Blood on the Snow Now Available

Kindle format only, though. If you have a PC or tablet, there are free apps for them.

Amazon: With Success Comes a Pain in the Ass

When I first uploaded the Hidden Witness to Kindle, Amazon was happy to accept it in almost any format.

Not any more. They've gotten a lot pickier. MS-Word, thankyewveddymuch, and there are a number of formatting "guidelines".

That'd be OK, I guess, if I wrote using Word. But I don't. So I have to spend a few hours reformatting and shit like that there.

Yeah, I know: First World Problems.

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.

Blood on the Range- Chapter 2

Lena woke up the next morning to nineteen pounds of purring cat lying on her torso. When she opened her eyes, Bucko’s face was about two inches from her’s. “Off”, she said as she pushed him over.

Bucko jumped down to the floor and stalked out of the room as he said: “Owp. Owp. Owp.” Translated, that meant: “Feed me now.” Lena swung her legs over the edge of the bed, found her slippers and robe, and went downstairs. She started her one-cup coffee-maker brewing before she opened a can of food for the cat. Priorities. For herself, Lena had some nukeable oatmeal with a bit of maple syrup dribbled over it. She had a contact in Vermont who sent her a half-gallon each year, fresh from a sugar house. After she had first tasted it, she swore to thrash the next person who offered her that crappy “maple-flavored” syrup.

After scooping out the cat’s litter box and getting dressed, Lena drove directly to her office. It hadn’t snowed in a few days; the snow alongside the roads was beginning to take on a brownish-black tinge from both road sand and oil leaks. Other than the local airport, there was nothing out her road other than large plots of land with nondescript houses. Some of the properties were working farms, right up until she got almost to downtown Petersburg. Some of the properties were hobby ranches, most had at least one barn that might or might not hold a few horses. More did before the big recession hit.

Blood on the Range

A draft of the first chapter of a work in progress:

Chapter 1

Lena Smirnova went out for lunch that day. She was jonesing for nice greasy burger, which meant a drive to Skipper’s Grill. The general opinion was that Skipper’s Grill was the equivalent of a vampire building. During the day, it was a terrific place for hamburgers, steaks and catfish. At night, it transformed itself into a notorious bucket-o’-blood. More than one sheriff had stationed a cruiser on the other side of the road to try and tamp things down, with little success.

The interior of Skipper’s was pretty dingy at night, or so Lena had been told. She wouldn’t have gone in there in the evening without being accompanied by a Marine reinforced rifle platoon. During the day, however, the interior was brightly lit and almost cheerful. The owners recognized the schizophrenic nature of their customer base, in that the daylight customers were different from the night-time customers. The changeover between the two was almost as well-defined as the shift change in a factory.

The Dream Weaver

A flash-fiction challenge.

The businessman walked into the office to see the man there. It was a nondescript office building in Manhattan. Both the building and the neighborhood had seen better days. It was the sort of building in which one would have found a `40s hard-boiled PI’s office. Judging by the very expensive suit he was wearing, one wouldn’t expect the businessman to have been caught dead in that building.

The man he was seeing looked similarly nondescript. Oh, he was dressed well enough, but he was instantly forgettable. He waved the businessman to a seat. “What can I do for you?”

“I have heard that you can arrange for people to do things that they may not have been inclined to do,” the businessman ventured.

Don't Cheat J-Hod

(Flash Fiction)

Jayerdene wasn’t judgmental. She couldn’t be, not in her town. It was on the edge of the largest spaceport in the sector. She was a trader and good at it. If you needed to outfit a wedding party or a raiding party, you went to Jaye’s House of Deals, known as “J-Hod” throughout most of known space. Only two things you couldn’t buy from (or sell to) her: Nuclear weapons and sentient species. Anything else, all you needed was either something to trade or about three different forms of specie. She didn’t care who you were or where you were from.

J-Hod had four rules. The other two were “no counterfeits” and “no stealing”. The rules were established by Jayelene, Jayerdene’s great-grandmother, the first “Jaye”. She founded J-Hod, you know. Oh, she bought and sold counterfeit goods.  It didn’t matter to her if it was a Cygnean knock-off of a Green Gyrene fusion fuel pump or the genuine article. She sold knock-offs, but she told you that’s what you were getting. And if you tried to sell her a knock-off and passed it off as genuine, she’d ban you from the store. If you succeeded in selling her a knock-off and Jaye (any of the generations of Jaye) found out about it, you were in serious trouble.

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!

The Monkey’s Star

(A flash fiction challenge)

I had settled in for my tour of duty some cycles ago. It was not difficult work to watch the Monkey Planet. The job was mine because of my treatise on the characteristics of emerging species. Based on a statistical and cultural analysis of worlds whose populations had developed space travel, I had developed a framework to use to assess the likelihood of any newly-discovered sentient species developing the ability to interact with the rest of the space-faring civilizations.

It was an analytical system which had stood the test of time. Or it did, until the discovery of the Monkey Planet. They didn’t fit the framework. On the contrary, they seemed to be unsuitable for mastering the technology of fire, let alone space travel. But they had figured out how to make fusion weapons and use the radio spectrum for communications. Now they were venturing from their world to others in their system. They had robotic probes that had left their star system.

Their spacecrafts were exceedingly primitive. They had recently been developing magnetic-plasma rockets. Every other space faring species had developed far better forms of propulsion before they traveled into space. The Monkeys had gone to their nearest neighboring planet with chemical rockets that we regarded as little more than children’s toys.

Fiction-Squared?

There are a lot of people who are writing works of fiction that will never see the guts of an offset press. That's kind of the way it is. Harsh, but true. So it really kind of galls my gizzard that there is a fictional author who is "writing" fiction. Look, I like Nathan Fillion's work. He was great as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly/Serenity. But the fact that a fictional author is publishing books? In reality, that's probably not much different from the "Tom Clancy's", "Richard Ludlum's" and now, "Robert B. Parker's" books that are in print. Maybe some of those books are based on notes (or at least grocery lists) written by the real guy. It's bad enough that people who don't read books (Snookie and Dubya come to mind) are writing books. And maybe the "Castle" series is no different from using a pen name. But it feels wrong to me. YMMV.