The Founders' Tribunal Art and Blurb

I'm being lazy with this time around with the cover of The Founder's Tribunal. I'm using a piece of art I had painted years ago. Since it is going to be an ebook/audiobook release only, I don't need to have a piece of art that wraps around to the back cover. (Although both pieces of art I considered, could be used to wrap around.) And, well, ebook covers are mostly only seen in thumbnails, so I'm not going to paint a special cover for a thumbnail.

Above is the complete painting for the alternative version of  the cover for The Founder's Tribunal that I considered. As you can see, being a landscape painting, I had plenty of room to frame the cover. Below is what I used for my trial cover, but it could've been adjusted right or left if I care to.

However, below we have the complete painting that I used for my first, and likely final version of the cover. It too was painted in landscape and the focus can be shifted for the cover as well.

Since first posting this cover, I have altered the cover slightly, zooming in on the painting, i.e. enlarging the scene I've chosen to focus on. That original post now features this zoomed in version as well. There were pros and cons for both versions, but in the end, this is the cover I have decided to go with, since it best captures the mood of the minor scene it is meant to illustrate.

I usually go for mood. If I do illustrate a scene or setting, it won't be a dramatic one. I don't paint drama. In this case of this cover, it is meant to "illustrate" a meeting Red Hu has with Lorivel Carvie, and Carleesa Trilae at Red's old law office, located in an old residential borough of Celora on a snowy winter's morning. As such, both paintings work, more or less, for that setting. 

So what's the story about? Well, below is my current blurb for The Founder's Tribunal. As usual, I don't like to do more than a tease the story in my blurbs. I'll no doubt talk more about it after its release.

In this sequel to The Darval-Mers Dossier, Redinal Hu finds himself once again playing a small, but perhaps dangerous, role in the Great Game.

When Red’s former colleague and good friend, Lorivel Carvie, calls and invites him to dinner – her treat - Red suspects it’s more than a social get-together. As much as he wishes it was. And, as it turns out, he was right.

Lorivel’s cousin, Carleesa Trilae, is the private secretary of their great grandmother, Penlane Trilae, the First Minister of the Commonwealth of Lorria. The First Minister has received a summons to appear before something called the Founders’ Tribunal to defend her administration against charges that she is not following the founding principles of Lorrian society. What this Founders’ Tribunal is, and who’s behind it, is a mystery. The Minister believes it to be a ploy of a cabal of Great Houses. Nevertheless she is determined, even eager, to face this secret tribunal and let them know exactly what they need to do if they want to maintain the founding principles. Her great granddaughters do not think this is a wise idea. They hope to persuade her to accept Red Hu as her legal counsel and bodyguard. 

Well, Penlane Trilae hasn’t remained First Minister of the Commonwealth of Lorria for over half a century by being timid. So it’s on to plan two.

The Founders’ Tribunal is a 25,000 word novella set several months after The Darval-Mers Dossier. Set during the troubled times leading up to the Second Founding, this story is his first outing using his alias, Red Wine, a gentleman for hire. The story is set in the same world of Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, but in an earlier historical period than those two novels.

The Founders' Tribunal is now up for pre-order on Amazon for $1.99 Its release date is November 6th, 2025. It will be released as a free ebook and audiobook around that date as well, in all the usual ebook stores. More on the story, and hopefully, news about a third Red Wine story, as its release date gets nearer. Stay tuned.

 

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 136)

 

In this installment I an reviewing one of the "booktube darlings," which to say a book that most of the people who post videos on fantasy books praise as a masterpiece. Given my track record of being out of step with the taste of the booktubers I watch, and popular opinions on books in general, I approached this book with some trepidation. It had a lot to live up to. Did it?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke  F

It takes a very special book to earn an "F" grade from me. I usually don't waste my time on the books I dislike as much as this one. If it wasn't such a universally praised book, one that I was determined to discover the reason why for this praise, I would've DNF'ed it halfway through, since it was the most boring book I've ever read. However, I pushed on, skimming through it to the end in the forlorn hope of discovering the wonderfulness of it which all those reviewers assured me was present, but didn't want to say too much about it, for fear of giving away too much of it and spoiling it for readers. 

Needless to say, I completely missed the proclaimed charm of this story. I sincerely am baffled by its acclaim. Was it all a mega-joke?

No doubt, as usual, it's on me. Perhaps I found this book so boring because, as I have mentioned several times before, I don't have a "mind's eye," which is to say I can't envision things in my mind. Elaborate descriptions do not build pictures in my mind. I have to believe that the elaborate descriptions in this book conjure up a grand vision in the minds of most readers gifted with the ability to construct mental pictures. Description comprises probably half of the words of this story. I kid you not. I suppose for fantasy readers, this is what was so wonderful about the story, since the story itself is frustrating and ultimately surprisingly mundane.  The fact that I can't do so, meant that much of the charm of this book is lost on me. It became just a repetitive descriptions of places by a simple minded narrator, without context. I needed a map.

Another reason this book failed to work for me is that, despite being an artist and a writer, I have a certain practical streak in my makeup. Things in a story have to make some sort of sense for a story to work for me. As a result, one of the things I most dislike about science fiction and fantasy, is when the writer comes up with some fantastic, mind-blowing concept, untethered to any sort of reality, and then just runs with it, building a scaffolding of a story and characters around it, simply to flesh out this fantastical concept. I feel that's the case with this book. The setting and story are simply a way to dress up a vague metaphysical concept. As a result, I simply could not, for even one instant, suspend my disbelief in the setting of the story, even with the magical explanation of it in the text that tied this world to our real world. It made no sense to me, especially as it was represented. And as I said, we spend half of the book exploring this concept-inspired, non-sensical place which we are expected to believe actually exists alongside our everyday world. We're dealing with a portal fantasy here, folks. Sorry if that's a spoiler.

The next sore point for me, is the first person narrator. He is one of those unreliable narrators who has amnesia, so neither he, nor we, the reader, learn his real nature until the end of the story. Throughout the story he narrates the story with child-like naivety, describing every little (unimportant) thing and every action in minute, and tedious, detail. As he begins to discover new things as part of the plot, the reader soon comes to know more about is going on than the narrator due to his amnesia and naivety. Thus we are doomed to listen to him slowly figure out all the things we already have figured out, while trying not to yell "Get on with it!" to either him or the author. 

And lastly, however imaginative the setting is, the writing, I found, to be, though  detailed, flat and tedious in its presentation. I felt no spark of life in it. Years ago I read her other famous novel, Jonathan Strange & Norrell, and in my memory of it I seem to recall it was pretty dull reading as well. Colorless is the adjective I would apply to her writing. Elaborate, but dull and tedious, without any wit or charm. I not a fan of Susanna Clarke's writing.

So what about the story, you ask? Well, the narrator, known as Piranesi lives in a vast series of great halls that are filled with statues; endless miles and miles of these great halls. And statues. Some of the halls are flooded; seas and lakes. They have fish, and birds, and seaweed, but for some unexplained reason, no plants or trees or other animals, at least in the part of the halls Piranesi has explored. Likely because they would be inconvenient for the author if she had to have Piranesi dealing with lions, tigers, and bears. Oh My! 

Piranesi spends his time - years - exploring and mapping these halls; the reader gets to know them quite well, as I said, half of the book is descriptions of them. Once a week he meets with the only other human (alive) in the halls that he knows of. This fellow is searching for some magical powers he believes are in these halls. This fellow brings familiar items from our world to give to Piranesi, items that Piranesi seems to recognize what they are, despite the fact that he has no memories of the mundane world that he came from. (Sorry, that's a spoiler.) All he remembers is his life in these halls where these things don't exist. But despite the fact that he is supposed to be very curious, exploring and mapping all these halls, his familiarity of these other world items and their origin never seems to strike his curiosity, or stir memories at all. Hard to believe.

Throughout the story we, along with Piranesi, gradually learn bits and pieces of his back story, mostly via notes that Piranesi himself had written in his collection of notebooks. The earliest entries, ones that he wrote before he came to live in the halls and forgot who he was, tell, or at least hint of the backstory. For some reason, likely the convenience of the author, he hadn't been curious enough over the years, to have gone back and read his older notebooks before, so it's all new to him. And, as I said, the reader is soon well ahead of him in figuring out what is going on. 

None of the reviewers ever wanted to say anything about the story for fear of spoiling it. The truth is that, if you strip away all the halls and statues, the story of Piranesi is a very mundane one. A dark academia story. While it is my policy not to talk too much about the story, I probably have said more than most reviewers have already, so I'll leave it at that.

Piranesi has a 4.22 star rating on Goodreads with over 400,000 ratings, so people must like it a lot, or a whole lot of people are in on the joke - or afraid to admit they fell for it. I seem to be in the 1% of readers who don't get it's charm and would rate it 1 star. Even discounting my lack of appreciation for all the effort put into imaging this world, I have to say, I truly don't understand the appeal of this story. I guess I didn't fall for the joke.

A harsh review, I know, but then, I had to read, or at least skim-read, the whole damn thing searching for the magic. And finding none. It made me a bitter man.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 135)

 

I found myself without a book to read owing to the one I had picked up at the library not being what I had hoped it would be (i.e. good). I was, however, waiting for another book to arrive from another library in the system, so with nothing to read and uncertain wait, I picked out an available ebook from a known author to read while I waited, and it proved to be...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer   B

Given my recent track record with Georgette Heyer, this was a somewhat risky venture, but any port in a storm. She's a fairly reliable author with plenty of books to choose from, some are readily available as ebooks from the library. This was one of those books, and it proved to be a lucky choice.

This is a historical fiction romance set in the later 1700's, before the Regency Period, and the French Revolution, when France still had a king. The premise is that the males of the Jettan family have always had a reputation of sowing their wild oats as dandies in their youth. However, they have always made a point of marrying for love when the times comes for them to settle down.  The hero of this story, Philip Jettan, is the grandson of the Jettan who build a great house in the country, when it came time for him to settle down, a house he loved. This Jettan's son, after sowing his wild oats, married, had a son, Philip, and after his wife died, he too settled into the country home. Philip, grew up in this country estate, and loved the country and country life. He didn't mind being considered a bumkin, and valued honesty and plain talk; much to the despair of his father, who wanted him to follow the family tradition of sowing his wild oats; or at least dressing in fashion and learning a little about life in the wide world before setting down to marrying a nice neighbor girl, one who Philip was in love with.

This girl, however, would also have liked to see him become more fashionable as well, rather like an old neighbor who returned to the village, as a fantastically dress, witty and charming flop. So Philip's love and his father combined, convince Philip, despite his objections, to go out and become a fashionable gentleman of the world. He travels to Paris to learn how to be a fashionable young man about town at the hands of his father's old friends. A determined man, he to meet their expectations, and succeeds in becoming just such a gentleman his lover and father seem to desire. Perhaps all too well as it turns out. Be careful what you wish for...

This is one of Heyer's light-hearted stories, laced with witty dialog and colorful characters. A pleasant, quick read. I turned out to be a lucky pick. All in all, Heyer is a pretty safe choice. Tomorrow 's EXTRA! installment will feature the book I was waiting for. Was it worth the wait? stay tuned.

Fields and Fence Lines (Part Four)

Geez, I got'a lot of limits, don't I?

This time around, let's talk about imagination. A rather essential tool in a writer's tool box. I have something of an imagination, but like everything else, it definitely has its limits; it's fence lines. And it's a pretty small pasture, in fact.

Now, I've written twenty-three books, so I'm not going to complain about my imagination. Still, when I hear of people filling notebooks with story ideas and bemoaning the fact that they'll never have enough time to write all the stories they have in their head, well, I'm not in their league. I've had just enough story ideas to fill my time writing for the last 15 years, with only a few to spare, and they're spares only because I couldn't get them to work.

The funny thing is that there is not a shortage of stories that you could put your own stamp on. Millions of them. The trouble is that almost all of those stories don't interest me. And that's the key. If I were doing this for money, i.e. producing a product, that wouldn't matter. I would write the stories that research would tell me were selling in the moment. I'd write to market, and call it a job.

But as an amateur, I can afford to be picky, telling only the stories that, for one reason or another, interest me. And, as I said in my last installment in this series, I have to live with the story I'm writing in my head for six or more months, so it has to be one that I don't get bored thinking about for that long. It needs to be at least a "B" story for me.  And given how picky I am as a reader, you can see how small this pasture is.

Another limit of my imagination, and my stories, perhaps because I'm a son of an engineer, is that the stories I write have to have at least one foot in reality. They have to have a solid element of realism in them. I have no interest in writing wild, mind-blowing, impossible, or absurd stories. And that pretty much includes writing pure magic. I'll sometimes hide a science-ish explanation behind something that appears to be magic, at least from the character's point of view, but I never wave my hand and just say it's magic. I feel that's cheating.  

Because I don't have a visual mind, my settings have to be vaguely familiar, at least to start with. I have to be able to envision them - not in any great detail - but get an "impression" of them in mind. For this reason, I'm not going to be able to invent weird, alien worlds, or characters for that matter. Instead, I strive to make my worlds realistic and relatable, familiar, and yet unexplored. While I have given my readers islands floating in the air, I usually find a way to make my settings similar to my favorite historical period; the fifty years before I was born. I like to mix the old with the new, the familiar with a twist. For example, my cars are usually an electric powered Model T (well a bit little more modern, but you get the idea) and societies are powered by solar energy and stored in high capacity capacitators. My weapons are mostly non-lethal. 

I usually write my stories set in modest utopias with a nostalgic air. I avoid religion in my stories and many of my stories are post-political; an united world administered by a bureaucracy with all the rules long established. One can say that when it comes to worldbuilding, I've imagined a world I'd like it to be and have largely ceased looking for something new. I just innovate around the edges these days, voluntarily limiting my imagination, having found what I want.

As for the details of my worlds, since I can't conjure up more than an impression of a scene, much less a world, I construct them from I know from life and perhaps more importantly, from some sort of impression of the real world from my readings. For example, I have an impression of the South Sea Islands of the Pacific from reading books set in them. I used those impressions to set my Taef Lang stories in, but I dotted my south seas with islands, so that you're never out of sight of an island or two in order to make it more interesting, and more convenient for things to happen. Plus, I used all those sea stories I've read for my settings on the boats. And this method, using what I know or have read, and then designing the world to suit the story I have in mind, is true for all my worlds. 

Once I have a world in mind, no more than an impression and mood, I proceed to build it out, one concrete object after another, as I, and my characters move through it. While I can't quite picture scenes, I can imagine what items might be expected to be on stage, so to speak, and add these items to the scene, not so much "seeing" them in my mind, but rather knowing they would be there, and then constructing them in concrete terms as I go along.  This is pretty much how I paint my pictures as well; constructing the scene as I go along, from little more than an "idea" rather than a picture.

Another limit is that I write the stories I want to read, the way I want stories to read. For example, I don't care to write dark, grimdark fantasy, or horror stories, if only because I don't want to live with them in my head for months. Nor do I have any desire to read them. And there are no doubt many other types of stories I either don't have an interest in, or the imagination to write. 

And on the other hand, there are some stories that would, in theory, require less imagination than I like to use in creating my stories. For example, contemporary fiction. For me it's a been there, done that (even if I actually haven't) feeling that doesn't interest me. Historical fiction falls into this category as well; though more because of the need to conform to known facts, and having to do the research necessary to make the story fit history accurately. I'd rather invent what I need for the story, unconfined by history, then be handcuffed in storytelling by existing facts, especially since my favorite period corresponds to the early 20th century, where too much is known. Plus, there are too many wars to work around.

Characters are also limited by my imagination and personality. I do not base my characters on any real people, and so, not being a student of humanity, my characters are rather limited. Save for my narrator, I don't go deeply into their thoughts and motivations, though I try to make them more than plot devices. Even my narrator is only pleasant, but bland character, without deep thoughts and powerful emotions. The variety of my characters is also limited. I look on them as actors under contract in the old movie studio model. Like it or not, I seem to have this stable of actors in my head. They play different roles, with different names, in different stories. But like the stars of the old silver screen, even as they play different roles, there remains the essential, individual character of the actor in every role. And thus, my characters and the narrator of my stories, no matter which one, are rather similar to every other ones in all of my stories. 

And while some people can see some of my attitude in my stories, I can assure you, I'm not the narrator, nor do I want to be. Any similarity between me and my narrators is a result of the limits of my imagination, and the fact that I approach writing organically; my stories are written as if by the person experiencing the story. Essentially I am telling the story as the character, but like an actor, that character is not me. Anything anyone might see of me in the character is just the residue of the actor playing the role.

So, summing things up. I have just enough imagination to write a story or two a year, and no more. I keep my stories grounded in reality, using as much as real life imagery as I can to fill my stories and, hopefully, make them seem real, while avoiding enough everyday reality to transport my readers someplace else. And when I've found what I'm comfortable with, be it characters, the world, the technology, and the society, I don't go further. I'm content to graze within the pasture of my limits.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (134)

                      

In this week's second episode we take a stroll down memory lane. Or rather a hike... or maybe a safari. We're traveling more than sixty years back down memory lane as I reread one of my pre-high school era's favorite books. I first read it as a library book, though I picked up a mass market paperback some years later, and reread it again. So, without further ado...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Starnan Jones by Robert A Heinlein  C (This time around)

A "C" is actually a fairly good grade for a juvenile written in 1953. As I said in the lede, it was perhaps my favorite science fiction story of my early youth, though when I reread it in my late teens, even then I can remember thinking that it didn't measure up to my memory of it. And knowing this, I went into this reread with muted expectations.

Let's get the story out of the way. It concerns an orphan in the Ozarks whose stepmother remarries a brutal man, and the title character, Max Jones, wisely heads for the hills, taking with him his late uncle's secret navigational books of the Astrogators' Guild, i.e. the people who navigate ships in space. His uncle had promised to nominate for that guild. (All work on Earth being controlled by guilds.) He meets Sam, a kindly hobo, who, while Max sleeps, steals the books and his ID. Max continues on to the space port and confronts the Astrogators' Guild. Though they are willing to help him find a guild and give him some money,  they won't accept him into the Astrogators' Guild. Plus, he learns he's not the first Max Jones who has just showed up. Rejected, he meets Sam again in the space port. Though he has some ill feelings towards him, he lets him talk him into using the money he was given to create false records so that both of them can join the crew of the passenger starship Asguard. This works and they become members of the purser department. What follows is the star-crossed voyage of that ship, and Max's advancement on board, due, in part to fact that he has a photographic memory, and thus can remember ever digit printed on those Astrogator's books he inherited.

Looking back now, I can see many aspects in this story that have remained a staple in my reading life. One can wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg, Starman Jones or a propensity for stories about ships.

Starman Jones is essentially a sea story set aboard a ship in space. In it are all the elements of a sea story, including (spoiler) a cursed ship and shipwreck. Ships in space - real ships, not little one-man UPS Trucks in space have always been in my wheelhouse. I wrote those stories myself. And I have always loved sea stories as well, though those came afterwards. I don't think there's a cause and effect; I think ships just appeals to me, though you won't get me on one.

The second element that this Heinlein book offered, that may have appealed to me back then, is just a hint, mind you, a hint of romance. These were written for young readers, and during this stage in his career, Heinlein had little use for, nor likely did his editor, for girls and romance. Nothing comes of it, and it's rather ham-fisted in its presentation, but it's there. A romance has always been a welcome feature in my favorite books - Edgar Rice Burroughs always had one in all of his stories.

In short, it was entertaining to see how closely this story hewed to my later taste in books.

Heinlein's Earth was also very interesting, in a strange way. At the start of the story we are introduced to "trains" that fly through the air, guided by rings on towers, as well as levitating 200 feet long trucks that travel at 200 mph, and yet Max was working the family farm plowing fields behind mules. There was something like TVs, but the star ships had nothing more complicated than cameras to take sights on stars and books of calculations used to navigate; values of which had to be fed to the astrogator who steered the ship to a certain "folded" spot in space to cross lightyears in an instant. While 1953 is a pretty long time ago, I am pretty certain that even in 1953 most farmers were using tractors.

It was also interesting to see that even at this point in his career, he was getting up on his soapbox and sprinkling his libertarian philosophy throughout the story; self-reliance, anti-government, or in this case anti-guild, honesty, at least when confronted, duty, and self-sacrifice. There were, however, no mention of female crew members at all, much less female officers. Women just were meant to be wives. That came through pretty clearly since Max's almost-girl-friend, a planet's junior chess champion's only goal was to get home and marry the man she loves.

By and large, it could've been worse, but I have no desire to revisit my youth again any time soon.

The Saturday Morning Post (133)

  

This week we have another Georgette Heyer book, however, this time, as I teased in an earlier post, we have one of her mystery stories.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer  C+ 

This is a typical 1933 English country house murder mystery. Our amateur detective is Frank Amberly, a barrister, who is said to be the rudest man in London, and not without reason. One evening Amberly gets lost on his way to his uncle's country estate and discovers a young lady standing next to a parked car. A car with a bullet hole in it, and inside, a butler with a bullet hole in him. The lady, Shirley Brown, has a automatic in her pocket, but it does not seem to have been fired. She proclaims her innocent of the deed. Amberly believes that... but what was she doing just standing there? In any event, he leaves her presence out of his report to police, and begins to investigate just what happened and why. And so begins a rather long and elaborate murder mystery story.

The story was fine enough for what it was; a classic English murder mystery with plenty of twists and turns. Perhaps too many, and too long for my taste. And it also cheats, as we are never told what Amberly is up to in his investigation, nor what he is thinking. We are left, along with the poor police sergeant, trying to figure out what Amberly is up to. It also has, what I consider, the great failing of murder mysteries in general; a series of connected murders. Three in total in this outing. If you have to keep tossing in a new murder to keep the story ticking, you haven't constructed a compelling murder mystery. But there you go; as I said a typical classic murder mystery. While it is well written with some amusing dialog, the characters are all just off the shelf, and Amberly, is indeed, rude and unlikable, and so it lacks some of the charm of the best of these classic stories. Still, it's better than any of the modern attempts to recreate this type of story. Perhaps simply because it is a product of the time, a contemporary story that the author didn't need to research Wikipedia to write. It gets the period right.

Bottom line; it was fine, but I could put it down at any time. I'll only add that I'm not much of a murder mystery fan, so you might want to factor that into my conclusion. If you are a fan of classic whodunits, you will probably not be disappointed by this story.

I might try one more of her mysteries. We'll see.

Auto-narrated Audiobooks; "Garbage?"

I recently watched an YouTube video by an angry self-published author/small press publisher, John G Hartness, on the current controversy concerning Amazon's new audiobook royalty plan. Long story short; it will lead to less money for authors. It's a convoluted plan that I'm not going to get into it here. However, in this video he called auto-narrated books "garbage" after trying one that he didn't like; it had wrong pauses and emphases. Plus, he apparently considers it generative AI, which he hates. He went on to paint a picture of AI generated books with auto-narration flooding the audiobook market.

I was tempted to comment, but decided against it, since he said he would delete comments defending generative AI. And well, it's his platform. This, however, is mine, so I'll post what would have said here, though in greater detail.

First, this fear of a flood of AI-written fiction is the "Yellow Peril" or "Red Scare" of book publishing is silly, in my opinion. Publishing a book is easy compared to promoting it. Getting a book seen by the thousands of readers needed to sell even a few copies is a very time consuming, social media focused, and expensive undertaking these days, which only works if the book is laser-focused on a popular sub-genre. How likely is it that people who churn out AI written books will turn around and spend their time and money doing what is necessary to sell those, theoretical, mass-produced books? Few people are likely ever to come across these books, if my brief experience with Kindle Unlimited is a guide, even with four million books the algorism serves up a few hundred, at most.

Though I recently came across a video where someone did review several AI generated books, so apparently some people do find them in the wild. And a few like them. So maybe I'm wrong...

... In any event, whether there are 4 million or 8 million books, it won't make any practical difference to either a reader or an author. If an author has the product, the skills, and the established audience to make money in the current market, that exposure and those skills will serve them just as well, no matter how large the pool of competing books is.

Second, is auto-narrated narration "generative AI?" I don't consider it so. Text-to-speech tech has been available for like four decades, long before generative AI was a thing. It just reads the words it is provided with, generating nothing on its own. I don't know about Amazon and Apple, but the people used for the voices on Google were hired and paid for their work. The fact that the technology has advanced to the point where it can create the impression of a human reading the text rather than a robot, is not a result of stealing anyone's work. No one owns language. It's merely a product of long research and development over decades.

As for the issue of quality, it's clearly subjective. Though I am not an audiobook "reader", I recently sampled the newly released audiobook version of the first Emma M Lion book. I found the sample all wrong. The narrator's voice did not match the one in my head, nor did her tempo, pauses and emphasis match the way I read the passage. These are the same complaints Hartness had with the auto-narrated book he sampled. In the case of the Lion book, Beth Brower, auditioned 70 people for the role of Emma. It is her Emma, and she is completely happy with the choice she made, and in the reviews I looked at, everyone else's is as well. (My daughter, however, agrees with me.) My point being that appreciating narration is every bit as subjective as appreciating a book. People love books that other people hate. I understand that many audiobook listeners speed up the narration by a factor of 1.2X to 1.8X, so it seems that many listeners don't mind Alvin the Chipmunk as a narrator. They value the story over the delivery of it.

Now this author and everyone else is welcome to their opinions. But is it "garbage"? I don't listen to audiobooks, so all i can say what is good enough, though Amazon, Apple and Google apparently feel it is.

While I don't have an opinion on the quality of auto-narrated books, I do have data. My data suggests that for my books, my readership, and my business model it is more than good enough. Over the last three years, I've sold more than 25,000 auto-narrated audiobooks. No one has complained about the quality of the narration. All of my auto-narrated audiobooks' ratings match or are higher their ebook versions. Moreover, on Audible, three of my books have ratings, which are split between the story and the "performance", i.e. the narration. They earned a 5, 4,& a 3, star performance rating, for a 4 star average. A small sample, but still, these are not free books; people paid a modest amount of money for them. A 4-star average performance is not objectively garbage.

But there was one other aspect of this video that actually angered me. In a comment, Hartness said that he wanted to "shame" writers into not using auto-narration for their books. Now, if you happen to be a cynic, heaven forbid, this sounds, well, a little self-serving. It is an example of what I'm calling "shadow gatekeeping" in the indie space these days. It's not just the hucksters, but successful authors, who are telling aspiring self-publishing authors that they really need to spend between $3,000 and $10,000 to publish their book the "right way". They need to hire editors, artists, designers, formaters, and human narrators, to insure a professional quality book. They tell them that they owe it to the readers and well, indie-publishers as whole, to put their best foot forward, otherwise they're letting down the side. Of course, if you're already successful self-publishing author, you're likely doing this already, and if you're rich enough to have that much cash on hand, which you can afford to lose, sure, go ahead, self-publish your book. Chances are you won't be around long... And don't let the gate hit your ass on the way out.

Oh, they might mention that there are cheaper ways to do this, but you don't really want to be one of the unwashed riff-raff of self-publishing, do you? As I said, this sounds very self-serving to me; the message is pretty clear; only the successful authors and the rich should release their proper books and audiobooks.

In my view the advice misses on two main points; books are sold by promoting them, all the editing, covers, etc. does nothing to address this. And second, the ebook market is not the traditional publishing market; it is the pulp fiction market, with different priorities. Story, not grammar rules the pulp market.

Of course, I'm sure that all their advice is good and well meaning. Don't let the cynic in you say otherwise.

A footnote; one comment on the post that original blog, was from a person who makes audiobooks. Amazon offered them a chance to try a beta program that would clone their voice. Presumably an audiobook could be produced with a press of a button in their own "human" voice. And then, I suppose, the human narrator could go through it to edit it to their liking, a process that I would guess would be a lot less time consuming for the narrator, who can spend 5 to 6 hours to produce one hour of narration. With this technology available, we will likely hear a lot more "human" narrators that have been at least partially produced by computers, just as we now have a lot of "human" cover artists who use generative AI as a tool to produce elements of their work and speed up production. Time is money, no matter what you do. A fellow's got'a eat. Art is a very poor career choice. 

It seems that in the 21st century, anything can be real. And anything can be unreal. You have options.