Private Mars Rocket II

I got an interesting call yesterday from a book "marketer." So normally I don't answer spam calls, but I was distracted so when the phone rang I answered it.

The caller on the other end, clearly not a native speaker of English (I think he was Filipino) asked if I was the author of Strawberry Gold. Well, yes I was, and I said I don't want to change marketing firms.

He then launched into a pitch about how his firm could help self-published authors "get the results they desire" and, apparently looking at Google, said that "I see World Castle LLC helped you with the book. How much did you pay them?"

Well, said I, I didn't pay them anything. They paid me. This baffled the guy. After I restated that fact, he quietly hung up. I guess I got a trainee at the digital sweatshop.

So, to avoid my social media pages being all-Trump, all the time, herewith are two cultural things I recommend.

Thing #1 - Sinners

I had heard a lot of good things about the vampire movie Sinners, now in it's 4th weekend in theaters. I screened it Saturday night at my local independent watch-and-eat theater. It's very good overall.

What I found most interesting was that, although it's not technically a musical (people don't spontaneously break into song) there's a lot of music and dancing, both traditional Black and Irish folk music.

Thing #2 - Dark Winds
I've been watching the AMC miniseries Dark Winds on Netflix. It's a neo-Western, set on the Navajo reservation in the early 1970s. Again, highly recommended.

Plug - Strawberry Gold
My non-SF novel Strawberry Gold was favorably reviewed by Windy City Reviews. Please see the review here.

Well, it's back to work for me after the MLK holiday, and to celebrate, you can read an excerpt from my latest novel "Strawberry Gold" here.

Posted here so I can find it later - an excerpt from my latest novel "Strawberry Gold".

I'm not obsessed with Mars - I can stop thinking about the Red Planet anytime I want to. In the meantime, I got a new iPhone and found the wallpaper ugly so I changed it to a picture of Mars. In other news:

As part of getting a new iPhone, I got a 3-months-free deal on Apple TV. So far I've seen:

1) Greyhound, a gritty WWII movie about a convoy attacked by U-boats. Tom Hanks is the lead and it's a tense ride.

2) Blitz, another WWII movie. In this one, a woman sends her son away to the country in 1940 London, but he runs away and comes back. Also very good and unstinting - the son falls in with a group of crooks who are robbing bombed-out buildings, including one with the dead still inside. Also I learned that the London Tube did not want to let people use their stations as bomb shelters but was forced into it by popular demand.

3) The first two episodes of Black Doves, a British spy thriller. Of interest is that the spies have normal lives outside of spying and balancing that with being a spy is part of the show.

The latest book, Strawberry Gold goes live tomorrow!

Some early reviews of my latest novel Strawberry Gold are trickling in. They like it!

The Prairie Book Review - A propulsive historical thriller.

BookView Review - A layered, emotionally rich story that keeps the pages turning.

Some Random Thoughts, only related by being in my brain:

Random Thought #1

I was contemplating dinner last night, and I thought about going out to the local country club. Then I asked myself why? They've changed the main venue to a sports bar. It's nice, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's very generic. There's frankly no particular reason to go there, so I didn't.

Random Thought #2

I had to get some work done on my car, and so I was exposed to daytime TV while in the dealer's waiting room. Doctor Phil had as a guest some 17-year-old who was dating a 30-year-old man. Her man had a history of beating on and cheating on his exes, but since he hadn't (yet) beat on or cheated on her, she was still good with him. After a commercial break or two, we learned that the girl's mother alternated between neglect and abuse and that the girl's father was AWOL.

In what I suspect is a case of the blind squirrel finding an acorn, Doctor Phil said that sometimes people focus so much on what they are running from that they don't look at what they are running towards.

Random Thought #3

I am what's politely called a "discovery writer" which means that when I start writing I don't have a firm outline or plan as to what's going to happen in my books. Sometimes, as in the current WIP, working title "What the Bank Robber Saw" that means I write myself into a corner and then need to back myself out of same.

On Books to Movies

I believe I have previously reported that I was a fan of the author Emily St. John Mandel, and specifically her novel Station Eleven. I recently broke down and signed up for a "free trial" of HBO in order to watch the miniseries based on the book. I've not finished my viewing, but so far it's been an education on the differences between two mediums.

The biggest difference is in how visual mediums work, and a character decision thereof. In the book, there is a character named Jeevan Chaudhary. All the main characters have a relationship to Arthur Leander, an actor who dies (not of the plague) in Chapter 1. Jeevan's relationship is the most tangential of the main characters.

He is, however, important in that through him we see the chaos of the collapse of civilization - Year One in the book. So for the miniseries, Jeevan is given a much bigger role - he basically saves the young Kirsten Raymonde, who is the book's protagonist. Frankly the other option would have been to cut him out entirely, but then we would have lost the emotional hit of Year One.

Other Creative Thoughts

I have also mentioned that I have a novel I've been shopping, a conventional cozy mystery called Eastville. I realized that the title was not helping to sell the book, so I renamed it The Body in the Backyard. The discovery of said body is the inciting incident of the book, and (one of) the mysteries to be solved.

However, over the weekend, I realized that I had a bigger problem. Said realization came about when I was looking to query a literary agent and I read her blog post six things you need in a mystery novel and noted I was missing one. Basically, the detective, especially an amateur detective like in my book, needs a reason to investigate. I didn't have one - or at least not a good one. Fortunately, I figured one out. Alas, that means a rewrite is in my future.

In my ongoing efforts to sell my magnum opi, The Pirates Trilogy, I decided to buy some ads from Amazon. These were ones that I only had to pay if somebody clicked on them. I ended up not having to pay because nobody clicked on them.

In another experiment, the second book in the series, which was sold to editors as a stand-alone novel, is free every Friday in August. I've been getting some Kindle library reads out of it and we'll see if this yields sales.