Melting Snow ... and a new book

Not With A Whimper: Destroyers has now gone live on Amazon. It's the second of the NWAW series. Can I really call it a series when the books run concurrently? Can you have a concurrent series, or is that an oxymoron?

I had a very difficult time with this book, matching the dates and events to those already established in Not With A Whimper: Producers. I really don't look forward to repeating the process in the remaining book(s) of the series. After I'm finished, remind me to never do this again.

Tough jobs like the above seem to age me. I feel older, more tired than I did in my younger days. Perhaps that's why I have an old man in the book recalling his own younger days, though not with joy. Old Paulo says that in his time of military service he created enough regrets to last him a lifetime, his memory triggered by a conversation.

My own memory recently got triggered, but not by a conversation. I was walking in Central Park in New York (on vacation) and water tumbled over rocks in a stream making its very distinct sound. It took me back to where I grew up, when the winter's snow began melting, and the runoff in the streets, ditches, and alleyways tumbled over ridges of slushy snow and gravel. The sound transported me back to where, as a child I and my friends would make little dams of snow, trapping pools of water, then put our feet through the dams, allowing the built-up 'lakes' to flow once more.

The air felt fresh, clear, and crisp. We wore not the parkas of just a month previous, but sweaters and light jackets. The world seemed to be returning to life after the long winter's slumber. And the sound of the water running and tumbling symbolized that.

There I stood, lost in the memory of so many years ago. I now live on the West Coast, and we don't get that much snow. The seasons down here don't have the sharp delineation that they seemed to have up north, and I miss that.

I suppose that, sooner or later, in some book I shall write of a character listening to the music of the melting snow.

But, for now, I'll rejoice in another book published, and hope that those who pick it up will enjoy it. My period of rejoicing, alas, will be limited. With that book out of the way, the next in line begins to demand attention, and it will be back to the old grindstone.

Live well, my friends, and make memories you'll cherish.

Not With A Whimper: Destroyers

Duty.

One man's "duty" is another man's "mutiny". Major Karl Müller of the European Treaty Organization (ETO) walks a fine line as his squadron of shuttle-fighters prepares to meet any enemy in Earth's Last Battle. His orders are to commit what many would consider a war crime -- an attack on a helpless civilian space station. But if they have to face the powerful United States of North America, chances are most of the squadron will not survive long enough to launch from their Azores base -- in which case the question become moot. But Müller can't count on death giving him the easy way out.

On the other side of the Atlantic, USNA Sergeant Frank Jensen views the near future with equal desperation. He and 39 fellow "volunteers" have failed Colonel Westorn's brainwashing course, and if the Colonel cannot successfully finish their indoctrination, he intends to finish them in another way. Jensen believes his group's only chance is to escape to one of the colony worlds, where Westorn won't be able to find them. That spells desertion, but his duty to himself and his comrades drives him forward.  However, he sees no chance of them getting into space without help, and dying here on Earth appears the only alternative. He knows his people won't go down easily, but wonders what use Colonel Westorn has for soldier-fanatics.

Throw scientist Christine Burnett, aghast at what the perversion of her sleep-learning program has done, and the powerful Yrden Family into the mix, and you know that the world will end not with a whimper, but a bang.

Repository of Memories

Anyone who has undertaken a “spring cleaning” will well know the torn feeling as the old ratty chair, which no one sits on any longer because of the broken coil that pokes the unwary, goes into the pile of  “discards”. Still more – especially men, it seems, though I don’t know why this should be so – will nod in companionable silence as one of their buddies mentions the wrenching loss that trading in the old clunker causes. If it gets sent to the bone yard, that’s even worse. Hell, I even wrote an obituary for my 1991 Chevy S10.

However, when it comes right down to it, the chair, the old Chevy or – in this case – the place where I used to work really don’t warrant the emotions that leaving them behind, or watching them get disposed of, causes.

Most anyone else seeing “Old Rusty” (my S10) wouldn’t even give it a thought, as they watched it getting towed to the junk yard. And, I wouldn’t either, had I not driven it for 9 years. Anyone else seeing the empty building where I worked until yesterday won’t particularly notice that the restaurant is gone – unless they had some sort of tie to it, ordered food from it.

The old ratty chair, the old clunker, the old school, the old town, or whatever, mean nothing much by themselves. However, they don’t just consist of their parts, they become repositories of memories.

Occasionally, when I looked to the back stairs leading to the rear exit of the take-out pizzeria where I worked, I recall seeing Gord there. Gord wasn’t a friend of mine – hell, I don’t even recall once seeing him outside of work – but he was a fellow employee, and we did share some laughs. He had his good points and his bad points, as do we all, and he occasionally got on my nerves. Gord died about 15 years ago. The only thing that brings back his memory is the physical space that we shared – the restaurant. Will I remember him again now that I no longer see the environment where he at one time was a familiar fixture? Will I remember Tom, another driver? He died about 10 years ago. Outside of the pizzeria, we had nothing in common.

See, the landlords of the building where I work – worked – want to tear it down and put up something different. So, my boss got notice – one month – to vacate the premises. Yesterday, I worked my last shift. That’s 25 years of going to the same building, doing the job, and returning home, creating memories. And the building – along with its accoutrements – has become a handy repository of those memories.

Yesterday, I packed up my personal possessions – we all know how they tend to populate any place where we go – and they, too, have have become repositories in their own right. My mother bought me the calculator I used – bought it back in 1981 when I had just graduated from a First Aid/Timekeeping course and landed a job out in the woods using those skills. I had need of the calculator, and she gifted me with it. I brought it home from the restaurant with me, not because it has any intrinsic worth, but because it was a gift from my mother who died in 2002. I look at the calculator, and I recall her and her wishes for her children to succeed at whatever they tried. I recall working at the camp out in the boonies, and I will now recall totalling up orders.

Each of those recollections will bring others along with them to the gathering. Recalling the camp where I worked brings back memories of the people whom I met there, the dangers I faced in our workboat during the storm when our dock broke free, and I had to take the boat to the other side of the inlet in waves high enough that watchers from shore would lose sight of it when it slipped into the troughs.

It brings back memories of the other guy who accompanied me. He hated that boat because the foreman didn’t know how to use the trim-tabs properly. He thought that he would only be on board for the time it took me to take the boat from one side of the dock to the other. Then the dock broke free and we had nowhere to go. When I told him what we were going to do – cross the inlet to a dock on the other side a few miles away – he asked me to go close to shore and he would jump in and swim the rest of the way back to camp. It was October, and the water was forking cold! I didn’t allow that. We made it, but there was one moment – when a minor squall hit – that I thought we might not.

And all this from seeing the calculator, a repository of memories, my memories.

The pizzeria had its good points and its bad points. But, yesterday, I watched it die. We knew that last night would be the end and had tried to have only enough food left for the day. When we ran out of cheese to make pizzas, we closed the doors and stopped taking orders. Then, I began packing up my possessions to take them home, sorting through the things to go into the garbage, to go to recycling, to be packed up and kept by the owner. The other drivers, who didn’t work last night, showed up, and each received goodies that couldn’t be kept, perishables. We emptied and then turned off the pizza cooler. The fans that had worked more or less continuously for the last 29 years went silent.

That silence really brought it home for me. This was the end. Unfortunately, I’ll be back there tomorrow to help with the clean up and dismantling of various things. Thus, I really get to see the place die. Better, by far, to finish the last shift and walk away, never to return. That way, the final memory of the place is of a working concern. Now, my final memories will be of the place empty, bereft of that which made it what it was. Now, I’ll be able to recall empty shelves, silent coolers, cold ovens.

Those are not the good memories, the fun memories. The memories of working beyond what we thought we were capable of, the memories of listening to the oldies station, of watching WWE Wrestling late at night, of laughing and joking and sharing triumphs and sorrows – those are the memories that I wish to keep. Now, I’ll have other, bitter memories to go with them.

And that’s why I never wanted to return to my hometown after my family left it. I was 16 at the time. And until I did go back 20 years later, my hometown continued to live in my memory as it was in 1972. Intellectually, I knew that all had changed, that my friends of the time had grown up and started families or moved away, that my teachers had probably mostly retired. 

But in my thoughts, I could still see them as they were, going to school, playing, riding bicycles. Returning ruined a lot of that. I still have those memories, but the later reality impinges on them. Yes, I ran through those woods playing Cowboys and Indians with my friend as a child; we picked wild strawberries there. I can still recall that, but I now KNOW that the woods are gone, replaced by housing; I know this from experience, not just as data that someone passed on to me. I saw it for myself. And the last house we lived in before moving away has also gone. A Dairy Queen now flaunts its wares where my home used to sit. A repository now destroyed, just as the restaurant will soon disappear forever – even to the building it resided in.

I used to work up in the Arctic on the DEWLine. Intellectually, I know that the stations, where I worked, have been dismantled. But I didn’t see that happen, and I haven’t been back to see the result. I got laid off from a still-functioning station. Thus, for me, they still exist, employees walk the halls, and operators watch the radar screens. They still exist, waiting for me to come off of my leave and take up my position and duties once more. (I still dream of them on a regular basis.)

I have pictures, video, and other repositories of memories to aid me in keeping the DEWLine alive.

However, all is not a loss, for the experience of seeing the pizzeria die will get transformed in my mind, and something similar will come out in my writing. Hopefully, readers will nod their heads – at least figuratively – and note that the author’s words have a certain authenticity to them.

Right now, though, I’m feeling nostalgic for a place that I alternately loved and hated, a place that only yesterday lived, a repository of memories.

Stress of the Unknown

STRESS

My day job is coming to an end this month. I’ve known about this for several months – just not the actual date – and this has added a little stress to my life.

Now, as the final days march by, I’m coming to terms with it – actually looking forward to the end. Ends usually portend new beginnings. Knowing the actual date allows one to plan. I’ve found that lack of knowledge in this matter produces stress all out of proportion to the event itself.

My job on the DEWLINE ended in 1992. A new system (NORTH WARNING SYSTEM) was taking over our operation, and the DEWLINE was shutting down in stages as the NWS came online. I went up at the end of June, knowing that my proposed lay-off date was three weeks later. People leaving the DEWLINE went south on a Wednesday. Those laid-off would receive word a week in advance. If you didn’t get your official lay-off notice when the plane came in on the Wednesday or Thursday, you know that you wouldn’t be going out the following Wednesday, and thus had at least two weeks left.

I didn’t get my notice the date I expected to, so I had at least two more weeks up there instead of the one. The next week, of course, I figured I’d get my notice, prepared for it, etc. But it didn’t come that week, either. And it didn’t come for another 4 or 5 weeks. But every Wednesday, I’d expect it, and be ready for the axe to fall. Let me tell you, a reprieve wasn’t much of a reprieve. The delay was worse than the notice. When I finally got the notice, I felt such a sense of relief.

Somewhat the same thing happened this year. My employer’s landlord wants to tear down our building. We received 30 days notice at the end of January. But my boss said he would fight for a longer notice, so I didn’t know if I’d lose my job at the end of February or not. At the end of February, we got the reprieve – but only one more month.

My boss may or may not reopen. He may retire. But, for now, I KNOW. My job ends at the end of the month. It’s a relief. Now, at last, I can make some solid plans, not tentative ones. Funny how becoming unemployed can actually reduce stress, eh?

For the moment, I figure I’ll have a little more time to write and be in a better mood to write.

At this time, I’ve just finished my preliminary edit of “Not With A Whimper: Destroyers”. I just need to go over it again and then do my usual 5 or 6 rereads, making sure that I’ve left no continuity errors or typos. Then it’s off to my proofer who will find about five dozen mistakes. (I think she puts them in and then ‘finds’ them in order to make herself look good. I just don’t know how she inserts them into MY copy, too. She’s probably a hacker – though it appears that I know more about computers than she does. She’s tricky, so it could all be a ploy.) See NEWS for an update on my writing.

Anyway, I thank you for your patience, and hope you take a look at “Destroyers” when it comes out.

Solstice ... and the symbiosis of storytelling

Well, the solstice has arrived. The northern hemisphere can now look forward to the return of the sun. So, I guess it is time to make my regular (1st) solstice report.

Okay. Not With A Whisper: Producers is up at Amazon. Has been for several days now, but I didn’t want to put out two posts on top of each other. NWAW:P went live 4 days ago, and I have 4 sales. Hard to not feel good about that. Someone, somewhere is reading what I wrote -- or at least intending to.

And that's what it is all about. I believe that for a story to be told, you need both someone to tell the story, and someone to receive it. It becomes a symbiosis. As such, each of us reads a different story, though the words remain the same. For one, the story can have great meaning, for another little or no meaning.

That this occurs -- and the way it occurs -- continues to surprise me. A reader once wrote me that one of my stories had affected his life and a relationship in a certain way. Now, of all the things I expected of the story, this came pretty far down the list. In fact, I didn't see it coming at all. But, together, we created a story that he could use to help himself. I felt both gratified and humbled.

Humbled because although the reader gave me credit, the credit belonged equally to him or even more to him than to me. He took my words and used them to his own benefit. We all do this, I know, and I owe debts to many other authors myself, taking from their words things to help myself.

What anyone may take from NWAW:Producers, I know not. I hope that those who do read enjoy the story. If not, well, they can always return it and get their money back from Amazon ... and perhaps leave a review warning others of like mind away. That's okay. I know that some will find the story wanting, for no author can please everyone.(If you happen to read and enjoy it, consider leaving a review as well -- and maybe even mention it to a friend.)

Anyway, with the returning of the sun I hope that I can return to writing. I still have stories I wish to tell, and until someone else reads them, they can’t achieve their full measure, become true stories.

I wish you all a happy Solstice (Winter up north, Summer down south). May the coming year bring all that we desire – and not necessarily all that we deserve.

Live well, my friends.

Damned if you do; Damned if you Dont: Kindle Unlimited

Amazon.com has this wonderful thing called “Kindle Unlimited”. It is a subscription plan whereby you pay $10 per month and can then borrow and read all you want of the e-books which are entered into what Amazon likes to call “Select”. "Select" gives the book extra visibility, and the author the ability to use a couple of different advertising devices – such as setting the book free for a limited time. In other words, it can be very financially advantageous.

It has its disadvantages, too. To be eligible for Select, the author must make his or her book available to Amazon exclusively for the duration of its time in the program (90-day increments). No selling it through any other distributor. Amazon has exclusive rights to sell it.

Originally, the authors were paid (about $1.35) every time someone read over 10% of their book. Short story writers loved that, novelists … not so much. And, of course, the scammers got involved. They put out very short books, such that if you even opened it, they’d get paid the $1.35 – even if the content was word salad, pure garbage.

Eventually, about a year later, Amazon changed the rules, to stop those scammers, and to make it more ‘fair’ for those who wrote longer works.

Amazon decided to pay the authors whose books got borrowed by the number of pages which the borrowers read. If you read 10 pages of my book, I got paid for 10 pages – or so they had us believe.

Authors are curious sorts. They study, and share what they discover. It seems that Amazon has no way of knowing how many pages you’ve read. Their program simply checks your kindle device or app each time you sync with Amazon. It then looks at the last page read. So, if you had jumped to page 150 in my book, Amazon would see it as 150 pages read, and pay me accordingly, even though you’ve only read one page (page 150).

Needless to say, scammers figured this out and went to town. They uploaded very large books (6000+ pages – sometimes of only the same paragraph repeated over and over) and then farmed out the ‘reading’ of them. So, if a ‘farm worker’ had 10 accounts with Amazon, he could ‘borrow’ that big book on each account, jump to the last page, and the ‘author’ would be paid for 60,000 pages read – about $280. If the ‘farmer’ had 10 such ‘workers’, he would quickly earn $2800. If he put up 10 such books, $28,000.

That had to stop, so Amazon put new rules in place. Maximum size of a book: 3000 pages. That helped.

But everything Amazon does seems to have unintended consequences -- like the above. Now, several of us have noticed that we’ll occasionally get a 'one page read' report. It would seem that someone opened our book, and that was it: thus, one page read. Perhaps they didn’t like it; perhaps they opened it and then went off-line, and we’d get the rest of the pages when they next synced with Amazon … or maybe not. Naturally, some authors did some experimenting.

It now appears that if you read my 350 page book, page by page, all the way through and then return to page one (as many of us often do) before going on-line again and syncing with Amazon, Amazon will see it as One Page Read and pay me one-half of one cent (approx).

A lot of authors are kinda upset about this. Amazon uses our book to get subscriptions, and allows borrowers to read our books, but has no way to check how much they’ve read, and fail of paying us our due. (If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, and use your kindle to read off-line, please, please, do not return to page one. Leave the book open to the last page read so that the author can get what is due. Please.)

Many of us, including me, have pulled our books out of Select – even though this hurts us visibility-wise (and thus monetarily, as well). If we’re not going to get paid for pages read, and if we’re prevented from trying to sell our books through other distributors, what’s the point?

It’s very depressing, as Amazon, through Kindle Unlimited and other means, seems to have a stranglehold on the market. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you don’t go in, you lose money. If you do go in, like as not you get cheated ... and Amazon's hold on the market becomes a little bit firmer. So, do you stay out as a matter of principle, or do you swallow your pride in order to be able to feed your family? Thanks, Amazon.

In my case, selling as little as I do, I can afford to stand on principle. Thus, my next book (due out very, very soon – within the next day or three), “Not With A Whimper: Producers” will NOT go into Kindle Unlimited.

I wonder if it will sell anything.

You Never Know

You never know what effect your words or actions will have on another.

The nights now grow longer, the darkness comes earlier, and the stars come out and shine coldly down, harbingers of the winter to come. And yet the darkness, along with the cooler temperatures, pulls my mind back to my younger days when I looked forward to the shortening of the days for a reason that many youth do – for Christmas comes during the darkest time of the year.

Back in the early 1960s I lived in a small town and Christmas, as a season, began on December 1st and pretty much ended on the 26th. You didn’t hear Christmas music playing in stores, didn’t see any Christmassy advertisements on either TV or in the papers, and didn’t hear anything about Christmas on the radio ... until the magical 1st of December.

Then, for a little over three short weeks, everything changed. Twenty-four days weren’t enough to make one weary of the festival, were just enough to keep the tension – good tension – building until released on the 25th. Peace on Earth and Goodwill To Men. Today, Christmas season seems to start in October. It's not the same.

Anyway, in my town, in early December, the two big (relatively) department stores (Simpson Sears and Eatons) would set a part of their floor-space aside for a ‘toyland’. They would make separate rooms of it – not just have a certain few aisles devoted to ‘Christmas things’. So, one would walk through the enchanted door and the ‘real world’ would disappear and a magical one – to the eyes of a child – would appear.

There in that small enclave, the imagination would run riot, and children’s eyes would grow large with the thoughts that some of this breath-taking array might find its way into their homes … and then, oh what fun would be had!

Ah, but I bring this up not to speak of Christmas, nor of the imagination (something without which we writers and readers would know a drearier world). No, I bring it up because of the man I saw in the ‘Toyland’ one day when I had come to feast my eyes on what might be.

With hindsight, he looked to be in his mid-twenties to early thirties. At the time, I only thought of him as ‘a grown-up’. And he had such a look of joy on his face as he looked around. And he smiled at me in passing. No more. Just a smile of recognition of a like soul in a magical place, perhaps. Or, perhaps, he thought of his own children when he saw me. I don’t know. I didn’t know him and never – to my knowledge – saw him again.

However, I remember his smile. And that smile, the look of quiet joy, has affected my life ever since. Perhaps more than anything else, it said, ‘This state of joy can exist’. This man – if he still lives – may be as old as 90, though I suspect something less. He will never know what he did for me in those few seconds, and how it lasted for 50 years.

Just a smile.

While working on the Distant Early Warning Line in the Arctic, I dove into the site’s ‘library’ during my off-time. We had collected lots of books – from various genres – that the Company had sent up on regular basis over the previous decades. Being a somewhat voracious reader – and having little else to occupy my off-time – I quickly went through those books of my own preferred genres (SF and History) and went on to other books including Mystery, Horror (not many), Westerns, and even Romance.

One day I sat in the ‘library’ reading a – to me – inconsequential book that had not much to offer other than a way to pass some time. I didn’t think overly much of the writing, the story, or anything else about the book. Within a week, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the name of the book or the author. However – and this is a big ‘however’ – one sentence in that book was just the sentence I needed to read at the time. It spoke to me in a way that it probably wouldn’t today, thirty years later. That author, whoever he or she is, presented me with a gift that s/he will never know was given. I no longer know the sentence, nor do I remember what it was about or why it had such an effect on me. But it did, and I am grateful to the author for writing it. It helped.

Just a simple sentence.

About fifteen years ago, my mother died, leaving me as executor of her will. One of my jobs as executor entailed the closing of her account at the local Credit Union. I presented my documents and one of the staff aided me in filling out the paperwork and tidying up my mother’s affairs at that institution. She (the staff member) treated me kindly and gently, helping to make it a painless, quiet closing of this aspect of my mother’s life. I appreciated it in a way that she probably didn’t realize.

Subsequently, whenever I went into that branch of the Credit Union to transact my own business, I would look around to see if she was there – and she often was – and I’d think of the kindness she had showed me and silently thank her. 

Just a simple kindness that cost her nothing. But I remembered, and she would never know this … no, wait, that’s not true.

About 10 years after my mother’s death, that woman was my teller once again. And I decided to act on the idea that had begun building in me over the previous six or so months: I should tell her.

Thus, after transacting my business, I explained how her kindness of that time had remained with me, how I remembered it – and her – over the last ten years. She looked at me and said, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that today.”

Just a simple act of kindness that cost me nothing.

She retired shortly after that, and I’ve not seen her again. But at least I’ve consciously returned something for the smiles, for the words that others have written, for the acts which, unknown to their authors, have made a difference in my own life.

And I know it continues, for some few have informed me that things I’ve said or done in the past – mostly not even remembered by me – or words I’ve written have likewise affected them. A casual word, a smile, a small kindness, holding the door open for someone laden with parcels can mean (to that person at that time) much more than just a smile, a casual word, or a small kindness would normally do.

We don’t know the lives of others; we don’t know what may help them in a bad time; we often don't even know they are having a bad time. A small act of kindness, a simple smile of recognition of just another person sharing this world may help that person on their path. Who knows, it may literally save a life. And we’ll likely never know.

It Ain't the Money

It takes me roughly 400 hours to write, edit, proof, design and create a cover, and get a novel ready for publishing. That doesn’t count time thinking about the work when I’m not actively writing it – like when I’m at my job, driving, lying in bed, etc., and have a few minutes to consider what’s happening, what I want to happen. That’s a fair investment of time and effort.

It has now been a month since I published Book 2 of the Yrden Chronicles, “Trading for a Dream.” The first month of a book’s sales on Amazon is usually the best month. For those who are interested, I ‘sold’ 37 copies of it on Amazon in that month (it’s exclusive to Amazon for the first 3 months), and had the equivalent of about 10 copies read through Kindle Unlimited. Give or take, this means a ‘profit’ to me of about $90 – or about $0.23/hour’s work. I’ll need to sell another 1950 books to get me up to what I’d make in a minimum-wage job. Book 1, “Trading For the Stars”, has sold about 430 copies in the last 18 months, meaning I worked on it for about $2.25/hr. At its present rate of sales, it’ll take another 12 years before I ‘break even’ (in other words, before I’ve earned what I would have made if I’d used those 400 hrs to work a minimum wage job).

Those are the realities for a lot of us independent self-publishers. What makes us do it? Well, for me, right now, it’s Mr Telford.

I conceived of him as an intermediary between Colleen Yrden and Alan McLean in "Pelgraff". He was just there to provide a link – after all, a woman in Colleen’s position wouldn’t go visiting Mr McLean on her own. No, she’d send somebody. That somebody was Telford. He had a bit part at the beginning of the book, and I had no intention of him ever being seen again. Then, at the end of Pelgraff, I had a thought – something to tie him and McLean together. They both loved Colleen, and they both had no chance. So, Telford got a few paragraphs at the end of Pelgraff.

When I went to write “Trading for the Stars,” Telford didn’t occupy a thought. That was Clay and Colleen’s story. But when it came time for the sequel, I knew that somehow, somewhere, I’d have to introduce Mr Telford. So, recalling that McLean had seen him as a dangerous man, I decided to introduce him to Colleen early on. Thus, he got a good deal of time in “Trading for a Dream”. And now, suddenly, he wasn’t just a bit character on the side, he had become a driving force in the story – something I hadn’t expected at all.

And that’s part of the joy of writing the way I write – seat of the pants. I don’t outline, and have every detail down before I start; I just start and see how I get to the end. I know how and where the story will basically finish, but not where the journey in-between will take me – and you, the reader.

So, now, Mr Telford has become a major character, and I’ve a lot of ideas for him. I also know where he will end up, but not how he’ll get there – and, of course, there’s always the possibility of a change, should the story warrant it. But, I’m pretty sure I know the end of his story in this series.

At present, I’m working on Book 3, “One Trade too Many”, which will take us to within a stone’s throw of Pelgraff. And I’m enjoying Mr Telford’s place in that book. I’ve come to quite like the man – and I had no idea he’d even have a role when I first came up with the idea of the Colleen Yrden story. But it’s fun.

So, as long as I have my health and imagination, I’ll get to see the story take shape, develop and end. I hope that I’ll have others who will take the journey with me and read the words I write. It doesn’t look like there will be too many of them.

I’m not a great (heck not even a good) marketer. Even this blog is really more than I’m comfortable with. But, if I write well enough, those who need to find my books will find them and enjoy them, as I’ve found and enjoyed books and authors I’ve needed to find.

What keeps me going? The joyful surprises that I get by writing keeps me going. It’s certainly not the money. I admit, that I’d enjoy a little greater remuneration, but I’m stuck in the story and I want to see how it plays out.

PS: You might check the 'news' page to see where I am. I'll try to better keep it updated.