What Next? (Writing)

 

My writing desk, with Popeye "I Yam What I Yam" and my jar of tea candy. On the screen I have my usual two pages open when writing; my notes on the story to the left, the story itself to the right. Music being provided by Matthew Halsall & et.al (a radio mix) on YouTube music.

Last, but not least, what can you expect to read from C Litka going forward? A good question. Wish I knew the answer. I’ve never been one of those authors who have more story ideas than they have time to write them. I don’t have notebooks full of ideas. And most importantly, I need an idea for a story that interests me so much that I not only want to spend months exploring and developing the idea in my head, shaping it into an actual story with interesting characters with original things to do, i.e. a plot, but then go on to spend months writing it down. Those ideas are rare. Plus, I don’t want to write the same story over and over again, so it has to be different enough from what I’ve done before for me to even want to write it.

Given all this, I haven’t done all that badly; having written and published 12 novels 2 novellas, plus a short story in the last 15 years or so. Indeed, beginning in 2020 with The Prisoner of Cimlye, I’ve written and published 7 books in the last three years. That’s a pace I can’t maintain. Ideally, I plan to write and publish a book a year going forward. Ideally.

Right now my planned 2024 novel is A Passage to Jarpara, the third and final Tropic Sea story. Being the third book in a series, only the people who liked The Prisoner of Cimlye are going to read it, so it has a relatively narrow market. I’ve been working on it off and on since last fall and have some 45K words written in the first draft, probably more than halfway written. Indeed, I have only two major episodes, the connecting narrative between them, and the conclusion to write. The major hang up is that I while I have a general idea what those episodes involve, I don’t have a clue regarding the details or how to make them different and interesting enough to make it worthwhile to write them. I hope it is just a matter of getting motivated. In any event, this will be a minor novel – a very self-indulgent, nostalgic story, written only because I like the characters and the locale and wanted to revisit them one last time. Plus, I feel obliged to get Taef Lang to his university post so that he can start his long delayed career as an island archaeologist/historian. The story will be very episodic, really more of a travelogue than a novel. I’ve got 18 months to finish it. We’ll see.

I’ve explored several other story ideas in the meantime. 

I spent a great deal of time thinking about a fantasy(ish) novel. It would've been a hidden SF novel, as the "magic" would have used the advanced science = magic trope. It would feature a colony of Earth, like in Sailing to Redoubt, that has, perhaps deliberately made the settling of the planet into a founding myth, describing the advanced technology of the Founders as "magic" and outlawing it. But not all of this banned "magic" was forgotten, and indeed, the richest and most powerful families have secretly used various forms of this banned technology to maintain their influence and wealth. Our narrator would be a member of one such but a very modest family, who inherits a mansion from his great grandfather after the grandfather has been missing and declared dead. He discovers that the "ghost" of the grandfather still resides in the abandoned mansion, and that his grandfather may have been murdered, though the ghost can not say for certain... The female lead would be a woman who so nondescript, so ordinary looking and dressing that she is virtually invisible in the art show openings that she and the narrator both attend, making her extra-ordinary. Together they would solve the mystery. As with this, and the other story ideas below, the devil is in the plot, not the setting. I have to come up with a mystery story that would new and interesting, at least to me, and that has proven to be very hard. I shelved the idea for now.

Another story idea I've explored, one that I mentioned in my March update, is that of a portal fantasy novella. The idea sprang from on evening I experienced many years ago. It was spring, I was in college and it was exam time. I took a break from studying to take a long walk in the falling evening, and for some reason, that walk felt somehow enchanted – remembered and never duplicated. Nothing special happened, it was no doubt just a state of mind. But I though that perhaps I could use that experience, along with a girl I noticed on one of my virtual bus trips through London, to make a story of an enchanted evening that was more than a state of mind. But I’ve yet to come up with a plot that works, nor a setting that is significantly different enough from a thousand other stories that take readers to fairyland to justify putting it into words. I am not optimistic.

I’m also thinking about a story along the lines of what I’ve been reading recently, which is to say light novels by Molly Clavering and Ruby Ferguson set in Scotland of the 30’s & 40’s. These stories are delightful little stories of domestic life in what is now a bygone age. I don’ think I could write the same type of story, but I do like reading “small” stories of everyday life, and I like to try my hand at it. I would use post-Storms Scotland which I set A Summer in Amber in as my setting, though I wouldn’t use the same characters. My currently version has a bachelor in his late 50’s retiring in a small Scottish town and… well there’s where the idea peters out at the moment.

A new idea has occurred to me; setting the story I just mentioned in post-storm London, and then using a version of the characters I had developed for the first story I mentioned, though once again, I would have to invent a new plot as it would not involve magic of any kind. Combining story ideas seems to be my go to method of getting stories to work these days. We’ll see what, if anything develops.

The bottom line is that I write for pleasure. I like to do it every day. Since no one has hired me to write, no one owes me any money for my writings, which is one reason why I share rather than sell my stories. However, the reverse is also true; no one has hired me to write a story, so I don’t owe anyone a story. If writing stories turns into work, I won’t write them. And if I can’t come up with a story that I want to write, I won’t lose any sleep over not writing one. So while I can semi-promise A Passage to Jarpara, for sometime in 2024, beyond that, only time will tell.

On a more positive note, I still enjoy writing these posts, and I’m planning to continue to write and post pieces on this blog every Wednesday. (It's such a 2010 thing to do, you know.) In addition, I’ve just launched a new series, The Saturday Morning Post, to be released every, you guessed it, Saturday morning. It will feature my book reviews. This means that my Wednesday post will most likely be about something other than the books I’ve read. I still love to write, and if I can't dream up stories to write, I can find other things of interest to write about. (Fingers crossed.) The idea behind a writer’s blogs isn’t primarily to sell books, but to pull back the curtain a little on the person behind the writing, so that you – dear readers – have an opportunity to get to know a writer as a person one way or another. I’ll keep that in mind when coming up with pieces to post. And, as always, I’ll remind you that I welcome comments and emails from you.

The Saturday Morning Post

I am reading a lot these days. By the end of the month, I will likely have read 11 books and sampled one more. If I review all the books I read or sample, they, for better or worse, threaten to overwhelm this blog. So I have decided to break them down and out into their own post, The Saturday Morning Post. I may also include some book reviews in my Wednesday post if I have nothing else to say, but the Saturday post will be primarily for books reviews.

In the past I listed books in the order I read them, but for this post I think it would be better to jump around a bit to feature only one book, or group similar books together in a post. I will simply note the month I read the books. So where we go. Since these reviews reflect my taste in books, I will restate my tastes so that you can discount my opinions according to your taste in books.

This reviewer's taste in books:

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.

With that out of the way, let's launch this post with a new fantasy book.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence C+  (June 2023)

The first, 200K word, fantasy/ SF book in The Library Trilogy. The story takes place on a dusty world of dried up oceans with humans, humanoids, and bug eyed monsters at war with each other. It set in a magical/medieval type of walled city that lays at the foot of a mountain. The city is small enough to walk through in an hour. Bow and arrows are the weapon of choice at the start of the story, an indication of its technological level. 

Set within the mountain and reached from the city is a library containing billions of paper books from countless places – apparently including Earth – and from untold ages. This library is so vast that it is divided into hundreds of rooms many of which can be measured in miles. Librarians can spend days search for books within it, sometimes getting lost and dying in it. Books are shelved in some rooms on racks of wood, in others, metal or carved stone. And in at least one room are just piled in rows and towers, and in another, scattered like a sea. Some of these rooms are accessible, others lay behind doors that can only be opened with magic of some sort. There are magic machines in the library that can be entered that recreate the world of the book one bring into it. People can apparently live within this machine for years. Oh, and monsters that need to be killed come out of these machines as well. The vast rooms have places that can magically heal wounds. The library also has a staff of magical robots of various sorts and shapes, like crows, dogs, as well as humanoids. Some appear to be broken, others serve the human librarians, sometimes. Oh, and the robot “blood” can open sealed doors. And last but not least, there is a section of the library where one can travel back and forth in time at will – even becoming a flying ghost when visiting the past. This part of the library will also create any illusion that one wants. As you can see, it’s a magic library. Anything goes.

The plot involves the city outside of the library being under increasing pressure from their traditional enemies, a humanoid race from somewhere, who, over the course of the decade which this book covers, close in and eventually gather in the desert outside the walls of the city with the intent of sacking it, for some reason. Only Lawrence knows what this army has to eat while camping in the desert outside of the city for years, and he isn’t saying. As the enemy closes in the city’s scientists begin to use the books in the library to design and build new weapons like rifles, to defend themselves. And nail polish. The final fifth of the book involves on extended battle/action/danger/chase sequence in which we also get dramatic plot twists, revelations, magical rescues and heroic sacrifices, as well as a metaphysical explanation of the library’s purpose that may, or may not, make any sense. It didn’t to me, but that might just be me, I was doing a lot of skim reading by this point, as I found it tedious reading.

The story is told in close third person, with two point of view characters. One is Livira, who begins the story as a 10 year old child refugee from the dried up sea bottom desert whose boldness gets herself assigned to the library. Over the course of the books she grows to become a young woman and a bold and curious librarian. The other point of view character is Evar, who is one of four children, raised by two of those robots, who have grown up to adulthood within one of the miles wide rooms of the library, trapped by doors that do not open. Each of his two “brothers” and his “sister” have great skills taught to them by the book that went with them when, somehow, they entered that machine I previously mentioned as children. All except Evar, our point of view character, who remembers nothing about his experience and has no special skills as a result. As a result, we don’t get to know much about how this machine works.

I am fairly certain that fans of fantasy will find this book very enjoyable given its sweeping scale and plenty of action. Indeed, the only reason why I ordered it up from the library is that it was getting almost universal rave reviews. However, as you can gather from my grade, I was less than impressed, and gave it the “+” mostly for ambition. However, I did read the whole book – though as I said, by the long action sequence at the end, I was skim reading parts to get to the outcome.

I enjoy Livira as a character and found her story far more interesting than of Evar’s. In the chapters featuring Evar, Lawrence kept repeating the same story of their origins over an over again, sometimes within a page or two, but only that story. And in that, I seemed to see the hand of the author deliberately withholding or dribbling out bits of the more complete explanations for the sake of using it at some other point in the story. He was keeping secrets for his own purposes. While not exactly cheating, I found it to be a peak behind the curtain of the story to glimpse the craft behind its construction, which took me out of the story a little.

I’m not a visual person, so that intricate action scenes don’t work for me. I can’t picture them. I find them tedious reading and if they’re long, I’ll skim read to the end. All I need to know is the outcome. I mention this because I had to slog through or read several long sections of wandering around the library discovering mysterious things, plus, as I said, skim read nearly100 page at the end where everything comes together for a conclusion that, in the end, mostly just sets up the next book in the trilogy. Don’t expect a complete story here. It serves to introduce characters and setting up the next one.

I also found the library to be more of a plot device than a believable, organic, or even fantastic reality. The metaphysical/biblical explanation of it made no sense, at least to me. And, well, It seems to be the case here, as with most fantasies, that an author can create anything they care to, and then explain it away with an airy sweep of a hand saying it’s “magic.” Moreover, the world beyond the library is barely sketched it, with little thought put into it, such as, as I pointed out previously, how a barbarian army can lay siege to a city for years from a vast desert – or why. One can only hope that in the next volumes the world beyond the library and its place in it becomes more, dare I say, realistic. Alas, I don’t think I care enough to find out.

Extra bonus book... 

Agent Zero by Jack Mars DNF  (June 2023)

A widowed college professor is kidnapped. The kidnappers, in searching for answers they believe he (unknowingly) possess find and remove a small device that had been surgically implanted under the skin behind his ear. With it removed, he is flooded with memories and abilities that had been blocked from a previous career as some sort of secret agent… 

I am undecided about this book. I wasn’t in the mood for another thriller, so I did not read on beyond this point, but I have nothing negative to say about it, as a thriller, at least so far. I may return to it if or when I am in the mood for a thriller.

What Next? ( Publishing)

Next up for review is my publishing business. It is a business, and as such, it perhaps more than anything else is affected by the underlying reason for these introspective accounts. And that is, I ain’t young anymore. I’m 73, and while I don’t have my foot in the grave just yet, the time for long term planning has passed me by. If I was 20 or 30 years younger, I could perhaps look on my publishing business and decide to try things different things. But I have neither the energy nor the time to change much, and to be honest, no desire to.

I have only recently come to fully consider publishing as a distinct activity, rather than an extension of my writing, but even so, from the very beginning, I had to consider my products. My books are passion projects, not commercial ventures with any sort of mass market appeal. This being the case, I felt that spending money on promoting them would likely lose money. And the money I'd make without spending money to promote them and/or the money I'd leave on the table by selling my books at cost – wouldn't be enough to change my life in any meaningful way. Given these facts, I opted to use the most efficient and laziest method to sell them, i.e. to sell my ebooks at my cost in every available outlet as free ebooks, using their FREE! price alone to promote and sell them. Some might consider this cheating, but I consider myself the Aldi of publishing, a discount publisher. In the last eight years I've sold over 74,000 books which I think is well above the mean number of books sold for both traditionally and indie authors. While the $600+ I've grossed from Amazon's foreign stores doesn't hold a candle to even the most unsuccessful traditionally published authors, I suspect that when it comes to indie authors who follow the "experts'" advice and “do it right”, i.e. spending a lot of money on all sorts of services to produce an ebook, even a $50 clear profit from my gross sales would still put me above the mean for indie authors when it comes profit and loss. While it is getting harder and harder to sell ebooks without spending thousands of dollars promoting them, I don't see any better alternative to my ebook sales model.

What has made a great difference in my sales was my willingness to jump into audiobooks when Google offered me the chance to do so - for free - last year. These days half of all my sales now come from audiobooks on Google’s Play Store. Had I not made that move, my sales would be declining rather than growing as they have been over the last two years. 

I can offer the Google auto-generated audiobooks on other audiobook platforms, as long as I keep them on Google. However, I would probably have to charge money for them, circling back to the fact that they would probably not sell in any economically significant numbers, so why bother?

The paper books market is a sector that I have entertained some ambitions in during the last year or two – mostly with the goal of creating a more lasting and tangible legacy than ebooks will likely provide. I was even considering spending money for that legacy. On the local scale, I toyed with the idea of offering some free sample copies of some of my books to the local bookshop. I also considered offering them into the local library. And on a larger scale, I considered offering bookshops that specialize in science fiction a free sample set of my books for them to sell. I have now abandoned those plans. Being a shy person who has successfully avoided the limelight his entire life, why risk my anonymity, however slight the risk, by calling attention to myself locally for sales that would amount to next to nothing. Plus, the library does not guarantee that they will shelve books contributed to them. My books could just end up on their sales rack for discarded books. I can give my books to charity shops myself. On the national scale, if the bookshop actually sold my books and wanted more copies, I would have to become the distributor of the books, likely having to keep a stock of books on hand to send out, since my books are not set up for extended distribution on Amazon, and Amazon takes it's time sending out author copies. Not worth the hassle. 

I toyed with making print books via Barnes & Noble's print on demand service in addition to my Amazon editions, since with the paper book files on hand, it would take little effort. I could then also sell my ebooks directly through B & N rather than via Smashword. But to what end?  B & N aren't going to carry the paper books in their stores, and my books will still be lost on their website without paying to promote them... so it hardly seems worth even the little effort.

I've found that no matter how big a publisher you are, books don't sell themselves. Selling books is a hard business, even for big publishers with plenty of money. I could, however take a page from their promotional efforts by sending paper copies of my books to "media influencers." Unlike traditionally published books, I probably could not expect to receive a review, but I do know a number of booktubers who post “book haul videos” every month or so where they show off the books viewers have sent to them. It amounts to maybe a minute of time holding the book, reading the blurb, and thanking the sender for the book in front of several thousand viewers. It is unlikely that they would read and review a self-published book as their TBR list numbers in the hundreds. Given how inefficiently social media works for selling books (it works, but you need clout and scale) I doubt that any resulting sales spike would be worth the cost of the book and shipping.

I've also toyed with the idea going back to listing my ebooks with Kobo directly, just out of curiosity to see how many of my ebooks they are selling, since they do not report free sales to Smashwords. I've done so in the past, but sales were so minor that I decided it wasn’t worth the bother of entering their sales on my sales charts, so I went back to Smashwords distribution. Still, I am slightly curious, and the effort would be small, but… being lazy… we’ll see.

Looking back at all these ideas, it seems like I'm just being lazy by not pursuing them. Maybe if I felt that I had more time to grow my publishing business, I might be more willing to try new things. But since I don't, I’m just going to stay the course. I have a business that runs itself and produces, if not money, readership, which is what I value most. No point fixing what isn’t broken.

What Next? (Social Media)

 

With eight years as a publisher behind me, I’ve been mulling over my roles as an author and as a publisher. What has changed over the years? And what hasn’t? What have I learned? And what, in light of those answers, do I want to change going forward.

One of the minor changes I'm implementing is to make this blog my main presence on the internet. I really hate doing any sort of self-promotion, and while this blog serves that purpose, it also serves to make myself available – and to some extent, real – to my readers. I see it as a two way street between my readers and myself.

I also have a gallery on DeviantArt where I post my artwork, including some of the covers I create for my books, On it I also mention my books. While this gallery does get viewers, I doubt it contributes much to sales. That is not the purpose of its, so I'll continue to post my art on it and respond to any comments as usual. Note: I do also have an art blog, but it is inactive, as I am not painting at the time, so I will not likely see any comments posted there.

Beyond these two sites, my culling of my social media footprint does not involve a great deal of change. I set out publishing my work with the expectation that price alone would drive my sales, It has. Thus, I have made only a minimum effort in (free) promotions over my years as a publisher.

While not aimed at promoting my work – the readers are all writers themselves – I have, over the last several years written some pieces about writing on a blog aimed at writers. However, I find that I have exhausted my wisdom when it comes to writing and publishing, and can think of nothing more to write about. So I will likely draw a curtain on that project.

While not for self-promotion purposes, I have posted comments on blogs and YouTube videos. And since some of the blog post comments have links back to this blog, these posts could be construed as sort of advertising. However, I often feel that my comments end up being out of step with the other comments. This makes me uneasy, and given my unease, I’ve decided to give up commenting, no matter how tempted I am. While I’ve never gotten into the practice of “liking” posts and comments as a rule, I think I will begin to do this instead of commenting to support the blogs and videos I appreciate.

For the last two years I have entered a book in the Self Published Science Fiction Contest, with the idea of promoting my books. It was free, after all. It hasn’t worked. All I’ve gotten from them is one review, and no appreciable spike in sales. I think the only people who pay attention to it are the authors in the contest. I’m not going to do that again. However, this year I did enter a book in the Fantasy version of the contest, as it draws a lot more attention. Realistically, there is no chance my book will advance to the final 10 books, and being my only fantasy book, this year will be the first and last time I do that.

Last summer I signed up for the service known as Discord, and joined a number of Discord channels that were set up by science fiction booktubers for their viewers, with the idea talking about books and perhaps mentioning my books, since they all have sections for users to post their work. I also joined a Discord channel set up by a traditionally published author designed as a place for writers and aspiring writers to discuss their work, get critiques and such.

I discovered that Discord is basically a chat room, something that has been around for a long as the internet has been around, but something I’ve never dealt with before. I found the nature of chat, short statements often separated by replies to previous statements, too disjointed for this old man to enjoyable engage in. Moreover, most of the people in the booktuber Discord channels were a lot younger than me and were talking about books that I hadn’t read, and had no interest in reading. As a result, I had nothing relevant to say. They probably weren’t my target market for my books anyway, so there was no point in being a member of them, so I dropped out.

As for the writing Discord channel, while there were a few substantial discussions, they were still  chats, often broken up between cross postings and separated by time lags making the discussion disjointed and hard to engage in. Moreover, I noted just how easy it is for the written word, especially in casual chats, to be misinterpretation. I had to be very careful how I phrased every comment, so as not to offend anyone. And well, there was the same age problem, plus the fact that I am an author/publisher, and most of the other authors were either traditional published or aspiring to be traditional published and so they were writing stories in the contemporary style that I had no experience in. I felt that I did not have enough in common with them, nor much relevant advice to offer, so I dropped out of that group as well, as I was paying to be in that group.

Looking back on all these efforts – as minimal as they were – I don’t see any positive results as far as sales go. As they say, you have to pay to play, and I don't care to pay. Low price is what drives my sales, and given the minimal effort I put into publishing, I can’t complain about the results.

So at the end of the day, I think that this blog and my DeviantArt gallery are my two places in the social media of the internet. I do, however, enjoy in hearing from and engaging my readers and on line friends, either by email at cmlitka@gmail.com, or in a comment on this blog or my art gallery. And like every good blogger, I respond to every comment or email. I want to hear from you!

Books I Read in May (Part 2)

Payment Upon Delivery by Hackley Hammett DNF 4%

Meh. Began with a recent college Spanish major grad, Jake Williams, returning to his home in a rather dumpy West Virginia town. Jake started a fight during a baseball game he was playing in in college and that’s a big black mark against him. He’s offered a job as a salesman for a Mexican plastics recycler over the phone, and takes it, even though he can’t find any mention of the company on the web. He then flies down to Buenos Aires to meet the owner at a conference for some reason… You can guess where this is going. I don’t think I want to read about a fellow that stupid. The boxed set of the first three books were free, if it sounds up your alley.

On Hadrian’s Secret Service by Gavin Chappell C

The story is set on the northern border of Roman controlled England in AD 120. We have a Roman soldier, Flaminius who is recruited into dealing with the troublesome tribes in the north of England, with the idea of keeping them from fighting each other at the instigation of a more powerful tribe in Caledonia. Competently written, the author does attempt to recreate the world of second century Britain, It moves along, and is set in a new, for me, time period. It was not quite as evocative as I would’ve liked, but I don’t have a visual mind. What keeps it an average story is that the main characters failed to really come completely to life for me. Certainly an effort was made to make them unique and motivated, but in the end, they seemed to be in the story mostly for the purpose of the story. Which is to say that they served to move the story along, rather than the story being about them, if you get my drift. But again, not for a lack of effort by the author, they just didn’t click with me. The other knock I have against this story, is that the author felt the need to insert the hero into a great event of history and make a critical difference, though I must admit that I haven’t been motivated to do the research to see if the event in the story was actually historic. In this case, the fate of the Roman Emperor in Rome hung in balance. While this made for a hectic, cinematographic ending, it was a little too over the top for me. But once again, that’s just me. I like things that are more understated. So final verdict; don’t let my C grade keep you from reading it. I think it is worth reading if you find the premise interesting, and there are more stories involving the characters set in other parts of the Roman Empire, if you find the story to your taste.

The Sands of Truth by Richard Townshend Bickers B-

A well researched, authentic sounding account of a British officer in one of the native regiments (a seypoy regiment) of the British army in India set in 1824. It begins with the mutiny of the 47^th Native Infantry in Barrackpore, who believe that they were to be sent to Burma via ship over the sea, which they believed would cost them their souls. They were actually being shipped in boats up river to save time marching. In the aftermath of the mutiny, that included the death of some fellow officers and their families, the story’s hero, Hugh Ramsey, a lieutenant in a companion regiment at the base, some of whom also mutinied, decides to change his career, despite soldiering being something of a family tradition. He agrees to become a partner with a Calcutta merchant and take a large consignment of goods to a native state some weeks of travel up the Ganges. This native state is ruled by a cruel and murderous leader, who, unknown to Ramsey, likely had the merchant’s first agent quietly killed, fearing him to be a British spy. Complications quickly arise beginning in Calcutta which changes their agreement. On the journey Ramsey loses half of the merchandise to pirates and thugs. Then on arrival in native state’s capital, he must deal with the intricacies the of native politics with a population divided by religious believes – Muslim and Hindu, of which we are given an extensive view of.

As I said at the beginning, this reads like a well researched story, likely drawn from contemporary accounts of life in India during the 1800’s. However those accounts come from its colonial rulers, and their view of India though the lens of their prejudices. How accurately those accounts reflect the total realities of India might be open to debate. I have little doubt that the practices described in the book – caste, child weddings and widowhood, beggars, traveling dancing girls/whores, and degenerate rulers did exist, but do not offer a complete picture of Indian culture. Plus there is the attitude of the author to be considered. While certainly not anti-Indian, he does paint his India with a lot of its unpleasant aspects. And treats sex and romance in a traditional way, i.e. while it is fine for Ramsey to sleep with a native, he must marry a European, or in this case, an American. Indeed, the romance aspect is a minor one, but handled in a very unconvincing and convenient fashion.

Bickers wrote this book in 1984, and is the author of over 50 novels, mostly military fiction, and mostly about war in the air. He knows how to write, and his story is intricate and engaging, with may twists and turns. Well worth reading if the story sounds appealing to you.

Murder at the Manor by Catherine Coles C+ (for what it is)

A Tommy and Evelyn Christie Mystery story, the first of at least six such stories. A classic/cozy country house whodunit. Written in 2020 and set in 1921, the story featured the husband and wife team of Evelyn and Tommy Christie, he an ex policeman recovering from a war wound, and she had also worked in the police department during the war. He is third in line to a title and an estate, and she the daughter of a retired MP, i.e. both with an upper class background. She helps makes scones in the kitchen, making this a cozy mystery. The story has all the tropes you would expect in a mystery set in an English country house, a murder, a flock of suspects, all with motives, bumbling constables (largely off screen in this story) that ends with a gathering in the study where Tommy and Evelyn explain whodunit. You probably shouldn’t waste any time detecting yourself, as Tommy and Evelyn, despite their name, not on the level of Agatha. Just go with the flow. If this sounds like your cup of tea, you should find it enjoyable.

Windrush by Malcolm Archibald B

This is book 1 of the Jack Windrush Series. Another story set in South Asia, this time in Burma in 1852. In this story opens in England with Jack Windrush, the funeral of his father, General Windrush. He expects to join the British regiment that his family has always joined, but instead, for his mother purchases a commission as an ensign in the 113^th Regiment, a regiment of ill repute for him, sending his younger brother to the family’s much more prestigious regiment. Jack’s regiment is stationed in India, and after traveling there, is given an independent command of a dozen men to serve in a war in Burma, and there, after a battle is sent on a mission to track down a cruel dacoit band (bandits) possibility led by a renegade British soldier.

I found this to be a petty entertaining book. It seems that between the Lonesome Dove saga, The Sands of Truth, and this book, I’ve been meeting some pretty cruel and bloodthirsty characters. I am not sure of the allure of writing these characters. Is it for historical accuracy or simply for thrills? Or both?

This is the first book of a long series – something like 15 books – covering Jack Windrush’s career as he moves up in the ranks of the Victorian era British Army while serving in its many wars, big and little. I enjoyed this book more than I did the Sharpe book I read, though, in this first installment, it doesn’t reach the heights of the Flashman saga.

The Lion At Sea A Kelly Maguire Thriller by Max Hennessy B

The story opens with Kelly Maguire as an ensign in the Royal Navy in 1911 and follows his career to the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Along the way he serves aboard a cruiser in the North Sea at the beginning of the war, in a submarine during the Dardanelles campaign, and aboard a destroyer during the fleet action known as the Battle of Jutland. This is the first of a three book series that was first published in 1977. Max Hennessy is the pen name of British novelist John Harris, who wrote some 76 novels under various pen names in various genre over a long career. I enjoyed this book, though it features the, serious, fearless, never say die hero for which George MacDonald’s Fraser’s anti-hero Flashman is an antidote for. I have long been a fan of the Royal Navy. Back when I was a teenager, my friends and I engaged in a naval race of our own. We each purchased 1:1200 metal models of WW2 warships of the fleet that we had chosen to collect in order to fight sea battles on our basement floor. We used rules invented by the SF author, Fletcher Pratt. I had chosen to built a Royal Navy fleet, which I still have, while my friends built the American, Japanese, French, and German navies. This is the second free book I’ve read which is a reissue of a book written 50ish years ago and are being used to draw readers into these older series books. The quality is there, making them a very good deal. Will I spend £4 for a digital copy of the next book? Well, no, but if you're not as cheap as me, the next book covers the inner war years from the Russian civil war and then on the China...