News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #180…
A short newsletter… just to say I hope you’re safe and staying at home. We’re social animals, so we might become bored doing what we have to do to beat COVID-19, but it must be done. We can only beat it by working together…by staying apart!
Solutions to boredom. If you’re noting more reruns on network TV, it’s real…and you can expect more. Film crews are no longer working to make new shows. I don’t watch much TV beyond news and cultural shows, so I’m ill-prepared: I don’t have NetFlix, Hulu, or other streaming services. As a consequence, I’m reading and writing a lot more, as you might imagine. With libraries closed, my main source of books has become Amazon (its delivery service has gone downhill, though, so I mostly read ebooks), but I understand many bookstores will take telephone orders that you can pick up. Consider the latter takeout to feed the mind, something to entertain and distract us. The last is less likely with TV, with PBS being the possible exception. Of course, books are excellent for entertaining those children at home too. Give the gift of reading to your stay-at-home kids. (See the next section for some good books.)
Busy reading. I’ve done a lot of reading lately. Here are some new books you might also want to read. I finished the first two and am working on the third. Saralyn Richard’s murder mystery A Palette for Love and Murder is the long-awaited sequel of Murder in the One Percent. Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time is one scientist’s attempt at a theory of everything, even beyond physics…everything! Keith Steinbaum’s mystery/thriller The Poe Consequence is a profound story about gang violence and ghostly revenge. All recently published; all interesting reading. My review of the first book can be found here as a blog post (search for it in the “Book Reviews” and “Mini-Reviews of Books” archives). The review of the second can be found at Bookpleasures; the link is https://waa.ai/T7a8.
Busy writing. I’ve also done a lot of writing lately. I finished A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse and submitted the manuscript. It’s the rom-com tale of a physicist who figures out how to time travel by hopping from universe to universe in the multiverse. Also, I’m currently editing (first read through on editing is mine, of course—other edits will follow, by me and others) what will become #3 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective Series” titled Death on the Danube (nice alliteration, right?). If you haven’t read the first two books in the series, Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder, now might be the time to ease your boredom while staying at home by reading these novels. Stay tuned for updates about how these two novels fare in running the publishing gantlet.
Free fiction. While my books and ebooks aren’t expensive, I realize people could be stretched thin. I’m not offering a Smashwords sale this month to my email newsletter subscribers—this newsletter is its cousin that’s published here later—that would require the internet to access the Smashwords website, and frankly it has been in slo-mo for a while (the internet, that is, maybe because everyone’s ZOOMing—Smashwords is probably business as usual). I just want to remind you that there’s a lot of free fiction available at this website, if you can get there from here without your connection freezing—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for the list of free PDFs you can download. I’m also going to keep this blog going as long as I can—you’ll find more free fiction here, as well as book and movie reviews (old ones of the latter, of course); author interviews; and articles about reading, writing, and the publishing business.
That’s all for this month. But three final words: Please stay safe.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
