Introducing Glencrow Summer, my Project 2026 Novel

 

 

I am delighted to announce the release of my 2026 novel, Glencrow Summer, slightly earlier than scheduled. It's Amazon ebook release will be on the 20th of February 2025 followed shortly by its Audible release. You can pre-order it HERE for $3.99. The Amazon paperback version will likely be released a bit earlier, the date to come. All my other ebook, and audio book versions, the FREE versions from the various retailers, will be available on or before the 20th, depending on when it clears my beta readers. More information on that date when I know it.

While my goal remains to write one novel a year, I believe in making hay while the sun shines, and at the moment, for some reason, the sun is shining brightly on my writing. I intend to make hay writing for as long as it shines and release the books once I finish them.

I have already talked about the influences that shaped this book in previous blog posts, and I will no doubt be talking more about this novel in the coming weeks. But for now, here are the covers, and its blurb. Stay tuned!

Are you weary of long, dark, and grim fantasy epics? Tired of evil priests, ruthless kings, sinister queens, knaves, and scoundrels—intricate palace intrigues and endless wars? Are you jaded by blood-soaked tomes of battle after battle, death after death? Need a break from accounts of disembowelment, torture, rape, and murder? In short, are you looking for a different sort of fantasy? Look no further.

Again.

Are you in the mood for a summer long holiday in the north woods?

Glencrow Summer is, like its companion novel, Chateau Clare, a leisurely paced, mundane slice-of-life fantasy novel set in a post-magic, Edwardian-era world. While this novel is set in the same world, three years after Chateau Clare, it can be read as a stand alone novel, since it features new characters and a new setting. Once again, the stakes are low, the company pleasant.

Ryeth Darth-Ruen is a minor scion of one of the seven remaining Great Houses of Lorria and the personal secretary of his uncle Avlen Ruen. He’s asked by his concerned uncle to travel to Loc Lore Rey to help look after Avlen's mother, the formidable Aunt Adora Ruen. She intends to spend the summer in a remote lodge in the north woods, accompanied her faithful maid, writing her memoirs. Rye agrees, only to discover that Uncle Avlen has a second mission for him – he’s to prevent, or at least delay, the writing of said memoirs. It seems that Aunt Adora had a rather scandalous youth, one that Uncle Avlen would rather not want brought to light. How Rye is to accomplish this is an unanswered question.

Glencrow Summer is his lighthearted account of a summer spent in Loc Lore Rey. He meets new friends, gets in a bit of fishing, finds a hint of summer romance, and slowly, and quite unintentionally, helps uncover one of the deepest secrets of the Age of Sorcery – the true story of the legendary Star Chamber of the Court of Shalott.

C. Litka spins tales of adventure, mystery, and travel set in richly imagined worlds. In Glencrow Summer, he has written a novel of a long summer holiday and its unexpected mysteries with his usual cast of colorful, fully realized characters. If you seek to escape your everyday life, you’ll find no better company, nor more wonderful worlds to explore, than in the stories of C. Litka.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 85)

Another library hold book came in, so... Another mystery. The fourth in a series of four. I haven't read the second on yet, as it had a lot more holds on it. Well, on to the book.

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.

Rivals in the City by Y S Lee   C

This cover calls it a "Mary Quinn Mystery." I don't know if she is planning more of them or not. They used to be called "The Agency." As you may recall, the premise is that Mary Quinn was saved from the gallows for theft as a child and raised in a private school that prepares girls for a successful life as a woman in Victorian England. The best and the brightest were invited to become undercover agents, on the theory that women were often overlooked. Mary Quinn is one such agent.

In this story we return to characters central to the first story to tie up at least one loose end, though it seems like several others were left dangling. Like all the other ones I've read, the story is rather over the top, but in this installment, only the premise is. It is actually rather prodding, featuring little snapshots of Victorian London, of which the author is an expert at. The appeal of these books for me was the character of Mary Quinn, and while that is still the case, it's not so much in this book. And, as I hinted at, the premise is pretty unbelievable, and how it actually was worked was not all that well explained. And the ending, melodramatic in a classic melodramatic way, with a gun pointing at our heroine. In addition there seemed to be characters who were left hanging at the end, their fates undefined. 

I see that this series is considered YA, and that may well explain how loose its plotting is. Well, as you can see, this installment left me feeling pretty so-so about the book, and the series as a whole. The first book while over the top, was a fair bit more entertaining than this one. You would hope they'd get better as they went along. Now, while I have yet to read the second installment I don't think they have. We'll have to see how that one goes when I get it, but it won't be for months yet. I'm not holding my breath in anticipation.

The Project 2026 Inspirations Part Two

In my first installment of this series I talked about the shape and scope of the story, in this one I want to talk about its mood. 

Though I toured Scotland some 50 years ago, I have such a poor memory of my own life, that I have little authentic memories of the experience. I know some of the things I did, but far from all. Which is to say, that much of my "idea" of Scotland comes not from personal experience, but from the books set in Scotland that I've read. I have a much better memory for things like that. These books include a number of John Buchan stories, like The 39 Steps, and Huntingtower, and John MacNab, as well as a number of Compton Mackenzie stories, like Monarch of the Glen, and Whisky Galore that are also set in the Highlands of Scotland. I've tried to give my Loc Lore Rey district a sense of place like that, though it is also very different, far more forested, recalling my vacations spent in Ontario Canada's Lake of the Woods area. As I said, this is going to be another "What I did on my Summer Vacation" story, and I want to get something of that timelessness that would be spending a whole summer in a cabin in the north woods.

The emotional component, at least of the narrator, are actually drawn from a tune with lyrics by Holt Marvell (Eric Maschwitz) music by Jack Strachey called These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You), It is a melancholy song the lyrics written on a Sunday afternoon between coffee and vodka in 1936. And specifically, Ella Fitzgerald's complete 7:31 minute version on Ella and Louis Again. You can hear it HERE on YouTube, so I won't include all the lyrics here. Now, I'm not much of a poetry fellow, and no doubt the lyrics are pretty basic poetry, but the images they conjure up and the mood they create is, for some reason, so very vivid for me - in a very much 1936 way. "The Ile de France with all the gulls around it" or "The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations" or "The waiters whistling as the last bar closes" reminds me of the Paris I never knew, at least in this life. I want to bring that mood into the outlook of my narrator. That and a bit of Chet Baker's  live version of I Get Along Without You Very Well from the album Straight from the Heart, The Last Great Concert Vol ll. that you can hear HERE. Heck, that whole album. By this time in his life Chet knew heartbreak well.

I also envision a singer in the story who looks something like Julie Collins as she looks on the album cover of Strangers Again or with Joan Baez Diamonds and Rust video HERE. In short, lots of musical inspirations for Project 2026.

Otherwise, well, there is going to be a little fishing in the story, fly fishing to be exact. Never much of a fisherman, I took up fly fishing when my son got into fishing. I decided that if I wasn't going to catch fish, I might as well have fun trying, and fly fishing seemed to be an interesting way to try to catch fish in and of itself. I think I'll put a little of that into the story as well.

There are also some old favorite tropes of mine in the story, too many, in fact, but alas, as an old dog, new tricks are hard to learn.

Well these are all the ingredients that I can think of that I'm tossing into the mix for my next novel. We'll have to see what it ends up tasting like. I am hopeful it will all come together to entertain you.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 84)

 

Though I moved my L L Bean mission-style easy chair from the photo of my wall of books, it usually sits right next to it. The authors on the shelves that I can reach over, pick out, and read without having to get up from this chair include Raymond Chandler, Sax Rohmer, and P G Wodehouse. I was between library books, and so, with nothing to read, I reached out and picked one out to reread. 

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.

Joy in the Morning (AKA Jeeves in the Morning) P G Wodehouse  B+

This one is one of the middle books of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster novels, dating from 1946. In general, I like the earliest of these stories, with Right Ho Jeeves! being my favorite novel. However, uncharacteristically for me, I actually might like the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster short stories even better than the novels. The earliest stories and novels have a freshness to them. As time went on, they became more and more formulaic as Wodehouse continued to churn out these and other books for five decades. This book in particular is very densely written, and while it has its share of laugh out loud lines - one of the characters is a writer and Wodehouse has a lot to say about writers - I found it was sometimes slow going because it was so wordy. Clever, but wordy. The reason for this wordiness, I suspect is that Wodehouse had six years to write it. 

As it happened Wodehouse was living in France when the Nazis invaded France and he ended up interned for the duration of the war. Indeed, he got into some very hot water in England when he agreed to appear on a German radio broadcast, intending to assure his fans that he was alright, but it was considered in England paramount to treason for aiding and abetting the Germans. He lived in the US after the war. In any event, he had six years to go over and polish this novel, and it shows, for better or worse.

The story is typical, and nothing too original for P G. Actually its rather loosely constructed, with Jeeves running the show. He's helping Bertie's uncle Percy by marriage (to Aunt Agatha) to strike a business deal. This task brings Bertie to a Steeple Bumpleigh. Most are characters are ones we've met already in previous stories. We have his ex-fiancée Florence Craye, Uncle Percy's daughter, along with that familiar pest, his son, Edwin, the boy scout who's always several days behind on his good deeds, and Stilton Cheesewright, now a police man. New to this one is Nobby Hopwood, the girl who wants to marry is old pal, the writer, Boko Fittleworth. While Jeeves tries to help Uncle Percy land his business deal, Bertie tries various schemes to get his Uncle Percy to accept Boko as Nobby's husband, since she is his ward, and she needs his permission to marry before the age of 21. While Florence is engaged to Stilton, their romance is on the rocks, and Bertie fears he'll end up being Florence's second option if that engagement goes south. And well, all the usual mayhem ensues as Bertie tries, and largely fails, at various schemes to help Nobby and Boko while at the same time attempting to avoid becoming Florence's default husband.

As I said at the top. Lots of clever writing, plenty of smiles and laughs but for me, it lacks the off-the-cup looseness and inventiveness of the first volumes of the series, hence the B+ grade.  

BookTube and Me

In the last few years I've gotten into the habit of watching "book tube" videos on YouTube, which is to say watching people review and talk about books. I think I can credit it for a revival of my book reading. Since the turn of the century, I maybe read a dozen books a year. Even less when I started writing my own stories. But in 2022, I at least started to read 40 books, in 2023, that number jumped to 108, and settled down to a respectable 53 last year. Those 53 books included longer and a wider variety than I'd been reading before. All to the good, this in spite of the fact that most of the YouTube videos I watch are on books I'm not very interested in.

Specifically, I watch channels devoted mostly to fantasy books. Which is hard to explain, since I'm not really a fan of fantasy. I read one every now and again, but most of the books they talk about I have no desire to read. I first started watching science fiction channels, but these days I like science fiction even less than fantasy. In fact I don't like science fiction at all.

So why am I wasting my time hearing about books I'm never likely to read?  A good question. One reason may be that some of these channels cover more than fantasy, and I've read a number of non-fantasy books they've promote, as well as some of the fantasy ones that sound vaguely interesting. But the main reason is that they talk about what they like in books, and being a writer of books, I am interested in that.

Alas, I have to admit that I doubt any of them would like my books. I don't write the books they, and likely many readers, seem to like. I've identified four of those reasons why.

The first is that these book people value being emotionally moved by the stories they read. The more the better. Just as sports fans savor the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, it seems that readers, at least booktubers, want their books to stir emotions in them. I, on the other hand, am not a fan of strong emotions. I much prefer peaceful contemplation and a pleasant, uneventful life to strong emotions, in both my life and my reading. This bias is likely reflected in my writing. I don't write strong emotional scenes or situations. The first person narrator doesn't dwell on his emotions, and the other characters' emotions are only seen, not felt. I'm quite sure my books would not deliver the emotional impact these readers look for in a book.

Secondly, as much as I like to think that my stories are character driven, I don't think they measure up to the book tubers' masters of that trait. They cite  Stephen King and Robin Hobbs as masters of characters. I've tried reading both those authors and DNF booth attempts. The King book was 11/22/63. I found that I was too deeply into the head of its first person narrator - too many trivial thoughts such that I found it vaguely creepy, in fact. I abandoned the Hobbs book after pages and pages of a side character thinking about mostly trivial things that had little to do with the story at hand. It was just too boring. I don't know how my characters come across to the reader, but I'm not much of a "people person." I don't make a study of people, and no doubt that is reflected in my narrator's description of people and my treatment of them. Thus, I think my writing may well fall short of what character-driven readers expectations.

Thirdly, many, though not all, of these book tubers value beautiful writing. One book tuber spend half an hour breaking down two paragraphs from a Janny Wurts fantasy book praising how masterful and wonderful her writing is. The first line of which was; "Dakar snapped awake, gasping and soaked in runnels of terrified sweat."  All I could think of was, I didn't know sweat could be terrified. As for runnels, I'd just have to guess what they were, not too hard, but still. Essentially this is what I would consider purple prose. We all have our own sense of beauty, so this is not a criticism. I prefer wit and cleverness in my reading, and try to put some of that in my writing. Otherwise I'm more in the Georges Simenon school of writing, which is to say, writing plainly to build scenes upon very concrete descriptions in order to create a sense of place and mood. At least that is what I aspire to do.

And fourthly, they often talk about the themes in books, issues they addresses in the narration. Often deep and serious themes and subjects are said to be explored in the story. I have no idea how much of this has been explicably put into the story and how much these readers find for themselves in the story. All I know is that I never read a book to analyses it for themes. Nor do I ever explore themes in my books. If you found any, great. But I'm innocent. I write solely to take the reader someplace outside of everyday life, and to entertain them while there. Period. I've no wisdom to impart, but then, no one listens to me anyway. Indeed, I consider my novels light reading, and I'm unapologetic about that. 

So, long story short, my work would not be a booktuber's darling. Many authors send these book tubers books to be featured for a minute in their "book hauls" and in the hopes that they might, someday, read it, and love it, and promote it. I'm not going to bother. I'm pretty sure I have to look elsewhere for my audience.

These days I'm slowly expanding my book tube viewing, looking for someone who has similar taste to me. Anything is possible. Nevertheless, I do enjoy hearing what they say, not only about books, but about their life as "content creators" on YouTube, as there are parallels to the problems faced by author/publishers finding and maintaining an audience. All in all, an enjoyable way to spend one's free time.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 83)

I have (well had at the time I wrote this post and read this book) several books on hold at the library that should be showing up soon, so to hold me over, yet another Cadfael mystery this week. What will I do after I've read the last one?

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 Potter's Field by Ellis Peters  A

A body is uncovered when the Abby of St Peter and Paul puts a plow to a field that they had exchanged with with another abbey. The Field used to used by a Potter who decided after many years of marriage that he had the calling to become a monk, and left his wife to become one. This was allowed at the time, the man was free to follow his calling, while the wife was still considered married and could not marry again. The Potter's wife very strongly objected to his decision, and disappeared shortly after her husband took to becoming a monk. The bones of a woman, who had the hair of the monk's former wife is found buried in the field close to his cottage. While there was no way to identify who this woman was, who else could it be? Suspicion turns to her former husband, now a monk. It falls on Cadfael and his friend, the sheriff, Hugh Beringer to discover the truth. And it wasn't easy, the truth being hard to come by, with may false leads.

Another good book featuring Ellis Peter's attention to characters and the time period.

There are not many Cadfael stories to go. One more novel in the omnibus volume I'm reading and two more novels and three novellas in the final omnibus volume. What will take their place?

The Project 2026 Inspirations Part One

A locale in The 2026 Project

The 2026 Project novel, as I outlined in a previous post, is going to be another  light novel - a "small" slice of life story.

I think this taste in light novels goes way back to the first books I read when I discovered reading (rather late in life - 5th grade). I started reading the Tom Swift Jr and Hardy Boys books. The Hardy Boys were focused on solving small crimes locally, and while Tom Swift featured inventing planes, submarines, and ever more exotic things - no doubt the seed for my interest in science fiction -  however, my favorite Tom Swift series was actually the original one, which was written over a couple of decades starting in 1913. It featured Tom (Tom Swift Sr. in the new books) living with his widowed father in then contemporary upstate New York of 1913. The first story featured Tom buying and fixing up a damaged motorcycle and dealing with bullies and crooks. Eventually his inventions took him far from Shopton, but there was always this air of quaintness about the stories, set as they were - when I was reading them - in the rather quint and distant past. Later, most of the science fiction stories I read were in fact, old fashioned romances - characters going off to exotic lands and surviving the trip. They may have discovered amazing things, and had amazing adventures, but the stories were focused on just that. As I expanded my reading to things like detective stories, mysteries, sea stories, Victorian/Edwardian adventure stories, military stories, and later domestic life stories, often set in England, these were all stories set on small scales, without epic scope or serious novelistic ambitions.

My current interest in writing small, light novels, arises out of my recent readings, which include the domestics stories/romances from the pen of British female writers like D E Stevenson, Molly Clavering, as well as the mysteries stories of Ellis Peters, and a modest novels like John Hadfield's Love on a Branch Line, and of course, P G Wodehouse. And this is not the first time I read such stories. Why thirty years ago I was reading not only D. E. Stevenson stories, but Miss Read stories, and several similar American stories as well. 

So, with that longwinded introduction out of the way, what will my Project 2026 novel look like? In my first tease about this novel, I said that the inciting incident is that the narrator has been charged with preventing, or at least delaying the publication of the memoirs of his great aunt. She had lived a rather scandalous life in her youth, one that involved a wide variety of serious and important people in the present day. Her son, the narrator's boss, fears that the publication of her memoirs might cause some of these important people to get upset enough to shove a spanner in the gears of his promotion within the government ministry he is employed at. 

This great aunt had decided, in order to get away from all distractions, write her book in a remote family-owned lodge in a setting inspired by the north woods, vacation lakes, and Scottish highlands. Her son is also genuinely concerned about her being up there with only her maid, so sending our narrator up there with her is not entirely selfish. In any event, the result is another "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" story like my first book, A Summer in Amber. During his summer, in the north woods, the narrator will meet more characters that eventually lead to investigating and solving an age old mystery from the distant past. Romance, or rather, romances in this time, will be a feature of the story as usual, but with a little different twist. In short, the usual ingredients.

That, anyway, is the over-arching ethos for my Project 2026 novel - a long summer holiday with a mix of romances old and new, old history and mysteries from the past to be explored. In my next piece on the project, at some point in the future, I'll talk more about some of the other influences that, like spices will be stirred into the pot plot, especially a few songs.