A MILLION PAGE VIEWS ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

My modest blog has now just crossed the million page view milestone today! 1000346 to be exact. I would've never in a million years dreamed that being the author of a 782 blog posts I would have attracted a million views. And counting! We certainly live in an age of wonder. 

I am truly humbled by the idea that my (apparently) tens of thousands of fans have looked in on this humble blog over one million times in the past eleven and a half years. I want to thank each and everyone of you for the support your visits have given me and my poor attempts to entertain and inform you. As well as for the comments you have contributed. Even the ones advertising some sort of scam or another that I've had to delete. It is nice to think that you believe my poor blog is such a valuable advertising platform. This is one of the proudest days in my life....

...Wait. What are you saying? Really, you think its bots rather than people who are visiting my blog... That the 2,000 to 3,000 plus visitors every day are not real human fans of my stories at all... That they're just bots crawling the web and sucking up content for who knows what reason? Really? Really... Oh well...

I am truly humbled by the idea that literally hundred of thousands of bots have looked in on my humble blog over one million times in the past eleven and a half years. I want to thank each and every bot of you for the support your visits have given me and my poor attempts to entertain and inform you. As well as for the comments you have contributed. Even the ones advertising some sort of scam or another that I've had to delete. It is nice to think that you believe my poor blog is such a valuable advertising platform. It is one of the proudest days in my life that my writing has become part of the digital DNA of our future robotic overlords.

SINCERLY, THANK ALL OF YOU, FRIENDS, HUMANS, AND BOTS! IT HAS, AND CONTINUES TO BE FUN TO WRITE THIS BLOG.

The Saturday Morning Post ( No. 207)

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

Sticking with detective fiction, but this time around with a fantasy world thrown in. I'm also sticking with rereading books from my collection. The best of my collection. In theory.

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. 

Petty Pewter Gods by Glen Cook   C-

This installment was, I believe, the next book I needed to reread the series in order. I didn't bother to look back on my posts to find out, mostly just going by what I remembered of the covers. Since they are mostly stand alone stories with continuing characters a background timeline, it didn't matter too much. I knew this was likely my most least liked book in the series, and as you can see, it hopefully is. I think I've gotten a bit more critical over the decades, which likely explains just how much I did not like this book, because I certainly liked it more in the past than I did now or I would've had stronger memories of just how much I disliked it. Oh well.

Like most of these stories, the action takes place in the fantasy world, and in the city of TunFaire, where every imaginable fantasy creature, and really anything else as well, exists, including things like dinosaurs, and in this case, gods, of a sort. Though the gods appear to have been refugees from some other dimension. There is a section of the city of TunFaire, the Dream Quarter, with its Street of Dreams along which all the religions of the city have their temples, the more believers they have, the higher up the street their temple is. As they loose followers, the they must move their temple down the hill towards the river. A new religion has arrived with more followers than the two at the lowest end of the street, so one of them must go, and going means the end of its pantheon of gods, or at least they become mortal without followers. To choose which of these two religion loses their temple, the commission of gods have created a quest for a special key, and our hero, Garrett is recruited by both sets of gods, very old school gods and unpleasant gods a that, to find that key.

Now, these books are a tongue in cheek satire of the old school PI school of stories, with the PI being great hunks of men who women are always throwing themselves at, which, I guess, is a trope that hasn't aged well. And in this case, a cynical view of religions in general. The problems in this book, are numerous, even overlooking women and female gods always throwing themselves at Garrett. Mostly it is an account of Garrett being chased and captured by the various factions of gods who then try to compel him to find the key for them. This happens time and again, giving Garrett little agency. This time the banter between him and the Dead Man, is often lame, not very witty at all. The sort of "found family" vibe other stories have by including a wide cast of reoccurring characters is largely missing in this story. And the mystery that Garrett and the Dead Man must solve, such as it is, is very confusing. All in all, a very tedious book, one in which I did a lot of skimming this time around, earning it, at best, its C- grade.  I chose it only because it was the next in the series. If I had known just how bad I would find it this time around, I would've skipped it entirely. Oh well.

Angst

There seems to be a lot angst in the author/publisher community these days. Though to be fair, there is always a lot of angst amongst author/publishers. The sad fact is that unless you choose to measure success by some personal metric other than revenue, it is nearly impossible to succeed in the conventual understanding of success, i.e. making a ton of money. You only hear about successful authors because making a lot of money as a writer is so rare.

Now, I can't claim to be well connected to the self-publishing industry, so I can't say to what extent the situation I'm about to describe is universal, but I feel it is fairly accurate for your average small self-publishing authors.

Sales are down. Enthusiasm to write and publish is down. Thoughts of giving it all up, are up. The big question is, "Why bother anymore?"

Three cause of this bout of despair are offered up: the market is being flooded with AI produced books, the economy, and the declining number of fiction readers.

Of the three, the flooding of the market with AI books is certainly a factor in dampening the spirits of small self-publishing authors. For many it seems that getting your books noticed, much less purchased, is almost impossible. Oh, there is social media, of course, but often authors are just following other authors and being followed by other authors. Not readers who might actually purchase your book. And well, I've heard it said that AI produced books are dominating some of the bestselling list of some romance sub-genres. While there are those whose motto is "Never AI," it appears that Kindle Unlimited readers prefer their formalistic genre fiction to come with good grammar and no typos, no matter the source. Art and soul be damned.

Steps are being taken by the publishing platforms themselves as they find themselves flooded by these mass-produced books. Amazon recently limited the number of books that can be uploaded and publish to two a week. And Draft2Digital charges an activation fee of $20 for new "authors" and a $12 a year fee if your books don't earn at least $100 in royalties. Both measures are meant to slow down the flood of AI books. But they won't stop the trend, using AI in some manner is becoming just too useful to writers of commercial fiction. Little wonder that people who write books the old fashioned way are feeling down.

The economy is suggested to also be playing a role in the downturn in sales, though I tend to doubt this. Most of the authors complaining about poor sales have their books in the Kindle Unlimited program were readers read their book for free after paying Amazon's monthly fee. People who read enough books in a month to justify that fee would seem unlikely to cancel it, since it's a relatively minor expense for the entertainment they derive. I suppose the economy may be a factor in individual book sales rather than page reads.

The third reason often cited is that the percentage of the population reading fiction has been declining for a decade or more. Often this seems to boil down to them young whippersnappers are spending all their time on social media and consequently, have the attention span of gnats. Which is to say, a version of the classic "the world is going to hell in a handcart" one hears from an older generation whenever the younger one doesn't do what they did, back in the day. I doubt this has much, if any, effect on declining sales, seeing that it is probably the casual, one book or two a year reader who has fallen off the wagon. Besides publishing companies' sales are actually increasing, though the higher price of books may account for some, or all of that.

There is one extra factor that I think must be considered in this discussion. And that is fashion. When a writer is producing commercial work, i.e. stories written for a specific market and reader, that subject/style will grow old and inevitably fall out of fashion with readers. The savvy author may be able to pivot with the trends, but even so, their back catalog still falls out of fashion. And if they don't quite catch the latest wave of hot sub-genres and style this time around, they can become yesterday's news. Many readers are fickle. (And with short attention spans!) So when I hear of writers selling far less than they once did, I have to think that perhaps readers have just moved on and left them behind.

As I said at the top, while expectations are always high, selling books, especially as a self-publishing author, has always been a tough go, and rarely successful. And even when it is, success often does not last for long. Fashion is ruthless and fleeting. Judging from my experience giving away books, it is indeed harder to sell books today than it was five or ten years ago. But given how hard it's always been, would most self-published authors really notice much of a difference?

Perhaps all this despair is really just the realization of how hard selling books is and has always been, which is finally filtering down into the hopes and dreams of writers. But probably not.

However, remember folks: No One Undersells Crazy Charlie's Book Emporium!

Bring it on, AI!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 206)

 

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

The smaller booktube channels, the ones that don't cover the newest releases or the ones trending on social media, often offer special reading "events". Things like "June on the Range" were viewers are invited to read westerns in the month of June. Or "Rocket Summer" where you read vintage SF throughout July. The book I'm reporting on today is a "PI July novel."  And when it comes to PI's you know who I turn to ...

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 Little Sister by Raymond Chandler   A

It has been decades since I read this book. but in my memory, I remember considering it the best of the bunch. It proved to be every bit as good as I remembered it. And, as I side note, I love the covers of this run of Chandler stories, this is the mass market paperback that I own. They are all great.

As for the story, we have a young lady from Manhattan Kansas. Miss Orfamey Quest, arriving at Philip Marlowe's office. She wants to locate her brother, Orrin, who has stopped writing to her and her widowed mother. She has come to LA to try to find him, fearing something is wrong with him. She's rather strange, but talks Marlowe down to a $20 fee to look for her brother at his last known residence, a seedy apartment building in Bay City (i.e. Long Beach), a city that has not delt kindly with Marlowe in the past. Well, within three or four hours Marlowe has encountered two murders... which is typical Chandler. I won't go further into the details, as Chandler doesn't do who-done-its, and in this case, I'm not really sure who did what and why. You just go with the flow, the flow of language. 

Raymond Chandler is a key figure in my taste in reading and writing. I discovered him in my early 20's, likely because I was a big fan of Humphry Bogart, and The Big Sleep movie that he stared in was based on a Chandler novel. Reading Chandler opened up my eyes to what writing could be. Prior to that I had read mostly science fiction stories, with a little Sherlock Holmes and Dr Fu Manchu tossed in. Many of them were very good and entertaining stories with competent, if non-descript writing styles. 

Chandler showed me what writing could be. He showed me that there was more to a story than a story. There could be style, there could be flavor, there could be fun in how words could be put together. Just the way a sentence read could be a joy completely independent of the story. While there are many masters of writing, who have their own styles, it is Chandler's and not long after, Wodehouse's way of stringing words together that became my preferred style. The interesting thing is that both Chandler and Wodehouse went to the same school, Dulwich, outside of London, and within a few years of each other. I owe a great dept of gratitude to whoever taught them how to write. 

Chandler's stories are chaotic, his writing exuberant, his characters deftly drafted with a minimum of words. I don't know how they've aged. They well may be too florid for this day of age, but they are a part of my youth, and I simply marvel at how he writes. To hell with plot.

On (Not) Reading

 

In the world of booktubers, for whom books are "content", it would be said that I'm in a "reading slump." Or I'm "burned out" on reading. I don't think those terms are an accurate description on my reading, or lack of, though they do describe my current state of reading, i.e. not much. 

I'm simply not in the mood to read these days. I'm not burned out from reading too much. And since I don't really have any reading goals or a TBR lists to complete, not reading isn't really a slump in the sporting sense. As I said, I find that I'm simply not in the mood to read. What books I have been reading these last several months, have been just rereads of books from my book shelves. Perhaps I've grown tired of looking for new books to read.

I've been trying many new books, authors, and genres on the recommendations of booktubers, and bloggers over the last several years. But, with the notable exception of Emma M Lion, I find that I do not really click with newly released books. There is something in the style books are written today that doesn't click with me. I certainly don't like stories set in contemporary times, I want to be taken somewhere else. However, even the historical stories they write today seem to have a modern sheen, making them seem unauthentic.  

Earlier this year, as in the past several, I was reading new to me old time authors. The problem is that they are often not available in the library, so to find more of their books I would have to buy them as ebooks, if available, or used paper books. Spending money on books is something I do only for special books. I've never said "I want to read this or that book" and without further thought, followed it by thinking "I have to go out and buy this or that book." There is no connection in my mind between reading a book and buying a book. I've always turned to libraries for my books... Though, I will admit, my wall of books sort of puts a lie to that statement. I was sort of into collecting books in my youth, but then again, most of those books were purchased more than 25 years ago. Many are second hand, purchased cheap at charity stores, or go way back to my youth and the days of  $.50 paperbacks. And even then, many were purchased used at half price. We've gotten a little off topic, but what I am driving at is that going out and just buying books that maybe sound like I might like them, is not something I do. Not at full price, anyway. Borrowing a library book is my book reading choice these days.

So, faced with no compelling reads - the next Emma M Lion book comes out in Feb. 2027 - what reading I have been doing has been going back to reread my old favorites. Even so, I've found some surprises, good and not so good. I won't say more than that, since I still have nine installments of my Saturday Morning Post book reports in the can that will cover those books. That also means that there will not be any crisis on Saturday mornings until at least December. I will say this, however, I'm not going to read books just to create "content" for my Saturday Morning Post. We'll have to see how things go on that front.

Even with the current lack of reading, I have read a fair amount of books this year.

I started 46 books and finished 38 of them. Not exactly a serious dry spell in reading. It is just that I'm reading significantly less books than in years past. I recorded starting 106 books on my 2025 list, 89 for 2024 and 102 for 2023. I may have been already feeling the lack of compelling books back in January, since my goal for 2026 was 50 books. With two and half months left, I may even make it. 

I guess, all said, it is more than numbers of books I'm talking about. It is my attitude. I don't miss reading a book or two every week. Honestly, right now, I don't miss reading at all. These days, I'm simply content to pick up an old favorite and read a chapter or two in the evening, and call it a day. And really, this lack of drive to read is not a new phenomena. There were many years in this century when I read very few books. Instead, I was writing my own stories, and only had room in my head for those stories. It is rather surprising that I found room for both my stories and books these past few years. 

I am still writing my own stories... and the current one needs all the attention I can give it these days.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 205)

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

I needed an antidote to the dreary grimness of the last book, This Tender Land, so I returned to O Douglas, who I knew would serve up a nice quiet story. One without two killings in the first 40% of the story. I believe this one is one of a set of three set in the same general area, the Border Lands of Scotland, with a few minor cross over characters.

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.

Love Comes Home by Molly Clavering  C+

To date I've enjoyed all the Molly Clavering novels I've read which include: Susan Settles Down, Touch Not the Nettle, Near Neighbors, Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer, Dear Hugo, and Because of Sam. Like the first two books on the list above this was last of her first four books that she published under the pen name of B. Mollett. It was written in 1937. I think Molly was trying to be hip and modern in this one, unlike her more domestic focused stories later on.

Most of the story takes place in Scotland. The main characters are young people. The title character, Love, is the younger sister of Jane, the point of view character. Love has just returned from a year "finishing" in Paris. With her arrival home their mother summons Jane home as well. Jane had been living with her best friend, Kitty, and her husband, George, a naval officer stationed at Chatham naval base. Just before Jane returns to Scotland, George's best friend, John, corners her and asks her to marry him. These were the days when you had to get the brides father's consent, unless you were black sheep. So they decide to keep their semi-engagement secret for a time. However, once home, Love has other ideas as to whom Jane will marry, and after some mishaps and misunderstanding the occur when John is invited to visit Jane at home - he has a new posting in the navy that took him to Scotland - Love sets out to break up their their attachment by seducing John herself. And so the story plays out. You get a generous helping of the life of the Scottish gentry, roam the scenic Scottish countryside, plus some political observations, as the celebrations around the new king who was just coronated, the civil war in Spain, along with a passing reference to Nazi Germany.

The thing about this story is that it has the hackneyed device of both Jane and John refusing to make any effort to clear up the minor misunderstandings that keep them apart. If they had, the story could've called it a day after chapter four. But, since it is a romance, I'll give Molly a pass on that. What I found interesting, and, as I said above was her trying to hip, or at least modern, by making John and Jane's best friend Kitty morally free and easy. It was clear nearly from the beginning that after Jane left, her love, John, had an affair with Kitty, his best friend's wife. And in it was made clear that Kitty was as much to blame as John. But still, your best friend's wife? She has George, Kitty's husband, seemingly tolerating her affairs, which are not rare. And when Jane and John make up, she intends to tolerate his as well, since she knows that he won't be faithful to her. In short not very good people tolerated by better people, however unwisely in my view.

Miss Clavering as always delivered an entertaining read, but the rather unsavory nature of its characters substantially reduced my enjoyment of the story. I think the characters need not have been so unsavory and it still would've been a good story. But I have to think she wrote this way to attract a young, modern 1937 audience. Oh Well.

The Sunsets of Summer, 2026 Edition

 

I try to watch every sunset over the course of the summer, sitting in my rocking chair at the edge of our garage. And it has become a little tradition to post the best sunsets I saw while doing so. The photos of the sunset above and the two below were taken in May. We had some striking sunsets early in the summer, and then again late in August and September.

Below is not a sunset, but a storm cloud near to sunset. If I used AI I suppose I could get rid of the powerlines. But I don't. This is an authentic photograph. Well as computational photography can get to authenticity.

Below is a very rosy June sunset and another rather fiery one.

And now we skip to August for several sunsets. The first for the flock of little clouds. The second for a brooding sunset. The last one is a sunset in blue.

And finally, an October 1 sunset, from our back yard. It was a very intense orange evening for a few minutes with this sunset.