A recent study shows that about 40% of banned books have a LGBTQ protagonists; another states that 40% have black ones. The tween protagonist in The Secret Lab has a lesbian friend; the teen in Secret of the Urns comes from a triad, i.e., a non-traditional family comprised of two men and a woman, and she has a sexual fling on a tourist planet; the young hero in Mind Games is an orphan who ends up with an older man; and the STEM teen in Origins is black and has a child out of wedlock. I suppose all A. B. Carolan’s books could be in trouble with the book-banners, if not already banned.

I assume that the studies mentioned focus on young adult novels. If they don’t, there are a few other novels in our literary tradition that might become or already be targets! (I had one crazy lady from the Midwest go after me for using profanity in The Midas Bomb. I basically ignored her. The book takes place in NYC and is for adults, but the mother of a teen interested in purchasing the book at a book event assured me that her daughter could read such books. After that diatribe from the Midwestern lady, I asked the mother to make sure.)

Thank God I didn’t live in a red state when I was a kid! (Texas is #1 among book-banning states, Florida #2, and others do their part in censoring literary works.) I was able to read more or less what I wanted to read, not what some fascist personality allowed me to read, for both fiction and non-fiction. I got my hand slapped in US history (this in the true-blue state of California) because I’d about and reported on the case against FDR for not warning Oahu about the eminent attack on Pearl Harbor so he could public sentiment on his side to enter the war. (I received an A+, though, because I researched the hell out of that, not initially believing what I’d read! It’s still an open question as far as American history’s concerned, but not in my mind.)

Next thing you know, especially if the fascists control all of national education, we’ll have a nationwide ban on Podkayne of Mars! Sexual mores on Mars as portrayed by Heinlein are a bit risque, you know. If not Podkayne, think what they’ll do with Strangers in a Strange Land. That might even get the fascist evangelicals involved! I read them both in junior high (middle school for easterners).

It’s true that book-banners attack school librarians, school teachers, and parents from both the left and the right, but the right is now the worst offender, and mostly in the red states where they already have an autocratic state governor, legislature, and court judges. Book-banning is basically a fascist activity, of course, as part of the control of all media—just think of Hitler and Mao and more recent autocrats like Putin and Xi. In the US, radicals on the left want to ban Huckleberry Finn; radicals on the right—well, they go after a lot more. And what they can’t ban, they try to rewrite, destroying the author’s story and voice in the process.

They can threaten librarians so much, especially if they take a stand against censorship, that they’re even afraid of going to work. Moreover, they’ve even demanded that books be removed from libraries that aren’t even there! I’m willing to bet the book-banning crazies haven’t read half the books they want to ban because they just take some radical fascist’s word that they’re bad for young minds.

In a democracy, book banning has no place. Reading what one wants to read is an essential freedom; censorship is the weapon of autocrats. If you don’t want to read a particular book, and if you don’t want your kids to read it, you and they don’t have to do so. I’ve yet to see a school that doesn’t let a parent or kid opt out from reading a particular book because of its content.

There are universal lessons to be learned from books, even fiction (good fiction has to seem real, and by doing so, they deal with real issues). In particular, books specifically written for young adults often are teaching moments for their readers. Like A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries, basically focused on the eternal battle between good and evil, YA stories offer a lot, so much so that they’re popular with many adults as well. (Let’s call them young-at-heart to distinguish them from the old fascist book-banners in the red states.)

Book banning doesn’t preserve our democracy; it contributes to its destruction!

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Mind Games. What could go wrong with a plan to give androids ESP powers? Find out in A. B. Carolan’s entertaining sci-fi mystery about a paranormal teen who searches for her foster father’s murderer. While all A.B.’s books are excellent reading experiences for readers of all ages, this third book from him might be the best one of the four. It’s full of thrills and suspense, a tour de force loaded with futuristic politics we have yet to experience on our planet. Available in ebook and print formats (I don’t know why B&N doesn’t show the print version, but it exists), it represents excellent book-report material for your young adult, and any hard-sci-fi-loving adult will enjoy it too.

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

I’m always astounded when some author informs me that they don’t read all that much because they want to spend all their time writing. I even read a lot and wrote when I had an intense day job. And I certainly don’t accept the excuse of binge-watching streaming videos or binge-playing computer games. And I also don’t want to hear or see the excuse that it’s because they don’t want to plagiarize other authors’ work. Are you a writer or not? If you’re a writer, you have to be a reader. Reading others’ stories makes writers’ storytelling better. Period.

Reading other fiction doesn’t have to take time away from your own writing or lead to plagiarizing. I can guarantee you that ever story I’ve written is free of plagiarism—theories, plots, characters, dialogues, and setting are all my invention and pieced together to make a unique tale that no one could have written except yours truly.

Yet, after finishing a story, sometimes a long time after, I might return to a story and observe how other writers have influenced my fiction writing. It mostly involves style, not content, but I also realize I’ve answered some long-standing personal questions.

In retrospect, the “Chen & Castilblanco” series of novels was influenced by the hard-boiled style of American crime dramas from the first half of the twentieth century, but only in the sense that I generalized that to establish my minimalist style. That style is often found in my sci-fi tales as well—descriptions of characters and settings, for example, with just enough information so that readers can create their own imagery and sounds as they read, thus participating in the creative process. Also, if a pronoun is obvious, I don’t include it. (That might be more influenced by my mastery of Spanish and my one-time mastery of Russian where the verb form often indicates the pronoun. One doesn’t say, “Tu hablas castellano”; one says, “Hablas castellano.” In Colombia, they often use “castellano” in place of “espanol,” especially in the interior where nearly pure Castilian Spanish is spoken.) I paid homage to those hard-boiled authors of American crime literature in one “space-time jump” found in the sci-fi rom-com A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. (Some sci-fi authors also receive homage in that novel as well.)

Recently I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time. (I missed it in my childhood reading.) I decided that fantasy story must have influenced George R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series. (Does his use of “R. R.” indicate that?) Tolkien’s dragon Smaug is a lot more fun than any of Martin’s. (My review of The Hobbit is found in the blog archive “Book Reviews.”) I don’t like that kind of fantasy. Magical and mythical creatures turn me off (not as much, though, as creating fantasy-world rules as the novel progresses, as in Rowling’s Harry Potter tomes). I suppose the halfling Hobbits might be considered magical or mythical, but I see them as mini-humans. (Others did too, because one hominid offshoot discovered about the same time as the Denisovans was nicknamed Hobbits.)

(more…)

With the exception of the MEs and a few others in the US and crime pathologists in the UK found in my mysteries (the first group contains an ER doctor, an important character in The Midas Bomb), the inimitable Dr. Carlos Obregon, Medical Officer of the starship Brendan who stars in several short stories, and some nurses and EMTs, I don’t feature any medical professionals in my fiction. After a lifetime of dealing with them, I can’t consider myself an unbiased observer of their behaviors. The most amiable and compassionate one I ever had was my GP and upstairs neighbor in Bogota, Colombia. (The completely incorrect term now used, “Internist,” didn’t exist back then).

Like Chile’s Salvador Allende, my doctor Ramon was a Marxist. He lived on the third floor of our apartment building just above our second-floor apartment; Allende’s ex-Secretary of State, who had fled Chile when Pinochet took over, had the other apartment on the third-floor; he and his wife were just above the apartment leased by a Jewish rabbi. (I forget who was on the fourth floor, but the building was a mini-UN, in any case. Our helpful and lovely building super had the small apartment on the ground floor, the rest of that area filled with lobby, storage area, elevator.)

I’ve dealt with a lot of doctors from so-called “internists” to super-specialized physicians with personalities having characteristics varying between compassionate and relatable to cold android-like snobs. The bad and incompetent ones whatever behavior dimension one cares to explore far outnumber the good and competent ones. That’s bound to produce a bias in my writing.

I don’t like to use stereotypes in my writing either. And there’s always the danger that readers’ experiences with medical professionals might be altogether different from mine.

I’ll have to admit that, despite any personality quirks they might have, some medical pros have saved my life a few times (this “cat” has used up several of his nine). I should also state that part of the problem that this observer sees is with the medical profession itself. The modern version of medicine has one over-riding problem: It’s so overly specialized that many patients require a cadre of specialists to treat their variety of ailments. The result is that too many physicians were elitists deluded by self-importance and having the notion that society owes them homage as super-geniuses and riches for their professional care. (Curiously, I’ve found that male doctors are usually worse than female ones in holding these erroneous beliefs.) Patients have to remember, though, that medical professionals are human beings, and their numbers, while far too few in the US (for doctors, primarily because of the dearth of medical schools, their number controlled by that evil guild, the AMA), cover the entire spectrum of human behavior (although I feel that’s skewed to the worst, at least for physicians). The bad ones provide many good models for villains, though, my most notable one being the cult leader in Cult of Evil (see below) and the doctor found in the free novella “The Phantom Harvester.”

As a reader, I usually stay away from fiction that deals with medical professionals too. (That again might be due to my bias. In particular, I don’t like to see an author make them into super-heroes, comedians, or curiosities.)

Medical professionals are just ordinary people working in a particular sector of our societies. Authors perhaps shouldn’t pay any more attention to that sector than others. Let the stories come where they may. If you have an interesting on to tell about a medical professional, be they a protagonist or antagonist, go for it…but don’t force it.

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The “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy. The new copper at a Bristol PD substation (he’s introduced in The Klimt Connection, #8 in the “Esther Brookstone” series) and his team have murders to solve. In Legacy of Evil, they discover a conspiracy organized by an MP and a Russian oligarch. In Cult of Evil, a David Koresh and Charles Manson-style doctor exploits lonely women and must be stopped, but a terrorist also complicates Morgan’s life. In Fear the Asian Evil, a local conspiracy that has been organized by Chinese agents is discovered as Morgan and his team try to find out who shot a reporter related to Morgan’s sergeant. Available wherever quality ebooks are solid (just not on Amazon).

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

As a fiction writer, I consider the whole human experience. As an old white guy, some readers might think that I can’t really portray the experience that minorities have in worldwide societies, the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I’ve been around a while and observed human behavior quite a lot (authors should always be observers). My observations have provided me with evidence that minority groups often have a harder time than majorities in any human society.

Because of the events and choices I’ve made in my own life, from growing up in California, the most diverse state in the union, and from years living in Colombia, South America, I’m more familiar with the Asian and Hispanic experiences in the US than I am with the black experience. I’ve considered all three minorities in my stories, though. (I’m ignoring religious minorities in this article, although the interactions between Catholics, Protestants, and other Christian sects, and Jews and Muslims, also have roles in my fiction.)

Dao-Ming Chen and Rolando Castilblanco, my two NYPD detectives, are Chinese- and Puerto Rican-Americans, for example, and their ME collaborator, Big Tiny, is black. They first appear in The Midas Bomb, the very first novel in the “Chen & Castilblanco” series, which starts my “future history” timeline, an alternate history of humans (and ETs!) that contains many of my novels and other stories. As that timeline stretches far into the future, less and less is made of minorities and ethnic differences because I’m an optimist who hoped and continues to hope, like MLK did, that, as the decades and centuries pass and human societies mature, variations in human beings will be seen more like a natural, non-controversial, and universal phenomena than something reflecting those artificial and contrived differences that haters and bigots make so much of, often feeding their own paranoia and worse mental illnesses.

Current societies, American society among them, now probably cause more pessimism that optimism, though. Will black-on-black snits like Chris Rock-versus-Will Smith’s shocker at the Academy Awards a year ago or like MAGA-maniacal blacks-versus-progressive blacks’ current battles become seen more as just angry differences of opinion? In the US, will we get past going after Asian-Americans, Chinese-Americans in particular, and realize that the pandemic’s spreading worldwide was more due to the incompetence of an autocratic government (China’s) and not its citizens? Will some people in America’s white majority, especially that MAGA crowd, ever stop considering Hispanic refugees and migrants as their enemies? MLK would hope that the answers to these questions could all eventually become “yes!” sooner than later. I see and portray in my fiction a lot more hurdles that societies must jump over, but I’m hopeful and optimistic as well.

Good fiction has to seem real, and our current reality in America and the world at large includes the minority experience. I believe it’s my duty as a fiction writer to portray this reality. Despite what words sent my way by those critics of cultural appropriation to damn me, I will not shirk on my duty of portraying the entire human experience as faithfully as I can. I want my fiction to seem real.

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“The Last Humans” trilogy. In the first novel, The Last Humans, Penny Castro surfaces from a forensics dive to find people dead and dying from a bioengineered virus. Her later struggles for survival end by her creating a blended family of other survivors. In A New Dawn, the struggling remains of the post-apocalyptic US government kidnap their children to force Penny and her husband to participate in a mission that will stop the deployment of a more toxic version of the virus. In Menace from Moscow, Penny and her husband must salvage nuclear missiles from an American submarine before the Russians do. Penny’s post-apocalyptic adventures will provide many hours of entertainment for readers of post-apocalyptic thrillers and suspense stories.

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

Early St. Paddy’s Day wishes for all my readers. On this day, everyone can be Irish! You don’t need to be of Irish descent to celebrate. (St. Paddy himself was a Briton.) Visit your local pub and toss down some Irish ale, stout, or whiskey and enjoy some lamb, bangers and mash, or a plate of corn beef and cabbage (that’s more an Irish-American invention, but it’s the spirit of celebration that counts), finishing everything off with an Irish coffee. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, have some potato skins or chips with cabbage. There might be singers and dancers to enjoy as well on this day when the leprechauns and banshees are out and about speaking their special secret versions of Irish Gaelic. Enjoy morning, noon, and night. Slainte!

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[Note: Readers might know that George Langston was Esther Brookstone’s boss when she worked in the Art and Antiques Division of Scotland Yard; like Dr. Watson with the sleuth Sherlock Holmes, George became the chronicler of Esther’s adventures. In the following, he interviews both Esther Brookstone and Steve Morgan, another ex-Scotland Yard detective and now Bristol PD Detective Inspector.]

George: I’m here at The Masterworks Gallery with Esther Brookstone and Steve Morgan. Who wants my first question?

Steve: Ladies go first, George.

George: So, Esther, people are asking why you seemed to have turned your sleuthing activities over to Steve here. Was it because you were tired of being compared to Dame Agatha’s Miss Marple?

Esther (with a laugh): That was used more as an insult by wags at the Yard. When my husband, my Dutchman Bastiann van Coevorden, came into my life, they started calling him Poirot, although he only looks like the actor who played that sleuth. I’m still a lot sprier than Miss Marple, so there was never any valid reason for anyone to identify me with her.

Steve: I believe some of what led to those nicknames, madam, was your and Bastiann’s sleuthing prowess, so you could consider the moniker an honor. Lots of people recognized that even before that BBC documentary came out.

Esther: I made those pillocks remove that documentary from their server. No one even remembers it now.

George (with a grin): Except for the copies people had already downloaded. Do you think the fame that brought helped sales in this gallery?

Esther: You should study that, George. It will give you something to do in your own retirement. It’s hard to imagine any potential clients even making the connection to that BBC trash.

George: So, should we consider that Steve took over your sleuthing activities?

Esther: I don’t mind. He’s young; I’m old. And I might still be a spry old hen, but Bastiann and I aren’t getting any younger. We’re both retired.

Steve: And you cats have used most of your nine lives by now.

George: You were once at the Yard, Steve, like Esther. Why did you move to Bristol?

Steve: Esther was in your division, old man. Generally speaking, that should have been a more genteel policing position than being a detective inspector in the crime-ridden area of London where I was working. Too intense. It got to me. My girlfriend left me too. I needed a change.

George: Seems to me, considering recent events, that you jumped from the firing pan into the fire. Did you expect that to occur?

Steve: No. And I didn’t expect to find the love of my life in Bristol either. Esther and I have both been lucky in our meeting someone through our work.

Esther: The difference being that I met Bastiann when I was still at the Yard, and that only happened because recovering art and chasing art thieves is an international activity. I just stumbled onto my three previous husbands as well. (more…)

Inspector Steve Morgan writes:

I’ve always had a healthy respect for water. I’d been without water in Afghanistan; and I had too much of it in a London canal when a wanker tossed me in one, thinking I was dead. England has two coasts. Once I’d settled in Bristol, I thought about buying a small boat to sail on the Irish Sea; I thought it might be fun in the future to sail a bit with Kanzi and our kids, after all. But that dip in the North Sea waters off Newcastle-on-Tyne where most of her folks lived to bring in the body of a Chinese spy made me reconsider that idea to buy a boat.

I’m DI Steve Morgan, a copper in the Bristol constabulary (technically part of the Avon and Somerset Police District). When I got my first case there after saying goodbye to the Big Smoke (London is known for other things besides its polluted air and river with its associated tides and canals), I barely had an inkling about how much it related to one of Esther Brookstone’s cases and a Russian oligarch’s yacht anchored off Scotland’s eastern shore.

They say China and Russia are the West’s major autocratic enemies. I personally experienced that at a local level. The politicians in Parliament—or maybe more the PM?—have to worry about the national and international levels. My copper colleagues and I worry about the local fallout. Yet China and Russia, led by thugs as bad as any of our local ones, get involved in local crime and even encourage it—anything to destabilize a Western democracy to further their autocratic agendas.

And Britain is one big island. It has to worry about water too because crime so often reaches its shores via its ports, Bristol being one. West, east, south, and north there’s water, and that creates entry points for smugglers, spies, human and drugs traffickers, and other rough scrotes who put no value on human life.

The island is a target for hate groups as well because it sits right off the rest of Europe’s coast, and they tend to support each other (and are sometimes funded by China and Russia). The Luftwaffe tried to destroy Britain in WWII; fascists, external and internal ones, have tried to destroy it more recently. The worst crimes often occur when scurrilous thugs like those listed above join forces with the local hate groups—or are one and the same thing.

I’ve had to deal with all that during my short stay in Bristol. Water itself isn’t culpable of anything bad, so I can respect it more academically. By isolating the island somewhat, it has mostly protected the UK and its citizens, after all, just like I try to do. I don’t respect the thugs I must deal with, though. They don’t deserve my respect at all.

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“Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy. These three novels deal with some of the events and themes Inspector Morgan writes about above. In Legacy of Evil, Steve and his team tie up loose ends left over from Celtic Chronicles and tangle with a Russian oligarch. In Cult of Evil, they tackle an evil cult, but Steve is distracted by a terrorist out for revenge. In Fear the Asian Evil, China’s plan to destabilize British democracy is exposed as the team tracks down the shooter who attacked one of its members. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon).

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

I have many characters sprinkled through my stories, of course. Most of my favs are found in my seven series. That’s no surprise: One reason authors create series is that they want to develop the characters present in the series’ novels a bit more. That’s probably why readers follow a series as well, but their main reason might just be their increasing familiarity with those characters.

I’ve created so many characters since I started publishing in 2006 (Full Medical) that it’s hard to signal out the favs. All my characters differ, of course, and I even like many of the secondary ones a lot too, not just the main characters (the priests in Son of Thunder, Soldiers of God, and Muddlin’ Through, for example). Two of those secondary characters I killed off, causing some complaints from editors and reviewers. (Always problematic.) The favorites I select here seem are longer-lived, though.

Readers won’t be able to accuse me of being sexist when I list my favs—many of them are women. My favorite female protagonists are: Ashley Scott (an exception to the rule—while she appears a lot in the “Chen & Castilblanco” series, she shows her mettle in the stand-alone novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan); Esther Brookstone, from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series; Mary Jo Melendez, from the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” series; and Penny Castro, from “The Last Humans” trilogy. Among the male characters, I’d single out Rolando Castilblanco, from the “Chen & Castilblanco” series; Brent Mueller, from the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”; Dr. Carlos Obregon, from many sci-fi short stories; and Vladimir Kalinin, from many series and stand-alone novels.

Penny Castro, the obvious MC in “The Last Humans” trilogy, most recently appearing in the third book Menace from Moscow (just published), might be evidence for my most recent fav being the one from my current work in progress or a novel I’ve just finished. All the rest become blurred in my old brain until I add another book to a series!

The entire “Last Humans” trilogy is Penny’s extended story, a post-apocalyptic saga of struggle and survival, but, as her adopted son Sammy points out in Menace from Moscow, the third book in the trilogy, she and Mary Jo Melendez are somewhat alike—strong, smart women, a bit fragile at times, but quite capable of handling what life throws at them. Readers probably expect that from my male characters; they should also expect that from my female ones as well. And yes, men can be fragile as well! All of my characters are complex.

All characters listed here are protagonists except for the villain Kalinin, who spans several series and stand-alone novellas and novels, all the way from The Midas Bomb to Soldiers of God on one extended fictional timeline. The only protagonist who comes close to competing with him is Bastiann van Coevorden from the “Chen & Castilblanco” (cameos), the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, and the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy (cameos). (Brent Mueller plays an important role but has an alias in one stand-alone book as well—readers can have a bit of fun deciding which one that is!)

How do I keep all these characters straight? The answer is obvious: I must do as my readers do. I refer back to previous stories. I certainly couldn’t remember all of them! (Although they seem to remember me, haunting my dreams and asking for more prime time!)

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Menace from Moscow. For your consideration and enjoyment: The end of Penny Castro’s post-apocalyptic adventures. In this third novel of this post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy, the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense. This novel will soon be available at most online retailers (but not Amazon!) and at most library and lending services.

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

I’m sometimes (albeit rarely now) asked what are the best retailers and lenders of ebooks. Readers (and authors!) all too often just assume it’s Amazon. It’s not…and there are many. Amazon has its hands in too many cookie jars now (the jars are full of money, not cookies, of course), going far beyond being a simple online retailer of ebooks (or being a lender in several programs that scam authors and publishers), so it dominates the world of retail sales so much that you have to wonder if the retail world will soon be controlled by the Bezos bots. I want to correct that misconception.

I can heartily recommend any of the affiliated retailers and lenders of Smashwords and Draft2Digital for your ebook purchases. As you may know, the two have merged (although their catalogs haven’t), so I’ll list them all together. The affiliated retailers include Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Gardners, and Kobo (and Kobo Plus, although I don’t know what that subtle distinction is…and don’t really care!); the affiliated library and lending services include Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Library Direct, Overdrive, Scribd, and Vivlio. Amazon distributes to no one! (They think they’re the be-all and end-all of the publishing universe!)

Those two “aggregating services” (technical term meaning they group reading material together and distribute it to retailers) also do a lot more for authors and publishers than Amazon, including distribution to those affiliates, which continue the service to authors and public at large. B&N, for example, groups books in a series together automatically. (An author or publisher has to ask Amazon to do that most of the time because it’s run by stupid bots—but they usually have no luck in accomplishing that…for the same reason!) Amazon’s bots are also very efficient at discarding qualified, valid reviews!

Many of the Draft2Digital and Smashwords affiliates allow readers to find authors and publishers’ ebooks in unusual places they themselves distribute to—Kobo to Walmart and the lending services to public libraries who often lend ebooks, for example. Moreover, they don’t discriminate between Prime and non-Prime customers—there is no damn Amazon Prime! (That “Anazon service” costs the consumer over $100 per year now.) Draft2Digital and Smashwords also don’t discriminate between traditionally and self-published ebooks. (Amazon pimps the traditionally published ebooks more, especially those from their own subsidiary traditional publishers. So much for supporting self-publishing! The reason is obvious: Most traditional publishers charge almost as much for the ebook versions as the print version, so Amazon makes more money from selling their ebooks!)

One of the worst things about Amazon is, in fact, its KDP for authors of ebooks (this is an acronym for “Kindle Direct Publishing”—the words “direct publishing” form an oxymoron, of course). Long ago, they (meaning the big Bezos bot, I suppose) layered KDP on top of the normal Amazon sales site that consumers love (or, like me, love to hate). That means the username and password used at the Amazon retail site by authors for their own book purchases are the same ones they log-on to KDP with for their publishing activities. Huh? Moreover, in their pond-scum-like wisdom, Amazon’s two-factor authentication on the main retail site, with its email or cellphone options, can only be used with a cellphone option on KDP! Because older authors (or even very tech-aware ones, young or old!) don’t use cellphones (I only use mine in the car for emergency situations, never for internet business), they can’t get their tax info like they used to. (Recently, I spent a lot of time trying to get a work-around to that roadblock.) This is a recent “feature” of two-factor authentication for KDP that even the guy on the help-line I talked to admitted was a major gaffe. Bottom line: Amazon doesn’t give a damn about authors!

All these problems motivated my decision to not offer any of my recent ebooks on Amazon—and I’m definitely boycotting KDP! Sure, Amazon offers some products buyers can’t find elsewhere. I’ve found this especially true of ebooks produced overseas (e.g., Joffe imprint’s Brit-style mysteries that I love to read). Like everyone else, I have to grimace, cave in, and buy those products on Amazon. Otherwise, I recommend you do what I’m doing: Boycott Amazon entirely, whether it’s the main retail site or KDP.

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Menace from Moscow. For your consideration and enjoyment: The end of Penny Castro’s post-apocalyptic adventures. In this third novel of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy “The Last Human,” the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense. This novel will soon be available at most online retailers (but not Amazon!) and at most library and lending services.

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

I’d always intended to finish “The Last Humans” trilogy. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond my control affected the second novel and delayed my writing of the third. To describe what occurred, I’ll just quote from the “Notes” section that will appear at the end of the recently published third novel, Menace from Moscow:

“…the trilogy has endured a troubled publishing past. It almost seemed that it was jinxed. The ups and downs I experienced in publishing it were largely beyond my control. You see, a while ago I had this crazy notion that I had to try traditional publishing again to have the full experience as an author. (When I began my publishing career, only traditional or vanity presses existed—today’s self-publishing options aren’t vanity presses!—and I was soon self-publishing my stories because I’d quickly tired of traditional publishing’s oppressive bureaucracy.) After first publishing Rembrandt’s Angel [2017], “Esther Brookstone Art Detective,” Book One with Penmore Press , I wanted to publish Penny’s first novel traditionally as well, but Penmore doesn’t publish sci-fi (even though Rembrandt’s Angel took place in the near future as well—they didn’t realize that, I guess). So, I tried another small press, Black Opal Books. Their acquisition editor loved that first novel [The Last Humans, 2019], so I thought the stories of Penny’s adventures had found a good home. That didn’t happen! I submitted the second novel [A New Dawn] to them; Black Opal was sold; and the new owners sat on the novel for over a year. I finally got disgusted, withdrew the novel, and self-published it [2020]. Then the Bezos bots at Amazon confused the second novel with the first (that’s not been fixed to this date!), one reason I’m now boycotting Amazon as a retailer for all my future books!

I consequently said, “To hell with it!” about completing the trilogy for a long time. Even though I had lots of ideas for the third novel (hints are found at the end of the second), I abandoned the project. But Covid validated my ideas about how a worldwide pandemic could have disastrous effects in our world. (Covid-19 might not have even been made in a Chinese lab, and certainly not one in the PRNK, and it wasn’t dispersed by an ICBM, which might have let it propagate even faster [if that was what the Chinese had intended], but it still efficiently killed millions as it moved around the globe.) Wasn’t it time to finish Penny’s odyssey?

An author’s travails on his road to publishing a novel aren’t that interesting to most readers, but they’re common enough that the NY Times not long ago published an article (Art Section, August 26, 2022), “Finished Writing a Novel? Now’s the Tough Part,” that offers an example of the problems another author had in running that gantlet of traditional publishing. In my letter to the editor that followed soon after, I argued that the author from the article should choose self-publishing the next time because it facilitates the whole process. But enough about authors’ publishing woes! Frankly, I only mentioned them here to explain the delay in publishing this third novel.

In any case, I now therefore feel a great sense of satisfaction after all these “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” because I finished the trilogy. Sure, they’re just three novels among many in my oeuvre, but they’re all special because of the problems I had with publishing them, more than with any others. I wanted to tell the world about Penny’s remaining adventures. I’m sure she wanted that as well. I’ve done that, and she can now have a well-deserved rest with her family….”

There you have it: The sad saga describing one author’s journey to finishing a trilogy!

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Menace from Moscow. In this third novel of this post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy, the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense. This novel will be available at most online retailers (but not Amazon!) and at most library and lending services. For your consideration and enjoyment: The end of Penny’s post-apocalyptic adventures.

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

In last week’s article, I reviewed J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Now, inspired by reading that prelude to The Lord of the Rings trilogy (I’d read the trilogy as a kid, but not its prelude), I’ve continued to read on into Frodo’s odyssey. This article isn’t about that, though.

Instead, I want to tell you about some advice to authors Tolkien offers in his Forward to the Ring trilogy. Okay, he doesn’t present it as advice, but I’ll interpret it in that way as a complement to my little course “Writing Fiction” (Revision 11 is now available as a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this web site for a list of all my freebies, which includes two full novels in the “Esther Brookstone” series). Let me start with a quote from that Forward:

“Some who have read my book [he considers the entire trilogy as one book here, although traditionally it’s divided into three parts], or at any rate have reviewed them [like today, there were probably reviewers in his day who never actually bothered to read the book], have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or the kinds of writing they evidently prefer.” Powerful words from a classic author!

First, let me state that I all I have to do is change “my book” to “my books” and “found it” to “found them,” and I’ll have something that also accurately describes my publishing career. Tolkien goes on to say that his goal is to have fun telling stories that he hopes might entertain a few readers. That’s all any fiction writer can hope for if they have any common sense at all—the publishing business is full of vagaries—and it’s all I hope for. In fact, I always state that if each of my books entertains at least one reader, for me that book is a success. Making a lot of money might be other authors’ goal, but my joy is in the storytelling.

Second, Tolkien’s quote certainly applies to the erudite critics of the NY Times who don’t seem to recognize a good story when they see one—or refuse to do so. It also applies to most literary agents who live in the River Styx among the rotting corpses between good fiction and the hell of predicting the marketability of a book. They choose something trashy like Spare (1.4 million copies as of the date I wrote this article) or any other celeb’s scandalous confessions over truly good, entertaining stories. In their defense, the Big Five publishing conglomerates. and all their formulaic old mares and stallions in their stables who should have been sent to the glue factory long ago, only worry about marketability—they’re well ensconced in that literary hell!

Some people will just write J. R. R.’s quote off to despair and despondency—he’d just lived through two world wars! While writers are undoubtedly influenced by current events (the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have been my most recent causes of agita, but the advances of fascism worldwide and in the US certainly mimic Tolkien’s frustrations with the Nazi fascists), his quote and my interpretation of it represents a damning indictment of the current publishing environment as well as his. What’s sad is that his Forward shows that not much has changed: The traditional publishing establishment still tries to control what people read. It’s a more insidious form of book banning than what is seen in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (or DeSantis’s Florida). I’m actually surprised that the publisher of that pocketbook edition of the Lord of Rings trilogy didn’t leave out that Forward!

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Menace from Moscow. Edits almost done! Here’s a summary:

In the third novel of this trilogy, the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense.

This book has Draft2Digital in its near future, so it will soon appear at all D2D’s affiliated retailers and library and lending services. I hope readers will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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