The Treasure Cave

 

The Door to the Treasure

Actually, it's more like a closet. And it will take some work, a death, and a lot of luck to make what it contains into a treasure, but it makes for a nice click-bate headline.

I've been drawing and painting all my life. Prior to 1992 I painted in watercolors, using old photographs from old picture books as references. But I realized that if I ever wanted to sell my work, I'd need to make it entirely my own work. So in 1992 I started on an imaginary journey through an imaginary land as a vagabond plein air painter, painting scenes  that I found interesting traveling the highways and byways of Cealanda. By 2003 I had painted hundreds of paintings, and with the handwriting on the wall stating that I would likely be unemployed anyway, (A large newspaper chain had bought the small daily newspaper and were hiring graphic artists that did need me to do their photoshop work) I decided to try my hand as a professional artist. Over the next five years I painted hundreds more paintings in oil and acrylic. I sold several hundred. Never for much, but that's the lot of artists. And even after I decided not to continue to pursue a commercial market, I continued to paint, for the fun of it, as I always have.

Maybe ten years ago I ran out of ideas I cared to paint, and my painting dwindled to a trickle. I almost always painted imaginary scenes, when I ran out of imaginary scenes I cared to paint I had nothing to paiting. But it didn't matter much, as I had my writing to fill the void. Writing is another thing I've done all my life.

I'm trying to get back into these days - by painting very small paintings that I can complete in an hour or two, i.e. the limit of my patience. With my  treasure cove, I don't need any more paintings because...

I still have all the paintings I didn't sell. Which was most of them. I have them stored in a closet under the stairs. Recently, after trying to select some summer paintings to put on the wall, I decided I needed real rack to hold all of them to make them easy to find and pull out. I bought one. Straightened up the closet to make it nice and neat so I and my heirs can get at the paintings easily. 

Today, I'll take you on a brief tour of that closet, so you can see the wages of not matching production with demand....

The photo above is the door to the art closet. To reach it, one must make it past the game shelves on one hand and the 2025-26 winter collection of jigsaw puzzles.

Opening the closet door we are met with two bookshelves.  Like all my bookshelves, they are actually salvaged plywood boxes that once contained printing plates - the perk of spending five years as the third shift platemaker. On the shelves most of my smaller paintings are filed standing. I have them in cellophane sleeves, two paintings to a sleeve. Most of them are 12X16" acrylic paintings on hardboard, though you can see there are several different sizes and some of them are small oil paintings. 

The plastic bag below them contain stretcher bars for the stretched canvas oil paintings that I dismantled when it came time to move seven years ago.

Below, we have  stepped into the closet and rounded the corner to look under the stairs. We have those stretcher bars, and behind them, some stretched canvas paintings, some large canvas boards, along with a couple of portfolios and a pad of watercolor canvas.

In the phot below, we have stepped further in and are now looking at my new shelves located under the steps. On the the lowest shelf are some of my standard 18x24" acrylic on hardboard paintings. I've divided  them into two groups to make it easier to sort through them. Like the smaller paintings, they are in cellophane sleeves, two to a sleeve. The second shelf up contains more 18x24" paintings as well as 16x24" ones. Hardboard comes in 48x24" sheets, so I can cut it to get either 3 16x24" or 2 18x24" boards for paintings with one 12x24" one. The 18x24" painting fit nicely into 24x30" frames with 3" mattings making them my preferred size. You don't need to frame acrylic paintings under glass, but I do, because a 24x30" frame makes them appear bigger on the wall.

Below, we take just a further step under the stairs to see where all my oil paintings are stored. They were painted on stretched canvas. You can see some of those standing against the wall on the left - stretched canvas that I bought. Later on, I bought my own roll of canvas and the stretcher bars and made my own stretched canvases to paint on. These I could disassemble, unlike the ones I bought and did to make moving them easier, and safer. All those oil paintings are stored flat in the blue box and plywood boxes beyond the shelving.

Below. The seven boxes on the top of the shelf, contain the hundreds of watercolor and thin acrylic paintings I did before turning professional, and after I did. I quickly discovered that watercolor paintings don't command a great deal of money, so I had to switch to oil and than acrylic paints. Which I hated, until I didn't anymore.

I've not inventoried the paintings I have on hand. Once I started selling them, I numbered them as I went along. My records show that I painted 282 oil paintings of various sizes, and 25 watercolor paintings ibn that period. I haven't counted all the watercolors I painted prior to 2003. I also painted 55 small, 5x7" "bookshelf" acrylic paintings, and 1,207 acrylic paintings up until 2015 or so when I mostly stopped painting and counting the ones I did. All of which is a total of 1,569 paintings that I have kept records for. I sold something like 200 of them. I haven't bothered to record paintings since then, and I don't know how many watercolors I did in the eleven years between 1912 and 2003, but they fill those seven big flat film boxes on the top shelf, likely 300-400+. Bottom line, I have a lot of paintings, to choose from when I change them out every season.  

The Summer Collection

The Saturday Morning Post (No.192)

  

Back to books suggested by my booktube viewing. This one has something to do with railroads, of which I am something of a fan on. It is an memoir of a fellow who like me, traveled by rail, though he did it in real life, not virtually like me. But, like me, he didn't bother to buy a ticket to ride...

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.

Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography by Jim Tully  B

This is the story of Tully's early years crisscrossing the country as a hobo around the turn of the last century. When his mother died in 1892, his Irish ditch-digging immigrant father was unable to look after him and turned the six year old boy over to an orphanage in Cincinnati where he spent six years before running away from job he had been given. As a teenager, with a wanderlust, a desire to write, and no desire to live a mean life of a factory worker, he took to traveling about the country hitching rides on trains and begging for food and money to buy food, and drink. This is his unvarnished account of that life and of the people he met until he finally settled down in Kent Ohio,  taking various jobs and in 1910, a wife.

Of necessity, this is a episodic account of that life, especially in the first years of being on the road as a young teenager. He recounts the hobos he met, and the stories they told. His story is filled with encounters, and near encounters with the police and railroad detectives who were trying to keep hobos off the trains and of being thrown into jail as a vagrant. He tells the story of some of the ordinary people who would give him a meal in their houses, and send him along with food for another day, as well as days with no food. He talks about how kind prostitutes were to him, and the kinship of people in misfortune, though that was far from universal. Indeed, the lack of morals of many hobos, including himself, a trait needed to survive the life.

Tully was an avid reader, and even as a teenager he wanted to be a writer, so that this account is not the work of a typical hobo, but of someone who had the eye and the talent to recall the life he had led, a decade later, and bring it to life. 

It is an interesting worm's eye view of life in this country a hundred years ago plus. It was certainly a harsher, and for many, a much harder life back then. Progress moves too slowly, but it moves. 

Your First Warning. That is to say, Tease.

 

A detail from the original cover art

I am, as I always am, delighted to announce that I have finished the first draft of a new novel. The boring one. 80K boring words to date. I started writing this novel on the 1st of March, 2025, and worked on it over the course of the following three or four months. I managed to get something like 24K words into it, before stopping. Started again, and stopped again over the following seven or eight months. I seriously questioned if I'd ever get it written, or if I wanted to. Writing a boring novel is boring. But on the 3rd of March 2026, I pulled up my socks, buckled my belt, and sallied forth to finish the damn thing. I wrapped this first draft up on the 22nd of June, to my great relief. Writing a mundane story where nothing happens is a monumental task. I can see now why literary fiction writers are so celebrated.

If you happened to have read a post of mine here a few weeks back describing my writing process, and then do the math (or maths, if you prefer), you will come to the alarming conclusion that I might be able to unleash this thing on the world sometime in September 2026, the gods willing and the creeks don't rise. However, if I want anyone to read this work, it is essential that I tell my mundane story in some sort of an entertaining way. That's the only way to tell mundane stories and expect them to be read. That being the case, I have my work cut out for myself. While I always try to tell my stories in an entertaining way, this story is the challenge of a lifetime. (Part of its charm for me.) I'm far from sure I'm up to it. But rest assured, you'll see the results of my efforts, one way or another, gods and creeks willing, sometime this fall.

As I see it, the only way to sell this story is to tease the snot out of it. Make it a read it or be square sort of thing, just to know if it is a boring as I make it out to be, or even more boring. Make it the long tease. 

So, let's begin. I will say this much - it's a Lorrian novel, set entirely in the city of Celora six months or so after the events of Glencrow Summer. However, it has a new cast of characters, along with a few cameos from Chateau Clare. And unlike the previous two novels in this timeline of the Lorrian novels - the Post-Second Founding period - there is absolutely no speculative fiction element in it at all, save for being set on a world other than our own. It's as mundane as any literary fiction novel, but without all that serious, thought-provoking, baggage they often include. 

I've already painted a possible cover for the book, in my best Van Gogh style and I've included a detail from the original painting above. It will mostly be covered up on the back cover. Another tease.

Stay tuned, more teases in coming. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 191)

 

Once more to Holland yet again! Originally I was going lump these last two or three book reports from this series into one entry, but then, I had a week or two when I didn't read any book at all, which made me nervous. I like to have a cushion of book reports, and it was getting thinner...

In the book world amongst book people, this would be considered a "reading slump" or a symptom of reading burnout. At least amongst "content creators" this is a issue of some concern. If you are producing "content" about books, not reading is something to be concerned about. This concern, and my reaction to reading less than a book a week was the subtle hand of "content creating" at work. In the back of my mind, I'm not just reading, I'm producing content for this blog. Not deliberately, but still, having already written 200 of these posts, at the time I'm writing this one, producing a blog post in this spot every week is now a part of my life.

I've since found more books to read, so the crisis is averted, for now and the next ten weeks. What I'm up against is not a lack of books, but a lack of alluring books. I have narrow tastes in books, and well, I've struggled to finding books that I want to read, even when I had access to 10 million books on Kindle Unlimited. These Mercurius mysteries were a godsend, but now, I think I can move on confidently, as my usual suspects on booktube have recently come through for me. In the coming weeks I'll be offering a wider variety of books to report on, with a ten week cushion. 

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 Noose's Shadow by Graham Brack  B+

This time the wife of a farmer who has been accused of murdering his neighbor named Wolf, a man who everyone disliked, as well as his wandering pig, arrives at the University on a winter's night to ask Mercurius to save her husband from hanging for a murder he didn't do. Mercurius, has a document William gave him in a previous story as a reward for his services, one that required officials to give him any aid he desires, so he uses it to talk the mayor into letting him investigate the murder, in order to ascertain that justice is truly being served.

With lower stakes, and a fairly straightforward investigation, i.e. talking to the neighbors, there is a lot less intrigue to the mystery this time around. But, as always, it is the character of the narrator, plus the characters and locale of the setting that, for me, elevate this series beyond a mere mystery story. That said, it is still be weakest of the lot so far in terms of engagement.

There are five more books in this series, but I will wait until my next visit to Kindle Unlimited on the cheap... It's June and I haven't looked on my Amazon page under Kindle Unlimited to see what deal, if any, they're offering. However, right now I'm halving no problem finding enough books to read from the YouTube channels I'm watching, so it will be a while yet. 

Producing My Books, Part 2 - Publishing

 

Writing a story is only half of a book. Turning the manuscript into a book and publishing it is the other half. Writing takes more time but putting together a book and getting it into stores is the essential second step. So what is my process of producing a book?

Let's start with the cover. I create my own covers by painting a picture with actual paint on hardboard, ideally, specifically for the story. I have, however, repurposed digital copies of paintings I painted years ago for some of my covers. The current covers for Tzasritsa Moon, Valsummer House, and Iron Kingdom are all repurposed art. I initially released them with original art, but wasn't happy with those covers, and so swapped in better art, even if its connections to the stories are a bit of a stretch. Other examples of re-purposed art include the current cover for The Lost Star's Sea and A Night on Isvalar, though, Isvalar's cover is a scene from an old comic book version of that story I did.

The original Tzaritsa Moon cover art

In any event I use hand-paint original art for all my books. Not being an illustrator, I settle for trying to capture the story's mood by using scenes that I, as an impressionist landscape artist, feel comfortable attempting. 

I paint each cover to use as a wraparound cover. This means that the main action is on the right side of the painting, i.e. the front cover. Having to fit the key elements in half of the painting usually makes for an awkward painting. However, I'm never too concerned about the painting, knowing that I can work with it "in post" i.e. once I take a photo of it and upload it to my computer where I use the free Photoshop-like app, Gimp, to correct its shortcomings. This may include cropping the original painting for fit and focus, and altering the color balance and contrast. I usually add a "cartoon" effect, i.e. black outline to the image as well, to sharpen it up. Some covers I do this more than others, and some, probably too much, at least for the paper version. 

The photo of the original art for The Red Wine Dossiers

Except for a brief period, I've given all my books a uniform cover design. These days I use a title box in the same position on every cover, and a blurb box on the back of the paperback. This design serves as my brand.

To produce the paperback cover, I discover number of book-sized pages once I  copy and pasted the text into the proper page size for the book. To save time I then select the cover art file from a similarly long book, as a template. I rename and save it to the new folder for the new book. Then, because every element of the cover - the painting, text boxes, and the text itself, have their own layer, I can delete the elements I don't need and then add new elements of the new cover, i.e. the new artwork, change the color of the title box, spine and back blurb box, and add new text over these sections. Using this method I can produce a cover in an hour or two. I also create a square version of the cover for the audiobooks. 

The wrap around cover done

For ebooks I use the old Smashwords style guide for the text, and then upload that file and the single page ebook cover to Draft2Digital. I let D2D format the epub version, using their minimalist style. I then download their epub version and use that version for Amazon, Kobo, and Google (usually), since they all accept epub files, plus it comes with a table of content, which I can't produce on my own. This way, I really don't have to format the ebook myself.

As for the paperback version, well, I grew up reading mass market paperbacks, and that's the standard I adhere to. While there are those who view books as works of art, and I give them the joy of it, I view books as storytelling tools. I don't bother with headers. If you don't know what book you're reading, by whom, I don't think the header is going to help you very much. I don't use doddles and do-dads to decorate chapter headings. I don't cater to the typeface-fanatics. One typeface is pretty much as good as another. I generally use 11 pt. Liberation Serif, which is likely a Times New Roman clone. I have also used 12 pt. Goudy Old Style in some of my books, and 9 Pt Liberation Serif on my two 350K word books.

I create the text of the paper book using LibreOffice with a page size that matches the paper book and set it up as mirrored pages. I set the margins and the size of the footer. I use a larger than the minimum inside gutter so that the reader doesn't have to peer around the inside fold to read each line. I place the page numbers in the footer. I either then copy and paste the ebook text on to this page, or start by creating the title pages, and copying and pasting the complete text after I've created the set of title pages - which is probably the best way, because as you're messing around with the title pages, every page down stream can be affected as well.

I have all chapters start on a righthanded page. I do this by spacing rather than using page breaks. This can be a headache, but since you really need to go through the whole book several times to make sure any little change you've made hasn't had ramifications twenty pages or more into the book, doing this manually kills two birds with one stone.

In LibreOffice you can specify how many pages are title pages, and they should be separate from the text. Actual pages numbers should start with the first page of Chapter One. This I can do. However, I always have trouble getting the title pages not to have their own page numbers, though it seems possible in the settings. Very frustrating. I usually give up and end up adding a small white graphics over the page number to cover them up.

I use at least six pages for the title pages. Books with the title page on page one scream "Self-Published!" to me.  No professionally published book, even all those cheap mass market paperbacks, have the title page on page one. I use page one for an illustration and a short blurb. Page two has my list of books, then the title on page three. Page four is the copyright page. I like books with maps, so if I have a map, I use page five for the "Thank You" to my beta readers and a dedication if I have one, and then use page six for the map. If I have more maps or other graphic elements, I will add more pages, and perhaps perhaps place the thank you and dedication on the copyright page, if need be. Every book has its little issues that have to be worked out. 

When I have the final page count, I need to go to Amazon to find the exact size of the cover I'll need for the specific page count, and then slightly adjust both the cover size, and the width of the spine in Gimp. Luckily every element you add in Gimp loads to the exact center of the image, so the spine always is in the right place when you add it to the file. 

Once everything is in place, I "flatten" all the layers on the cover art in Gimp and export it as a jpg. I then create a LibreOffice document in the size of the cover, and insert the cover art onto it. I then export this as a PDF. Once the text is right, I export it as a PDF as well. 

I only publish my paperback books with Amazon, as it is cheaper, and the only place I'll even bother trying to sell my paper books. So I upload the PDF of the cover and interior text to Amazon, and let them do their magic. I go through the entire book again in their review, and if everything is okay, I choose a price and publish. I keep the price low. I may make a dollar and change on a $13 book, since I ain't in this for the money.

Audiobooks use the ebook text to create an auto-narrated book, which I think is an essential tool for small self-publishing authors to reach a wider audience and who's business can not justify a human narrator. Writing speculative fiction, I make up a lot of words, so it pays to go though the text to get them to sound sort of like I want them to. In Google I can go through a list of questionable words to check how they are being pronounced. For example, my "Mz" Google pronounces as m -z, instead of "mizz" but I can correct that. Apple gives me no option. Apple knows best. With Amazon you need to listen to the text to hear questionable words, though they can be corrected. Apple and Google require square covers, Amazon does not.

This may seem like a lot of work, but I've probably spent more time writing and revising this post than producing and publishing a book, not counting painting the cover. LibreOffice is a lot like Word, so it should be easy to use to produce the text for a paper book. Because I used Photoshop back when I was working for a small daily newspaper, working with Gimp is fairly familiar, for what little I need it for. But it is not for everyone. However, I know it is possible to produce good covers using the free version of Canva, or going all in for a month to get better options when the book is ready. Of course not everyone is an artist, or has an eye for design, but anyone can study the covers of best selling books in their genre, and then find similar artwork in Canva or some other source, and arrange it, and the title text, onto a book cover template that mimics the covers readers expect. 

I feel strongly that self-publishing authors should embrace the "self" part of publishing. We should learn how to produce our own books, including covers. My work experiences gave me a leg up when it came to producing paperback books. But I think that learning how to use an app like Canva that includes resources for making covers is a viable option for everyone. The idea of hiring editors, cover artists, and formatters is foreign to the ideal of self-publishing, and often a scam at one level or another, as well as an approach that rarely pays off.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 190)

 

We return once more to Holland...

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.

Dishonour and Obey by Graham Brack  A

William of Orange (later to be come King William of England) sends for Mercurius, as a Protestant minister, and asks (i.e. commands) him to travel to England to interview his cousin, Mary, the eldest (15 years old) daughter of James, the brother of King Charles ll of England. He is part of a delegation exploring the possibility of Mary marrying William to hopefully cement an anti-French alliance with England. He is to evaluate just how Protestant Mary is, since her father is a Catholic, and Catholics are just barely tolerated in the Netherlands, as in England, for that matter. And William feels that, as the nominal leader of the Dutch nation, he could not marry a Catholic. However, there is a pro-France faction in England, and the court of Charles, who are attempting to shove a stick into the wheels of this plan. On arrival in England, not a day goes by before one of the Dutch delegation is found murdered. King Charles, having heard of Mercurius' past success in solving mysteries, asks (i.e. commands) him to solve this murder as well. 

This story takes us to London and the court of Charles ll, where we get to meet various historical figures of that place and time. Again, it is an elaborate mystery told with wit and humor. If you enjoyed the first two, you'll like this one as well.

The Poison-Pill Will and The Pawns' Game Now Available

 

The Amazon version will be released early on the 18th of June. I will be uploading the free versions today, the 17th, on Draft2Dgtial. It will take a few days for those versions to filter down to all the various stores listed below. I will post links to those stores when they offer the book. 

This novella and short story are the last of the prequel stories to the fictional Red Wine Agency Series that play a role in my novel Chateau Clare. I had no intention of writing an actual Red Wine Agency story, but now... maybe. But that's a bird deep in the bush, and whether or not it ever comes to hand is a very open question. For now, these are the last Red Hu stories, as he is drawn into the affairs of the Great Houses of Lorria.

The Poison-Pill Will, along with a companion short story, The Pawns’ Game, is a 40K word novella and a bonus short story installment in the saga of Redinal Hu’s slow evolution into the title character in the fictional Red Wine Agency books that play a role in the novel Chateau Clare. It is a direct sequel to The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again taking place just several weeks after Nine Again.

In the novella, The Poison-Pill Will, Constance Darma, the new Head of the House of Darma has rivals within the House of Darma; a pair of ruthless uncles and an equally ruthless aunt. Mz Darma’s grandfather, the old Head of the House, died under unlikely circumstances, and now she’s now being pressured by each of her uncles and aunt to cede her inheritance to them. The Great Houses of Lorria can hide dark deeds, so her murder may not be out of the question. Kelta Versay, a friend of Constance, fears for her life, even if Constance doesn’t. She does manage to convince her to hire Red to draft a so-called poison-pill will that would end the House of Darma should she die, which hopefully, will make murder too counter-productive for even her ruthless relatives to contemplate. Plus, Red is to guard her until this will can be filed and put into effect. Red discovers Kelta’s fears were not unfounded.

And finally, in The Pawns’ Game, Red, facing an uncertain future, decides what his role will be in the Great Game, that struggle to control the fate of Lorria that is being waged between the Great Houses of Lorria. In this short story he learns how that game is played by the playing pieces of the game; the disposable pawns.

Links to the ebook and audiobook here:

Amazon ebook $2.99 HERE

Amazon audiobook $3.99 HERE

Apple ebook FREE HERE

Apple audiobook FREE HERE

Google ebook FREE HERE

Google audiobook FREE HERE

Smashwords ebook FREE HERE

B & N ebook FREE HERE

Kobo ebook FREE HERE

Bookshop Org. FREE HERE

Everand Subscription HERE

Fable ebook FREE HERE

The complete collection of Red Wine/Hu novellas and short stories - The Founders' Tribunal, The Isle House Ghost, Nine Again, The Poison-Pill Will, and The Pawns' Game - in a paperback omnibus are available from Amazon for $12.99 HERE