The Ghost- For Sale!

Now available for purchase for your ebook gizmo.

Project the Next: "The Ghost"

I have it done. I uploaded a draft to Amazon, so that I could then download it onto my Kindle for a final review.

Good thing, I'm 40% through it and found two mistakes.

It came in at 18,000 words.

I don't do outlines. I just start on a story and then the arc of the story and my imagination takes it where it goes.

It should be live in a few days.

Sam Hawkins vs. Lena Smirnova

Besides the obvious, writing the two characters has different challenges.

Sam is more of a traditional hard-boiled PI. He takes a job and he does it. He dishes out lumps and takes them as necessary. He's by no means a gorilla, but he keeps what's private out of the story that he is narrating. What you see is what he wants you to see. Essentially, his tale is a long version of his eventual report to his clients.

Lena's character is more complex, in part because she is not the narrator. You never see the narrator (like Chorus). Because Lena does not control the narration, you see a lot more of her life.

I read a lot of the old school detective novels when I was a teenager: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane. Of the lot, it's a bit of a shame that Ross MacDonald's work seems to have drifted into obscurity the fastest, though some of them have been reissued in the last few years.

For me, Lena's character is harder to write because of the level of detail and complexity of her life. She has a large multi-generational extended family (I maintain a growing genealogical chart), she does other things besides detective work, and, in the one that I am now working on, she has a love life (such as it is). She is involved in her community. Because Lena lives in a fictional American state, I have had to create maps as I go and imagine a bit of history.

Though, in true hard-boiled tradition, both Lena and Sam are somewhat alike. They are both comfortable in their own skins and in being on their own.

The two characters will meet eventually.

Project the Next^2

I am also working on another Sam Hawkins story. This one does not have a working title.
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Chapter 1

I was hired to do a background check on a possible candidate for a political-appointee job.  They’re not terribly unusual in this area. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t bother to ask why.  If the person hiring me has a good reason for hiring me to investigate someone, asking why will often result in my learning a lot more than I care to know.  I’m not a shrink, I don’t get paid for listening to other people’s problems.  If someone has a not-too-good reason for wanting to hire me, they’ll just lie about it.

Sometimes I know they’re lying, sometimes I don’t.  I check to see if there is a restraining order out with the person I’m supposed to check’s name on it.  I’ll check to see if the person is a witness in the kind of cases where witnesses couldn’t afford to buy life insurance.  But mostly, I’ll check to make sure that the checks that I’m given don’t bounce.

My name is Sam Hawkins.  I’m a private detective.

Aluminum Rain and Apple Pie

Aluminum Rain is now available for purchase in the Amazon Kindle store. It's only a buck, less than a cup of coffee from almost anywhere (except here).

If you're a fan of the TV show Justified, you probably remember Mags Bennett and her apple pie moonshine. I had a taste of that last night, but not the stuff that Mags poisoned. It did indeed taste like apple pie and it was about the smoothest booze that I've ever had. I could see where someone could put away several shots of it and end up being drunk on their ass without knowing what hit them.

Wuffo Aluminum Rain?

As you may have noticed, I have taken down most of Aluminum Rain.

First, that's the title that I've chosen.

Second, what I had posted was the first draft. The story has changed a bit since then. I've revised it a few times and now I have it out to some "beta readers".

After they've read it, I'll offer it for sale in the Kindle store for a buck. I think that's a fair price for a novella of about 22,000 words. It's almost a "flash fiction" novella, as the first draft took a little over two weeks to write.

I have to take another look at the draft of Blood on the Range, as there is something about it that just doesn't feel right.

(And I have to gear up for court today.)

Aluminum Rain, Pt. II

My client was an elderly gent named James Bell.  He was related to Alexander Graham Bell, his father had been either a cousin or grand-nephew of the inventor.  James Bell was wealthy, not just rich.  He had money managers who looked after his investments.  This Bell was a patron of the musical arts and, in his youth, had been both a musician of some note and had helped jazz cross over into a higher level of society.  More to my concern, he was a great-uncle of Loftus.  I went to see him the day after I talked to Dr. Durden.

Aluminum Rain; Sam Hawkins Returns

I am working on a new Sam Hawkins story.  This one will be set around 1992.  I don't know if it'll work out to be a novel, a novella, or a short, but here is the first chapter:
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It didn’t look like much of an airplane, just bits of twisted and blackened metal.  The fragments had been laid out inside the outline of an airplane.  There probably had been an odor at one time, but the wreckage was old enough for any smell to have faded away.

And Baby Makes Three

The first draft is done!

I like having a printed copy to read and mark up.

With sporadic royalty payments from Amazon, I've maybe made fifty bucks so far on the first book.

I finished the second book, "Blood on the Snow" almost two years ago. I pick up the printed manuscript from time to time; I keep finding typos, bad punctuation and things that need revising. And that was after re-doing the last 10-15% of the first draft.

All of which pretty much means that I can write, I guess, but I can't market for shit.

Plugging Away

I've been working full-time and, as I'm finding out, it's pretty difficult to get motivated to do any writing. I spend much of my day working on a computer, whether it is writing legal papers or researching them. To come home and look at the same word-processing screen is, well, kind of sucky.

But still. I do some.

What I'm not good at is marketing. The Hidden Witness sells about a copy a month from Amazon. I did a "free promotion day" through Amazon and about a hundred copies were snapped up, but they didn't lead to any increased sales. (All you buggers who took advantage of it and then couldn't be troubled to at least drop a nice review, thanks for nothing.)

I'm into the fourth revision of Blood on the Snow. It's kind of depressing, in a way, to pick it up and find typos and crazy phrasing. But that's why I let it sit for months and then go back to it, so I read with fresh eyes and I see what is there, not what I think is there.

And I've been working on first draft of the sequel to Blood on the Snow. That's probably about 60% finished, maybe more, maybe less. This one has more detail about Lena's life and her surroundings. I've also tried to make it seem that she has an active career/job, in that she's working on several things at the same time. Most lawyers with an active practice have a lot of open cases and matters and I expect that most private investigators do, as well. Whether the extra stuff is fluff or necessary detail, well, I'll leave that up to my readers. If I ever have any for it.

Anywho: Happy New Year!

Free Day

For today only, The Hidden Witness is free for Kindles from Amazon. Or it should be, if I didn't screw it up.

Consider it a reverse birthday present.

UPDATE: I'm not certain that it is working. Ah, well.

W00T!!

I'm not a writer. Oh, I've written stuff, mostly for my own amusement. Wrote a mystery novel, once. I even had an agent for that one, but no dice, chum. So awhile back, I just threw it up on Amazon Kindle's list just for shits and grins.

I'm horrible at selling myself. It just doesn't feel right to me. I can go argue a client's position and I'm pretty good at that. But when it comes to bragging on myself, I suck. Not like "Dirt Devil" suck, or even "Dyson" suck, but in "open up the air lock on Galactica" suck. During job interviews, when I'm asked "why should I hire you", I have to really restrain myself from shrugging and saying "you could do worse."

Did I tell you that I suck at selling myself?

So anyway, I was doing my bank statement when I saw that Amazon sent me just a skosh over ten bucks. Royalty payments. For that book. Which works out to a wage of, what, two cents an hour for writing it? (300 years ago, that'd be good money, I bet.)

But still, I'm a little bit tickled about it.

Hidden Witness

This is a completed work, you can find a link to buy it on the right side of this blog. I'm posting the first chapter as a teaser.

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Chapter 1

The house was in a ritzy area of McLean, Virginia. It was a townhouse, but that word doesn't begin to describe a place that costs ten times or more than mine. Toss in the wall around the place, the gate with an armed guard, and the private police patrols; you have a place that might be called "Money!" instead of the pseudo-French name that it carried. The guard didn't jump to attention when I drove up, but he didn't open fire, either. Being invited has its advantages.

The invitation was delivered by a uniformed messenger, but he didn't refuse the tip I offered. The invitation itself rode in a buff-colored envelope. It read: Mrs. Frederick Soweby respectfully requests your presence at eleven AM tomorrow. Keeping the invitation company was a set of directions and ten one hundred dollar bills that looked as if they had come directly from the presses. I wasn't overly thrilled to see the messenger, he came damn early and I had a hangover. The sight of all that green cheered me right up.