News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #163…
Summer’s over. Well, not officially yet, but some leaves are starting to change around here. Family vacations are over. Kids are back in school.
The weather was bad, and Mother Nature smacked us around for our pecadillos. As I write this, hurricane Florence is pounding the coast of the Carolinas. Be safe, fellow readers and writers!
Make reading a part of your life and for your friends and family. Reading and literacy are the keys to civilization and intelligent, informed discourse. Reading is also entertainment, as in my books, but I’ll first mention a few other cultural things to do around my neck of woods this autumn that are also entertaining. Because people are still visiting the tri-state area, either for vacations or holiday events, some of these might work for visitors to our area.
Local News…
Two favorite places. If you live in or visit the Montclair, NJ area, you might know them already. The Montclair Public Library is a quiet place where you can browse the stacks (you might see some of my books—I’ve donated a few). The library also has many events of interest to the cultural community (last year I participated in the Indie Authors’ Day, for example)—talks, meetings, and courses.
Another favorite place for reading aficionados is Watchung Booksellers. You can browse their stacks in a quiet, intimate setting, looking for those new releases you’ve heard about. I haven’t had the privilege of doing a book signing there yet (the queue is long, I suppose), but the bookstore has a lot of them too.
Montclair events. Since I’m on this shtick about places for cultural events, I’ll mention some more.
Don’t forget Montclair State University’s events. We’ve seen some excellent performances there—the drama and music students are very talented. At this writing, school has just started there too, and the program circulars aren’t available yet. If the programs are anything like last year, though, you won’t be disappointed. And the price is right.
The Papermill Playhouse often has plays that end up on Broadway. You can see them before that. We’ve seen some good ones, and we weren’t surprised when they ended up on the Great White Way.
The Montclair Orchestra is new this year with four programs, I believe. Some MSU students and faculty belong. You’ll see their flyers if you’re out and about in Montclair. Keep it in mind.
You don’t have to go into NYC for cultural events—the burbs have plenty. Here’s another one:
Holly Berry Show. Is it too soon to think of the holidays? No. You’re probably lining up visits to family and friends already. The fourth event I’ll mention is one you shouldn’t forget if you’re in northern New Jersey, the Upper Montclair Women’s Club’s annual Holly Berry Show, Nov. 3-4.
This is an arts and crafts show where you can find many homemade items for your holiday gifts and decorations, from decorations and stocking stuffers to larger and more expensive items like jewelry. Writing is a craft, and I’ll be there ready to discuss reading, writing, and the publishing business with all who stop by.
I’ll also be offering five books this year at special show prices. A. B. Carolan’s two sci-fi mysteries, The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns, will make fine gifts for your young adult readers (and also for adults who are young at heart). The mystery/thriller, The Midas Bomb, and the sci-fi novel, Rogue Planet, will be good diversions for your snowy nights by the fire. And the mystery/thriller, Rembrandt’s Angel, will bring fond memories of Dame Agatha’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to the fore as Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone and Interpol Agent Bastiann van Coevorden try to recover a Rembrandt stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. Their mission becomes much larger.
See you at the Holly Berry Show November 3 and 4 in Upper Montclair, NJ. Encourage your family and friends to come. Kids are always welcome.
Other activities in northern NJ. One of my great pleasures is wining and dining in Montclair and environs. There are great restaurants with ethnic foods and cooking styles from all over the world. Because Montclair has so many trees (in spite of the summer’s bad thuderstorms), autumn provides a beautiful palette of fall colors just to be out and about, and fall weather, like spring, is usually better, especially after this summer we’ve had! If you’re a bit more adventurous, make a day trip out to the Delaware Water Gap to see the fall colors and visit the Lakota Wolf Preserve (reservations needed).
General news…
How do you find the books you read? A lot of the venues mentioned above—book fairs and events or art shows, libraries, and bookstores—are ideal for browsing. I’ve discovered a new way to do it online without Jeff Bezos lurking over me, thanks to my affiliation with Black Opal Books. What do http://www.tor.com and https://blackopalbooks.com have in common? Those sites feature publishers’ catalogs.
I can’t browse much on Amazon anymore. Their stupid bots think they know what I like to read, but they base everything on my past reading history. I avoid getting into ruts, so that past history doesn’t mean much.
You’re probably like me. We like to browse and find new books to tickle our reading fancies. If you like online shopping, visit a few publishers’ catalogs, especially small presses or indies’ lists (I just bought three ebooks from the Goodreads list I receive), where those golden nuggets can be easily panned in that great wilderness of all the books now available.
If you insist on using Amazon, you can browse there with more difficulty. Forget the reviews—they’re mostly zero content. Do as you do in a bookstore: read the blurb and “peek inside” to see if the writer can write well. You are unique. Don’t let Jeff Bezos or anyone else determine what you read! That’s where my motto “In libris libertas” comes from (I probably saw it etched in Gothic letters on some public library).
Do you shop at Walton? Here’s some other valuable information for booklovers: Walton has signed an agreement with ebook retailer Kobo and will now sell Kobo’s ebook offerings in Walton stores and online. They’ll give Amazon some more competition. You’ll find most of my ebooks on Kobo because Smashwords distributes to them, and 99% of my ebooks can be found on Smashwords as well as Amazon and elsewhere. (This new Walton feature was just announced in the NY Times Book Review section on August 26.)
You don’t have an ereader? Walton provides a free app for most electronic devices (just like Amazon does), and they also sell e-readers (not just Kindles).
Author interviews. You probably like to learn more about the authors who write the books you’ve read, or will read. Author bios, if they’re included in the books, are generally short. Authors do podcasts, book signings, and so forth, but they also are often interviewed. I’ve done several interviews recently. You’ll find them in the “Interviews” archives of my blog: https://stevenmmoore.com/blog.
Free short fiction. I rarely give away my novels (mostly to reviewers, of course), but I do give away PDFs corresponding to short story collections and novellas. You can see the list on my web page “Free Stuff & Contests.” You can either follow the download instructions there, or send me a list of the PDFs you’d like to have. (If you can’t access my website for whatever reason, send me an email requesting the list.)
I recently placed The Phantom Harvester in that list—it’s a mystery/crime novella featuring Detective Castilblanco’s adopted children. (How that came to be is described in the novel Gaia and the Goliaths.)
Feel free to copy and circulate these PDFs to friends and family—I only ask you to respect the copyright…and consider some of my novels for your reading pleasure.
Did you miss it? Thrills and suspense in the Art and Antiques Division of Scotland Yard?! You’ll find them with Esther Brookstone. She goes far beyond “60 is the new 40” as a Miss Marple on steroids. Paramour Bastiann van Coevorden is the Interpol introvert…and a modern Hercule Poirot. Don’t miss the excitement in the mystery/thriller Rembrandt’s Angel. (Penmore Press has reduced the ebook price to $4.25 on Amazon. I’ll sell the print version of this and other print versions at 20% off at the Holly Berry show.)
Coming soon. This fall the third novel in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” Goin’ the Extra Mile, will be published by Carrick Publishing. You can discover the fate of the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”) as Mary Jo and her family and friends battle Chinese agents.
In 2019, Black Opal Books will publish the post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans. Penny Castro survives the apocalypse caused by a North Korean missile attack on the continental U.S. only to fight for her life in the post-apocalyptic era.
I also finished the manuscript for the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel; the new novel’s title will be Son of Thunder and features Esther, Bastiann, Sandro Botticelli, and St. John the Divine (there’s no time travel, though).
Phew! A busy summer. With all that, you can understand why I’ll follow my collaborator A. B. Carolan’s advice to focus on short fiction for a while.
On sale. I don’t give books away, but sometimes they’re on sale. All ebook sales are on Smashwords, https://www.smashwords.com (sales of print versions only occur at book events like the Holly Berry Show). For September, Soldiers of God is now 50% off; October, all the books in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” Full Medical, Evil Agenda, and No Amber Waves of Grain, will be 50% off; and for November, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan will be 50% off.
Who knows? There might be other sales too. These are all ebooks. Use the coupon code on checkout from Smashwords to receive the sale prices. You can read about these books at my website (see below) or on my Smashwords author’s page: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/StevenMoore.
Follow me. I have a Facebook author page that complements my blog. Tweets on Twitter do the same. Here are the URLs: https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore and https://twitter.com using the handle @StevenMMoore4. Please “like” my posts and tweets and “follow” me. Of course, you’re also ALWAYS welcome at my website, https://stevenmmoore.com, where you can find book and movie reviews and read my blog posts on reading, writing, and the publishing business (and comment on them as well as “like” and “share” them using the icons below each post).
Have a great autumn!
In libris libertas!
