demi smile

      Ghost Walk is very near release, a week or two. Just finishing the final review of the text, zeroing in on the cover art. So close.

      Little Fishes is finished, cooling off, probably will have a summer release.

      The fifth title in the series, tentative title Drosselmeyer Chronicles, is well underway.

      Writing coninues to come easier than posting. Or: with time limited, the writing wins.

Sometimes a few seconds in a reality altogether different breaks the block.

      Thanks to Andrew Campbell there are new covers for both published books, already uploaded to Amazon KDP. My original and very amateur versions are officially flushed. Anyone interested in covers for ebooks should check him out:

                   https://www.andrewcampbell.weebly.com 

      I think they’re handsome. Next job is to get him working on Ghost Walk and Little Fishes.

New Cover for Fit to Curve.

New Cover for Heart Attack.

Here’s a link to the story in the Washington Post, from September first:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/worlds-oldest-bank-meets-a-formidable-foe/2012/09/01/c42e85b6-f1dd-11e1-adc6-87dfa8e

By Michael Birnbaum
SIENA, Italy — Tucked away in this Tuscan city, the oldest bank in the world has survived the Borgias, pestilence and too many wars to count. Now, a mundane foe has proved far more dangerous: Italian government debt (follow the link for the rest of the article).

        So what? The world teems with teetering banks. It’s a little arcane, a Poundian thing. If you ever fought through the economic crankpot parts of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, you’ll remember the Monte dei Paschi. It’s the good bank, founded on natural increase (sheep breeding as they manure the ground that grows the grass they eat). Distinguished from the downright iniquity of the banks of discount, collecting interest on self-created funds. A rock, an icon, an ideogram. So, it would be sad, that’s all.

       You can’t judge a book by its cover. But you do. And you have to, even though you can’t. There is a dense immensity of titles in the Amazonian cosmos. To catch the eyes of browsers and scrollers, a cover has to read, nor repel, and engage. Fit To Curve and Heart Attack will soon have new e-covers. They’re in the pipe.

      I’ve been fortunate in the reviews I’ve had on Amazon for Fit To Curve, far more positive than negative overall. But one failing struck everyone: a vast abundance of spelling mistakes and typos. One of the reviewers made an extraordinary offer, and then made good on it: she sent me a list of errata, somewhere between dozens and hundreds, depending on how you score recurrent violations, both for Fit To Curve and for Heart Attack. I entered the corrections and uploaded cleaned versions of both titles. All new purchasers (since a couple weeks ago) have got the improved text.

      So: thank you, Sibyl. It was a wonderful gift.

      Meanwhile, it is apparently becoming possible for Kindle readers to receive revised versions of previously purchased titles. It’s a new thing. I’m going to try to get that feature turned on for my books.

       Most of the spam that comes to blogs is blatant. It shouts. It wants you to do something or buy something, with no connection to the context it has landed in. When comments are moderated, as they are here, it’s a simple chore to delete them. Annoying, but easy.

       The new stuff is creepy and insidious. It masquerades as a comment (bland generic usually positive). But ends in a URL. And it’s standard with WordPress to show name, email, and url for anyone making a comment, both as an identifier and as a way to make contact with an individual. So that’s two URLs.

       And that’s the purpose. I can’t see any other. Let me know if anyone’s aware of a different motivation. Sprinkle your urls around the web, randomly, maybe every hundredth or thousandth gets a click. You don’t care about the inefficiency or waste of bandwidth, it’s free to you. It’s weirdly organic, like maple seedpods spinning as far as the wind will take them, maybe one in a million makes a tree.

       Fake name, fake email, fake comment. Real URL. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and delete them. I haven’t heard any discussion elsewhere about them, but I haven’t really looked. So planting my ignorance as my flag, I’ll claim the discovery and naming rights: it’s SpermSpam. And it hopes you will be its egg.

       I’ve left a few scattered here, with the URLs stripped. Can you spot them?

       Some reviewers know how hard their words can hit, or how high their words can lift. Some don’t. Some know that their audience includes one human person with a particularly focused attention, some seem not to know. Or don’t care. The empathy that can imagine your self as your target is not automatic or available to all.

Revised: Capitol-Bane, a bloom that is toxic to civil government. 

On the block, the naked states and cities quiver while the buyers bid.

The earlier version: man on moon, dog on car, man on dog. The dogs are on top.

old Heart Attack cover

Special introductory price: $0.99

Sample Chapter: Heart Attack

direct link to Amazon

       Ellen’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg gets complicated. She’s researching an article about the people who work there. But somebody is making things difficult for those people. At first just puzzling, then malicious, then seriously nasty. The local police and the administrators of the Historical Area can’t agree whether all these events are connected, or what they should do.

       Ellen’s daily updates alarm Geoff, and he rides down for consultation and company. During the two days it takes him to bicycle from Roanoke to Williamsburg, things take an even nastier turn. He’s almost too late.

old cover for FTC

       Ellen is on assignment to Asheville, North Carolina, to do a followup on a story she wrote a year before. Geoff is reluctant to come until he learns his college girlfriend and new husband will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast.

       Their trip turns deadly, but the police see only accidents. They’re on their own if they want to solve the killings before there are more vicitms, before they become victims themselves. Fortunately their fellow guests pitch in.

See the first chapter sample.

direct link to Amazon

       Geoff visits an old friend’s low-country plantation to attend the wedding of the daughter of the house. Carrie’s twenty-two now, she had been just six when Geoff abducted her from an abusive father. But in Charleston the secrets have secrets and there is more going on than just the wedding preparations. When Charleston’s Ichabod killler strikes after a two year lapse just before the bridal shower, and again just after, somebody had better begin thinking quickly. Maybe Ellen can help.

See the sample chapter.

Ellen’s assignment to write an article about what goes on behind the scenes in Colonial Williamsburg begins to get strange. A cluster of destructive pranks seem to be leading to more serious crimes, but the police don’t believe there’s anything to investigate. Murder changes their minds, but they can’t untangle the pattern. Geoff rides his bicycle from Roanoke to Williamsburg to see if he can help.

See sample chapter.