Some Thoughts on Some Small Dive

I know I promised the next entry in the long tease would be the cover reveal, but this quick sketch of my initial idea of the cover will have to do for today, since I want to talk about the story itself instead. 

First of all, I've signed off on the story, save for any inputs from my various beta readers. My wife is now proofreading it... but hey, she signed up for "for better or worse". You sometimes have to take the rough with the smooth. Once I've corrected the mistakes she finds I'll sent it along to any beta reader brave enough to tackle it. 

As for the story itself, the first draft came in a just under 80,000 words. The final draft came in at just over 84,000 words, for a 5% increase. This is half of my customary 10% (plus) word count inflation as I always add words through the second and third drafts. This less exuberant result is due, at least in part, to a concerted effort on my part to rein in my customary wordiness. The narrator of the story is a newspaper editor, and I wanted the narration to be sparse. Not quite telegraphic, but lean, or at least leaner than my usual fare. Though the word count still grew...

Eighty-four thousand words is a rather short novel for me. I generally shot for 100,000 words and end up longer. I want to give my customers their money's worth. My two shorter novels are Someday Days which comes out at 79.5K words and the Prisoner of Cimlye comes in a little short of 55K words. However, I believe that 80K words is considered a standard novel, if there is such thing. And since this is my version of a standard novel, eighty thousand words was my goal, so I pretty much nailed it.

For me, every story has a challenge. That's what makes it worth doing. My challenge for Some Small Dive was to write a story only filled with mundane events. This not what genre fiction is all about. It's about extraordinary things happening. As a result, I believe my usual audience will find this story boring. But boring was what I was going for. I think I nailed it. Why a boring story? Well, why not? That's what self-publishing is all about; doing something real publishers are afraid to do. Or are too smart to do. This approach is only viable when you're not doing it for money, like all publishers and most self-publishing authors. When you're not trying to get rich, you've got nothing to lose, no matter what you do.

The main question I was exploring in writing this story was; can I write a story without an antagonist, and in which everything that does happen in it is something mundane? A story in which everything that happens could happen to any of the readers without raising an eyebrow. And in doing so, can I keep them reading? And incidentally, can I keep writing it? That last question was touch and go. It took me a year and a half to do it. The former question is still an open one.

As I said in an earlier post, I can now see how literary fiction writers are so admired. Trying to make the ordinary seem interesting is quite a challenge.

I consider this story to be my literary novel. Well, literary-lite novel. I had no agenda, no great insights into human nature to get off my chest. All I really wanted to do was to bring these two lines to life; "I'll live a lush life, in some small dive." A story about a cozy refuge of good friends.

However, I find that it does has a theme running through it, as all literary novels must have. Mine, however, is emergent, which is to say, it originated not by design, but by the story as it developed. This theme is change. Everyone in the story faces the opportunity to change. Will they take it or pass? 

Boring or not, I know that there will be an audience for it. However, it is unlikely to be a large one. But there will be one. I read books like this one all the time. Some of the books I've been reading recently are as every bit as mundane as mine. And I've enjoyed them, though part of their charm is that they offer a glimpse of everyday life twenty, thirty years before I was born. That said, I also know that there will be people who find it terrible. To deal with this, I'm cutting them off at the past. My whole blurb is going to celebrate just how boring the book is in the name of honesty. Thus, the worst they can do is agree with me.

As I said, this project is close to being done. About all that remains is to inflict it upon the unsuspecting world. Despite the fact that I only released a novella in July, I see no reason to hold it back once all my beta readers read it or bailed, so I expect to set a release date in late September 2026 or early October. Life is too short to put off things. At my age, anyway.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.196)

 

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

Guess what. You do get a break. A book I had on hold at the library that came in, so here we go.

The author of this book is someone I came across several years ago as one of the hosts of The Publishing Rodeo Podcast where she and another author interviewed author guests highlighting some of the darker alleys of traditional publishing. All very interesting. She just released her second novel in May, so I put my request for a hold on it. I've now read it, and here's my thoughts.

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 Girl With a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean C-

A big disappointment. I finished it, but I did a lot of skimming to do so, hence a C- is the best grade I can give it. It should've been better. Modern writing...

The story has as split time line. One time line is set in Hong Kong's Kowloon's Walled City in 1975 with the second on a small island close to Hong Kong prior to and during World War ll. Plus, there's some in between time as well. Yep, it's one of them stories that have you jumping back and forth in time. It's set in a fantasy version of our world, mostly the same, except that ghosts are real and can interact with the living. The rules of ghosts seem rather flexible, i.e. as in whatever the author needs for a ghost to do for the story to work the way she wants it. The basic concept is that anyone who is not properly buried, and who has unresolved issues in their lives, become ghosts, at least for a while. Or first protagonist, Mercy Chan, is a rare person who can talk to these ghosts in order to resolve their issues so that they can move on to whatever. She works for the triad boss who runs things in Kowloon Walled City, and this is part of the triad's service for the "dues" they collect from everyone. 

The books starts with a hook, Mercy dealing with a disgruntled grandmother who has a bone to pick with her son. He stole her money and left her to die. She is not a happy ghost.

Hook over, we then go back to 1941 with Mercy washing ashore as a young lady without a memory of her past. She ends up working for the Chinese resistance to the brutal Japanese occupation, and after the war is employed by that triad boss.

Then it's back to 1975, where she gets assigned to deal with a powerful ghost or demon who is killing a lot of people. She starts her investigation, finds the ghost/demon...

And then, this is around the 30% point now, the story changes, yet again. All that went before was just a bigger hock, because we now go back to learn about Mercy Chan's past, the part she can't remember. The style of narration changes for this part of the story, it is now being told in second person by the Goddess Kwun Yam. We end up on a small island haunted by ghosts with various twists and turns follow, only to then follow another character back to the present. Very confusing, especially when you're skim reading.

So why a C- grade from me?

First, the writing style is very plain. I've seen it called YA in reviews. I don't read YA as a rule, so I can't say it is,  all I can say is that the author's voice had no character. I think this is a modern trait, getting rid of all those useless adjectives, and such. I found the characters uninteresting, and jumping around so much didn't help me connect to her or one of them. I guess you were supposed to be invested in the mystery of her origin, but if you aren't interested in her, why should you care about her past? You know that all you have to do is sit back and be told about it no matter what. 

The there was the view point change. The first 30% was third person, but the remainder was, as I said, told in second person by a Chinese goddess to Mercy Chan, as in "You studied it intently..." or 'You flushed." "You then... etc." I find second person annoying, but I did put up with it, though for the life of me, there seemed no reason to write in that style, as it was just relating the character's back story. Usually second person is used to convey a sense of urgency drawing the reader in. 

And of course, all this hopping back and forth in time, which I see as slicing and dicing a story to make is seem more complex than it is, and in this case to hide a "clever" twist.

All in all, a very modern story for readers who like very modern storytelling. I don't, so it wasn't for me. The book has a 4.02 rating on Goodreads, with 4,600 ratings, the largest bar the 4 star rating, so that I think a lot of people, even if they like it, see it's problems as well. As someone who talked about hidden parts of publishing and how brutal it can be, I will note that her debut novel from 2022 as 59,000 ratings, though a 3.6 star rating. Given that most books sell the most copies in the first three months of release, I don't see this book selling as well as her debut. She has one more book on contract. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about this experience, if they continue the podcast.

Taking Back the Day

Not a great photo, but you have to take what you can get. Taken shortly before sundown this past Sunday. You also get the last of my hollyhocks, and a corner of the hammock slung under our deck where I idle the summer away. When my wife lets me have it.

This summer the neighborhood deer apparently have decided to take back the day. They're no longer going to be creatures of the night, as they have been in the past. They're not going to slink around in the moonlight to eat our flowers. Nope. They're going to do it in broad daylight. The salad bar is now open all day long. This has been a very noticeable change in behavior. Seeing deer out and about at any hour of the day has made them, almost, as common a sight as squirrels.  

Eau Claire has a large deer population. All the parks have their herds, as does every wood lot of any size, of which there are many around the city. My son, who takes long walks after work reports that deer just stand 10 - 15 feet away and watch him him pass when walking along the bike trail through a small wood lot. Not quite tame, but not shy either.

In the past I've seen deer about, but usually around sunset, like in the photo above. Which is about the time they begin venture out from local wood lot of the school below our hill. I call them wood lots, as they are usually less than 50 meters wide, not true woods, just lots with trees and underbrush.

The faint white path on the grass is  a track that the deer have trampled down this year in our backyard. They run just along the retaining wall which is about 30 ft from where I hang out on the hammock. 

One March day several years ago I happened to see a herd of maybe 15 or more deer running down the street and into our condo complex, heading... well who knows where? Likely the wood lot on the school property, no doubt they'd been kicked up from some other wood lot on the other side of the neighborhood. In short, we have a large urban deer population.

But, as I said, what makes this  summer so different is that the deer are out and about all day. There is one doe with twins. The twins, followed by their mom loped past me, within 30 feet, while I was reading in the hammock just last week. Who knows how often they do when I don't notice them? There is also a doe with one fawn, and a doe without a youngster in tow. What I haven't seen is a buck. They are less bold. A few years ago I was sitting in the garage watching the sun set, when a pair of deer, a doe and young buck started down the drive towards me. When they spied me, they stopped, looked, and then the doe continued on, followed, reluctantly by the buck. Maybe all those generations of being hunted has left its mark more on bucks more than does.

Below is a photo I happen to snap just yesterday afternoon. Wanting to have some photos for this piece, I've been carrying my phone around, as well as having the camera button on my tablet on the home screen. 

Faun on the run, along the retaining wall. Photo taken from the hammock.

As I said, the above photo is one I managed to take yesterday while the fawn ran along the deer track shown above. He or she had just run across the yard going the other way. I hadn't seen the faun until it was too late But then he or she stopped at the end of the lawn, and looked back, stood watching me for half a minute or so, allowing me to get my phone out and its camera up and ready. Then, either to taunt me, or just show off, the fawn ran back. Or simply the exuberance of youth. In any event, it allowed me to get several nice pictures of him or her. Clearly this faun has cut the apron strings of mom.

 These days this happens, this seems, to happen a lot, several times a day. Pretty cool.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.195)

 

THE SATURDAY BOOK REPORT

One more, for now. I'm going to take a break... but unless I read something other that O Douglas, between now and I return to her, you won't have a break.

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.

Penny Plain by O Douglas  B

This is O Douglas' third novel of 1920. In this story we have Jean, age 23 raising her two brothers on her own. The eldest is just going off to Oxford at the start of the story, leaving somewhat younger brother, as well as the son of her step-mother. England at this time sent her sons and their wives off to the East, to India, where they routinely died. I gather that it was customary to send the children of the British Rah, once they reached a certain age, back to England to be raised by relatives or lodged in boarding schools. In this case, Jean and her brothers were sent to an old aunt. When the aunt died, Jean was left to raise her siblings. But that's not all. With Jean's mother dead, her father remarried and had a son. He proceeded to die as well, to be followed by his second wife, who, on her deathbed, set their son back to England for Jean to care for, knowing that Jean was a good and caring person.

They live in small cottage in a fictional Scottish boarder town, probably a fictionalized Peebles. Along comes a daughter of a lord, age 40, who sick of society decides to board in the house next door, and she and Jean become close friends. The story slowly evolves mostly to introduce more characters, though there is a late blooming romance as well, that, in its way, reflected certain attitudes of the day. But I can't go into it without spoiling it, so I won't.

Like her previous novels, a lot of this story is taken up with sketches of the local people and their backstories. A lot of the dialog is, well, kindly gossip about everyone, as well as a description of small town life at that time, which I find interesting. It is somewhat eye-opening to read in books written in the past how much people back before radio, TV, and the internet had to make their own entertainment playing games, singing songs, playacting in ad hoc plays, and calling on, or entertaining, neighbors for tea and such. This is contemporary fiction made historical fiction by the passage of time, and depending on how authentic is was at the time, it becomes authentic historical fiction with time. In the case of O Douglas, I don't think she makes her characters out of nothing. I am sure they are drawn, at least in parts, from people she knew or met, having grown up in Scotland, and went on to live in the very part of Scotland that she's writing about.

As usual with her stories, the characters are all likeable, and even the rather unpleasant ones are not without their good side as well. So far I think the stories of Molly Clavering and D E Stevenson are more novel-like (as they should be) than the three stories O Douglas has written at this point. Douglas is more interested in exploring people than in plot, and indeed, sometimes she even slips herself into the story, mentioning that she's telling the story, rather than having it play out on its own.

I'll be reading on. There are seven more novels in the omnibus, but, as I mentioned in the lede, I'm going to take a break. Maybe I'll read something else, or maybe it'll be just a short break. We'll see.

The Inspiration of the Boring Book

 

A detail from the original artwork from the unrevised cover

Every story starts with a tiny kernel of an idea around which the story slowly grows. Or doesn't. In the case of my newest novel, the boring one, the kernel of the story comes from a jazz standard. More specifically, from two lines of a specific performance of that song.

For some unknown reason, those two lines evoke the wisp of ghost of an untraceable pseudo-memory whenever I hear them sung. Very strange. Strange enough to write a book about. What better subject than a ghost of a pseudo-memory of and unknown time and place?  A past life? Sadly, I don't think I actually got any closer to that time and place. In any event, it inspired a book.

The song is composed by Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was a jazz pianist, composer, lyricist, and arranger in the Duke Ellington band for almost 30 years. The tune is Lush Life, much of which he wrote while still a teenager. The tune is about the failed romance of the song's narrator, who hangs out in "come-what-may places" to get the "feel of life from jazz and cocktails." He falls in love, and for a while, believes her "poignant smile was tinged with the sadness of a great love" for him. Alas, "I guess, ah, yes, I was wrong, again." Heartbroken he muses that a week in Paris might ease the bite of it, though all he cares to do "is to smile in  spite of it." Still, he can't get her out of his mind, so - and then come the two lines that strangely evoke that ghost of a memory of a time and place I can't place - "I'll live a lush life, in some small dive"  Where he'll "rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too."

But it's not just those two lines, but the way they're sung by Johnny Hartman, on the album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. This song, sung by Harman with Coltrane, is that little kernel around which this novel grew. 

You can hear that version of the song HERE

What makes it all so strange, is that when I hear those lines sung, I get a flash of familiarity, not even an image, but a tinge of deja vu, a fleeting memory of knowing this small, dim-lit bar in New York, where a small cadre of regulars, sophisticate men and women gather at night, every night. Stranger still is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've actually been in a bar. Really, I can only think of two times. I'm not a bar person. I'm not very social, I don't drink, save for some cheap wine every once and a while, and I really, really hate loud music and trying to carry on a conversation over it. Plus, I've never been to New York. Not in this life, anyway. It was this inexplicable reaction to those words that intrigued me enough to write a story around it. 

Alas, as I said, I didn't really capture the elusive feeling I was seeking in the story. I ended up writing a story where nothing happens. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. But that became the challenge. Write a story about mundane lives. And having written it, I will publish it, with suitable warnings. I'm actually looking forward to its reception. It's a mystery. Will boring sell? Or be damned? In any event, this fall you'll be able to stop in after ten to meet the habitues of a small Press Borough dive known as the Bleu Moon, just by reading my boring novel, titled Some Small Dive.

Some Small Dive is the third Lorrian novel, set in the Chateau Clare - Glencrow Summer time line, with all new characters, plus a few cameo appearances from a couple of characters from Chateau Clare.

In the next installment, I'll talk about the cover of Some Small Dive. I had actually painted it before I finished the first draft.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.194)

 

THE SATURDAY BOOK REPORT

I warned you.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Setons by O Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan) B-

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

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

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

Or as she says;

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

Book Report on My 2026 Reading

A tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 197

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

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

A (4)     12%

B (11)   33%

C (10)   33%

DNF (7) 21%

F (1)       1%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 202

Full Circle

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 193)

 

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

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

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Olivia (AKA Olivia in India)  by O Douglas  A  

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

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

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

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

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

The Treasure Cave

 

The Door to the Treasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Summer Collection

The Saturday Morning Post (No.192)

  

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

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography by Jim Tully  B

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

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

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

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

Your First Warning. That is to say, Tease.

 

A detail from the original cover art

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned, more teases in coming. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 191)

 

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

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

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

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Noose's Shadow by Graham Brack  B+

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

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

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

Producing My Books, Part 2 - Publishing

 

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

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

The original Tzaritsa Moon cover art

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

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

The photo of the original art for The Red Wine Dossiers

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

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

The wrap around cover done

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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