A Special Guest Contributor on the Uniqueness of Writers

I came across this introduction by James Payn. I have slightly edited it. I found it quite timely.

A Vanity Fair Caricature 1888

"In these days, when every man and woman becomes an author upon the least provocation, it is not necessary to make an apology for appearing in print...  Neither sex nor age seems to exempt from the universal passion of authorship. My niece, Jessie (ætat. sixteen), writes heart-rending narratives for the "Liliputian Magazine;" her brother, whom I have always looked upon as a violent, healthy hobbledehoy whose highest virtue was Endurance, and whose darkest experience was Skittles, produces the most thrilling romances for the "Home Companion." Even my housekeeper makes no secret of forwarding her most admired recipes to the "Family Intelligencer;" while my stable-boy, it is well known, is a prominent poetical contributor to the "Turf Times," having also the gift of prophecy with reference to the winner of all the racing events of any importance. And yet, I believe, my household is not more addicted to publication than those of my neighbours.

What becomes of authors by profession in such a state of things literary as this, I shudder to think; I feel it almost a sin to add one more to the long list of competitors with whom they have to struggle; but still, if I do not now set down the story which I have in my mind, I am certain that, sooner or later, my nephew will do so for me, and very likely spoil it in the telling. He writes in a snappy, jerky, pyrotechnic way, which they tell me is now popular, but which is not suited to my old-fashioned taste; and although he dare not make, at present, what he calls "copy" of the stories with which I am perhaps too much accustomed to regale his ears, he keeps a note-book, and a new terror is added to Death from that circumstance. When I am gone, he will publish my best things, under some such title as "After-dinner Tales," I feel certain; and they will appear at the railway book-stalls in a yellow cover bordered with red, or with even a frontispiece displaying a counterfeit and libellous presentment of his departed relative in the very act of narration."

I've lifted the piece from the "Prefactory" of James Payn's novel, Lost Sir Massingbert: A Romance of Real Life, published in England in 1864. James Payn was a  prolific novelist and editor. I came across him and this novel via one of my booktube fellows who is conducting a read along of bestselling authors of the Victorian period who are now forgotten. Payn and this novel is the April selection, which I felt like giving a try, as he sounded like something of a character. As for the novel itself, I'll be reviewing it in a month or two, so stay tuned.

Besides finding this introduction to his most famous novel amusing, it think it serves to illustrate an important, and often overlooked point; creativity is a very common human trait. So common in fact that it is not a commercially viable trait for most people in most areas of creative endeavors. And, in what is recognized as "The Arts", only the good-and-very-lucky few may be able to produce commercially viable products, usually only for a time, as careers in the arts usually fall well short of a "career". The arts are ruled by both fashion and scarcity, neither of which are conductive to long careers.

Still, modern society and technology has allowed far more people the opportunity to practice, perform, and display their artistic abilities than ever before. It has created many more opportunities to turn those talents into some sort of income, though rarely at a professional level income. And as I mentioned, rarely a lifelong professional income. 

Being essentially an amateur, or a part time performer of one sort or another, is not only in the arts, the norm, but realistically, about the most anyone can expect to be, at least from my observations and in my opinion. I also think it's enough. The beauty of being an amateur is that it is impervious to market conditions, since it is all about the personal pursuit of beauty, meaning, art, and not fame and wealth, neither of which has proven to bring happiness.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 180)

 

What can I say? It was available on Kindle Unlimited, I hadn't read it, and after such a rather rocky start...

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 Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer  B

The premise of this story, set immediately after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender to the English throne in 1746, is that because a lifelong con man, and his two children chose the wrong side in that civil war, they are now in danger of having their heads on spikes on London Bridge. Their resourceful father, whose moto is "I contrive" pretty much sums up his approach to life. He contrives. And his two children are often involved in many a wild scheme of his invention, the result of which, they are both very adept at intrigue and playing roles. In this case, they cross dress. Robin, the boy plays Prudence and Prudence plays "Peter" her brother.

The story opens, confusingly, (which seems to be a characteristic of a Heyer story) with the brother/sister pair saving a young heiress from a ruthless toff in need of a fortune as she is being dragged off to Gretna Green to be married against her will, after changing her mind. This, in turn, drags them into London Society, with Prudence play a young man and having to do all the things a young man about London did at the time, gambling in clubs, fighting duels, etc. Luckily her father once ran a gambling house, so she hold her own an any game. In saving the heiress, they meet a noble man, who befriends the pair, and takes the fresh "young man" into his care... and, who begins to suspect...

This is another of her light hearted stories, not strictly a comedy, but not one to take too seriously either. It was written in 1928. Stories written prior to 1940 were often set before the French Revolution, as this one is. After 1940, she began writing Regency Romances exclusively, and I think for the most part, those later stories were her best stories. While this is a good story, it's not peak Heyer for my taste, i.e. comedy.

Well, it's back to exploring KU once again with a contemporary story next week. Stay tuned.

A Bird in the Bush

I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to pull back a corner of the curtain on what I am thinking of writing next. The key word is "thinking". There's not a word on a page, and won't be for months, if ever. I don't know if I can make a story out of this idea.

I'd been planning on finishing my boring novel before starting an entirely new story, and indeed, I spent three weeks in March revising what I'd written last year; giving a character more character, rearranging some incidents, and generally sprucing up all 35K words of it. But standing in the shower a week ago, I realized I was too bored with it to continue. I hadn't settled on an ending. All I could see was that it would drone on and then fizzle out. So much for embracing boredom. So I called it a day on that and instead I'm working on the second draft of the Poison-Pill Will and The Pawns' Game instead and thinking about what's next.

The idea I'm exploring began as a fantasy novel, since fantasies outsell science fiction like ten to one. But since I can't bring myself to write pure magic and dragons, it has to be one of my pseudo-fantasies, i.e. a fantasy because the narrator is unfamiliar with the technology of the lost advanced civilization that proceeded his present age. This still counts as a type of fantasy. 

I had began exploring this story idea as I finished up the Poison-Pill Will, but decided to get back to my boring novel first. Thus I had the world - a moon, actually - already sketched out in my mind. It's base loosely on India under the British Rah, and the Grand Trunk Road (pictured above) that crossed it. I'd have an "empire" of consisting of many small, technologically backward, and deliberately isolated diverse states under the nominal rule of one central authority. All of these states are linked by a great road, and its offshoots. The narrator of the story would be a widely traveled young courier of the central authority.

In the foot hills above the central authorities' capital city stands a vast iron gate set into the stone of the mountain, which is understood to be the gateway to the largely mythical, and often considered supernatural world that this world is ruled from. It is know by the people running the empire that this is a real gateway to a greater empire, and there is a regulated amount of trade between their little empire, and this greater empire beyond the iron gate.

Now, our narrator would know that there is a real vast empire beyond the iron gate because he is part of the central administration, and his grandmother, the governor-general of this empire, actually arrived from beyond the iron gate. However, the true extent of what lays beyond it, is kept a secret, in part because of the treaty between the various throw-back, dissenting societies and the greater entity, the Unity, (if you know, you know) that created the rules for this "empire" 30,000 years ago. The dissenting societies wanted to keep themselves isolated from the Unity, and the Unity wanted to use that isolation to study the evolution of a great number and variety of human societies. And thus everyone is content to let what lays beyond the iron gates remain a myth. 

Just because it seems like most fantasy stories involve wars, I am going to have my empire at peace for all 30,000 years. That's the way I roll. This means that my story will have to be another small, relatively low stakes one, i.e. the type I write.

My current story idea is that a very limited number of the best art that is created within these very unique and deliberately isolated societies is purchased by the Unity, which then it is sold beyond the iron gate, at vastly inflated prices to wealthy collectors throughout the Unity of the Nine Star Nebula. Only three or four pieces a year are purchased, and elaborately authenticated so that copies can be easily identified, making the art very scarce, and hence very valuable to collectors with the wealth to afford them. However, at a recent art auction of a wealthy family that faced an reverse of fortune, it was found that a dozen of the pieces of this type of art were both authentic and (nearly) properly authenticated, but they  were not sold through the proper authority, i.e. that they had not only been somehow smuggled out, but they also had apparently been supplied with proper authentication as well, making them all but indistinguishable to anyone without the access to the complete list of items stretching back all those 30,000 years. And this smuggling appears to have been going on for thousands of years. 

In response, the Unity sends a team to this moon to track down just how this is being done from ground zero; where the art is being created. The Unity team would consist of a Patrol officer, someone like Vaun Di Ai of the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, though a new character. The other would be an old spacer/enlisted man to act as her aide. Our narrator would then guide then to several of the throw-back societies of this moon to track down the smuggling ring. Adventures would ensue... Move along folks, there's no story here yet, just as premise.

But then I got an idea. What if I made the enlisted man Rafe d'Mere, the narrator of those Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories? I could set this story a few years after he left the Alantzia System, with him having been roped back into the Patrol. 

And yet again, what if I made him the narrator as well? 

There are three pluses. The first being that I could then describe the world through his eyes, as someone new to it. This would make world building a lot less telling and more experiencing. Secondly, I like the character and could have fun with him. Third, I could toss in a few opening chapters about how Rafe gets snagged back into the Patrol by his admiral parents as he transits his home system. And I could use those chapters to set up the details of the smuggling activity by having Rafe investigate the trail of the smuggled artifacts from the moon, and then use his special info-system skills to get assigned investigation on the moon. In short I could set up the premise with action rather than all telling.

Alas, there are minuses as well. First, having him as the narrator would make this a science fiction book rather than a fantasy, since we'd be seeing it coming from my sf universe. And secondly, it would make this novel past of my Nine Star Nebula Adventure/Mystery series. I have said on several occasions that writing sequels is for chumps, and here I am again, writing yet another sequel, the fifth, in fact, rather than a new standalone novel, which is what I really wanted to do.

Of course, it may not matter. This is still all in my head, my dreaming up a story phase, and it is far from certain I'll come up with enough of a story to make it into one. I don't have enough yet. And if I do develop enough of a story to write, I won't be writing it for months. My plan has been to write a novel a year. I've been working ahead. I think I'm caught up to 2029, so I have no deadline to meet, and I'm going to write it as a novel, not like the novellas I've been doing recently, so it's likely going to take a while if, or when, I start. 2027 at the earliest.

We'll just have to see. What I can say is, don't hold your breath for that boring novel.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 179)

 

Alas, my exploration of KU titles has been going pretty much like I expected, given my taste in books. Which is to say, I am not a fan of contemporary writing. This time, however, we have a book that was originally published in 1995 and republished as an ebook in 2025. But it is yet another sea story. That was the search category I was exploring.

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.

Waterfront by Richard Woodman  DNF 19%

Well, at least I can say that I really like the cover of this edition of the book. I also like that the story is set aboard a tramp steamer in the early 1900's. I love the lore of tramp steamers, so it should have been a winner. But... 

I make no claims to be a patient man, and this story tried my patience to the breaking point. It just meandered aimlessly around for the first several chapters. We start with the prologue; the fictional bio of the early life of the main character James Dunbar. Fine, I guess, if unnecessary. Chapter One opens with our hero, Dunbar, now an apprentice aboard a tramp steamer, and we met an old sailor, Dunbar's unofficial mentor, Williams. After a few pages it changes focus, location, and characters to the captain and mate, discussing their cargo and the Mexican  port they are calling on. And then it shifts focus to the backstory of the captain for a few pages, and then on William's backstory covering his years at sea, before shifting back to the port of call in Mexico, briefly, before going back in time to Dunbar's first days aboard the ship at the start of this voyage. And then back to the present, briefly, before going back to Dunbar's youth and an early romance, of sort. Where it meandered after that I can't say, since a this point I just gave up.

I will readily admit that I prefer stories told in a fairly linier fashion, and stories that focus on one principle character. This story was just too disjointed for me to get into. I came for a sea story, not for all the back stories of the characters that littered the pages for the first three chapters. I think that one could work those stories into an ongoing narrative that drove the story forward without all these asides. Indeed, I have no idea why the story didn't start with incident - a storm at sea - described when the ship was first setting out. It would've made a far more compelling opening than the one the author chose to start with. All the other character building could've been done with incidents on the voyage from England to the west coast of Mexico. Still, as usual, all this is on me, the book wasn't delivering on what I expected, and wanted.

I suppose that this book settled down, eventually. But after sitting on my shelf for a few days in the middle of chapter three, I decided I wasn't going to force myself to push on and find out. The ebook was a two book boxed set, but as I found out when looking him up to see if there are any more in the series (no), I discovered that many years ago, I had read a book or two in his Nathaniel Drinkwater series of Napoleonic era naval stories - but only one or two, as they were not, as I remember, all that good. I think he was the one who had his hero, Drinkwater, crash his little ship into a vast enemy three-decker at the battle of Trafalgar, slowing it down just enough for Nelson's ship to come alongside, and well, the rest is (real) history. That historical invention was just too over the top for me, since,  as you know, I'm a bit of a stickler for somewhat accurate history in historical fiction. In any event, Woodman has written over a hundred naval adventures in a variety of series. It's just too bad I'm not a fan of his stories.

The Mysterious Case of the Case Without Glasses

The glasses in question. If you find them, drop me an email

I've worn glasses since grade school, but these days, without blackboards to stare at, I only wear my glasses when I am driving. And then, only because I don't want to risk flunking the driving test. I prefer seeing the world in soft focus. I keep my glasses on the desk in the great room, where they are handy whenever I want to take the car out for a spin. 

Right. Stage set.

One afternoon this past February we decided to, I believe, pick up some Valentine cards for the grandkids at the Dollar Tree three blocks away. Which we did, and then stopped at the supermarket to pick up some groceries. When I got back into the car, I realized I wasn't wearing my glasses, as I should've been, seeing that I was doing the driving. As unlikely as it seemed, I thought perhaps they had fallen off my face when I was bagging the groceries, so I retraced my steps back through the parking lot to the store and the checkout counter, without encountering my glasses. My wife was unhelpful, as she could not say whether or not I had them on when I left the house. I guess when you've been around someone for the better part of 50 years, you don't need to pay all that much attention to details like that.

Well, I thought, maybe I didn't put them on this time. Though I would've thought I'd have noticed the omission with the stoplights being a little blurry. But I hadn't. And, arriving home, I found that little sleeve on the desk where I keep my glasses was empty.

We had a mystery.

Subsequently,  I searched the car, the house, and several days later, went back to both stores to ask if my glasses had turned up. They hadn't. Though, interestingly enough, the supermarket had a drawer of abandoned glasses...  Two months later they still have not shown up, even after the almost infallible method of having them turn up - I went and bought a new pair.

It seems to me that classic science can explain this mystery in only three ways.

1, For some reason I took my glasses off in either store, and set them down, only to forget them. I didn't just hold them in my hand, or put them in my jacket pocket, I set them down somewhere for something and forgot I did so a minute later. I can not imagine why I would do this.

2. They just fell off my face and I didn't notice it. Now, they were loose enough to fall off my face if I carelessly looked down, but not to notice it... Well, unless I'm more ga-ga than I think - and you are free to think otherwise - I can't imagine this happening.

3 The only other solution is that I used them from some other purpose around the house, put them down somewhere, forgot about it, and they simply haven't shown up yet.

All three possibilities seem very unlikely, so unlikely in fact, that they rival far less conventional explanations.

As I briefly mentioned last week, the normal world we know is based on the statistical likelihood of quantum particles behaving in a predictable manner, but not all of them do so. Just most of them. Most do this, but there are always those that do that. It seems to me that over the billions of years of quantum particles doing this and that, that some of those unlikely "thats" would persist and play a role in our reality. The fact that they would be rare enough not to be scientifically reproducible does not preclude their existence. They might be considered "bugs" in the "matrix" if you will. I'm talking about incidents like people disappearing, or appearing out of the blue, time-slips, ghosts, and apparitions, i.e. things that science scoffs at as supernatural nonsense, if only because they, one, can't be explained by science as we currently understand it, and two, they are so rare and fleeting that they can't be studied.

The thing is that I think most people during their lifetimes have had experiences that they cannot explain. Little things. Things seen or felt that seemed somehow out of place in their everyday life. I suspect that if you ask anyone, they will tell you some event that they experienced that they can't explain. 

In my case, I think something like this is a 4th possible explanation for the disappearance of my glasses. A little slip or flaw in the reality of world. A little bug that erased my glasses at some point during that shopping trip in such a way that I never realized they existed. Until getting into the car at the supermarket. Now, this is only the 4th possible explanation, and I'm not saying it is the explanation, mind you, only that it seems not all that less unlikely than the first three.

A 5th explanation is that my wife hid them as part of a cunning plan to drive me  around the bend so that she can run off with some secret lover with my money. It might work. If it's even necessary.

I'd like to say time will tell. But I don't think it will. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 178)

 

The "What can I find on Kindle Unlimited" quest continues this week.

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. 

Soundings Edge by Adrian Westbrooke  DNF 7%

This is the first book in a six book series (so far). I found it to be boring. This not to say that it was poorly written. Westbrooke had done his research and includes a lot of description of the time and place the story is set; in the 1770's. And he places his hero on a ship captained by Captain Cook, during which I believe was his second voyage of exploration to the Pacific. But three chapters into it, it simply hadn't hooked me. There was a lot of telling, if you like that sort of thing. By the time I called it a day, we had seen our hero grow up, spend two years at a naval academy, and cross the pacific to Australia, i.e. a lot of stuff, without much depth. All of which necessitated a lot of telling, with very little personality or characters.

It is perhaps unfair to compare every sea story, at least of this period, to Patrick O'Brian, but I do. He is the gold standard, in my opinion, for several reasons. The first is that he brings the age he is writing about onto the page in the way he writes. He uses just enough historic words and usages to take the reader back in time, without having to stumble over lots of unfamiliar words and obscure items. There is more to bring a historical period to life than writing a description of scenes. Speech and words should suggest the period as well, without compromising readability. And secondly, for my taste, the story has to feature people first and foremost. We have to see and experience the world through the characters' eyes, not the writer's. In this case, it was just Westbrooke hurrying us along to tell his story, and perhaps to educate us. I assume we would eventually reach a point where our main character plays a more active and important role in the story, so, if I had a little more patience, the characters would likely have unfolded. I mean, with six books, they must have unfolded and grown richer. Or so you would think. But even so, I fear what would not have changed is the writer's style, and style to me is all important. HIs style simply did not click with me.

At the time of writing this piece, it is in the #7000's best selling books on Amazon, with just over 1000 ratings with a 4.7 star rating, so it is a very popular and well regarded book, especially for such a niche category. So, as always, read my preferences above and take my review with those expectations in mind.

Evidence of the Uncertainty Principle at a Classical Physics Level

Typical start of a jigsaw puzzle with edge pieces whose waveforms have not yet collapsed, and are therefore missing until they do so.

I'm not going to claim that I understand quantum theory. Indeed, I think that if you find someone who claims they do, they're liars. What little I do know can be summed up in the uncertainty principle, mainly that before you make an observation, you cannot say for certain what the state of a subatomic particle is in. Only once an "observation" is made does the "wave form" collapse and the particle can be described. It's the old cat in the box thought experiment of Schrodinger. You can't predict if the cat is alive or dead in the box, until you open the box. This quantum action is thought to happen on a subatomic level. But I have found evidence that the quantum uncertainty principle operates at a far higher level in jigsaw puzzle boxes. At the level of classical, real world, physics.

This past Christmas our daughter gave us one of those jigsaw boards that you use to put jigsaw puzzles together on. You know, something that allows you to move a puzzle in progress else where, should you actually happen to need your kitchen or dining room table to eat on. So, with this device in hand as well as some old jigsaw puzzles on hand, some dating back to the 1940's, and a long winter ahead of me, I took up jigsaw puzzling as a better time-wasting alternative to playing mahjong tiles or sudoku, or some such game on my tablet.  

I should first mention that I'm not a patient enough fellow to attempt 1000 piece puzzles. I know my limits, which is 500 pieces. Still, I have found this uncertainty principle observable in 500 piece puzzles, but not, however, in 100 piece puzzles. 

My experiment is simple. I empty the box of pieces out on the board, and carefully separate out by hand, in six to ten piece batches, the edge pieces from the interior pieces. This is a simple operation; edge pieces have a flat side and only five prongs instead of six. If all the puzzle pieces in the box have had their wave form collapsed, then all the edge pieces would be easily identified and sorted out. However, this is never the case. I find that there are always six to a dozen edge pieces missing when I try to assemble the edge of the puzzle. 

Clearly I could not have missed identifying something as easily identifiable as edge pieces. One only needs to look at an edge piece, and it's obviously an edge piece, as described above. I can assure you they are impossible to miss. So, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, when you have eliminated the impossible (missing edge pieces in the sort) what ever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And the truth is, that however improbable, it seems that the missing edge pieces were not yet present in the box during my first sort. 

This phenomena can best be explained by the theory that jigsaw pieces operate as a quantum-level particle/wave, and that opening the box operates as a observation and thus collapses them into the classical physics universe. But quantum theory is a statistical theory, i.e. it only predicts the outcome as a percentage of all possible outcomes. There is always a fraction of collapses that do not conform to how the vast majority shake out. In the case of pieces in a jigsaw puzzle box it seems that not all of the potential puzzle pieces collapse on opening the box and during this initial sorting process. However, evidence suggests that most do eventually collapse, most of the time, into edge pieces, their proper form in the hours and sometimes days that follow, showing up every now and again when I am looking for other pieces. I have, however, come across jigsaw puzzles where one or more pieces fail to materialize. But that's quantum mechanics for you.

But it is not only edge pieces that fail to collapse upon opening the box. Other pieces also fail to appear until long after the box has been emptied. I don't know how many hours I've spent looking for a particular piece of the puzzle, a piece so obvious that it would be impossible to overlook, if it existed when I was diligently looking for it, only to find it amongst the last dozen pieces left to fill in the puzzle. It seems impossible that it was present prior to my discovery of it.

Jigsaw pieces are very tricky things. 

The scale of this uncertainty principle suggests that we're dealing with  a significantly different quantum process, one that present day quantum theory has yet to discover, much less address. Therefore I feel it deserves further research, and funding.

An obvious next step to verify my theory would be to count the number of pieces during my initial sorting out of the edge pieces. This would definitely prove my theory, as I would postulate that the total number of pieces counted would fall short of the number of pieces printed on the box and only at some time later would all the pieces appear as their waveforms eventually collapse. However since I don't have a grad student to do this counting for me, that experiment must wait for the day I have one. And for the necessary funding, of course.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 177)

  

I've stumbled on to an efficient way to search for Kindle Unlimited books. I selecta a category and then click the box "Kindle Unlimited" which only dishes up KU titles. Well, I got to thinking that I like seas stories, so what does KU have to offer in sea stories. They have a pretty good selection. This week we're starting with a memoir.

Going forward, for now anyway, I'm returning to one book a week, as my reading has slowed down, and as you can see from last week's entry, it's pretty iffy. I think a book a week is going to be my 2026 rate. 

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 Best of Days A memoir of the Sea by Harry Nicholson  C+

This is the first volume of Nicholson's memoir covering his early life, his training and first year at sea as a radioman at the age of 17 in 1955. I think there are five volumes in all. 

I came to this book wanting to read about his life at sea, per the title. However, the first 20% or so was about his ancestors, family, and growing up in England in the 1940's and post war years. I must admit that I was impatient to get through these chapters, as they weren't what I was looking for in picking up the book. That, plus his writing style is what I think you'd call first person present tense,  when he's talking about himself and even when he is describing events in the past. He also tends to insert asides here and there, making the first part of the book rather a confusing read for someone impatient to get to sea. All of which is to say, I probably knocked off half a grade because of this.

However, when he does get to the sea, you do get an authentic taste of the life of a sailor on a variety of merchant vessels in the mid-1950's. A life that is much different today. For example, ships don't spend weeks in port loading and unloading. Today, they don't spend more than a day or two loading and unloading, as time is money. Freighters that load break-bulk cargo, i.e. cargo in crates, bags, etc, are very rare today. Almost all cargo is transported in containers on thousand foot long ships, except for bulk cargo like grain and ore, etc. So you do get a taste of a bygone past. 

As I mentioned above, he recounts not only his time at sea and in port, but at home as well, which is fine, I guess. It give you a snapshot of life in England a decade after the war, and how different it was from the prosperity of America during that time. I will probably continue on with Nicholson's memories, but not right away. I have downloaded several more and different types of sea stories. A new one, hopefully, next week.

UPDATE: 

Since reading this book a month or so ago, I have sampled the first three chapters of two more autobiographies of fellows who followed the sea in the 1930's to the 1950's. While they were well written and offered interesting details of life at sea, because they were telling stories spanning decades, they tended to clip along, lacking the immersiveness of a novel which I was looking for, so with the clock  ticking on my KU subscription, I moved on to try more books. If I have time and the opportunity in the future, I may well return to them. They were;

Now the Long Tick's Over by Captain Arthur Mathison (11%)

Not Wanted on Voyage by Peter Langton (8%)

I'm not going to count these as books read or DNF'ed, as really, I just sat down and sampled them, but I thought they deserved mention.

Biking Around the World while Never Going Anywhere

Each winter, over the last five or six years I've been exploring the world, virtually, from the cabs of trains while spending half an hour riding my bike-on-a-rack. Hundreds of train drivers have posted videos of the routes they run to YouTube, and using a laptop computer on a rack attached to the handlebars, I've traveled the rail lines of Europe, from Bulgaria to Finland, Norway to Portugal, Britain to Poland, and all the countries in between. I've taken trains in Japan, and last winter I explored the North and South islands of New Zealand, where is seems you can't toss a stone without hitting either a cow or a sheep. I took some train rides in Brazil, but Brazil is a big country, so I saw only a little of it, though I did take some trolly rides through one or two of its cities, which was interesting. I also caught up on a few routes in France that I hadn't ridden on before, and ended up crisscrossing Poland, mostly from the rear carriage, filmed by a fellow who seems intent to ride and film every train in Poland that still has old fashioned trains with carriages without an engine on both ends.

This fall I started out in Australia, taking trains out of Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney. However, I have to admit that, as an American, the Australian countryside is not very exotic - flat ranch land, a few hills every now and again, and where there are trees, they line the ralline hiding the countryside. Sort of boring. So I went looking for someplace more exotic.

I first took a ride on a commuter train through Manila in the Philippians. Now trains often travel through the backyards of wherever you are, so you're not seeing the best face of any city you're passing through, but, I have to say, the Manila train traveled through something of an urban wasteland. Trash, junk, chickens, and shanties lined the right of way in all stages of disrepair. Exotic? Yes. As well as eye opening to the relative poverty of at least some of the inhabitants. Though while one can live more casually in the tropics than in temperate climate with winters, poverty is poverty. And I should add that this is far from the only country where I've seen trash dumped along the railway tracks. Indeed, there were places where trash had been dumped on the next country I visited this winter.

And that country was Sri Lanka. I really have loved exploring Sri Lanka. It has  the exoticness and beauty I was looking for.

https://www.bradtguides.com/sri-lanka-by-train

Sri Lanka is exotic. Oh you have your shanties along with every sort of housing in every sort of setting, as well as Buddhists shrines and monasteries/temples. The streets are filled with those three-wheeled motorized rickshaws. Ladies carry umbrellas for sunshine rather than rain. In the countryside cows graze at will. And Sri Lanka is the only country I've run across where the people use the rail tracks as footpaths. Where there is a double line, there are always people walking in the other line, and on single lines, you often see people just standing alongside the tracks - no doubt having just stepped off of them to let the train pass.

The trains themselves are varied, and usually slow. In all but the first class carriages, the windows are open, as are all the carriage doors, where people stand or sit as the train goes along, and tourists get their photos taken hanging out of them.

And as for the countryside itself, is can be breathtaking. In parts of the country the steep mountainsides are covered with terraces of tea bushes, and in the low country there are rice paddies and palm trees. In between there are patches of lush jungle. I still have a few more videos to watch covering a route that I saw snatches of, but which I hope will take me back up the tea growing region. They are still being release once a week but I hope they take me to the end of the line.

If you are curious, here's a  3 hours and 40 minute train ride down the western seacoast from Fort Columbo to Galle, near the southern point of Sri Lanka. You can find it HERE

In the meantime, I'm currently taking a commuter train through Mumbai India, and I have a train ride in Viet Nam lined up as well.

Real travelers may scoff at my virtual travels, but I have to say that moving pictures are a thousand times more immersive than photos, and not all that far away from driving in a car with the windows closed. You miss the smells and the ability to gawk around, but you also get to know how trains work. You also miss all those churches, castles, and museums that real tourist feel compelled to visit, but frankly, they're welcome to them. I'll take the countryside, away from traffic and crowds. Plus, in my case, given my poor memory, I'm taking away from my travels just about all I would be if I'd done it for real, so for me, it's the ideal way to travel.

 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 176)

 

My "What can I find on Kindle Unlimited" quest continues this week with two very different books, though both are historical mysteries, of sorts. And a word of warning; I'm being a grumpy old man this week.

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 Bookshop of Secrets by Kerry Barrett  DNF 35%

This story is set in Lisbon from 1938 into 1940, at least as far as I made it into it. It follows a young woman, the daughter of a playwright and director, who after his death in 1938, travels to Portugal to visit the relatives of her mother, who had died when she was a baby. She finds that her grandparents are also dead, and with no one else to look up, she is set to return home, until she has all her money and passport stolen, so she finds a job in a bar to save up money to get home. Fast forward to 1940, with the war on, neutral Lisbon is overrun with refugees and secret agents. She gets fired from her bartender job, but lands a job in a bookstore, and thanks to her ability, as an aspiring actress, to mimic just about anyone, she is then recruited by British intelligence to help produce radio broadcasts with "secret" codes that contained false information to mislead the Germans they expect will hear them and break the code. From Portugal? Whatever.

So fa so good. The author apparently made some effort to explore Lisbon and the period. The problem is that despite all the color she put into the story, it did not, at least for me, create the impression of Lisbon in 1940. I think it takes more than descriptions of places, and the time. To create an authentic historical novel, the writing has to at least suggest the period. This book was written in a very modern, breezy style. I almost quit on the first page when the author used the term "drama queen" which took me right out of the story. But I soldiered on, and had come to enjoy it, as the characters were enjoyable and the plot was evolving, until...

Until the author tossed history overboard. It was 1940, refugees were said to be pouring in from France and elsewhere. The war said to be going badly for the English. It was hot and she was swimming in the ocean. Right; obviously the summer of 1940. And then she has her characters make their first broadcast as British secret agents, with the aim of  misdirecting the Germans who, they believed, were about to invade Norway... An invasion that, in real life, began on 9th of April, 1940, followed by the invasion of France & Belgium beginning on the 10th of May, 1940, which is to say prior to the in-story time.  And the war wasn't going all that badly for the British before that. It makes no sense to alter history for no reason other than the author's ignorance, or for the convenience of the story and the way she wanted to write it. This made me mad. What's the point of setting a story in a historical period and then not paying any attention it?  You should fit your story into real history, not twist history to suit your story. And why? I[m sure one could come up with a different mission, or set this one in the proper time. In any event, I simply could not take the story seriously anymore. I moved on.

Onward.

Men of Bone by David Penny  DNF 70%

If there is one thing that I hate, besides ignoring history in a historic novel, it is when an author has a character do a bone-headed thing just to ramp up the stakes. And that is something that Penny did around the 70% point in this novel. It annoyed me enough that I called it quits on this book. It is a me thing, a grumpy old man thing, so don't take my DNFing it as a general commentary about the book itself.

The first thing you should know, is that there are ten books chronicling the earlier career of Thomas Berrington. This, however, is the first book in a four book series telling the story of Berrington, now aged 60, upon his return to England and can be read without reading all those other books. 

In this book he has been charged by his friend, the Queen of Spain, to look after her daughter, Princess Catherine of Aragon, who has been sent of to England to marry Arthur, the English King's eldest son. Historically accurate. They did wed. However the 15 year old Arthur died six months after his wedding, and Catherine lived on to became Henry the Eighth's first wife.  

In any event, Berrington, who left England and had not returned until now, is now an expert doctor, having been trained by Arab doctors, and an excellent fighter, able to kill at least two knife wielding bad buys emptyhanded. On arrival he inadvertently stirs up trouble with an organized extortion gang, the "Bone Men" and trouble follows him north when he is asked by the King to look into a questionable Justice of the Peace on the Welsh border, who is, in fact, up to no good. So we have a historical mystery/thriller with plenty of intrigue and action. 

It is a well written, well paced book. There was, however, nothing special in the writing, and no humor. Moreover, I failed to connect to the main character, Berrington. He was well developed, not surprising after 10 books, but I did not find him engaging. And for me, engaging characters are half of what I enjoy in books; writing and characters.

If I really like a book I'll read it every night and finish it in a couple of days. This book fell, well, short of that. I'd read it one evening, but wasn't invested in it enough to read it the next. I may've kept at it just to write this review, so when, he had a character do something too stupid, I just didn't care what happened next, and with other KU books to read, I called it quits and won't be continuing on with the series, or going back to his earlier career.

All that said, if you like historical fiction with lots of action, this book, and this series, might well appeal to you - as well as all the proceeding books.

Art, Products, and Me

A Self  Portrait of An Author in the style of Van Gogh 

I'll start by defining the terms as I use them in this essay.

Art. I use the term very broadly: art is the product of a creative effort to bring something of one's own into the world. 

Artist. This includes everyone who uses their creative talents, for example; painters, writers, composers, musicians, dancers, photographers, and a host of other creative endeavors. In this essay I am usually these terms referring to stories and writers.  

Product. A product is an item offered for sale. In this essay, we are talking about a work of art, like a story, that is offered, or created for sale.

Amateur. While there are several definitions of amateur, the one I'll be using is that of someone who produces a work of art for the joy of the process and results, rather than for money. A pure amateur does not create to sell their work. However, I feel that an artist may still be considered an amateur, if their primary purpose is the creation of art even if it is offered for sale.

Professional. A professional is someone who works, or creates, for the purpose of making money, not necessarily someone who is proficient at what they do.

Right then.

I have always considered myself an artist. I work in inks, paints, and words, and have for the last seventy-some years. The evolution of my art has been a long and enjoyable journey. At several points in my life, I have attempted to sell my creative works for money, and so, perhaps for several years I could've been considered a professional artist, though not very successful one. However, for most of my life I have pursued art as an amateur. I still do so today.

In the case of painting. At the age of 42 I decided to get semi-serious at painting, and for some 11 years, I painted 30 to 40 watercolor paintings a year. At 53, I decided to give making a living as a professional artist a chance - a now or never sort of thing - and with enough money saved up to pay my room and board for a few years, I quit my day job to paint. I sold my paintings online, and over the course of 5 years or so, I grossed some $20K. I had the starving artist thing down pat. 

However, this episode taught me some important lessons. 

The first is that as a professional, you create for your customers, not for yourself. This is very basic, but what I discovered is that I didn't like doing that. For example, I quickly learned that watercolor paintings command much less money than oils, so that within months I had to start teaching myself how to paint in oils. I can still remember sitting in front of the easel muttering "I hate this. I hate this" But like it or not, I needed to master oils and later acrylics. I also felt that I needed to follow trends in art and decor, i.e. the "hot" colors. Fashion rules commercial art. Moreover, I found that my potential customers preferred realism over abstractness. As a result of  I found myself painting pictures with the question "Will this sell?' always in mind. And well, realism wasn't, in my mind, my best work, and so, my best work wasn't getting out into the world. My dissatisfaction grew, and when the Great Recession took a bite out of my sales, I decided to wrap that endeavor up.

The type of painting that did not sell, but that I like. And yes, I did get to love painting in oil and then acrylics, so that being a professional and having to do what sold did, in fact, make me a better artist. Though my wife would disagree. But you can never please everyone. So please yourself.

I took my experience in art and applied them to my writing. I would write like an amateur, which is to say, I'd tell the stories I wanted to tell in the way I wanted to tell them. Customer preferences would be considered. I'd not write stories that I thought might appeal to the mass market wanted, unless they appealed to me as well. However, , my experience in art had shown me that there is a market for all art, it is just a matter of how large and how hard it is to reach it.

Unlike art, which is complete in and of itself, the end product of stories are books, which have to be published. If I wanted to write books, which I did, not publishing is not an option.

Luckily, this being the 21st century, there is nothing in the process of producing and selling  a book as an ebook, which requires money to change hands, so producing a book as a non-product product, as it where, i.e. a product that did not generate revenue is possible. There are two advantages to this approach; nothing is lost by selling it for free if you're not trying to make money in the first place, and second; it sells itself, which goes a long way towards solving the problem of finding a niche audience.

Thus, between ebooks and ebook stores, I could create art in the form of the stories I wanted to write, and still have some expectation of reaching an appreciative audience. Plus, I never had to ask myself, "Will it sell?" 

This not to say that I entirely ignore "the market" when writing my books. It is simply not a major concern of mine. For example, The Bright Black Sea is my bestselling book, by far. So, back in 2019 or so, I decided to return to that "universe" using a younger version of a character that appeared in that book. These stories became my Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures. 

I have also come to realize that fantasy outsells science fiction, so I have steered away from science fiction to find other genres to at least label my books.

But sometimes I just don't care about what sells when writing a story. My Lorrian Novels, like Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer are examples of this freedom. Though I pitch them in the blurb as cozy fantasy, they much closer to plain literary novels than most genre novels care to be. Sometimes this freedom to do something different, pays off. In my case, these books have found a good audience. They serve to illustrate that at mix of pure creativity with the widest possible (free) marketing can succeed, if making money is not your endgame.

I should add that I don't think there is anything at all wrong with using one's creative ability to make art for money. It is that in my case my tastes do not align with the mainstream, presenting me with a choice; do what sells, even if I don't like it, or do what I like, and don't expect it to sell in any great numbers. I chose the latter. 

The bottom line, for me, is that there is art, a joy, and there is work, i.e. a job. Many, if most artists dream of making art their job. But if you do, you no longer have two things, joy and work. You just have a job. 

 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 175)

 

More Kindle Unlimited books this week. More mysteries, but of a "cozy" variety this time around. Will cozy be the charm needed to enjoying mysteries? My first cozy mystery from two weeks ago, says no. But was that just a fluke? Read on.

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 Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood  C+

This is very much the archetype of "cozy mysteries" i.e. it involves ladies, one of which is at least elderly, investigating a murder in their village. In my search on  Amazon for both mysteries and humous stories, this appeared on both lists, so I decided to give it a try. Unlike most of the cozy mysteries, this book was traditionally published. And, I discovered after starting it, that it has been turned into a TV show that can be seen in the States on PBS's Masterpiece Mysteries. All of which gave me confidence that it had more going for it than that retired assassin book I tried a couple of weeks ago. Was it warranted?

Well... Yes. Maybe. I did read it to the end, which says something, more than desperation. And while it was written tongue in cheek with a genial nod to the conventions of the sub-genre to traditional publishing standards, and not to be taken too seriously, it was, okay-ish. However, it not only committed the mortal sin, in my opinion, of mysteries, i.e. having two murders, but it had three. Not good. The only saving grace is that, as I said, the story was not to be taken seriously.

You have the mystery of these murders. And though you might figure out the mystery in a general way, I don't think this is a reader solvable who-done-it. The setting is a small town set on the upper Thames River. The main character is an elderly widow living in a somewhat run down house on the river. She hears the gunshot that marks the first murder while swimming in the river, and thus gets involved in the mystery. Along the way, she meets a dog-watcher who knew the second victim, and the young wife of the curate who feels obliged to be the perfect housewife of the curate, but gets tempted by the adventure, along with the female police detective in charge of the case. The characters, though I presume fairly blog standard for this type of story, are the saving grace of the story, well written, likeable, each a character in their own right. The story earns its "C+" on the basis of these characters.

The exciting climax was, in my opinion, too long, too over wrought, really quite over the top. I mean, this is the first book in a series, the main character is going to live... I found myself skimming through it, which says something...  And the explanation of the mystery... motivations for the murders seemed rather thin, but I suspect that is par for the course. Bottom line; a good cozy mystery if that's your thing. I'm not a mystery fan, but if you are, you might want to consider this a "B" grade story or more.

The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods  DNF 67%

This book had several things going for it. It has a 4.1 star rating on Goodreads with 48K ratings. It has a first person narration, though with third person interludes from the past and a view of the romantic male lead's life. It was set somewhere else; in France. But it also had downsides. First off, it is a contemporary story, which I generally dislike. And as it went along it began to fall into well worn tropes... 

Gave it a good go, but alas, eventually I found that I had no desire to keep reading, since life, at my age, is to short to force myself to read something I'm not really enjoying.

The premise is that a 30 year old woman has been staying at home to take care of her mother with Parkinson's disease. After her mother dies, she,  at the urging of her father, sets out to start her own life, applying for and getting accepted as an assistant manager of a bakery on the Rue de Paris... Which she assumed was in Paris, but it is actually a small bakery in Compiegne, too small to really need an assistant manager. Which is one of several mysteries going on in the story including a maybe ghost, that we discover as we go along. Luckily, murder is not one of them, at least as far as I read. There is also a budding instant-romance plot with a very nice, rich, man as well.

Where the story goes off the rails for me is, first, it follows the bog-standard romance blueprint with the inevitable breakup, this time at the 2/3rds point. All that would have needed to prevent this, is an honest conversation. Who's fooling who here? We know they'll get back together and live happily every after. But then there is the second half of the story where our plucky hero steps up to help save the bakery from mean developers. And we know how that is going to end as well. 

In short, a cozy, sugar-sweet romance if you like that sort of thing.