Thoughts on Audiobooks

Audiobooks are popular. They're the fastest growing segment in books sales. A lot of people consume audiobooks. I use the neutral term "consume" deliberately. Personally, I don't consider listening to someone read a book  to be "reading" as book. Stretching the word reading to cover listening is a bridge too far for me. However, I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to do so, i.e. whatever. (Or is it 6-7 these days?)

I think there are several important differences between reading with one's eyes and with one's ears that make it a truly different experience.

Now, I'm not an audiobook "reader" for several reasons that I will touch on later. So I have only a very limited exposer to the medium, and what I know about it is mostly second hand. Still I think I can say a few things about audiobooks.

The first thing that strikes me is that just listening to an audiobook, and doing nothing else, seems rare for many audiobook fans. I gather that one of the great benefits of audiobooks is that you don't have to sit down and read the story. You can be multitasking. You can listen to audiobooks while driving, doing chores, grocery shopping, and perhaps even working. You can do it anywhere. This is a plus for busy people, and I think partly explains the popularity of audiobooks. 

Contrast this with reading print books, paper or electronic, where you have to be paying most of your attention to the words. You can have music on in the background, but most of your focus is on the story, not on whatever else you are doing, because you can't be doing much else.

Comprehension aside, I think this difference is significant in that the act of reading in the case of text is primary, and sedentary, while audiobooks are often a secondary experience while doing something else. There seems to be a deliberate ranking of importance. If you don't have the time to sit down and read, you can add "reading" to whatever you are doing while listening to an audiobook. The other activity is the primary activity, with reading just adding value to it. 

Audiobook fans will often cite the narrator as an essential element to their enjoyment of the story. Indeed, it is sometimes the entire reason for picking up the audiobook.  It seems that the more creative reading the narrator can bring to the story, the more voices he or she can do, is one of audiobooks' great draws. Indeed, there are some audiobooks now that have a cast of readers to voice the different characters. Being familiar with the old radio shows you used to see offered on cassette tapes, this sounds familiar. I wonder how they work? In radio, the actors were working from a radio script, but in audiobooks, the voice actors are reading, I presume, from the book, with all the bookish things still intact; from descriptive passages to dialog tags. That would seem, well, awkward to me.

And then there is the fact that most people read faster than the narrator can read out loud.  As a result, many audiobook fans listen to their books at 1.2X to 2X times the natural speed of the narration. Apparently they don't mind listening to Alvin the Chipmunk narrating their books for them. I wonder if they speed through all the great narrators and ensemble casts as well?

As I said above, I'm not a fan of audiobooks for several reasons.

For me, what I enjoy is sitting down in my easy chair and reading a book. I might have music on in the background, but I hardly notice it, and probably don't need it. I guess I have too much time on my hands and so, I have no reason to resort to audiobooks.

I find audiobooks too slow, too tedious, and not being a fan of Alvin as a narrator. I find it is just easier to do it myself.

And then we come to the voice of the narrator. I have a "voice" in my head as I read the book. A very familiar voice. With audiobooks you must accept another voice, and it may not match the voice in your head. I recently sampled the audiobook version of the Emma M Lion books, and while I can't say that I had any particular voice in my head for Emma - I just have one voice - I knew what I was hearing was just wrong. The voice acter, selected out of a hundred candidates by the author, sounded too old and too posh for Emma, the daughter of an Irishman and raised in a cottage. I would've expected a much lighter voice for a twenty year old and with an Irish lilt to it. Perhaps you get used to it, but well... The reality is that any voice acter will likely sound different than you reading voice, and will take getting used to. If you can.

And while I've not heard any of the best narrators audiobook fans rave about, I have to admit that I find the whole idea of creating different voices for different characters to be inherently silly. The whole idea sounds to me like a parlor trick for a kid's birthday party. You just know it's someone distorting their voice, not a real character speaking - a gimmick, a lie. Plus, I think it's entirely unnecessary. I don't think I give characters any distinct "sound" in my imagination. As with Emma M Lion, their individual speech in my head is created by the way the author writes their dialog and thoughts. Nothing more seems to be needed. And I suspect that this is true for those "full cast" audiobooks as well. 

And then there is the fact that with audiobooks, unless you listen to them as you read the words, you are missing all the visual clues that text on the page gives the reader when looking at it. Audiobooks present the story as one big block of words. Yes, there are pauses and stops to break it up. Emotions can be put into words, that may help define the text - though they may not match how you would read the words yourself. (I noticed that as well in those Emma M Lion audiobook samples.) Nevertheless, I know from my own books in audiobook form, that it's sometime hard to decipher where one speaker finishes and the next one begins, so that it can often be, at least briefly, unclear who is say what without a dialog tag. Plus, dialog tags sound awkward when spoken out loud. All this is no problem on the page, what with all the visual clues in the way the sentences are set out and with the use of visible punctuation. Plus, what are your eyes doing while listening to an audiobook? Close them and risk falling asleep, keep them open an risk distractions. Little wonder audiobooks are often an axillary activity.

And for me, there is one last consideration. Given how easily I blank out music - I can't seem to concentrate on a tune for more than a minute, unless I know the words and am following along - I have to wonder how engaging an audiobook would need to be to hold my attention. And how quickly I'd loose concentration and interest in the too slow narration?

Obviously my concerns about audiobooks are not shared by a lot of readers. And I have no issues with people who like reading that way. Especially as a publisher. Audiobooks now account for up to half of my sales. 

But what about you? Do you read audiobooks?

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 152)

In this week's second post, we have a historical fiction book by one of the more popular living historical fiction authors. He's written several series, one concerning Rome, another about Genghis Khan, plus a fantasy series. None of those, however, is what I picked up. So what did I opt for?

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. 

War of the Roses - Stormbird by Conn Iggulden  DNF 57%

This is a contemporary written historical fiction book that reflects the seemingly bog standard contemporary style of writing fiction. Instead of telling just one story - how boring - authors these days, especially in fantasy, like to tell four, five, or more stories in every book, using multiple points of views. That's the case here. I counted five point of view characters used by the author just o tell the opening stages of the English civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster. 

We get the point of view of a fictional spymaster/fixer. We get young Margaret of Anjou, the 14 year old bride of the King of England's story. Plus we have a retired English archer turned farmer in Marine, France's experiences. And that of various Dukes. And for some unknown reason, the story of some random fellows murdering a magistrate. I have no idea what they are doing in this story, since the episodes seemed to have no relationship to the larger story. Indeed, I ended up skipping those episodes after that first one. That wasn't the story I picked up the book to read. 

Multiple point of view books are simply not my cup of tea, but if you like them or don't mind them, you can skip the rest of the review, and give the book a try if historical fiction appeals to you. Iggulden is a good writer, with interesting characters, assuming that you don't mind them coming and going all the time. 

My problem with stories like this is that I need a character to travel alongside through the story. If I don't have one I'm not drawn into the story. That is the case here. While it may be that an author weaves all these stories in in order to create a multi-faceted epic, I question the necessity of doing so. Do you really need them if you have an epic story to tell? I'm left wondering how boring the story would've been, had not all these random characters been tossed in to have more things happening. 

I also get the sense that by slicing, dicing, and sprinkling in all these viewpoint characters throughout the story, the author doesn't have to tell a complete story for each of theses characters. He just brings them for random dramatic parts, without the need to write a coherent story for each character. All the mundane parts of their lives can ignored, hidden behind all the other point of view interludes. I think that's cheating.

My other complaint about this book is that, after doing a little Wikipedia research myself, it seems that Iggulden is playing rather fast and loose with history. No doubt there are several interpretations of the historical events of the period for him to choose from. Still, in this book he has the truce between England and France that had England giving up two provinces to French set to last 20 years, whereas it seems it was only 23 months in real life. It also seems that he compressed timelines, perhaps for dramatic effect; historical battles may've been  pushed up 3 or 4 years - though he is careful not to state the years, or the intervals between episodes. Yes, it is fiction, after all. But then again, it's historical fiction, not fantasy....

As I said above, my problem is with its structure, not the writing. Any character I could care about appeared only occasionally and not often enough for me to keep forcing myself to continue on reading all the other parts.

The book has just under a 4 star rating on Goodreads, but the spread is pretty even between 5 and 3, with 4 being the most popular, so I take it that this book is considered good, but not great. I won't be returning to this author. Too modern.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 151)

 

Topper is a 1937 supernatural comedy movie staring Candence Bennett and Cary Grant. The story's premise is that a fellow is haunted by a fun loving couple who died in a car crash, the car in question being the one he bought. I wanted to read the novel the movie was based on.  However, I could not find that book on Gutenberg, so I picked up another of his books to read instead. But hey, while researching and writing this lede, I discovered that Topper is, in fact, available the public domain, just not on the Gutenberg Press site, so I ended up getting it after as well.

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

Biltmore Oswald, The Diary of a Hapless Recruit by Thorne Smith  C+

This 1918 book recounts the humorous experiences of the title character as he joins the navy. It is told in diary form, each with some sort of mishap or observation about his shore training in the navy.

It is a very quick, light read, each entry is something of a short comedy skit or sketch. Nothing deep. Not a lot of details about the life, just a breezy account of a rather inept young man. It is witty enough, but does not quite have the magic of a P G Wodehouse story, perhaps because there are no supporting characters. It's just Biltmore and some nameless fellow recruits, along with a goat and a dog.

Nothing to write home about, not laugh out loud funny, but amusing enough.

Topper by Thorne Smith  DNF 21%

This is that story about a haunted car. Cosmos Topper, a 40 year old banker/broker living in the suburbs feels like his life is in a rut. Well, it is. And discontented about it, so he buys a car. It turns out the car he bought was well known about town. It was the car of a wild-living, hard-drinking married couple, George and Marion Kerby met their unfortunate end by hitting a tree. The car, however was repaired, and Mr Topper buys it. Unknown to him, it comes with the ghosts of the Kerby's, who, in this story are basically invisible people.

It probably made a better movie, especially with Cary Grant as Topper. As a book, well, it suffers from my big bugaboo when it comes to storytelling - remoteness. Cosmos Topper, as well as George and Marion are just characters in a story, with no actual connection to a believable life. Ghosts aside. And while Smith tells the story with wit and insights, I never stopped noticing him telling the story. I didn't hate it, but I realized that I as forcing myself to keep reading, and that's something I do only rarely. I decided that in this case, I didn't like anyone enough to keep reading. So I didn't. 

Still, you might like it; a screwball comedy in words, and illustrations. Thorne Smith is a well regarded writer of humorous stories. He's just not to my taste.

I'm DNFing a fair number of books these days, but I think that can be explained by the fact that I am looking far and wide for books to try. I've got a couple more iffy ones on the way.

 

Links to The Founders' Tribunal

 

The Founders' Tribunal is now available. Below are links to the stores where you can pick up your copy. I will add more Links as the book make its way through the various stores.

Amazon $1.99

Smashwords FREE

Thalia FREE

Everand  FREE WITH SUBSCRIPTION 

Vivlio FREE

Apple FREE ebook

Apple FREE audiobook

Fable FREE (in app )

Google FREE ebook

Google FREE audiobook

Barnes & Noble FREE

Kobo FREE

I am not going to release an audiobook version of this story on Amazon/Audible as it is just a novella, and the minimum price I can list it on is $3.99, the same price as all my novels. I am, however, planning to release a paperback book and an audiobook that includes this story along with The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again in  Q1 2026.

10 & 1/2 Years of Self Publishing, A Report

The first half of my 11th year as a publisher has been a remarkably good one. My best ever, in fact. The three keys have been 1.) a fairly substantial catalog of books, 2.) relatively frequent releases, and 3.) the elephant in the room: the Google Play Store.

1.) My back catalog now offers 19 to 23 books, depending on the the store. (In some stores, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea have been split into a six book series in order to offer them as audiobooks on Amazon.) 

Even 10 years later, The Bright Black Sea continues to be my best selling book. Between ebooks and audiobook versions it sold between 150 and 337 copies a month over the last six months. This illustrates that genre does matter, since space opera is one of the most popular SF sub-genre. Shadows of an Iron Kingdom is set in the same universe as The Bright Black Sea and it's usually my second most popular title. However, for some strange and unknown reason it outselling the first two books in that series. My best guess is that it has something to do with its title or the Gothic vibe of the story.

Depending on the month, most of my other books sell from 50 to 150+ copies between ebooks and audiobook editions, the bulk of them on Google. With twenty-odd books to sell, sales add up. Plus, as I've mentioned before, for every new reader you sell a book to, they may go on to read more of your books, ideally, all of them. In my case, a single new reader might account for 18 additional sales. 

2.) Since September 2024 up to this week's Nov 6th, 2025 release of The Founders' Tribunal, I have released two novels, and two novellas. I plan to release a third novella with a bonus short story, The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again, in February 2026 to continue this pace. New books generate a bump in monthly sales, not only on account of the sales of the newly released book, but in sales across the board, as new releases have their own less crowded selection on the ebook stores making it is briefly easier to reach new readers and remind past readers you're still around and writing. 

I am not racing to release books for the sales. I write because I enjoy writing every day. When I have shorter stories to tell, I can write more stories, which naturally leads to more releases.

3.) My sales on Google for both ebooks and audiobooks continue to dominate all the other venues combined. In any given month, most of my books on Draft2Digital, Kobo, and Amazon usually sell in only single digits, and many do not sell at all on Amazon. I sell 8x to 10x more books on Google than any other venue. The only way I can explain this is that people read books on their phones, and there are a lot of Android phones out there, with the Google Play Store as the default book store.

I'm going to keep this simple this time around. Here are the sales by month, venue, and book type for the period May 2025 thru Oct 2025.

Monthly Book Sales May - Oct 2025

 Sales           ebooks        audiobooks     percentage ebooks/audiobooks

May 1405     779 ebooks 626 audiobooks   55.4% ebook/44.6% audiobook

June 1707    982 ebooks 725 audiobooks   57.5% ebook/42.5% audiobook

July  2040  1407 ebooks 633 audiobooks   69% ebook/31% audiobook

Aug  2084  1364 ebooks 721 audiobooks   65.4% ebook/34.6% audiobook

Sept 2007  1261 ebooks 746 audiobooks   62.8% ebook/37.2% audiobook

Oct  1796  1121 ebooks 629 audiobooks   63.4% ebooks/36.6% audiobook

                       6 paperback books sold

Total Book Sales 1H 2025  11,039  ebooks 63% audiobooks 37%

For comparison;  1H 2024 7,671  1H 2023 9,177   1H 2022 9,054 

Total Book Sales April 2015 to October 2025  114,503

Sales by Venue/ Percent of Sales. (Year 10:  May2024 - April 2025)

Draft2 Digital* 1,767     16%  (Year 10: 21.5% -5.5% )

Kobo                 118       1%   (Year 10: .5% +.5%) 

Amazon             256       2%  (Year 10: 5% - 3%)

Google           8,888      81%  (Year 10: 73%  + 8%)

*D2D includes Apple, Apple audio, B & N, Smashwords, et al. 

Revenue from Amazon sales

$36.53

The most interesting number in the data is that audiobooks only accounted for 37% of my sales so far this year, compared to 49.5% in my 10 year sales period (May 2024-April 2025) despite selling more total books this half. I have no clue as to why.

The bottom line is that I continue to sell at a midlist author's rate. Enough to keep me from getting discouraged. Of course, it is 100X easier to sell books at $0 than even $.99, so you can discount my sales as much as you care to. However, underselling your competitors is a Business 101 strategy. I sell most of my books at cost, and yet still make a tiny profit doing so, and have been doing that for more than 10 years now. I chose to value readership over pocket money, and laziness over hustling for sales. This low stress approach to writing and publishing has paid off; I'm still writing and publishing new books after 10 1/2 years in the business. Most authors, indie or trad can't say that.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 150)

 

Well, today kids, we have another story rifting off of a classic story. It seems that you can't throw a dart on a publisher's lead title list and fail to hit a "retelling." We are, perhaps, in the end times of literature. Just about everything has been written, so all we can do is go back and rewrite stories already told. Well, no one was twisting my arm to pick this book up, so I have no right to rant. Right?

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.

Wait! No, that's not the one! Mine has a talking dog, not a bustling beaver. Alas.

Toto by A J Hackwith  C

It could've been worse. This is a retelling of Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, set in modern times, with Toto the dog as the narrator. I watched the movie half a century ago, but never read the book. (Though I do often use that line in the movie when Toto pulls back the curtain on the real Wizard.) Given my vagueness, I can't speak to how faithfully this version retells the story, though, of course it has its modern twists to it. Having a snarky dog narrate the story who can talk to the inhabitants of Oz gives the book the only flare this rather prodding story has going for it. It was just enough.

It starts with the tornado and the house landing on the Wicked Witch of the East and Dorothy ending up with the silver slippers (in this story), with Glinda, the good fairy arriving on the scene and sending them off along the yellow brick road to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz for help getting home. Along the way they collect the usual characters and several more as well. As I said, I'm not sure how closely this story follows the plot of the book or movie, so let's just say they have adventures, they reach the Emerald City, see the Wizard, who sends them out to capture the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, in order to get home to Kansas.

The world building in this book is sketchy at best. This Oz feels as deep as a stage set. They seem to travel from the Munchkin village to the Emerald City in a day or two. There is no sense of distance or how they find the food to live on after the picnic basket they are given runs out. As I said, they meet Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion, each with their special twists. As with all modern stories, there is commentary on the social and political issues of today sprinkled through the story. Though, rather heavy handed, this author thankfully weaves these observations into Toto's narration instead of delivering then as lectures as was the case in that Mary Darling book. I may be the pot calling the kettle black, but for me, I found this book overlong. If it wasn't for Toto, and Crow, I wouldn't have continued on to the end. The two of them were just entertaining enough to get me to the Emerald City and back.

This book only has a 3.5 star rating, so with my C grade I'm a lot closer to the mark than I usually am.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 149)

 

This week we return to what has turned out to be one of my favorite authors of 2025. As I mentioned last week, I was at the library for the previous books, and walking through the stacks, picked up this one as I passed it by.

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

April Lady by Georgette Heyer  B+

Georgette Heyer's Regency Romances vary somewhat in intent. Some are more serious or at least more soap operaish, while others are more light hearted, even comedies. This was one of the latter. Clearly Heyer was having fun writing this lighthearted story, since it is full of sly and dry humor which are the ones I most enjoy and this outing proved to be a good one.

The set-up is Nell, a daughter of a count whose fortunes had been largely gambled away, has been the wife of Giles Cardross for a year, she, under the impression that the marriage was one of convenience. Her papa need the money, her husband needed a heir. Even so, she was desperately in love with Giles, and though she did not realize it, he with her. Prior to his marriage he had a mistress, and so she strove to be a perfect wife, expended only fondness in return. She spent more money than her generous allowance allowed her and gave some of it to her brother, a somewhat wild young man about town as well, against her husband's wishes. As a result, she had bills that she could not pay and had to approach Giles about paying them. He did cheerfully enough, without more than obtaining her promise that these bills were all of them. 

However, as it turns out, she forgot one big bill from a dressmaker who was pressing her for payment. She was afraid to bring yet another bill to him, after promising that she had given him all of them. Since she did not want to appear to have married him for his money, she, with the dubious help of her brother, set out to get the money to pay the bill. Somehow. Add to this plot line, Giles' 17 year old half-sister and ward, Letty, who is living with them. She's in love with a young man working at the foreign office - a sensible but boring young man, totally opposite of Letty. She wants to marry him before he goes off to South America as a diplomat, and Giles refuses; saying that she is too young, and her lover hasn't the fortune needed to keep her in the style she is accustomed to. It is one of those stories where two minutes of conversation would have solved Nell's problem anyway... but that wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun.

As I said at the top, Heyer's romances vary in tone and approach. All concern themselves in the romantic couple discovering that they love each other, but only at the end of the story. While not a page turner, Heyer takes her time with this story, it features her signature characters, including the noble, tolerant, somewhat remote gentlemen, young goodhearted rakes about town, and naive, well-bred young ladies.

All About The Founders' Tribunal

1 

With the release of my newest Redinal Hu/ Red Wine story just a week away, I thought I'd offer a little background on the story. However, being a novella, I can't say too much about the story without spoiling the story itself.

This story is a sequel to The Darval-Mers Dossier, featuring the main character of that story, majordomo and ex-lawyer Redinal Hu. Finding himself left to look over a large, and empty house in the wealthy borough of the Rivers, he has a lot of time on his hands. He fills some of that time by doing occasional consulting work for his old law firm, and since the Darval-Mers affair, for his friend, Roghly VonEv's private inquiry agency. Most of that work is background and legal research, though at Roghly's insistence, he's taking lessons on arms and hand-to-hand combat. Just incase.

As I said in an my last blog post about my writing projects, I came up with this story in order to bridge the time gap between The Darval-Mers Dossier, set in autumn and a different story I wanted to write that would take place the following summer. That story became The Isle House Ghost. due for a Q! 2026 release. As such, I wasn't concerned about the length of the story, I just wanted a little something to fill that time gap. I set the story in the Lorrian winter holiday period to match my planned release date in early November. It ended up running some 25K words. A solid novella, but still not long enough to make a print version of it very appealing. Thus, initially it's an ebook only release. I'm planning on bundling it, with with The Isle House Ghost. a 38.5K word novella and its 9K word short story sequel titled Nine Again. 

Besides bridging the length of time between the stories, I wanted a story that included Red Hu's good friend, former colleague, and sometimes lover, Lorivel Carvie. She only appeared as a voice on the caller in The Darval-Mers Dossier, so I had her appear in order to introduce Red to her cousin, who remains a character throughout the rest of the story.

One of the happy accidents in writing this story was that Red gains a side-kick. All good detectives need a side-kick, if only to explain to the readers what they are thinking. I hadn't really planned on a side-kick in this story. It came about as a "why not?' sort of addition as I was writing it. The side-kick's name is Ellington. We met him in the Darval-Mers story as fun-loving dog Red's retired yardman had adopted so that the neighboring children would not lose him entirely when he was exiled for breaking too many knickknacks. I used Ellington in that story somewhat as a side-kick, having Red talk out loud to, in order to organize his thoughts and speculations about the case. I wrote those scenes that way in order to make those thoughts an external dialog into shorter sections instead of big block of internal speculation, plus Ellington adds a dash of humor - at least I have fun with him. Ellington plays a much a much more active role in this story. And he's going to remain Red's faithful sike-kick going forward.

Other than that, I don't want to say too any more about the plot of the story than what is revealed in the blurb below.

I do think, however, that a little background on the story might be helpful. 

These Red Hu/Wine stories are set some 1,500 years before Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, just prior to what became to be known as the Second Founding or the Humanist Revolution. This was later stages of the period that would become after the Second Founding, the Age of Sorcery. 

The first founding was when the Commonwealth of Lorria was founded after the planet was terraformed and the passengers landed from two slower-than-light settlement ships which had sailed from our own solar system. They had traveled for ten plus thousand years to reach the planet. 

The subsequent first 1500 years saw the population slowly growing, and still featured the advanced technology of the solar system spanning society they had come from. However, one of the three settlement ships has yet to arrive, placing some limits on this technology and manufacturing capacity. Moreover, it seems that the manufacturing of key high-tech components needed to support this level of technology were not, at first, in great demand, so they were not manufactured for a long time. And when things started to break down, ten plus centuries later, it seemed that too much time had passed so that the know-how had been forgotten, and could not recovered in time to prevent a nearly complete collapse of the high tech society. At the same time, the population has reached a stage where it is growing rapidly, making the short-falls in manufacturing all the more pressing.

This then is the turning point where these stories take place. Pocket callers, i.e. cell phones, and info-systems, i.e. computers still exist, but as they break down, they are not being replaced. The question arises as to what to about the situation. The traditionalist plan is to keep the old system of production, everyone is a craftsperson, but require each item to be as durable and repairable as possible, so that new manufacturing can be focused on meeting the demands of the expanding population. The progressive faction want to introduce more efficient manufacturing methods, including human-manned assembly lines, systems of production at odds with the founding ethos of the world.

This conflict is not played out within the population, but rather within the rich and powerful Founding Families, also known as the Great Houses. Lorria is governed, such as it is, by a non-political bureaucracy, as there is universal agreement about the nature and shape of society, with no political factions. The Great Houses have, since the Founding, divided and operated this bureaucracy for the public, and their benefits, and this growing crisis has split the Great Houses into Traditionalist and Progressives camps, with the newer wealthy concerns outside of the Founding Families, divided as well. There have always been feuds and rivalries within the Great Houses as they strive to maintain and increase their wealth and power within the government and society, but as the crisis builds, these rivalries have only increased the bitterness and ruthlessness of these rivalries, so that they increasingly employing agents to do their often illegal biddings. 

The Red Wine Agency stories that I used as a plot device in Chateau Clare are the basis for this set of stories. However, I don't think I'm the type of writer to do those thrillers justice, so I have my stories featuring Redinal Hu as he slowly becomes Red Wine, gentleman for hire. The are, in effect, prequels to the Red Wine Agency series of books, set perhaps a year of so prior to Red setting up his own agency. And as such, are much more small scale affairs with lower stakes than what I would imagine a full blown Red Wine Agency thriller would feature.

So with that background out of the way, here's the blurb. Look for the story itself to be release on or a few days before or after November 6, 2024. As always, it will be free in every story, except Amazon where the ebook will be $1.99 and the audiobook $3.99

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 to 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 that takes place several months after The Darval-Mers Dossier. Set during the troubled times leading up to the Second Founding, this story is Red Hu's first outing using his alias, Red Wine, a gentleman for hire. The story is takes place in the same world of Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, but in an earlier historical period than those two novels.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No.148)

 

While I was at the library to pick up The Inn on Lake Devine, I took the time to wander through the fiction section looking for something else to read, and realizing that I should have given it some thought and written down some authors I might want to look up before I drove down to the library. I did pick up the only Georgette Heyer book they had on the shelf (coming soon) and then, still wandering through the stacks, I saw, by chance, this book. I'd read a review of this book on the blogs who had recommended The Adventures of Mary Darling, but I didn't hold it against him. So I picked it up.

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.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford   DNF 34%

This is a gritty noir detective story set in 1922 America. But not the America we know. Rather, an alternate history America, where the mound building native civilization of central North America did not decline, as it did in our time-line. Thus there is the state of Cahokia, along the Mississippi River south of Illinois that is largely made up of Native Americas from this civilization, along with a volatile mix of black and whites - the white people being very much 1922 pre-civil rights white people, and black people of the old segregated south. Lots of world building used n this story to bring the setting in time and place alive.

My problem with this book is that Spufford took every noir trope and every bad aspect of 1920's America, and then dialed them up to 11 in this 400 page plus mystery story. I wasn't crazy about the story to begin with, but pushed on reading it for another day. However, on the third day, having read 140 pages of it, 34%, and we were still only in day two of the investigation - just to give you an idea of the pacing of this story - I decided that I had enough. I didn't care about the two detective protagonist, found the world unbelievable. I just didn't feel like forcing myself to read any more.

However, having read the first third, I can say that he had indeed, introduced just about every noir feature found in the books and movies of and about the period. There's a gruesome crime; a ritual killing, whose lurid headlines dials up racial tensions in the city. Thus it has to be "solved" fast, and in anyway possible, i.e. the stakes are at 11 right from the get-go. Then toss in stock hard drinking tough-guys, corrupt cops, the good cop-bad cop trope, the squeaky-clean asshole FBI agents, gangsters and bootleggers, various mysterious rich people, the bog-standard poor losers-types, as well as the KKK on streetcorners, touring jazz bands, grim, smoke stack factories, slaughter houses, and this alien society, all jammed together in an exaggerated caricature of the 1920's American society which is largely taken off the historical shelf, but not "roaring".  As I said, it's  an 11 on the trope dial.

I found this world too unbelievable, in that the existence of this civilization would certainly have altered American history far more radically than the British author has it doing. Basically, he seems to just have dropped this civilization and its people into America of the period, with a few additions - an independent Mormon nation in the west, and Russians in Alaska. The whole set up reeks of being an artificial device designed to highlight the ills of society, with a notable lack of subtlety.   

Raymond Chandler is my gold standard for detective stories. His stories have plenty of corruption and grit, but he often uses it poetically, and keeps his stories grounded in everyday life. His writing is clever, his characters each have their  own characters. And his stories prove that you don't need sky-high stakes to make an engaging, thought-provoking story. I like clever, understated stories, and this isn't one of those. It lacked any wit or charm. It's characters are bland and do things that don't make a lot of sense, at least to me. All in all, I didn't care about them, the mystery, the stakes or the story.

While the story sounded interesting, it turned out to be a dreary slog, though, as usual, it seems to work for a lot of people, having just under a 4 star rating on Goodreads. If you are fan of gritty noir fiction, and want something different, feel free to give it a try.

As for myself, I hopefully have a more engaging book waiting in the wings. Onward.                 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 147)

 

During the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the family packed up the car to spend a month in a holiday camp in the Catskills. This was a custom of New York Jewish families throughout the most of the first 80 years of 20th century. In those days Jews were often denied accommodations at many places, so they made their own places. 

I learned all this in my search for books set in a summer camp where whole families would spend a month or a summer living in bungalow camps, returning year after year. It just seemed such a wonderful idea; spending more than a week in the wood with people you knew, doing all sorts of activities. I felt that this would make for some entertaining stories, so I searched for them. And I didn't find many. The few I did find seemed to be either mysteries or only slightly related to setting I was looking for. I suppose I'd have to find autobiographies and such of people who grew up in this tradition to get a flavor of the time. I did, however, find one book that looked promising, and it was available from the library, so I placed a hold on it. How did it turn out?

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. 

The Inn at Lake Devine  by Elinor Lipman   B

As it turned out, this book, too, did not have what I was hoping to find. I enjoyed it, read it in a day, as you can see from my grade, but except for a couple of chapters set in a hotel in the Catskill in the 1970's, it had nothing to do with the time and place I was hoping to find. 

It is, however, a story about anti-Semitism. The young narrator's mother had sent out letters looking for places to stay for a family vacation in Vermont, and received a letter from the owner of the story title's inn, implying that it was only open to gentiles. This upset the young narrator more than her parents. They took a cabin on that same lake for a couple of years after that, and one year, they adopt a different name to visit the Inn at Lake Devine to see if they could book a room, with no results. However our narrator, Natalie Marx had made a friend at a  girls' camp with people who actually stayed a week at this very inn every year, and a year later she is invited to stay with them at the inn. It turned out to be not a great week and the two girls don't keep up their relationship, having little in common, including religion.

The story then skips ahead to when she is 24 years old. She is studying to be a chef. More or less by chance Natalie hooks up with that old friend, who remembers her fondly, and invites her to her wedding. What follows is the main part of the story, involving Jewism, expectations, and the Inn at Lake Devine.

As I said, I enjoyed the story, though it was not what I was looking to read. While it explored serious topics, it did so grounded in everyday life. Family considerations - young people, gentile & Jew and family considerations - played a large role in the story and the lives of the characters And while I am not fond of contemporary novels, the '60 & 70's are remote enough to be almost historical, even if I lived through them. A nice story, I recommend it.

An October Update on My Writing Projects

 

I thought it might be time to update my legion of readers on what I'm working on, writing-wise. I'm always reluctant to talk about birds in the bush, i.e. stories I'm working on but are still at a stage where they might not work out and could be abandoned. However, once I have the first draft of a story done, god willing and the creeks don't rise, I'll see it published. Having two birds in hand, I am willing to lift up a corner of the curtain for a peek at the two, stories I have in hand. Both are potboilers.

The first story is the novella I've talked about before; The Founders' Tribunal. Save for any corrections from my beta readers, it is done and almost out the door. It's up for pre-order on Amazon for release on the 6th of November 2025 to be precise. I will, however, likely release the story a few days earlier on Draft2Digital since it takes a few days for books to be added by various bookstores. At the same time, I'll likely release it on Google as well, both as an ebook and as an audiobook. Audiobooks on Amazon will follow within a day or so of the release date, and someday, maybe, on Apple Audio as well. You never know about Apple audiobooks. This is an ebook only release.

I'm calling this story a potboiler, not because I wrote it to pay the rent, but because I wrote it just to keep writing after I set aside the novel I had started early this year. (One of those birds in the bush.) I had written some 25,000 words in that novel, only to find that I wasn't happy with what I'd written. I went back and rearranged things, but in that process, I lost a bit of enthusiasm for the story, along with having some serious doubts and questions about it. I was far from certain it would be interesting enough for anyone to read. Thus, I decided to put it aside and come back to it, hopefully with fresh ideas, and, you know, an actual plot. 

So, in order to keep writing, I decided to write another Red Hu/Wine mystery story. It didn't have to be a novel, just any sort of story - something to fill the first hour of my day when I do my fiction writing. However, the story I had in mind, was not actually The Founders' Tribunal. The story I had in mind - and it was mostly just a locale - would be set during the summer. I felt the time gap between The Daval-Mers Dossier and this story idea was too long. So I got to thinking, and came up with a little story to bridge the gap, that being the novella The Founders' Tribunal which I set in Lorria's winter holiday period, with the idea of releasing it in November, prior to our own holiday season. I am happy to say, that plan has worked out.

Then, having wrapped up that story, and not yet ready to tackle my abandoned novel, I continued on with tha tother Red Hu/Wine story. It has proven to be either a long novella or a short novel.  40K is considered a novel in science fiction, but the usual ebook novel is more like 50-60K. I'm currently working on its second draft which clocks in at 39K words with 20 pages to go this draft. It'll be 40K plus. Some people refer to going over a story as "editing" but I just consider them drafts, as I go over the entire manuscript with each draft. The process involves going through the story fixing up sentences, filling out dialog and description, etc, and if I have to fix something more major, I'll do it now, in the second draft. I'll follow this with a third draft in which, hopefully, I find nothing more to do than smooth things out few sentences here and there. If there are too many, I'll do a forth draft. These drafts only take a week or less, so things move a lot faster than the first draft, and they're a lot more fun. 

As I said, I wanted to write a summer story, and I've always wanted to write a story set in the countryside of my youth. Originally, I though this story might be an excuse to do so. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the mystery element of the story would not support a novel length story without a lot of side plots, that might come across as "filler".  Thus, I've scaled back my ambitions along those lines, fitting in just one dairy farmer's co-op picnic into it.

I decided to set this mystery story on the Isle of Autumn, which is the main locale of Chateau Clare. However, this being a pre-Second Founding era story, that island is only home to several mansions at this early date. It is mostly just a rural countryside devoted to dairy farming and making cheese, with tourist summer camps along the shore of the River Fair. 

Its title of this story is; The Isle House Ghost. 

I've not set a solid release date for The Isle House Ghost yet, but I'm thinking February 2026, in order to keep the ball rolling. This will also be an ebook only release. However, at the same time, I'm planning on releasing a paperback book titled Two Cases of Red Wine, that will include both these novellas, just for something to put on my shelf, and the selves of my beta readers.

I consider The Founders' Tribunal and The Isle House Ghost my Project 2028 (a) and project 2028(b) projects, (or Two Cases of Red Wine as project 2028) so I'm at least two years ahead of my one book a year schedule. But I write because I like to, so hopefully I can push on. But on to what?

That's the ten dollar question. And a couple of days ago I had written;

There is that novel I started. I will give it another go. It's another Lorria novel, set a year after Glencrow Summer. Once again, it has new characters, along with a cameo appearance from one of the characters from Chateau Clare to tie it to the first two. This one, however, is something a little different. It's a more ambitious book, in that it's not a mystery, nor an adventure story. Nothing or no one out of the ancient past will turn up at the end. Basically, its literary fiction, or as close to that as I care to approach that style. It's a story of ordinary people living ordinary lives, from the beginning to the end of the story. Making such story interesting to readers, is the challenge I've set for myself. We'll see if I'm up to it. 

But yesterday morning, while laying around in bed waiting for the time to get up and get working, I thought of another story that I really liked. Another Red Wine story. A direct sequel to The Isle House Ghost that would take place just a week after the conclusion of that story. I don't think it would be more than a long short story, sort of an encore for that story. But I do think it works better on its own an extension on to The Isle House Ghost. We'll have to see how long it turns out being before I decide how to release it. (Assuming I write it. This is one of those birds in the bush that I usually don't talk about.) But if I do write it, it would certainly be included in the paper version, which might then become Three Cases of Red Wine. Or maybe 2/1/2 Cases of Red Wine? And I might simply include it as a bonus story in the ebook version of The Isle House Ghost. I won't decide until, or if, I have that bird in hand.

I am, however, also toying with a substantial idea, which doesn't have any plot attached to it. It would be some sort of novel set on a new world in a city very much like London in 1930. For 50 years I've wanted to write a story set in that period of London. I've stared at least one 50 years ago. These days I don't want to set it in London, for the usual historical deterministic reasons, but I'd like to set it in a city something like London. But without a plot, it's just desire.

Well, I need to finish the last two drafts of The Idle House Ghost, perhaps write that little sequel to The Isle House Ghost, and then I'll likely go over what I've written on that abandoned novel. Hopefully I'll have enough confidence to push on with it. If not, something new. Stay tuned.