used to finance. In the process, the couple’s romantic interludes become a full-blown romance. Available on Amazon, Smashwords and its affiliates (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc), and in most bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

In libris libertas!

Many of us love them, but the modern versions have changed a lot.

First, as genres categorizing stories, they’re too general.  Add “psychological” or “legal” to each one and you’ll have too common subgenres. Add “romantic” to each one and you’ll have two more. Second, they’ve become more violent and sexy, the latter now including LGBTQ themes and S&M, so much so that Victorian readers would be shocked. That just means that they’ve kept pace with changing times, of course, and become more realistic.

We’re all familiar with Holmes and Watson, but there were other early characters like Father Brown who began to change the mystery landscape. H. Rider Haggard’s adventure stories (surely Indiana Jones owes something to them) morphed into the thriller genre. (Maybe Star Trek owes something to Jason and the Argonauts, but I digress.)

Even the classical who-done-its (Christie comes to mind) have changed. How-it-was-done has become more important, sometimes blurring the line between mystery and thriller. Many of my own novels lie on that fuzzy boundary. (For example, Rembrandt’s Angel starts like a classical Christie mystery and ends up a thriller.) In my case, I’m experimenting a bit, with telling a good story always the goal.

The usual distinction between the two genres are often as follows: In a mystery, some villain commits a crime, and the protagonist must figure out who did the deed. In a thriller, the reader usually knows who the villain is and what he plans, and readers learn how the protagonist prevents the deed from happening. This is over-simplification, of course, but I ask: Why not both? In particular, a lesser crime can lead to the protagonist discovering a major conspiracy in the process of solving that crime. Even my first published book Full Medical, the plot was like that (so it’s a sci-fi mystery/thriller!).

Does all this confuse readers? I hope not. Fiction is storytelling, and good stories can be told in many ways. While I dedicate Rembrandt’s Angel to Agatha and her two great characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, I don’t follow her plot plan.

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I won’t go into relatively new forms, like flash fiction and some memoirs and celeb books (with the fiction sometimes discovered after publication). I won’t deal with the genre question (I got into trouble on Goodreads for doing so). I’ll only discuss the traditional forms—short stories, novellas, and novels.

The best (and maybe only reasonable) way to separate them is via length. (I’ll probably get in trouble for that too.) Length is measured in thousands of words, abbreviated kwords, whether you use simple or complex ones, erudite ones, or slang and regional language. For me, anything less than 10k is a short story (many ‘zines want less than 3k); between 10k and 40k, it’s a novella; and anything above 40k is a novel, although most novels are 60k and above for the simple reason that publishing even an ebook is expensive, and anything less than 60k is hardly worth it. That doesn’t mean that authors don’t play around with word count. Word count is also a function of genre (again, I won’t discuss that).

There are more subtle ways to separate them that are usually fuzzier and more controversial. The number of characters in a novel is generally much larger than the number in a short story, but you certainly have some novels that have only a few characters (hard to imagine it going the other way—you can probably make a whole short story just listing all the characters in Clancy’s Red Storm Rising). Description of settings in a short story also tends to be sparse and extensive in a novel, as well as the number of settings.

In brief, the short story is bare bones while novellas and novels have more meat in them (apologies to the vegetarians and vegans among my readers). Because of this, some people claim the short story is the hardest to write well. Maybe that explains why anthologies and short story collections don’t sell well, and why the vicious circle closes, because authors don’t bother writing them as a consequence.

“Everyone has a story in them” goes the adage, but there’s a corollary: …but everyone doesn’t have a novel in them, despite what NaNoWriMo claims. I was recently corrected about that program: NaNoWriMo doesn’t expect you to write a novel in a month; the idea is that wannabe novel writers learn to follow a schedule and organize their time so that they can eventually write that novel.

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There are little ones and big ones.  The former are generally moneymakers for the organizers—the author is either charged an entry fee or pays a “reading fee” (even if reader-judges are volunteers!).  The latter generally have some august committee of erudite scholars and narcissistic old women and men who have no idea what good storytelling is.  I don’t have much use for either the little or the big.

Sour grapes? No.  I haven’t entered any little contest in over ten years, and that was only because it didn’t require an entry fee (A. B. Carolan has turned that short story, “Marcello and Me,” into the YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—the short story won some kind of honor I can’t remember and am too lazy to check my records for). They don’t quite represent as much time an author can waste querying literary agents (the latter almost an oxymoron in most cases), or sending short stories and novellas to cliquish ‘zines run by tyrannical editors in most cases.  And they don’t quite represent as much money an author can waste paying for a Kirkus review or some fancy promo campaign run by so-called marketing gurus. I don’t recommend the little contests and award programs—they’re a waste of time and money. ‘Nough said about those.

The big ones are worse.  In general, you can’t enter them.  That august committee of erudite scholars decides who they’ll ask to enter. And sometimes that august committee isn’t so august! Consider the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s generally meaningless gesture designed to appease the faux literati, and the committee is now suffering through its very own scandal. You can read about that elsewhere, but one consequence is that the prize’s prestige will forever be tarnished at worst, and certainly more meaningless in the future at best. The committee’s makeup has suffered too. It turns out that once you’re elected to that committee, you’re something like a royal Swedish knight and can’t resign—you’re in it for life. This has led to members on both sides of the scandal no longer participating, and the committee no longer having a quorum to proceed with the business of nominating an author for the prize. There will be none this year. I imagine the choice of Bob Dylan didn’t help either (although he’s probably a better poet than any committee member).

We’ve all heard about the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes—the latter’s committee also has its own scandal by giving one to a rapper (I don’t particularly care about that, but why not Bob Marley, Neil Diamond, or some other singer-poet?).  Now a more recent award program (contest?) now exists, Katie Paterson’s Future Library Project. Ever hear of it?  I’ll confess I had no idea who Katie Paterson is, so I had to google this. The idea is that ye olde august and erudite committee for that project decides every year to invite a famous author to submit a manuscript (MS).

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I used to participate in discussions on Goodreads and LinkedIn. I no longer do so. The reasons are many. Here’s one: both have gone downhill since Amazon and Microsoft bought them, respectively. That might explain why there seem to be some moderators who are little tyrants; I’m open to discussions, but they aren’t. Same for members of their discussion groups.

In Goodreads, these few moderators assume their group is their little fiefdom; in LinkedIn, they’re often against indie authors and small presses and favor big publishing conglomerates and their associates. Sour grapes? No. These moderators are rare, but there’s no regulation from either Amazon or Microsoft who give the despots free rein to cancel anyone they please. They offer some “Terms of Service” discussion group members must follow, but the latter often ignore them. (And you thought it was just Facebook and Twitter?)

I’ve already cancelled ALL my memberships in Goodreads discussion groups (it was cathartic to do so from my Kindle, because Amazon bears most of the blame for not cleaning up Goodreads’ act.) I just don’t have the time to discover the bad apples hiding in the barrel among the many good ones. I will avoid any discussion on these sites. Same goes for many reading forums where you’ll find this us v. them mentality (us = readers and/or some publishing professionals, and them = certain authors they like to bully). I’m first and foremost an avid reader—always have been—so that turns me off, to put it mildly.

To be fair, some authors abuse their privileges on these sites. I never have, except for giving “discussion group” its literal meaning “discussions invited.” When thin skins, agendas, and pride get in the way of intelligent discussion, I bail. I’ve also been bullied, lied to, and even threatened by other group members. (Perhaps I should name names, but I’m not that kind of guy.) From what I’ve seen, I’m not unique in having these experiences. It’s sad that we have come to this!

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I had one correspondent say that my book she read would just be fine without the bad language. I overheard another person say that a musical play would be much better if it weren’t so crude.  This has me thinking about the audiences for my fiction stories. Because this is intended to be a PG-13 website, I won’t go into examples here, but I want to analyze authors’ use of cursing all the same.

First point: Cursing is a cultural phenomenon. It’s an old one too, although cursing publicly used to be more frowned upon. New Yorkers curse, for example. Can you imagine a hard-boiled NYPD homicide detective not using a few swear words, especially when s/he’s in a firefight with some bad apples in the Big Apple? Certainly those bad guys will use foul language. I’ll repeat Clancy’s maxim: fiction has to seem real. Language reflects culture, so language used in fiction has to seem real.  “I am in a gun battle with some bank thieves” might be correct English, but you’d have something more colorful in that situation in a real firefight.

Second point: Curse words are often part of slang. While I’m against slang being used throughout a book because it can be tiresome for readers who don’t know that vernacular, it can be used initially for color and to make situations seem more realistic. When I was writing Rembrandt’s Angel, I spent a year studying British English, including slang, while I was writing.  It’s clear that my character Esther Brookstone, whose father was a vicar, was probably taught to be prim and proper and not to use British swear words, but she utters a few throughout the book she probably learned by working in MI6 (barely mentioned in the book) and Scotland Yard. Everyone picks up slang and swear words in their work environment.  Everyone uses them judiciously, right?

Third point: Cursing and slang, or the lack thereof, can differentiate characters and establish POV. The latter is important in narrative, most of which shouldn’t be written in omniscient in order to establish that it only represents the thoughts of one character X. The reader will unconsciously think that these are X’s thoughts because they reflect how X speaks. This can also be used in dialogue to avoid clumsy tag lines.  Think about it.  You’re listening to a discussion among your friends. You can generally know who’s speaking just by how they speak, although timbre, rising and falling of a voice, and so forth are important too (the latter is harder to convey in written dialogue).

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I don’t pretend to be a professional reviewer, whether I’m reviewing books or movies. I can’t be a professional reviewer, in fact. No one pays me for book or movie reviews. Reviewing books is my way to give back to the community of readers and writers.  Reviewing movies is a service to readers of this blog, especially those who want to see what an average moviegoer thinks about a particular movies. OK, maybe I’m not an average moviegoer, but no one pays me to go to movies and write a review, so what I say never suffers from avoiding biting the hand that feeds me—I can say what I like. Bottom line: All my reviewing work is purely voluntary.

Maybe I have an advantage over other book reviewers because I’m an author, but I don’t dwell on the esoteric elements of storytelling for fiction, for example, or historical or other accuracies when it’s non-fiction. And I’m certainly not or ever want to be a Hollywood insider. (I do believe some of my fiction would make good movies, though. One person said my recent novel Rembrandt’s Angel would make a good movie. I can imagine how Hollywood would destroy that one!) I occasionally sample others’ reviews (not of the book or movie I’m reviewing, of course—just in general), and then I’m often surprised by how bad the reviews are that are posted, that surprise having many reasons.  When some of those are a negative reflection on the skills of the reviewer, I try to ignore the reviews. Why are those reviews even posted?

Let’s start with movies. I’ve come to ignore what professional reviewers say about a movie. First, when the reviewer states it’s a fantastic movie (max number of stars) or a dud (one star or less), I suspect there’s an agenda. That’s a kneejerk reaction dictated by experience.  (Sometimes I’m wrong.)  Most movies have positive and negative qualities.

If the reviewer complains about the plot, I wonder about the screenplay…or the editing (good stuff often gets cut, leaving only the mediocre flash-bang stuff the director thinks will sell the movie). If the reviewer complains about the acting, I wonder about the casting person who chose those actors. For example, I’ve railed about choosing Tom Cruise to play Jack Reacher; I even think he’s a bad choice to play Ethan Hunt. His acting is a problem, but it’s not the major one. The problem is that it’s impossible to think of him as Reacher, no matter how well he acts.  Someone made a major mistake in casting him in that role, so why shouldn’t a movie reviewer say so?

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“The older I get, the more acutely I am aware that the vast majority of what is written remains unread.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, writer and Pulitzer Prize winner for Interpreter of Maladies, a short story collection. This quote is disconcerting to me as both a reader (so much to read, so little time to do it) and as a writer (probably most of what I write remains unread, but I haven’t read Ms. Lahiri either). We can search for causes of the decline in reading and literacy; there are many. In this article, I’ll focus on one most pundits neglect—it might not be the most important one, but it is relevant.

First, let’s back up what Ms. Lahiri says with some statistics: a U.S. government survey just released records the percentage of people who read for pleasure or self-fulfillment on a typical day (funny that they don’t consider the pleasure of reading self-fulfilling, but that’s the government for you), by age groups: ages 15-24, 9.4%; 25-34, 12.0%; 35-44, 13.9%; 45-54, 15.3%; 55-64, 25.5%; and 65+, 38.3%. Does that surprise you? It doesn’t surprise me. Compare the extremes: 9.4% for 15-24-year-olds (so much for the Harry Potter revolution making millennials into readers) v. 38.3% for 65 and over. The trend goes down going from older to younger people. That doesn’t mean that young adults are illiterate; it just means they don’t read. If they go manage to get through school, they have to become literate, right? Especially if we call cellphone acronymese English: “HRU WU M4C” (this translates to “How are you? What’s up? Meet for coffee?”—they usually don’t care about question marks).

What’s causing this negative trend? It’s more complex than the simple age groupings indicate. I submit that expensive book prices contribute to the decline in reading and literacy. People seek out entertainment options that are less expensive in general, and the younger they are, the more entertainment outlets they have to spend their limited cash on. The pundits rarely focus on the fact that prices can drive entertainment choices. Is it the ticket prices driving young people away from Broadway shows? Do young couples prefer to watch pay-for-view because taking the whole family to the movies almost requires a second mortgage? And, if you’re a reader (the stats say most people aren’t), do you prefer reading three to five ebooks from indie authors or small presses than reading and expensive one from a major publisher? And, if you’re not a reader, would you be more likely to become one if ALL books were reasonably priced? (If the general answer is no, we’re in big trouble!)

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Recently a house blew up in Hutchinson, Kansas—a tragedy caused when a car hit the house and broke a gas line. There hasn’t been much follow-up since then (news media aren’t good at that), but the tragedy sent me back a few years. I spent the summer I turned twelve with my grandfather learning what farm life was all about (growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley had already given me a good idea, though) and meeting relatives I didn’t know I had (and have sadly forgotten about). During that period, I visited Hutchinson. I don’t remember who the relatives were, but they were nice people who treated me well.

That news item started me thinking about worldlines. MS Word thinks that should be two words (MS Word makes a lot of mistakes, so every author should be on guard), but it’s one word in physics. A worldline is the path an object takes in space and time; the term was invented for relativistic discussions. In quantum gravity, quantum history is preferred, because all worldliness are possible, making up a bundle, but some are more likely than others, in a quantum-probabilistic sense. If your eyes have glazed over by now, you can reopen them. Except for the term worldline, I’ll discuss writing issues here, not physics.

Human interactions often leave human beings’ worldliness an entangled mess, a huge bowl of spaghetti, more so now than ever before because people travel a lot and interact on social media (OK, that’s not spatial, but it’s an interaction in time). The more entangled authors’ worldliness are, the better chance authors can tell interesting stories because a complicated and winding worldline in space and time implies authors have a lot of experiences that can influence their fiction. In brief, they have something to write about. They might be making it all up, but those experiences will have a positive influence on what they write. Even for sci-fi authors, because good sci-fi is about human experiences and relationships for the most part. They’ve experienced human situations and problems, so, even if their fiction has a futuristic setting, their characters’ worldlines will seem all the more human.

The length of an author’s worldline is important. We’ve all heard of child prodigies who write a full novel in their teens (I did that, but I was no prodigy—I don’t think it’s that hard either), but I can’t imagine that novel’s characters are anything but caricatures (my first novel probably suffered from that—I tossed it when I went to college—but I’d been to Kansas the summer before!). After all, children who are authors don’t have long worldlines. They don’t have enough experiences to make their fiction seem real (and I agree with Tom Clancy that fiction must seem real, even if it’s sci-fi or fantasy).

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