The Saturday Morning Post (No.194)

 

I warned you.

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 Setons by O Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan) B-

If her first novel, Olivia was semi-autobiographical, this one is as well. Though it has a different main character, Elizabeth Seton, she comes across much like Olivia, with a similar family; the younger sister of three brother in a close-knit family where the children ran rather loose. In this story she is the 28 year old daughter of a Calvinist minister who ministers to a church in the Gorbals of Glasgow, the poor sections of Glasgow. She looks after the house, and her much younger brother as well does all sorts of church work expected of the daughter of a minister, years after the death of her mother and an older brother. Now, consider that the author was the daughter of the Rev John Buchan, a Free Church minister who worked in the Gorbals of Glasgow, who had at least three older brothers, and kept house for her a brother until her father's death after which she lived with her mother. The minister in this story sounds very much like her father, as does the life they lived growing up.

Set in Glasgow, this starts strangely enough, with a chapter about a family preparing a party for their oldest daughter. In it we are introduced to a number of minor characters that will reappear, often briefly, throughout the rest of the book. However, this family is not the Setons, and they too mostly disappear after this opening chapter. The story concerns the everyday doings of Elizabeth as the daughter of a churchman - her duties as such and the people she meets. Long passages are spent describing those people, their Scottish manners and attitude, and a bit of moralizing tossed in. In Olivia, written as a series of letters, these ruminations seemed natural enough, but in this book, they often appear as long speeches or explanations of Scottish life. For me, the story's saving grace is that the Elizabeth is an engaging character - I suspect very much like the author. 

The book's most poignant chapters come at the end. Most of the story takes place in the fall of 1913, but the story goers on... And with all stories set in the real world, there are unavoidable changes. For example,  August 1914 and what the start of World War One wrought to the world. These changes are reflected in its closing chapters, as the male characters go off to war, a war that killed O Douglas' youngest brother in real life. And since this story was written in 1916-17, with the war still raging on, there could be no definite conclusion to fates of many characters in fiction or real life. There were no "happily-ever-after"s in 1917.

Or as she says;

You know, of course, Gentle Reader, that there can be no end to this little chronicle? You know that when a story begins in 1913, 1914 will follow, and that in that year certainty came to an end, plans ceased to come to fruition—that, in fact, the lives of all of us cracked across. Personally, I detest tales that end in the air. I like all the strings gathered up tidily in the last chapter and tied neatly into nuptial knots….

Book Report on My 2026 Reading

A tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 197

Since 2026 is now several weeks more than half over, I thought I'd post a report on what my book reading has been like so far this year. I'm about ten weeks behind in my Saturday Morning book reports, so I may mention some books that I haven't posted yet. And I'm several books behind in the list I am using for this report, but it's close enough.

In the first half of the year I read, or at least started to read, 33 books. I (usually) rate my books on a scale of A, B, C, and DNF. I don't waste my time reading books that would end up with a grade of D or F, so the end up as DNFs. However, I did give a grade of F to one book, for reasons I will mention in a moment. Below are my grades for the books and the number of books in that grade, so far. 

A (4)     12%

B (11)   33%

C (10)   33%

DNF (7) 21%

F (1)       1%

For a total of 26 books completed, roughly one a week, which is my target this year.

I debated about listing the books, but since it would spoil the suspense for several months of Saturday Morning Post reviews, I decided not to. I will post all the books in my end of year summery.

I don't consider this to have been a stellar reading year so far, with only four excellent books. Two thirds of the books I read were either very good/good (B) or good/okay (C). I did not count the various + and - brackets within the letter grades, but still, it is hard to get too excited when most of your books being one degree of mid or another.

All of the DNFs came during the three months I had a Kindle Unlimited subscription, for $.99, and I was trying to make it worth the $.99 I paid for it, and so I was sampling books that I otherwise would not have. Those DNFs might be considered the price of finding good books.

Since my Kindle Unlimited subscription ran out, many of the books I've tried are books brought to my attention on various booktube channels. With these suggestions, I'm still ranging out of familiar reading paths, which again, might explain why my grades are so-so this year. I did find one of my "A" books this year from one such channel, the O Douglas story Olivia.

Kindle Unlimited also serve up the Master Mercurius mysteries by Graham Brack which account for two of the A's and two of the B 's on the list. The other two A's were for that picture book on train paintings, and Olivia.

Another factor in the lack of A grade books this year is that I haven't reread any books from my personal  collection - all of would likely be "A" books. Also, I haven't found that one standout author, like Georgette Heyer, Ellis Peters, or Beth Brower of recent years with lots of books to read.  I've read four O Douglas books, and while they were fine, for what they were, I found them not up to the standard of Olivia.

As for the one book that earned an "F" from me, it did so because it really made me mad. It ended with the line "To Be Continued", without any indication anywhere on the book or in the blurb that it was an incomplete story, or the first book in the series. Even so, it probably would've been a C+ book at best, but you'll have to read all about that in Saturday Morning Post No. 200.

Looking ahead I see more of the same. What I am hoping for is that Beth Brower releases a new Emma M Lion book this year, No. 9. She didn't release a book last year, being too busy traveling, doing research in England, launching the audiobook versions, and landing an UK agent for seeing her books published traditionally in Britain and France, and probably elsewhere. Anyway, once a new book is announced, I'll reread (for the third time) the whole series again.

Other than that, it will probably be sticking to authors I know, often the small domestic stories set in England and Scotland prior to WW2. There are a number of women authors that I could try, and several who I know, and who have plenty of books for me to read - books I'd just have to buy... The problem with liking old and obscure writers.

Another tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 202

Full Circle

 

An early cover idea, with my preferred spelling of "Some Day"

I hadn't realize it when I was writing my latest novel, the boring one, but with it, I've come full circle. My earliest piece of writing currently in print is the short story Kiss of the White Witch. It became, in time, the first piece of Some Day Days, A Romance in an Undetermined Number of Pieces.

I originally wrote it as a short story, sixteen or more years ago, as a response to two short stories I'd read by people my wife knew. Both of those stories were told almost without dialog. I felt they suffered for the lack of it. I felt, and still feel today, that dialog is necessary to give life to the story. So I set out to prove my theory by writing a story that was told almost entirely in dialog. I mean, if a play can tell a story in dialog, why not a plain story... or a novel? After finishing the short story, I felt compelled to write more pieces with its characters, eventually making something of a novel out of it; Some Day Days, Then, as now, I try to use as much dialog as possible to give them, and the characters, something of a life. 

The Kiss of the White Witch is a near future story set over the course of two days, at the end of an Oxford University term. It is an account of mundane events, with the characters telling each other their backstories. Nothing much happens, and indeed, all of Some Day Days is an account of a series of mundane events; a visit to Cambridge, a dinner, an online space game, setting up an apartment... and such. A story that, in the light of expectations as genre fiction, science fiction in this case, nothing happens. Nor does it offer big, far-out ideas to be explored. It's just as mundane a story as any romance or literary fiction story.

That can also be said for my latest novel, the boring one. The parallels only struck me when I started working on the second draft. This new novel also leans heavily on dialog to tell the stories it has to tell. They are all ordinary, everyday stories. Only the fact that the story is set on a world other than Earth makes it somewhat a work of speculative fiction. However, unlike the other stories in this loose series, i never mentions the Age pf Sorcery, and the Second Founding, which were featured in the plots of the previous two novels. And there is no SF-ish reveal at the end, like in the previous two. In short, plots don't get any more mundane than the plot of my new novel.

Of course there other genre books are just as mundane . I'd think most contemporary romances concern themselves with a lot of ordinary events, as does most "Chic Lit", plus, them literary novels. However, the romance in my boring novel is light, it's not aimed at any particular audience, and as a work of literature, it comes with none of the heavy baggage of ideas, themes, and pretentions that literary fiction often features. It's neither fish nor fowl. A work of speculative fiction with no speculative fiction. But too imaginary to be anything else.

Some Day Days is the closest book of mine to this new novel, and though I published it second, it was the first one written in the burst of creativity that led to the writing and publishing my first three books and then on to all the books below. It is my slowest seller, so I don't have great expectations for this new novel, my 20th. Which is just fine. Indeed, that's half the fun of this novel. It's the personal challenge to write a story that not depend on any sort of  mystery, or adventure. A vanilla story. Really, boring is challenging. And boring is the new cool... Isn't it? Or was someone pulling my leg?

Stay tuned for more updates on the boring book coming soon. Work is progressing at a pace. The next entry examines the story's inspiration, and reveals its title!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 193)

 

Today we have another booktuber recommendation, this time from a newly discovered booktuber. She talked about a number of English women authors from the turn of the last century to its mid-point. Writers the like of Miss Read, D E Stevenson, and Molly Clavering, all of whom I have read and enjoyed. 

However, this time around, we have a new such author. How will she stack 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.

Olivia (AKA Olivia in India)  by O Douglas  A  

This book was just what I was looking for. Indeed, I had been exploring my options both from the library and on Kindle to find some new British women authors' fiction, which includes some of my favorite authors, and whose work I haven't exhausted. And so when I came across a video talking about ten such authors. So here we are.

This is an account of several months Olivia Douglas spends visiting her government official brother during the Indian cool season. It is written as a series of letters to a good friend/lover back in England. It recounts the voyage, the people she meets, the sights she sees, and the experience of India from the point of view of an British woman prior to World War One, i.e. it is mostly a view of the thin veneer of English rule over the vast subcontinent. 

I've now read a number of stories set broadly in this period, and find them fascinating for some reason. So much so that I am considering trying to capture whatever it is about India under the  British Rah in a speculative fiction novel. No promises, just thinking. In this account, as I said, she talks mostly about the people she meets as she travels across India along with her brother. This is not a story about the Indian people, rather it is of the English living and ruling India.

O Douglas is the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, who is the younger sister of John Buchan of The 39 Steps fame, an old favorite author of mine, and it is based on a trip she made to India to visit one of her other Buchan brother, so it is probably an edited version of her actual experiences in India, an authentic account of the slice of life she chose to describe.

She is best membered, if she is at all for a series of domestic focused novels set in the Peeblesshire in the low lands of Scotland. I came across her on Jen's Reading Life YouTube channel in a video featuring ten British women authors prior to the 1950's, which, as I mentioned in the lede, included old favorites like Miss Reed, Molly Cavering, and D E Stevenson, as well as several others that I've read. And it just so happens that a ten novel collection of O Douglas's novels was available on Amazon, and on sale as well. So for the princely price of $.99 I have ten of her novels to explore. I hope that they will prove as interesting in their own way as this rather exotic account did. She can write... and that's more than half the battle for me. You can expect to see more book reports on O Douglas's novel in the future. Hopefully, for months in the future. I have nine left to read.

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 300 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.