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.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 146)

 

After yesterday's detour we're back to two more adventure books from the Gutenberg Project Adventure selection.

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 Gentleman: A Romance of the Sea by Alfred Ollivant  DNF 6%

Many novels today, at least genre novels, like starting with a bang; putting the reader in the middle of some sort of action in the hope of "hooking" them into the story. Apparently this is not a recently invented technique, seeing that's what Mr Ollivant does here. With a bang. Well, that is to say, after the forward, which featured an unnamed person longingly looking across the English Channel from France at night. I suspect this person was, in fact, Napoleon.

But after that, the action begins in breakneck earnestness, starting with with a man riding his favorite horse to death, commandeering a rowboat to take him to a ship at at anchorage, which then he orders to set sail...Why? I believe a bold French spy has escaped capture and is in possession of valuable information for Napoleon and his invasion fleet across English Channel. He must be intercepted before he can make his way across the channel to France or else... I think. It was told in such a breathless style, in a series of rapid, fragmented dialogs with characters who are largely unidentified. Thus, what's actually going on, who, and exactly why, are hard to discern. At least by me. Some of the people we meet on the ship seem to know the rider, since they begin to recall other times and sea battles they share, some of this shared history seems to involved the father of the young midshipman was in the row boat when it was commandeered by the rider who rode his horse to death... I was completely befuddled by this relentless, breathless, and confusing narration right out of the gate that I threw up my hands and simply gave up trying to figure out what was going on. I'm an old man and things were just moving too fast for me, especially if the whole story was written in this style. Spoiler: I'm pretty sure Napoleon doesn't end up invading England.

The Yeoman Adventurer by George W Gough  B

This story is set in the fall of 1745 as Bonnie Prince Charlie leads his highlanders down into England to reclaim the English crown for the Stuarts. The yeoman of the title, Oliver, Wheatman, a minor member of the gentry is the not-so-reluctant adventurer. His father is dead and he feels duty-bound to look after his widowed mother, his sister, and the family's land. Thus, he can't go to war and adventure, as much as he wants to. All around him, the King's troops are gathering to meet the threat from the invading Highlanders from the north, while all he can do is go fishing. He does, and hooks a 30 lb pike, but can't reach his gaff to land the monster. A young woman, Margaret, steps down from the bridge to the river bank, and gaffs the fish for him. He learns that her father, a well traveled mercenary captain, has been arrested as a Jacobite spy, and our yeoman, proceeds to save her from capture as well from dragoons searching for her, by carrying her under the bridge. And with that, off they go adventuring across the countryside heading towards the invading Scots in order to save her father who had been sent north. What follows is an adventure story very much in the vein of a Robert Lewis Stevenson adventure, with one thrilling episode after the next.

Oliver has made an enemy of a lecherous nobleman leading a unit of the King's dragoons, who lusts after the mercenary's daughter, Margaret, and he has set ruthless people after them. Oliver gets almost captured, captured, escapes, captured again and again only to be either saved or escape himself, to eventually, join the rebellion. He gets to know Prince Charles, and becomes one of his aides. And well, it's still one adventure after the other, one flip of the coin after another, captured and saved, as he gets deeper and deeper into the conflict, and faces the hard choices, and sudden deaths it involves.

I've read some of RLS's adventures, like Kidnapped, and I have to say that Mr Gough's writing, characters, and story are up to that level of both adventure and writing. That said, it took me the better part of a week to finish this book, despite the many things it had going for it. That may well be because this isn't quite the type of story that I'm into these days. The fact if the matter is, I don't think Kidnapped gripped me anymore than this one. Still, I think I can safely say that if you like RLS's stories, you will likely enjoy this one as well.

I tried tracking down Mr Gough, and despite this story being fairly widely available, I could find no more several purported photographs of him, that you can buy framed, and a description of him as an early 20th century British novelist. It seems he wrote at least two more novels, Terror by Night, (1922), and A Daughter of Kings, 1930, as well a several books on politics.

As a wild young novelist?

Or an elder political commentator?

The Saturday Morning Post (No.145)

I haven't seen the movie, but why not read the book? I ordered the book from the library, and it showed up sooner than I expected. So here we go...

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 Princess Bride by William Goldman   DNF 19%

A dumb book. Okay, I thought it was a dumb book. Still, it's a dumb book. A joke is a joke, but when you repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it, and then advise readers that if they don't like it, they don't have to read the remarks in the parenthesis, I took Goldman at his word, and in the spirit of skipping what I grew weary of reading, I skipped the rest of the book. Actually, to be completely honest, the rest of Chapter One.

Thus, that 19% read is a bit misleading. I skipped the two forwards in my edition, though I did read the framing sequence. However, I didn't make it all the way through the first chapter, "Bride," before I gave up. I'm sure it gets better. It has no other way to go.

Maybe it works better as a movie. Indeed, I suppose it must, since everyone has seen the movie and it has a 96% rotten tomato score and is 8/10 with the critics. Plus, the book comes in with a 4.27 star rating with almost a million reviews on Goodreads. As usual, what do I know?

What I think this all comes down to is that I don't like silly. Not at all, never. It's not a flavor of comedy I appreciate. The Princess Bride pummels the reader with silly humor. Mercilessly. 

Now, while I hesitate to make a broad statement, I will anyway. I don't think I'm much of a fan of American humor in general. I like British humor. But not all British humor. Silly British humor, and they have a lot of that, isn't my cup of tea either. I like sly, dry, witty, understated humor, and that's not what The Princess Bride offers. Or perhaps it offers too much of it. Nah, it's just silly and dumb.

Well, here I am, six paragraphs into my review of The Princess Bride, and I haven't said anything about The Princess Bride itself. Do I need to? I assume everyone has seen the movie, and maybe some of you have even read the book. Anything is possible. But the thing is, I haven't seen the movie, nor, to be candid, even now, read the book. Though I tried, I read part of chapter one. Thus, I can't really say much about the book itself. I knew it was a humors fantasy/fairy tale story, but I guess I expected something along the lines of a lighthearted Prisoner of Zenda story. As I mentioned in a previous review, I need a story that is grounded in some sort plausibility. Absurdity doesn't work for me, so the silliness of this story was never going to work for me. The framing sequence that I did read, came off more like lame advertisement for the career of the author than anything else, and the first part of the first chapter of the "novel" itself that I read proved to be even lamer. 

So to sum it up, if you haven't read The Princess Bride, you shouldn't bother. In my opinion. But if you have, and if you enjoyed it, well, I won't judge you.

Alright. Fine. I'll say two positive things about The Princess Bride. ONE: Books like The Princess Bride make writing reviews for them a very enjoyable task. A popular, fifty year old book that allows my inner critic to roam freely, dagger out, is a godsend. TWO: Because of reason ONE, I didn't waste my half hour reading what I did of it.

That's a win, right? Sort of. 

Developmental Editors and Indie-Publishing

I'm going to say it up front. Publishing is a business. A very risky business. So if you're not certain that the revenue from the book you're publishing is likely to pay for a developmental editor, you should not hire one. A developmental editor's value, at least in indie-publishing, is minuscule. Developmental editors are the ones who go through stories and "suggest" what needs to be fixed to make it a "better" story.  Which may be helpful, but considering that they'll likely charge anywhere from $1,000 to more than $3,000 for their work, unless you already have a large established readership, you'll likely never see any return on that investment. This makes spending this sort of money on developmental and/or line editing without a booming self-publishing business, a very poor business decision. In my opinion. As I said, publishing is a very risky business, and investments in it need a thoughtful consideration of facts, not dreams. Any money spent, should be spent very prudently at the scale of expected sales.

Writing, unlike publishing, is an art. Stories are a work of art, created by their author(s). This work of art can be, and almost always is, turned into a product in the hope that it will sell. The job of the editors is use their expertise to re-shape a work of art into the most commercially appealing product possible. In traditional publishing a team of editors work on the cream of the manuscript crop, i.e. manuscripts culled from the thousands submitted to agents, vetted by the agents, and then selected by acquiring editors. Still, they only manage to produce one profitable product out of every three books they work on. And how much of that success might well be attributed to the book's promotional budget is an open question. This is not to say that editors are completely incompetent, it is simply very hard, even for professionals, to know what readers will like. Your own-edited, self-published book is as likely to succeed commercially as a professionally edited self-published book, i.e. statically very unlikely.

A "well edited" book is like a tree that falls in a forest. No one will ever know it is well edited, unless they somehow discover and read it. For this to happen,  thousands of impressions are needed just to get a potential reader to click on the cover, read the blurb, and perhaps, read a sample before buying it. Only if, or when, they get to the sample pages will editing ever have a chance to play a role in making a sale. Thus, money spent on getting the book seen is a far more effective way of making sales than thousands of dollars spent on editors.

Given how late in the sales process any effects of editing might have on influencing sales, there is no compelling case that it is needed at all. Your work, your vision, is just as likely to succeed as an editor's. You just never know what will click with whom.

These days, in traditional publishing, authors usually get only one chance to prove to their publisher that they're potentially a bestselling author. This is not the case in indie-publishing.

The beauty of indie-publishing is that, unlike traditional publishing, you have as many chances as you care to take in chasing commercial success. There's a very simple reason for this; on average, only several dozen to a hundred readers will ever buy and read most indie-published books, be they good or bad. A hundred readers out of a million potential readers gives you a lot of headroom to make mistakes and many chances to get better over time, without coming close to exhausting your potential readership. And the best way to get better is to write, publish, write and publish, again, and again, learning from your mistakes and any feedback you might get along the way. And then, when you reach the point where you can look back and find yourself embarrassed by your first book, you can unpublish it. In the meanwhile, you've been building a back catalog for readers to explore and buy, when the day arrives when your newest book sells more than a hundred copies. When you've made it.

Thus, it's indie-publishing's very long odds of commercial success that allows an author the freedom to write their story the way they want to write it, without compromises to conform to some "professional" editor's opinion. I strongly believe you shouldn't give up that artistic freedom. Who's to say that being different is any less effective than being a copy of last year's successful books? Fashion moves on.

Advocates of using editors often try to make authors feel that they are betraying readers and their fellow indie-authors if they don't get a "professional" editor to polish up their story. Never mind that anyone can set up shop as a "professional freelance editor." There are no bar exams for editors needed to pass in order to put out a professional editor shingle on the internet. Who knows what your "professional editor" knows about editing.

Advocates of professional editors will also point to popular authors who, they say, grew too big for editors and their books suffered for it. Authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson are examples of whom they say produced bloated work as a result. What they don't mention is that while some readers might find this to be the case, there are likely as many or more readers who think those "bloated"  stories are wonderful just as they are. You can never please every reader, and shouldn't try. 

So don't be afraid. It's okay, indeed, desirable, to create your story, your way, no matter how quirky it might be. Remember the abysmal success rate of agents and editors in the traditional space. You really can't do worse by doing it your way. 

Now, by all means produce the best book you can. Get all the feedback on your story that you can from spouses, family, friends, critique partners, and beta readers if you have any doubts about your story. Produce as clean a copy as you can, using the built in spelling and grammar checks, as well as free, or paid (for a month) grammar checkers like Grammarly. But, whatever you do, keep your book uniquely yours. That's its greatest value. Don't let its uniqueness be eroded by someone's idea of making it more marketable. The numbers tell the story; editors have no magic to make a book better and there's no proof they make it more salable. Plus, when it comes to indie-publishing, it's a very different market, with different readers and reader priorities than traditionally published books. Thus,  hiring traditional publishing editors, and mimicking traditional publishing standards is almost certainly a recipe for missing the mark in indie-publishing.

I believe that authors should keep the "self" and "indie" in self-publishing and indie-publishing.

The inspiration for this post came from watching a small publisher/author's YouTube video several weeks ago. In his list of "lies authors tell themselves that will destroy their careers," he listed not hiring a professional developmental editor as one of them. It seems that we're too close to our work to see it's trash. Then last week, he posted another video, where he made the case even stronger - despite the fact that he doesn't feel the need for a developmental himself. (Is he telling himself a lie like the rest of us?) In any event, his advice seems to be a do as I say, not as I do. He then went on to say that cost of editing should be no excuse. Save up for years, if need be. No mention of the steep odds facing success in indie-publishing. And in this video he freely admitted that he was acting as a gatekeeper to keep the riffraff, the "bad" books out of the market - something a holy mission for him. He also admitted that he sees himself and his small press a traditional publisher, so his mission seems to be keeping indie writers out of publishing, or to bankrupt them as quickly as possible, should they take his advice and hire expensive editors. All of which struck me as pretty self-serving. I don't think it is in the best interest of aspiring indie authors to follow his advice, since he never addresses the sad truth of indie-publishing; that tens of thousand books are released every month and only a tiny fraction of them will sell a hundred copies or more. Most will lose most of the money the authors spend on publishing their books.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 144)

 

I discovered that you can browse the collection of books at the Gutenberg Project by categories. I started with adventure, and downloaded four books out of the first 300 I came across. There were a fair number of books in those 300 that I had either read or had come across before. I chose new ones that looked promising.  So how did that promise play out in the first two books I tried?

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 Car of Destiny by C N Williamson & A M Williamson  DNF 6%

I know that I had read a book by this husband and wife writing team years ago. They wrote mystery and adventure stories usually centered around cars, which was C N's specialty. A M wrote many other novels on her own as well.

A poor-ish, i.e. wealthy, but not wealthy enough, soldier of fortune who is the son of a Spanish noble who fought on the wrong side in some sort of Spanish dispute, and thus is a person non-grata in Spain, instantly falls in love with a companion of an English princess who is marrying a Spanish prince... or something like that. And she instantly falls in love with him as well. But how can their love flourish when he dares not reveal his true identity? Plus, he's so "poor" as well? I'll never know, as the story seemed so improbable and so melodramatic that I simply couldn't take it at all seriously. I moved on.

One of the Six Hundred by James Grant  C+

Wouldn't you just know, this book starts out with the same premise of the last one, save that our hero, the narrator has met the girl of his dream, Lady Louisa Luftus, a number of times before he meets her again at he Uncle's estate in Scotland. There, on a month's leave from his Lancer Regiment, he and his rival, a fellow officer and a rich cad, vie for the love of the daughter of an earl whose wife aims to marry her daughter off to an old rich man. 

This story is set just prior to the Crimean War, i.e. 1853. The first third of this book concerns itself with our hero's courting of the beautiful Lady Louisa Luftus, who is one of a large party staying at his Uncle's house. Our hero is blind to the love of his sweet cousin Cora. It seems to have been a popular trope, and for all I know, still is.

 

If the first third is about our hero's romance, the second third recounts his experiences after leaving England, his regiment having been sent east to fight the Russians in the Crimean War. Over the summer months they camp in Bulgaria, ill supplied, ill housed, ill and inflectionally led, doing nothing but dying of cholera and dysentery. During this time he makes some friends, sees a bit of the generally squalid sights, and almost dies of cholera himself.

In the final third of the book, they are landed on the Crimean Peninsula, and begin to fight the Russians. I read the corresponding pages of this operation in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman at the Charge, so that I would have somewhat cynical, but historically accurate picture of the events of this campaign to compare Grant's account to. In general, Grant did not glorify the battle; he faithfully describes all the carnage and horror of the battle and the aftermath; the wounded and dying left without waxing about the glory of the English victories. But besides criticizing the red tape that kept the army ill supplied, he does not comment directly on how poorly the champaign was run from on high, save to say that there was a lot of discontent within the ranks over spending those useless months dying of cholera. Anyways, in this section our hero is captured by the Russians, escapes, only be able to ride in the famous/infamous Charge of the Light Brigade; the six hundred, of the title, who rode down the valley of death in a charge that was misdirected to the wrong gun emplacements, a charge that resulted in over 50% casualties. He makes no mention of the unclear orders and mistakes that led to this foolhardy adventure. Wounded, he is returned home weak but whole to slowly recover, unlike many of his comrades.

Over long, and long winded, with the romance too melodramatic for my taste, but still, I have to give him credit; he does take the reader to many colorful and/or squalid places with his story, to a place that 170 some years later, they're still fighting over.

James Grant was a prolific author of both historical tales of famous Scottish historical figures and more popular novels such as this one. This one was written in 1875, and is a rather curious book. It is written in first person, but has sections that are set in a different locale and those parts are in third person. In addition there are at least three short stories - several chapters worth - which are unrelated to the main story included as well. These stories are told by characters in the story from their past experiences, or just stories they have heard. And brother, does he like to describe just about everything. There are pages worth of descriptions of everything from thoughts to people, to the landscape, not to mention the horrors of war. He spends many pages doing just that.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 143)

 

This is the third book I've read by Jean Webster. Let's see how this one fares.

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.

Dear Enemy by Jean Webster   C

This is not a book I would recommend, unless you are interested in children and orphanages. Though it offers a detailed glimpse of the treatment of a hundred plus orphans, some with various disabilities, as practiced a hundred and twenty years ago. I read it out of curiosity, but I found it rather dense reading. Not without its charm, but, not a page turner either.

This is the "sequel" to Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, which I greatly enjoyed. She uses the same format here as in that book; a collection of letters. In this case written to a number of different people, including Judy Abbot, the hero of the Daddy-Long-Legs story, now married to a wealthy husband. The writer of these letters is an old collage friend of hers, Sallie McBride, who she has talked into becoming the director of the orphanage that Judy Abbot grew up. Sallie is given in the mandate and money to modernize the orphanage to make it far less grim place than it had been when Judy was raised in it. Funded by money from Judy's husband, Sallie sets out to do just that, making a more cheerful and healthy place for the children. The long series of letters relate her struggles over the course of the better part of a year. to do just that. 

Whereas the letters in Daddy-Long-Legs were bright and interesting, these are often highly detail accounts of her effort and of individual children, one letter after the another to various people. While the content of the letters are varied and often laced with humor, I still  found reading this story pretty heavy going, perhaps because there were so many letters, and so detailed.

Webster was social active, not only in the suffrage movement but the reform movement to improve orphanages and the plight of the poor. She uses this story to highlight the challenges and possible solutions. My wife Sally was a special ed teacher, both in grade schools and high schools, and I recognize some of the issues this Sallie faced dealing with some of the children, brought to them, often out of poverty. Everything now has a name and some sort of classification, and some sort of treatment. But not back then. It was interesting to see how they approached these issues 120 years ago, how the approach and understanding changed, and how such things have not.

There are various storyline running through this novel, with a variety of characters, so you shouldn't come away from this review thinking this is a dry, dreary book. It is not, I just found it, well too dense, as in the Gutenberg copy I was reading had virtually no breaks between letters, so one tended to run into another, from one end of the book to the other, which made it  for me, rather tedious reading. As always, your mileage may vary.

This Blog

I had originally planned this post to be a piece entitled The Underlying Premise of My Books. I'd written it a month or two ago for a week when I had nothing in mind to write. So far, so good. But scrolling down my list of blogs, for some reason I don't recall, I came across a four(!) part series called "My Universe" that covered my characters, society, timeline and technology which I had posted a year ago. Talk about beating a dead horse...

But it did get me thinking about this blog. What it is, what it isn't, how it's read, and what I want out of it. And so today's post is just my rambling thoughts on this blog and what its for.

I started it 2015, when I published my first book. Back then, all authors were expected to have websites and/or blogs. Websites cost money, this blog is free, so I settled on a blog. These days most major author blog & websites are mostly dead. The purposes of those websites/blogs in 2015 has now been moved to newsletters, TikTok, and other such social media sites, which are not my thing. 

In 2015 I posted 25 post, all of them about the books I was publishing. My books continued to be the focus of the blog, but after 2015 I usually only published one book, so there was only so much promotion I could do. 

One of the other reasons we authors had to have websites & blogs, was to introduce ourselves and make a connection to our readers. The idea being to present the actual person behind that name on the cover of the book. And that, I took to mean, to talk about things that interested me, and to share my opinions about some things. I have continued to do that, and in the last three years, adding reviews of all the books I read. These days I publish a general post on Wednesday, and a book review on Saturday. An since I am currently so far behind  posting book reviews, I'm reading too many, I also post on Sunday as well.

As of writing the post, this blog has been visited 225,200 times, likely 220,200 times by bots. (Luv Y bots!) That number means nothing to me. I have no goals for this blog. Indeed, I've made a conscious effort to keep a low profile for this blog by not using the tags that search engines can record and show up on searches for most of my posts. I like obscurity, because in obscurity I can write what I want without worrying about creating any ill feelings. I (usually) have no agenda. I will share my opinions on a number of subjects and the books I read, but that is all I'm doing. Sharing what I think. You're welcome to think what you want.

Circling back to proposed The Underlying Premise of My Books post, the question is, would it have mattered if I had covered that material a year ago in far greater depth? How many non-bots read these posts, and would they ever remember something from a year ago? Does any non-bot ever search back and read any of my old posts? I don't have an index for them, so they would need to scroll down through the first page of posts, to the list at the bottom and pick a year, a month, and a post from the list of posts to read something. 

I know that I read the blogs I visit as newspapers; what's new on them and almost never go back and read posts from years ago. Still, as unlikely as it seems, it appears that all my posts pick up views over time, since many of them have around 70, plus views, far more than what they likely had a month or two after positing. Are there non-bots out there reading those posts, or are they just the usual suspects - bots? I have no way of knowing, and to be honest, I don't care. I never pay any attention to  old posts. The only reason I know those numbers is because I looked back on them to write this piece. As I said above, I ain't chasing views.

So what am I doing blogging? Well, there is still the promotional aspect of the blog. I can talk about upcoming books, and talk about the stories and how they came about. I can express my opinion on various book related subjects - stay tuned for a rant next week. And I can write reviews for the books I read. But to be perfectly honest, I do this for one simple reason; I love to write. This blog is just an excuse to write. Writing and posting my writing is its raison d'etre. While I hope to amuse all the bots and non-bots alike who happen by, that is the icing on the cake. I write it to write.