Last Chance For the Omnibus Editions

 

I will be withdrawing my three $.99 omnibus ebook editions of my stories currently on Amazon 30 April 2024. Over the past year I've sold less than 25 of them, and while I had no set expectations to be met, they haven't done what I set out to do, which is to significantly expand my non-US sales by offering my ebooks at as near to the free price as I was selling them at on Amazon.com. More over, in January, of this year, after some 8 plus years, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price of most of my ebooks. So be it. They gave me a chance to find an audience, and now it's time to leave the nest and fly... 

It has been my experience that any reasonable price more than free is not a large factor in determining sales. No matter what price you put on a ebook, it is a hundred times harder to sell than a free ebook. There seems no point selling ebooks at $.99 when you can sell almost as many of them at, say $3.99. Your increased royalties and royalty rate will more than make up the volume difference in sales.

In my case, I've an out of date idea of what things should cost. I used to buy real paperback books for $.40- $.50 back in the day, so that even $.99 seems high to me for a digital file. But the reality is that the paperback books I used to by at those old prices now sell for something like $8 today so that even my most expensive ebook, at $4.99 is a bargain. Less than a cup of coffee, as many author/publishers point out. So be it.

The lesson learned here is that visibility is the primary factor in sales. If potential customers never sees a book, they can't buy it. $.99 doesn't make books more visible. 

You can still download ebook versions of all of my books for free from Smashwords and at least read them for free from a host of other retailers. You can also listen to them for free on the Google Play Store, and (maybe some day) from Apple. 

It was a useful, but not very successful experiment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

So, if you want those ebooks on your kindle, now is the time to buy! May first 2024 will be too late! Act Now!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 44)

I'm taking a brief break from books this week to review an Amazon Prime TV series. Amazon recently gave me, no doubt out of the kindness of their heart, a free month of Amazon Prime, and with it Prime Video which gave me a chance to view this series.

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.

Fall Out  Amazon Prime 8 part season one C+

First disclaimer - I am not a gamer and I haven't played any of the various Fallout video games, and thus I may not be its prime target viewer.

Second disclaimer - I am not a big fan of gore and violence.

This series is based on a video game franchise with something like half a dozen releases. It is set in a post nuclear war United States, and like many shooter style games, I gather that it has the usual quota of violence, blood, and gore.

The TV show is faithful to the game that inspired it - in that it has a lot of violence, blood, and gore. There are also many references - Easter eggs - to items and visuals in the game, and how the game is played, many of which I no doubt missed.

So why in the hell did I watch it?

The first reason is that I could, with my free month of Amazon Prime and Prime Video. Now, I could've finished watching Good Omens 2. I had watched a number of episodes of that show before Christmas when we paid for a month of Prime. I had stopped because I found that season pretty lame and boring. I didn't feel like continuing on with it.

The second reason is that Fallout looked visually interesting, at least in the show's trailers. The scenery, the look and feel of the world, looked intriguing enough for me to give it a look.

So, not being the intended audience either for the game or the type of story, and interested in it mostly for the scenery, what did I think of it?

It was not bad. Not great, but not bad either. It told a story rather than just patching often violent scenes together. A rather contrived, and incomplete story, but a story nevertheless.

I while generally I wasn't grossed out by the amount of blood, violence, and gore portrayed in the show though there is a lot of it - I assume it's there as a nod to the game play. The show takes a fairly lighthearted approach to the story - at least at times - making the gore and violence mostly of the comic book variety, i.e. nothing to take seriously, and thus, gratuitous. The only thing of consequence that was killed, was time that would've been better used to tell the story better and more cohesively. But hey, I'm not the target audience, so what do I know?

The story does try to get serious and meaningful, at times. Nevertheless, lot of this effort struck me as being rather ham-fisted - with a lot of close-ups of the faces of characters saying nothing, but clearly thinking something - I guess to save writers from having to actually come up with serious dialog, which was not their long suit.

The story starts rather simply with some sex and violence, and settles into a plot driven by two, count them, two McGuffins.

The basic premise is that some people purchased places in great underground fallout shelters, and now, several hundred years after a nuclear war, their descendants are still in them, waiting for the radiation to die down. There is however, all sorts of dystopian life on the surface, a dog-eat-dog/people-eat-people, society with plenty of mutant monsters and such. 

The first McGuffin has the daughter of one of the leaders of the fallout shelters leave the shelter for the surface to search for her father who was taken/kidnapped/tossed out by some gang of outsiders for mysterious reasons. We only learn why in the last couple of minutes of the last installment. Does the reason make a lot of sense? I'm not really sure, hence I consider it a McGuffin, but I suppose who cares? You're along for the ride, not the destination.

The second McGuffin has that some surface scientist injecting himself with a blue light something, (again we only find out what it is in the last episode - tying the two McGuffins together) and then goes on the run, with a number of people searching for him, including a knight & a squire from a surface military order and a ghoul bounty hunter. The girl from the fallout shelter, the knight's squire, and the ghoul repeatedly cross paths or get together throughout the story, stitching the story together.

There are also flashbacks to the time before the war which tie into characters motivations and builds a backstory for the present state of the world.

The show introduced a number of colorful characters along the way- usually they are the humorous parts - but often, annoying, mostly then kills them off. 

As I said above, it was its look that got me to look in on it. It is simply a good looking show. My only complaint on this score is how erratically the scenery seemed to change from story point to story point, so that the locales never seemed to be connected and time and distances between them vague. And often we seemed to be revisiting the same sets over and over again in supposedly different locales. Plus days go by and no one seems to eat. Minor points for sure, but little things like that catch my eye.

I was ready to DNF this after the first two episodes, but decided to push on, and I'm glad I did watch the whole season. Still, it only earned a C+ from me. Its reliance on violence and its rather lame attempts at seriousness lost it points on my report card. I think it would've been far better if it had just embraced the many quirky aspects of the story, characters, and setting. You know, give it the Jasper Fforde treatment. But that's just my opinion. Give it a try if it sounds interesting. It has been received pretty positively by viewers and critics and has been green lighted for a second season. 

A New Wide Release Coming April 27th 2024!

27 April 2024 is the release date for my novella, A Night on Isvalar, as a trade paperback book, a free ebook in all the usual ebook stores, and as a free audio book on the Google Play Store. While this is not a new story, this will be its first release in paper and the first time it will be available outside of Amazon.

I wrote the story as a serial story for the launch of Amazon's Vella platform in 2021, on the off chance that the service would be a massive hit. At the same time, I also decided to enroll a novella version in the Kindle Unlimited program. My thinking was to use it more or less as advertising on those platforms in the hope that if readers found and enjoyed this story on those venues, they would go on to read more of my wide-release books. While this may've occasionally happened, the numbers sold/pages read - under 50 copies in 3 years - suggest that it would do better a better job by being sold wide for free. I had originally planned to make that move this summer, but when I looked into getting it out of the Kindle Unlimited program, I found that it's automatically renew date for another 90 days was on 26 April, and that all I needed to do to unenroll it was unchecked the auto-renew box. I did so, and so soon the ebook  A Night in Isvalar will be free and wide, except Amazon. What makes this release extra special is that the 27th of April will mark the anniversary of the release of my first book, A Summer in Amber, which I published on the 27th of April 2015. So here we are, nine years and fifteen books later. Time flies.

As you can see, I'm taking a slightly different approach to its new cover this time around, going with black and white line art only. This reflects my dislike of its current cover and my desire not to have to paint a new one for it, as well as its long history, which included a comic book treatment of the story.

The setting, and small parts of this story, are lifted directly from the first science fiction story I wrote, The Hybrid Worlder, which I shopped around to magazines back in 1980, without success. Just for fun I returned to the story with a different plot for a comic book treatment some ten or fifteen years later. And then, three years ago, the Vella opportunity arose with only a couple of months lead time. I decided to use the story yet again by rewriting the (unwritten) comic book picture version with major changes in the details, that I reformatted the twenty installments for the novella. While I had penciled in the whole comic book story, I had only inked a few pages, enough, however to be able to adopted a number of the panels to use not only as the cover art, but also as interior illustrations in the paper book, just to make the slim book a little special. The ebook version won't have illustrations as they are too clunky in ebooks.

Long story short - you will shortly have an opportunity to read a newly freed  C. Litka novella. It's a stand alone story set in an entirely different "universe" than any of my other stories - the first one I wrote stories in - which features faster than light starships. It uses a "tea clippers in space" motif as the background to the narrative.(I was into tea and tea clippers at the time.) I doubt that I'll write any sequels, though the story, like all of my stories is open ended.

The A Night on Isvalar blurb;

It was supposed to be a quiet night. It was anything but.

Riel Dunbar grew up and, for many years, sailed out of the little moon of Isvalar, the interstellar port of Aeroday. But then the restless life of a starfarer carried him away for decades. Chance had now brought him home with a promised long leave ashore. But, it turned out, that was not to be. Instead he found that he had only a few free hours to spend on Isvalar.

His plan was simple. He’d dine at an old haunt of his youth, and then, after a brief nap, he’d visit the starfarer dives of Isvalar for a real spree before sailing. But Riel hadn’t counted on crossing orbits with Cera Marm, the powermate of a rival ship. Somehow he found himself entangled in her plans – plans that included not paying a gambling debt to a very persistent bookie and his collectors. Riel’s night on Isvalar turned into a hectic series of chases and escapes across the little moon, encountering neuro-blade wielding thugs, a snake obsessed shadow-rat gang, an auton enforcer, and the bookie himself. It didn’t end well.

A Night on Isvalar is a 26,200 word novella. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 43)

 

I vaguely knew that Charlie Sykes was a rightwing AM radio talk show host for many years in Milwaukee, though I was neither an AM radio talk show, or rightwing type of fellow. More recently Sykes evolved into a Never Trumper, and critic of MAGA, and had aYouTube channel that came up on my feed. I watched a number of his YouTube segments, and in his last episode - I gather that he's now moved on to MSNBC - and in the course of thanking people, he thanked and named his novelist wife for proofreading his copy every morning. Curious about this novelist wife, I tracked her down on Amazon, and found that she has written a series of four, and soon to be five books set in Wisconsin's Door County - the peninsula or "thumb" of Wisconsin between Lake Michigan and Green Bay, and Washington Island - just north of the peninsula. Door County is the Cape Code of Wisconsin; a summer resort destination, with all the touristy things you expect, but with an old time flavor. I have fond memories of Door County, having spent weekends and several week long vacations up there in tourist houses on the lake shore. So, to make this long story short; I checked at our library and found that ebook copies of these novels were available, and put my name down for the first one, which followed in a few days.

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.

 

North of the Tension Line by J. F. Riordan  B-

If you take the stories of Molly Clavering, or D E Stevenson, send them 80 years into the future and across the pond to the middle west of America, you might well get North of the Tension Line. I am not quite sure what chic lit is, but I suppose this book would likely fall under that genre. The story concerns the adventures and romances of two 30 something year old single women, Fiona, an ex-reporter, now a freelance writer, and Elizabeth, the owner of an art gallery in Door County.

The story begins in the resort town of Ephraim on the "Busy Side" of Door County, which is to say the Green Bay side of the peninsula, where Fiona is living. We meet Roger, the coffee shop guy, and Elizabeth. During a day trip to Washington Island with Elizabeth and Rocco, Elizabeth's German shepherd, we see the sights of the island, one of which is a house that catches Fiona's attention. A few days later, she finds that the house is for sale, and proceeds to buy it on a bet that being a big city girl, she couldn't survive a winter on the little island of Washington Island. 

The rest of the story recounts Fiona's efforts to deal with the problems that arise from this rash decision, which include making repairs to the house, dealing with spiders, mice, and an unknown creature in the walls, as well as with a troublemaking goat that was given to her as a gift by Roger, plus a evil neighbor who wants to drive her out of the house, and getting to know the small town community of Washington Island, and winter in Wisconsin. A lot of things. There is also a second story line involving a romance between Elizabeth and Roger. 

I like these types of stories, though I had several minor issues with this one. Fiona's problems and adventures are played for lighthearted amusement, a stranger in a strange land sort of thing, but I didn't like the totally evil neighbor bit and all her problems with Robert, the goat, got old quickly. You need problems and antagonists, I guess, for a story, but perhaps these antagonists were a little over the top, and I felt that the story went on a mite too long.

The other thing I found interesting, is that Fiona as a freelance writer of non-fiction articles never seems to spend much of her time writing. And whatever she does write, it seems that all she needs is the internet, since she never travels anywhere to interview anyone, or investigate anything or any place. And yet, somehow, she has plenty of money, not just to buy a house on a whim, but spend it on single malt scotch, Italian shoes, and basically anything else she needs, without giving it much of a second thought. The only sacrifice she makes because of a lack of money is that she couldn't go home for Christmas. In short, in this story, being a freelance writer is nice work, if you can get it. However, knowing a little bit about how well freelance writing pays, or doesn't, I found her free spending lifestyle very hard to believe. But then, maybe what I was seeing is how many people live; they spend up to their credit card's limit and perhaps that was how she was living. Or maybe that's how the world can work in fiction.

So, all in all, not a bad story. I don't know if I'll go on to read more of her adventures, but I might, if, this summer, I find that I want to take an imaginary vacation to Door County.

What the (distant) future holds...

It's Tuesday night, and I haven't a clue as to what to write for my Wednesday blog post. And if I don't write anything, everyone will think I'm dead. I'm not, at the moment, However, I do have a dentist appointment tomorrow morning, i.e. right after I post this, and those are always touch and go...

So how can I fill up a few paragraphs with nothing? What's more nothing than books that you plan to write? So I'll run with that. Here's what I hoping to write now that I pushed Passage to Jarpara out the door.

My first priority is my 2025 novel. I happened to have spent all last summer dreaming up a story, with something like a plot. I decided, however, that having spent all summer dreaming up this story, to then go on and write it, might have been too much of it, and I'd get tired of it halfway through writing it. So instead, I put it on the back burner and finished Passage to Jarpara, which needed finishing. However, as a result, I actually have a story ready and waiting to be written now that I've finished Jarpara, which is something that's gotten very rare in my writing life these days. Needless to say, this story is my next project. 

What is it, you ask? Well, I'm not going to tell you much, except to say that it will be a slow paced, post-magic, slice of life, fantasy story with a little mystery woven into it. I'm planning to sell it as the perfect antidote to a grimdark/epic fantasy overdose. It'll probably be very boring, but I don't care. I'm pretty content to let  things be what they be.

Ideally, I would like to then write a novella to finish off Litang & Cin's story, one that would follow The Lost Star's Sea. The thing is I have an actual idea -- Litang, who, at the end of The Lost Star's Sea, was going off to visit the inner islands for a year or two, giving Cin time to finished up her mission. We'd pick up the story as he starts on his way back to her by hitching a ride aboard the Order's courier ship, the one captained by his old friend, the one who took them on the last mission - you know who I mean, don't you?  I could go back and research this, and come up with actual names and such, but, I'd have to get up, walk several steps to get the book, and then page through it... eh, it's just a bird in the bush at the moment, so why go into all the details? Anyway, the idea is that along the way they... wait for it... run into a storm and get shipwrecked on one of those floating islands. Except that this island doesn't seem to be merely floating -- it almost seems to be flying like an island-sized bird, using parts of the island like vast wings... So, is it actually a vast living creature so big that there is a jungle growing on it?, Or is it some sort of vessel piloted by someone, or some thing... Or just three islands connected together with webs of vines that are moving in the wind?  Who knows? I certainly haven't a clue. Which explains why it hasn't been written in the last six years.

Beyond that. I always planned to write two more novellas set on Mars, to make Keiree into a full novel. I even started writing one, but the idea I had at the time, didn't work/didn't excite me, so I put it aside, and haven't had any better ideas since then.

Both those ideas are, however, sequels, and I've vowed to write no more sequels, so I'll have to see what new story I can dream up for 2026. That will be my summer project. In any event, any story I can dream up will always be set in an imaginary land - so I don't have to do any research - but it will not be marketed as science fiction. It'll either fantasy, or another genre based on the story line, rather then on the place or time.

Okay. I just spent an hour typing this up. Looks like enough. I'll see if I can come up with something more substantial to write next week. In the meanwhile, I have at least a month's worth of my Saturday book review in the can, so there's always that.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 42)

 

There was a reason for rereading and, last week, reviewing Shades of Grey. And that reason is that I was preparing myself for the arrival of a book that I had never to expected to read. I actually never expected it to be written, since years ago I had learned that the planned last two books in the Shades of Grey trilogy, Painting By Numbers, and The Gordini Protocols had been cancelled due to the disappointing sales of Shades of Grey. But apparently the book slowly developed enough of a following, that a single sequel was greenlighted, and after the usual set of delays that seem to come with every Jasper Fforde book, it was in the mail. 

I had pre-ordered it from Amazon UK, as the last two of his books were either not released in the US or arrived a year later. But I see that this one is available from Amazon in the US. But it's here, and I've read it. Was it worth the wait?

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.

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde  A

While this book has the same delightfully clever and witty writing of the first book, as indeed, do all of Jasper Fforde's work, it tells a much darker story, in keeping with his last two books, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit. Given the discoveries of the first book, this story was always going to be a little darker, so it should have come as no surprise. What was surprising was just how harrowing the story turned out to be. In Shades of Grey, the narrator, Eddie Russett is a pretty naïve young many when he arrives in East Carmine, on the fringe of the Chromatacia, the society organized along what colors, and how much of those colors, an individual can see. Over the course of that story, he discovers, with the help of Jane, things aren't quite as they seem, which causes them not only to question everything, but to discover some of the answers and even more questions. Those answers come at a price. And they are determined to find the whole truth. In this book the truth comes at an even higher price.

This story takes place just a week or two after the events of Shades of Grey, with both Eddie and Jane awaiting trial for what they are suspected, falsely, of having killed the son of one of the powerful people in power in East Carmine. Even though the story flows seamlessly from the first, I have to wonder if this was the original continuing story  which Fforde had planned to tell in those cancelled two volumes compressed into one book. In some ways, it seems like this is the case, with Eddie and Jane quickly and rather effortlessly finding out a lot about the inner workings of the Choromatacia, much of which had been even hinted at in the first volume, much of it  simply told to them, rather than having them uncovering it themselves. This suggests to me that Fforde was pressed for time and plot, fitting two books into one. But on the other hand, there is one important character and one important plot line that looked to be an important part of the story going forward that is completely missing in this book, suggesting that the plot was significantly altered. 

In any event we discover many facets of this peculiar society - and hints of what lies outside of it - while Eddie and Jane await their trial, the result of which is a foregone conclusion, and not in their favor. And the more they discover, the more dangerous this knowledge is, to them, and everyone around them. Suffice to say real bad things happen.

When this book was first announced, Fforde was saying that this, and the next Thursday Next book were books meant to wrap up each of these series. And to a fairly good extent, this book wraps up the Shades of Grey series - not with all the answers, but with most of them. 

But wait a minute. After reading the book, I recently came across a YouTube video from the British SF bookstore Forbidden Planet, where they interviewed Jasper Fforde after a book signing. In that interview he talked about Red Side Story. He said that Shades of Grey was a book where he wanted to use characters of his own creation, and that he let himself go well, wild. However in Red Side Story, he wanted to rope the story in a bit, though it still seemed every bit as out there as ever to me. But with a much darker tone, not only because of the death sentence hanging over Eddie and Jane, but because their efforts to find the full truth put many more people at risk - for the more people know of the truth, the more dangerous it is for them. And then Fforde went on to say that he is now planning a third book. What? While it is certainly possible, given the revelations at the conclusion of the story, it would have to be a very type of different story - but apparently he has a good idea where he wants to take the story - I guess to its ultimate conclusion. That story is slated to be written after the Thursday Next book, and a stand alone book, which given Fforde's writing pace means that I can expect it sometime around March of 2036, so I'm not holding my breath.

So, what's the bottom line on Red Side Story? I think it's essential reading for readers who enjoyed Shades of Grey. It is every bit as entertainingly written as all of his books, and that earns a score of an A from me. However, I must confess that I don't see me re-reading this book half a dozen times like I did Shades of Grey. It is simply too dark of a story to fall in love with, for me to read again and again, no matter how clever it is written. If I ever reread Shades of Grey, I might go on to read this one too. But simply knowing the truth may be enough for me.

C. Litka Audio Books

Most of my books are now available as audiobooks on the major audiobook platforms. All of them use "auto-narration"  or "virtual voices" for their narrator for the simple reason that my publishing business cannot justify the cost of  hiring human narrators at between $100 to $500 per the run time of the book, For a book of 100,000 words the run time is around 12 hours and would cost between $1,200 to $$6,00 per book depending on the skill of the narrator. The fact that I can produce acceptable audiobooks for free, and sell them for that price as well, when the store allows, highlights the appeal of AI to producers of products. The fact that I would never consider hiring a human means that I'm not taking the break out of the mouths of starving audiobook readers. But it does illustrate the appeal of Ai to companies that can replace humans...

In any event... 

GOOGLE

All of my audiobooks are available on the Google Play Store for free. You can find them here. Google offers the most voices - I used a British voice for my narration - as well as the most options for editing, including text and using multiple voices within the narration. Its audiobooks are available hours after you hit publish.

APPLE

Some of my audiobooks are available on Apple, also for free. You can find them here. Apple offers the fewest choices, i.e. as in none at all. They also take forever to produce. All of my books were uploaded for conversion on the 1st of January, 2024, and of this posting. only 8 of the 13 books I uploaded are audiobooks. I have no idea why it takes so long. Hopefully more will be coming down the pike shortly. 

AMAZON/AUDIBLE

And finally all but two of my books are available as audiobooks on Amazon/Audible for the price of $3.99 - the minimum price set by Amazon. You can find them here. Amazon offers a limited choice of voices - and the lability to edit how words are pronounced, as well as adding pauses and adjust how fast a word is spoken. The audiobook appears within hours of publication. Two of my books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long for Audible, at least for this program. They run 34 hours plus on Google, but Audible is limiting run time to 26 hours or about 240K words. I am thinking of offering them in two volumes just for the audiobook version, though I would have to publish the two volume novels as ebooks, i.e. offering two versions of the same book. I'm still thinking about that.

I am a firm believer in audiobooks, even though I never "read" them myself. The audiobook market continues to grow. And I think, in this multi-tasking world, they will continue to grow, as they allow people to "read" books when doing things like driving to or for work. And I have no doubt that the technology that powers them will continue to improve to the point where they will become indistinguishable from your bog standard human narrator. Of course there will always be better, more dramatic human narrators - the super stars you will find in every field of endeavor - but they will always be rare. And expensive. All in all, I believe I am as well positioned to take advantage of this market, and reach more readers which is my publishing goal. And to that end, I'll keep an eye out for other audiobook platforms like Spotify, should they also offer this service in the future. Stay turned. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 41)

 

I've set myself up for an impossible task - describing, reviewing and recommending a book that I've read maybe six times over the last thirteen years, making it perhaps my favorite book of all time. The book is not Anne of Green Gables. Or anything like it. Instead, it is a strange, silly, satirical, mystery/post apocalypse novel. It's a slice of live story that only covers just four days. But a lot happens in four days. I recommend it to everyone, knowing that it's not a book for everyone. I will say, however, that I think most people who have read it on my recommendation have liked it, though not to the extent I do. So, without further ado, tallyho! 

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.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde   A+

I think I'd best start with the writing before I get to the basic premise of the story. This book offers exactly what I value most in a book; a small story (though with big implications), a first person narrative with a focus on characters, which is written with a great deal of clever wit and humor. I'm not a lad for silly stories, as a general rule. Silly, slapstick humor doesn't have a great appeal to me. But having said that, this story has a great deal of silliness in it that is handled in a matter of fact way. It's part of the humor. What redeems it for me is that all the silliness is grounded in the premise of the society the story is set in. It is not silliness just for the humor of silliness. It only seems silly to us because we are peering into this world from our own. Everything is very real to the characters in the story. Wodehouse was a master of this; while you couldn't take his characters, and the situations they get themselves into, seriously in our "real world", they are, however, entirely believable within the make-believe world he creates; a world that is just next door to our world.  

Part of the charm of this book is that it is a mystery on several different levels. We are dropped into this world without an info-dumps. You have to just sit back and go with the flow and abandon the desire to make immediate sense of the world. Fforde builds this world step by step throughout the entire story, and slowly you get a picture of a very closed, hieratical society where stasis and stability are the goal with human characters who are not quite like us. The second mystery is what lies behind the curtains of this society. It is the mystery that our narrator, Eddie Russet, slowly discovers, or rather discovers its existence, because he is a mite too curious. 

The basic premise of the story is that the humans of this society can usually only see one or two primary natural colors, if that. What colors they can see, and how much of that color they can see, determines their place in this very regimented society; a collective ruled by an elaborate set of rules and the highest color seeing members of the collective. There are, however, synthetic colors that everyone can see. Seeing color is one of the great desires of these humans. Showing off one's predominate color using these synthetic colors is a status symbol. The story is a post-apocalyptic on set some 500 years after "Something Happened," though what happened is not known. 

Our narrator, Eddie Russet, (everyone has the last name of related to the primary color they can see) has been assigned to conduct a useless task -a chair census - for a month in a remote town in Wales as punishment for a practical joke he did. Or so he believes. His father accompanies him as a replacement swatchman. Swatchmen are the doctor to these types of humans; curing various ailments by showing a specific synthetic color to the patient. (Think of the pantone series of color samples, if you're familiar with them.) They find that the collective's own swatchman has died under mysterious circumstances, and nothing is quite as it seems. This town is on the fringe of society and the rules are rather loosely interpreted. The story covers only four day as Eddie uncovers a deadly secret with the help of Jane, a "grey" girl i.e. someone who can't see any colors, and are the manual labors of the collective, making enemies in the process.

Enough. 

Here's the opening paragraphs to give you a taste of how the book reads;

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself  - I'd hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient.

But it wasn't all bad, for the following reason: First I was lucky to have landed upside down. I would drown in under a minute, which was far, far preferable to being dissolved alive over the space of a few weeks. Second, and more important, I wasn't going to die ignorant. I had discovered something that no amount of merits can buy you: the truth. Not the whole truth, but a pretty big part of it. And that was why this was all frightfully inconvenient. I wouldn't get to do anything with it. And this truth was too big and too terrible to ignore. Still, at least I'd held in my hands for a full hour and understood what it meant.

I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.

Passage to Jarpara, Final Thoughts and A Map

 

I've talked a length about Passage to Jarpara in several previous posts, so there isn't all that much more to say about the book. I rather rushed my volunteer beta readers to get this book out on the 21st of March. In part because this book, with all its fits and starts, has been in the works for some 18 months, and I just wanted to be done with it and have it out the door. The other factor is that I ain't as young as I used to be. I don't think I have one foot in the grave just yet. But at 74, I could drop dead tomorrow and no one would raise an eyebrow. Like Captain Hook with the crocodile that swallowed a clock, and had eaten his hand and found it tasty, one hear the faintly ticking of the clock at a this age. So there is no time like the present. For every writer, one of their books is going to be their last one, and if they die in harness, one left unfinished. I'd spent too much time and liked these characters too much to run the slightest risk it being that unfinished one. Hopefully it'll not the last.

As for the story itself. As I've said several times already, I've never been into writing epics. I enjoy reading small scale stories that somehow make everyday life interesting, either with pleasant characters, an interesting time and/or locale, and/or a quiet, but engaging plot. And that's what I enjoy writing as well. In this story I pretty much doubled down on that. The only overarching plot element is the journey to Jarpara and its University in the hope of finding employment. Every other element of the story is incidental. And almost, but not quite all, are everyday events, at least in the islands and on seas of the Tropic Sea. The story then depends on its pleasant characters, and interesting places with a travelogue motif. Hopefully that works for my readers.

This book is different from my other ones in that the romance element is subdued. The chase is over and Taef and Lessie are married. I had hopes of being able to write some witty dialog between them, a sort of Nick and Nora type of relationship, but I don't think I succeeded. In part I may've beyond the limits of my talent. But I will also blame the characters. Writers will sometime talk about their characters taking the story in ways they never envisioned, as if they had an agency of their own. I can see how that happens, though in this case it wasn't so much as taking the story where I wasn't expecting, rather it was the fact that Lessie never had all that much to say in either of the proceeding stories - she is a quiet character, especially in the company of her sister Sella, and I was unable, and/or unwilling to reinvent her for this one. I would've hoped to have made their relationship a little more complex than I was able to. But, as I said, that probably isn't in my wheelhouse as a writer.

I did enjoy the opportunity to bring back a lot of the minor characters from the previous books. I may've stretch coincidences a little to do so, but I used the opportunity to bring them back, even if only for a little walk-on part. It gave me the opportunity to explore Taef's beliefs and attitudes. I also had fun writing several new characters, one in particular that had been lurking off the page in the first two books. I won't say who, but that character was always going to be part of this story. 

A number of my beta readers expressed a desire to have more stories with these characters and setting, suggesting possible story lines. There are certainly plenty of story lines to pick up and run with, but I'm not planning to do so, at least not until I'm 84. As I've said when introducing this book, writing sequels of less than a bestselling series is for chumps. Stand alone books, "singletons", with open endings are the way to go until lightning strikes and you have a bestseller on your hands. Then you can write sequels until the cows come home or readers don't. Of course, if you look at my back catalog, I don't follow my own advice. However, I intend to going forward. No more sequels - except maybe, someday, a novella sequel to The Lost Star's Sea just to get Litang and Cin back together again at the ending. But, mind you, I'm not promising that, it is just something I'd like to do, just as I wanted to give Taef a job.

Well, I guess I've rambled on long enough to fill this post without saying much about Passage to Jarpara. But I hate spoilers, and hate spoiling my books more, so this is the last post for now on that book. 

Below is the official map for Passage to Jarpara. I don't include it in the ebook, as using maps in ebooks is a pain. 

The Saturday Morning Post (40)

 

"What's this?" you say. "Another mystery story? I thought you weren't a fan of mysteries, and here you are, two in a row."

Well, as I mentioned in my last Saturday Morning Post that I'm out of books to read. I've read all the recommended books I had on my list, so I'm on my own for reading material. My wife had just read this library book on her Kindle, and thought I might like it, as it had a first person narration, and none of the things I dislike, like contemporary settings, flashbacks, and multiple points of view. So I decided to give it a try before she returned it.

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.

Duty to the Dead  by Charles Todd  C+

This is not a bad book. It reads well, has an engaging narrator, and is set in a historical period that sounded right to me. Unlike that Victorian era historical mystery I read some time back, the authors (a son and mother team) did not try to impress the reader with their research with mini-lectures drawn from Wikipedia. By chance it is the first book of a (currently) 13 book series whose stories take place during and immediately after World War l.

The story involves a British World War l nurse, Bess Crawford. She survives the sinking of the hospital ship Britannica in the Mediterranean Sea in 1916, though her arm was broken. She finds herself on medical leave in England until her arm has healed enough for her to do her job once again. She had been given a message by a dying soldier to deliver to his brother in person. Just two sentences, that told her nothing. Using her leave, she decides that the owes it to the dead soldier, who she had warm feeling for, to deliver this message. After contacting them, she is invited to the family home, and delivers her message, which opens up an ugly can of family worms. An ugly mystery, and her promise to the dying soldier, compels her to uncover the events that took place 15 years before the story opens and their repercussions, in order to uncover the truth. 

My major criticism of the story is that I found it hard to suspend my disbelief in some key aspects of the mystery. While the authors made a valiant effort to make the reader believe that these people could do what they did, and that the authorities could do what they did, I must admit that I never quite bought it. The backstory and some of the actions of the characters just seemed too contrived. Still, I read the entire book, and that says a lot when it comes to me. I don't waste my time reading books I don't like. I think fans of mysteries, especially ones set in historical settings would find this book just fine, and probably enjoy the series as well.

A New Novel and New Audiobooks

The 2024 C. Litka Novel - Passage to Jarpara

I am happy to announce that my 2024 novel, Passage to Jarpara was released on Thursday, 21 March 2024.

The story:

Taef Lang must set out on his grand quest…

… To find a job. 

Now a married man, the time has come for Taef to begin his long-delayed career as a professor of Island archaeology and/or Island history. To do so, he and Lessie, along with Sella and Carz, set sail for the Island and the University of Jarpara.

Passage to Jarpara is a travelogue of that journey. It’s an account of islands called on, old friends and acquaintances met, new ones made, as well as potential pirates, curse-beasts, haunted Tiki palaces, fire islands, and a hidden race of immortals. In short, it’s an episodic record of the everyday life of the island-studded Tropic Sea.

Passage to Jarpara is the third and final volume of Tales of the Tropic Sea from the pen of C. Litka. It draws a fitting conclusion to the adventures of Taef, Sella, and Lessie that begin with their voyage to Redoubt Island and continued with the freeing of the Prisoner of Cimlye. It blends fantasy, science fiction, adventure, and romance told in C. Litka's classic lighthearted style. Like all his novels, it features engaging characters, witty dialog, meticulous world-building, and mysteries to be solved in unexpected ways.

The ebook version is now available for FREE from these ebook retailers. 

Smashwords 

Apple

Barnes & Noble

Kobo 

Google

And several European ebook retailers, including; Thalia , Vivlio .Borrowbox, Odilo.

(It is priced at $.99 at Gardners.)

The FREE audiobook version is available from Google.

The ebook version version is available from Amazon for $3.99

The audiobook version is available from Audible for $3.99 You can add the ebook for $1.99 more

The trade paperback is available from Amazon for $11.99

NEW! C. Litka Audiobooks are now on Audible!

And my second announcement is that most of my books are now available as audiobooks on Amazon and Audible for $3.99.(The minimum price Amazon allows) These auto-narrated audiobooks from Amazon are part of a new beta program that I was offered and was more than happy to take part in. I have to say that I was very happy with the AI narration quality from Amazon. The only hitch in the program so far is that for some unknown reason, I've not been able to get The Bright Black Sea, The Lost Star's Sea, and Shadows of an Iron Kingdom working as audiobooks. Hopefully I'll get that worked out with Amazon shortly. 

I also have six audiobooks available for FREE on Apple Books, the rest are hanging fire, and have been for the better part of three months. What Google and Amazon can do in hours, Apple appears unable to do in months. Hopefully at some time in the not too distant future Apple will get around to converting the rest of my books, though a this point I'm not holding my breath. 

Writing Passage to Jarpara

 

click for a larger map

As I told my beta readers, this is a totally unnecessary story. I had left Taef and Lessie sailing for their bright future together, a more definite ending then I usually provide. So why then, does it even exist? There are several reasons.

The first is that I sort of always wanted to see Taef get the job he wanted, and I thought that there might be a story in a long trip across the Tropic Sea. A second reason is that I really like these people and the Tropic Sea, so I didn't need much of an excuse to revisit Taef, Lessie, Sella and Carz, and the Islands. Thus, there was always a motivation for one more story.

Next was opportunity. In 2022 I had written and submitted The Girl on the Kerb to a publisher during their un-agented open period, and had to wait at least 9 months to learn that they passed on it. And during that time I had, just for the experience, been querying agents while I waited on the publisher. So with that book hanging fire, it was time to start another one, even if The Girl on the Kerb looked to be my 2023 novel.

And then there was the fact that story ideas are very scarce on the ground for me these days, and quite frankly, that sort-of-story idea I had, was the only one I had. So when fall 2022 came around, and with it, the writing season, I decided to run with the one story idea I had. And that story idea was summed up in the (not serious) working title Zar Lada, Taef Lang, and the Island of the Slumbering God. I didn't care if it turned out to be a novel or a novella, I'd play that by ear.

The basic idea was that I'd have Taef, Lessie, along with Sella and her new husband, Carz sail east to Jarpara and during the voyage get talked into making a side trip to view the slumbering god, or some such mysterious thing, by a person they met aboard the ship. I wanted to see how I could write a married couple, once the romantic chase was over. I had hoped to be able to write some sort of Nick & Nora type of small talk between them. I also felt that I could use the story to bring back a some minor characters for their final bow as well. It was never going to be an epic quest. I've always been into small personal, character-focused stories, and this was going to be a very small scale, low stakes, character-focused story.

I started writing it on 14 Sept. 2022 and by 6 Nov., I had about 25K words written. I stopped work on it at that point because I had no idea what a slumbering god, or any Island mystery, could be. This has been a curse of mine recently, starting a story, with a vague middle part, and once into it, unable to come up with that middle part. 

On the 2 Jan. 2023 I once more started on the project, starting with a new beginning scene - the return to Lil Lon to introduce Lessie to Taef's parents, which was not in the plans at the end of The Prisoner of Cimlye, but seemed like a good idea. I had 38K words written before the project petered out again a few weeks later. During the following months, I returned to it in spurts - mostly editing what I had - so that by 6 June 2023 I had 44K words done. At this point the story clearly wasn't going to be a novella, and so I needed  to come ups at least 30K more words to make it a respectable novel. 30K words for which I didn't have the faintest idea where to find that slumbering god, or any other attraction could be.

I then spent the summer daydreaming up other potential stories, one a portal fantasy novella inspired by a girl I saw at a London bus stop during one of the virtual bus rides I was taking on YouTube. And a second, very mundane fantasy story, somewhat inspired by the stories I've been reading by D E Stevenson and Molly Clavering, which is to say stories that don't involve more than domestic trials and perhaps a bit of romance. I like to color outside the lines, and given how popular the epic & grimdark fantasies are, with their dragons and epic battles, I wanted to write something completely different. I spent all summer working a story out to the point were I probably could've written it, but...

But I had half a novel sitting unfinished, and I feared that I might find myself burned out on this summer story idea half way through writing it, so I decided to buckle down and finish Passage to Jarpara. To trust that I could find the slumbering god when I needed it and just start writing. So on 1 October, I once more started in on Passage to Jarpara, inserting another new chapter in what I'd already written, editing what I had written, and then writing forward. I came up with two ideas for side-trips, one minor, the other major.

The major idea I came up with for the slumbering god motif came to me while I lay awake one night. It was actually a return to an early idea I had for what Sella, Lessie and Taef would find on Redoubt Island in the first book of the series. I modified it somewhat, but the core idea for what they would've discovered in my first version of Redoubt Island will be found on Recluse Island in Passage to Jarpara. I thought it a fitting way to draw the series to a close. 

So it all worked out and  I finished the first draft of the story a few days before my self-imposed deadline of 1 Feb 2024, with a 105K novel. Now people often say that you should put the story aside for a few months before coming back to it for a second draft, but at my age, I can't take that chance. I spent February doing my second and third drafts and running it through Google Drive and Grammarly, before turning it over to my wife Sally in early March for her proofreading.

And being an old and impatient man, I decided to publish it on the first day of spring, 21 March 2024, no doubt putting my beta readers on the spot.

I will write more about the story itself after its release. Stay tuned!

 

The Saturday Morning Post (No.39)

 

With the last two massive books dealt with, one way or another, I found that my TBR list was blank. I had nothing to read. So I went to the bookshelf and pulled out volume three of the Brother Cadfael series, and read the next story in that series.

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 Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters  B+

In this story we meet a young, traveling juggler and musician who is fleeing an angry mob of towns people who are accusing him of murder and robbery. He makes it to the Monastery and into the church, which, by law, gives him sanctuary for 40 days, or as long as he stays in the church. The person he is accused of murdering, does not, in fact, die, so only the theft charge hangs over him. Still, might be enough to hang him in this time period. Bother Cadfael is called on to dresses the wounds the juggler received from the mob, and in questioning him, believes his claim to be innocent of both crimes. But that impression must be proven and Cadfael, along with his friend, the under sheriff, set out to find the true facts in the affair.

The crime took place on the night of a wedding celebration in the house of a wealthy, and miserly goldsmith, and in the course of the story we get to know the inhabitants of that house. As customary with Ellis Peter's Cadfael stories, the person in trouble is a young man, and there is an element of (an unconvincing) romance involving him as well. 

Like always, this is an interesting tale, with a lot of time spent finely drawing the characters involved in the mystery, with some detective work mixed in here and there. Like the previous story, The Virgin in the Ice, it has a very dramatic closing scene which, I must confess, I'm not overly fond of. In some ways I think these dramatic climatic scenes are not only unnecessary, but seem out of place with the general tone of these stories, with their focus on the everyday life of the 12th century monastery, the city, and surrounding countryside, then on the extraordinary event - the mystery to be solved. And I think that's best solved in the classic murderer mystery style of some sort of review of the evidence, and the unmasking of the criminal. But as always, that's just me, though in this case I was also unconvinced that the who in the whodunit had sufficient motive to do it. Even so, it was an enjoyable read, though not quite top tier installment of this excellent series. I think that you can't go wrong with a Cadfael mystery.

Proofreading

Any long time reader of mine is well aware that the first editions of my early books had too many typos. While I was well aware that I couldn't spell English to save my soul, I didn't realize how blind I was to my typing mistakes. I read what I expect to read, whether the word(s) is(are) actually on the page or not. As a result, I often miss in both typing and reading the little words that aren't there but should be. As well as the double words that arise either out of stopping to think of the next phrase, or from moving lines about in editing, and the use of the wrong words that look similar to the right ones. 

Proofreading is a very specialized skill, and though my wife, unlike me, knows the rules of grammar, spelling, and was a high school teacher for decades, she only finds 95+% of my mistakes, so that some of my mistakes inevitably through. Thankfully, over the years, some very kind readers have taken the time to point out the errors they come across to me that I then correct. Some of these kind people have since become my beta readers, and with their generous help I've been able to slowly improve all my books over the years.

I'd like to believe that having been at this writing thing most of my life, I've gotten better at it. And while I think I have, I'm still far from perfect. I have, however, started using several programs in addition to LibreOffice to process my work. Three years ago I discovered that Google Docs has a much more robust grammar checker than LibreOffice, so I ran all my published books through it, and now upload all of my new books to proofread my stories before handing the story off to my wife. It finds many of the double words and some of the wrong and missing words. But not all. My wife still had to do her proofreading, and my beta readers still find some typos that had escaped both Google Docs and my wife.

For Passage to Jarpara, I decided to add a second layer of automated grammar checking, and ran the story through the free version of Grammarly, after running it through Google Docs. It found a number of double words and wrong words that Google Docs had missed. I had hoped that between the two programs, I'd be able to hand my wife a clean copy that all she'd need to do was read it. Alas, this was not the case.

Spelling wise, few words escaped detection. There were several missing little words, mostly "to" that were missed by both programs. Grammarly liked hyphenated words, i.e. "white-painted house" and having no opinion one way or the other, I went along with Grammarly on that. However, something like 75% of Grammarly's suggestions involved the elimination or insertion of commas. I may not know the "rules" about comma placement, but place them where I think a speaker would pause, which, given that my books are now auto-generated audiobooks, is pretty important. Still, I made the lazy decision just to go with Grammarly on commas. My wife, however, quickly complained about the lack of commas where commas ought to be. I also found them missing where I would've, and maybe did, place them, so I spent a lot of time adding commas back in. Another point was that for some crazy reason, I decided to use semi-colons instead of my usual dashes. Grammarly didn't complain about them at all, but my wife has very strong  and narrow opinions on the use of semi-colons/colons, and so I had to go back to dashes to please her. I'll never use a semi-colon again.

Both these programs tend to ignore words that make no sense, so that they usually don't try to correct my made-up words. This simplifies things greatly. However, LibreOffice will underline them. And unfortunately I will misspell my own made-up words, and since they are all underlined, I never realize that I have. I could tell the program to ignore those words as I write them, but it seems to lose those instructions as soon as I close the program, so they're all underlined again the following morning. This time around, I spent several hours working on the final proofread draft, telling the program to ignore the correctly spelled made-up words, so that I could find my misspelled ones. I found maybe 20 of them. So frustrating.

I haven't given up hope of finding a completely reliable, and free, grammar checker, or perhaps use three or four of them in succession to see if I can eliminate all the errors that one or two programs seem to miss. But that will be for the next novel. This time around, I'm hoping that my beta readers don't find too many errors, none being too much to hope for. In any event, Passage to Jarpara should be a close to perfect as a C. Litka book in this world will ever be.