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Coming soon to a TBR pile near you

So, someone mentioned this book in a recent post:

Whispering Wood is due to drop in early November, which seems REALLY SOON to me because I’m trying to get books in shape to drop in September and October and wow, that does not seem far away AT ALL. By that time, I expect I will need something comfortable to relax with, and here this book will be, so that’s nice to look forward to. Did anybody realize it’s been seven years since the last book in this series? Astonishing.

Here’s the description:

Valentina Serlast has reluctantly traveled to the royal city to witness her brother Darien be crowned the king of Welce. A hunti woman with an affinity for the forest, Val is much more comfortable living in isolation on her country estates, almost forgotten by everyone. When Darien convinces her to extend her stay, she is drawn into an unfamiliar whirl of activity, meeting with ambassadors from other countries, becoming friends with the unpredictable Princess Corene, and trying to learn the secrets of a glamorous foreign visitor named Melissande.

But nothing makes Val more breathless than the reappearance of Sebastian Ardelay, a red-headed rogue who has been her best friend since childhood. She quickly learns that Sebastian has been risking his life in a dangerous venture that could get him banned from the kingdom—or even lead Welce to the brink of war.

Darien’s sister! That’s a good point of view. I love Darien, so I expect I’ll enjoy seeing him from his sister’s viewpoint.

Thinking of upcoming releases brings a couple other books to mind, such as this one:

Menewood, now, has been long-awaited FOR SURE. Hild came out in 2013, so ten years! For a change, that feels like it’s been even longer. I really will have to re-read the first book before I can read the sequel. I remember just tiny bits of the events of Hild. Mostly what I remember is thinking how the writing was just amazing and the worldbuilding was just amazing and the research behind the story was just amazing. Re-reading the first book will be great, but though I’ll preorder the second … despite the high price for a kindle ebook … anyway, fine, I’ve preordered it. Not sure when I’ll actually read it. This may be something I put off till I’m a lot less busy. OR I might decide it would be perfect to read in tiny little bits while I work on other things.

What else is coming out this fall? OH LOOK —

Defiance is due out in October. I’m not sure whether I should cheer or not quite? I would be happier not to see a coauthor on the cover. I do not have any great faith in Jane Francher as an author considering comments on the Alliance Rising books. Still … even so …

Here’s the description:

In the east, outright warfare has tied down the Assassins’ Guild, and that region is in confusion. Ready to hand is an age-old feud in the west, where the Master of Ashidama Bay has long hated the Edi people of the north shore and equally hated the Aishidi’tat for bringing the Edi to his shores—and hatred is a resource the Shadow Guild knows how to use to its advantage. Bren Cameron is tasked with getting Ilisidi, the aiji-dowager, back to the capital alive, on an urgent basis. But events are cascading down on the south, the Guild is stretched thin in the east, and the Shadow Guild is within striking distance of critical targets that could bring war to the entire south.

I think I’ll wait and see what early reviews look like. And re-read Book 21 to remind myself what’s going on. I think the events of Book 21 set up this situation, but I don’t remember all that clearly.

Okay! What else is coming out this fall that I haven’t noticed? If you’re excited about an upcoming release, please drop title and author in the comments!

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Recent Reading: The Killing Trails by Margaret Mizushima

Deputy Mattie Lu Cobb liked her new partner. In fact, she was quite taken with him.

This is the mystery with the K9 police dog, so I bet you can guess who the partner is.

I can tell, I think, that this is a debut novel. I can see the author thinking behind the scenes. I can see thoughts like, “How can I describe my main character without having her look in a mirror? Is this thought about her own appearance too much or does this work?” The prose looks just a little, I don’t know how to put this … self-conscious, I suppose. On the other hand, the author’s decisions were good ones: the descriptions and so on were indeed pretty smooth.

As a mystery, Killing Trail is just so-so. I remember a good while ago reading a historical mystery in which the detective was stymied largely because the murderer was a woman and the detective thought himself in circles looking for a male murderer, while all the time if he had ever, just once, paused to think, “Hmm, what does the PHSYICAL EVIDENCE indicate?” he could have solved the mystery in jig time. In the same way, though the author does a good job throwing red herrings across the trail, if Mattie had trusted her dog more, then she could have thought, “Hmm, why might Robo seem hostile toward this particular guy?” and boom, there you go. On the other hand, Margaret Mizushima has WAY more justification for her protagonist to be a little slow than most mystery authors. Mattie is brand spanking new to the K9 thing, literally on her way home from three weeks of training in how to handle the dog. Some of the training involved “Trust the dog, dimwit!” practice, but it would be startling if Mattie really had that part of being a dog handler down after just three weeks. She honestly does really well with the dog!

As a dog story, this mystery is great! That dog is just beautifully drawn, practically everything about him rings true, and although I think I can see the author painstakingly drawing him into the story, I don’t care. She did a great job capturing Robo as an individual. He seems like a real dog, and actually he is based on a specific individual dog, so probably that helped. But a great choice! I love that this dog was play-trained and has such verve and such a great attitude.

As a bonus, Mizushima only used the word “alpha” once, which is pretty decent considering how embedded this term and concept is in pop culture. I’m sure the K9 trainers and handlers she spoke to and watched probably used the term, but at least Mizushima mostly avoided it.

Digression: The idea of the “alpha” wolf and, even worse, “alpha” dog, is ludicrously distorted from anything to do with actual wolf or dog behavior. Not sure I’ve said that before here, but it’s been interesting to watch because this weird distortion has taken place in my adult lifetime, so I’ve had a chance to watch it happen. It went like this:

Misleading descriptions of wolf behavior based on observations of unrelated captive wolves kept in an enclosure à first wrong description of the “alpha wolf” à wrong descriptions of alpha wolves applied to dogs, where it is an even worse fit to reality à correction of original wrong descriptions and accurate descriptions of wolf behavior enter the field of animal behavior, but simultaneously à an absolute explosion of werewolf paranormals, which picked up the alpha concept, already wrong, and absolutely ran with it à pop culture assumption that the way alpha werewolves are depicted should be based on accurate descriptions of wolf behavior à amazingly distorted view of how real wolves behave heavily popularized à Quora questions such as “When two wolf packs meet and the alpha males fight, does the loser submit to the winner and the two wolf packs merge?” appear in considerable numbers, and there you go, pop culture now has no idea at all how wolves actually behave. Pop culture is committed to werewolf tropes, so who knows how long it will take to get rid of the alpha concept. Probably we’re stuck with it for good.

All right, end of digression, back to the mystery.       

I did find all the characters a little simplistic. Not badly drawn, but again, I can see – or I think I can see – the author making decisions about how to draw them and painstakingly drawing them. Another way to put this is, I think I see the brush strokes. But, again, it’s not that the story is bad. It’s not bad at all. It’s quite good. There’s very little surprising, which I don’t really mind, as I read mysteries for character and setting, not for the mystery part. I enjoyed the dog so much I was fine with Mattie’s fairly cliched backstory – which had some nice details that prevented it from being too cliched. The male lead here, who did not take a hugely central role in this book, is the veterinarian whose wife left him and their daughters to go find herself, and that’s also cliched, but again, largely redeemed from cliché in this case because there are nice details. Among other things, the author makes no attempt to justify the wife’s decision to walk away from her family, which is good, because considering she wants nothing to do with her daughters, that would be hard to justify. Mizushima is plainly setting Mattie and Cole, the vet, up to be an item eventually, but she’s got the restraint to let that relationship unfold slowly.

The other deputies and the sheriff and the female detective who arrives from the city to take charge of the investigation are all drawn simply, in broad strokes, but with just a little complexity as the story moves toward the climax. I liked how Mizushima shifted one of the cops from “jerk coworker” to “maybe actually not such a jerk.” That was believable and I liked how Mizushima used this character throughout the plot. The final interaction between Mattie and her boss is genuinely powerful.

Will I go on with the series? Yes; and here we see the power of putting a teaser for Book Two at the end of Book 1. I was kind of maybe/maybe not on that because as you know I have a lot of books right here and do not need to pick up the rest of a seven-book series. But I enjoyed the beginning of Book 2 quite a bit, so yes, I went ahead and downloaded that.

Update: Okay, I did read the second book after writing this post. I liked it, and I like how the author is handling characters and relationship development, and I still like the dog a lot. But, wow, I may never in my life have seen such an obvious murderer. No red herring even began to distract attention from the exceedingly obvious murderer, who was exceedingly obvious. I don’t read mysteries for the puzzle, but wow, I would prefer a little bit more of a mystery than this! Not sure whether I’ll go on to Book Three.

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Am I becoming a recluse?

From Kill Zone Blog: #WritersLife: Am I Becoming a Recluse?

The other day a friend asked me to lunch. At first, I was excited about it, but as I was getting ready, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d rather work on the WIP.

This happens all the time. A friend will say, “Let’s get together.”

“Sure. Just let me finish the first draft.”

After I’m done, they say, “Now can we get together?”

“But I’m getting ready to do the first read-through.”

“Now that you’re letting the book cool, can we grab lunch?”

“Oooh, ahh, I started the next book.”

This made me laugh. The person who wrote this post — Sue Coletta — is considering this phenomenon, not necessarily considering it a problem. That’s good to see because I don’t consider it a problem. I should add, I’m even more of a hermit than Coletta, who indicates here that she says yes more often than no to suggestions about getting together with friends. Personally, I don’t really welcome (most) suggestions about going out to do anything with anyone. Sure, there are exceptions. There just aren’t very many exceptions.

I realized a long time ago — wow, about 25 years ago, I guess — that fundamentally, as a rule, when someone says to me, “Hey, would you like to [go somewhere] and [do something]?” the answer is almost always, “No, not really, but thanks for asking.” Once I specifically realized that, I kind of leaned into the hermit thing and quit worrying about it and that has worked for me ever since.

Coletta, musing upon this, finishes: An increase in serotonin induces feelings of happiness. Runners chase the same euphoria. Am I addicted to having fun? I’d say “alone” but we’re not really alone, are we? We’re with our characters, who are as real to us as anyone.

Our characters, our dogs, our cats, and music playing. Unless I forget to turn on the music, which often happens when I’m writing “in flow.”

I’m sure not all writers are hermits … well, not that sure. Probably somewhere, someone is a writer and also a social butterfly. Hard to imagine, but the world is wide.

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Update: Both very busy and totally distracted

Okay, so what I’ve actually been doing:

a) Writing new chapters and scenes for Invictus. I can only really do this in the morning. It’s obvious that my brain is a morning person’s brain: I can sit there and gaze at the screen and think, Oh, this is hopeless for an hour in the afternoon, but boom, the next morning, suddenly it’s obvious how to solve whatever problem. That doesn’t mean every single thing works itself out overnight, but it does mean I don’t bother trying to force myself to figure stuff out in the afternoon. I just do other stuff in the afternoon.

b) Such as finally put the Tuyo World Companion in a paperback template. This wasn’t nearly as tedious as I feared, as I used primary headings as chapters and tucked secondary and tertiary headings into those chapters. But! Oh, look, if I make this 5×8, which would be reasonable for a 120,000-word novel, it is insanely long because this isn’t a novel and the spacing is so weird. I mean, the alphabetical list of characters obviously takes up a lot more pages than just the number of words would require. That’s true even though almost every character gets a little note. Anyway, a lot of the book stretches out like that and boom, the overall length is well over 500 pages. That increases the price of the paperback. So I threw that away and did it over as a 6×9, and that is much more reasonable 380 pp.

I wouldn’t bother to do a paperback except I really expect to reach for it all the time myself to check the spelling of character names and so on. Plus who knows, maybe some of you all would like a paper copy.

In connection with (b), I have a question! Should I leave the ToC at the front of the ebook? This would not be okay if the thing were a novel, because the full ToC stretches out and out. It’s, I don’t know, about five pages long. Ordinarily you wouldn’t want the ToC to take up that much of the sample. But! in THIS book, it shows the potential reader what topics are covered in the World Companion and it’s clickable, of course, so it makes sense to put it in the front where the reader can’t miss it. Right? That seems sensible to me. This isn’t a problem with the paper edition because I’m only putting major headings in the ToC for that edition. I figure that rather than clicking on “K,” it will be easy enough to flip to the character list and then flip to the Ks.

c) I’m beta-reading a rather cluttered and madcap cozy historical mystery for a BVC author. I have discovered the secret to doing this more quickly and easily: read it and take notes on my phone. Then I will open the word file and add the notes, expanding on them where that seems reasonable. I bet I will have this done by the end of the week.

d) Kittens!

I put this nice dog bed on top of that crate because the kittens keep wanting to get on top of every horizontal surface and that looked super uncomfortable given there was only a towel up there. They like this bed a lot better.

I leave the gate to the puppy room — I mean the kitten room — open most of the time when I’m home. I just close it when I put their food down. They are much, much too tiny to jump on the counter, so the food has to be put down where they can get it, and that means in reach of the dogs. The dogs are forbidden to go into the kitten room, but get real, they’re not programmable robots, so the gate is closed when the food is down. The Tiny Tortie is completely unwilling to eat dry kibble. Will that wear off on its own, the way it always does for puppies? Or is she going to need to eat canned food forever? Which is good for cats, I realize that, but it’s also inconvenient. Anyway, she gets her own very pricey canned kitten food on the counter, away from the other kittens, because as I say, it’s pricey.

In return for special food and care, the Tiny Tortie is the most cuddlesome of the kittens and has the loudest purr.

e) I have to admit, just knowing that TASMAKAT dropped is honestly pretty distracting. I keep wondering where everyone is and whether readers appreciate the scenes I most like, including quiet scenes like the conversation between Ryo and Elaro, for example. And, yes, the big events too, of course! I keep picking up my last proofing copy and reading little bits of it and thinking about all this.

Also, I keep glancing at KDP to see how many pages have been read today. Sunday was a one-day record for a single title and a one-day record overall. Out of curiosity, I glanced back to look at numbers of pages read for TARASHANA per day since it was published. I thought it did okay. I suppose it did do okay, comparatively speaking. However, yesterday TASMAKAT got nearly five times more pages read than TARASHANA’s best-ever day, which is making me very happy.

Coming up this week: Involved with Invictus! That’s where my attention will be this week.

Well, and on the kittens!

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Recent Reading: Game of Fox and Squirrels by Jen Reese.

When I recently wanted to pick up a new-to-me book, I had A Game of Fox and Squirrels sitting on my TBR pile and decided to give it a try:

Winter is fast approaching and you, brave squirrel, must prepare! Your survival depends on finding and storing nuts for the cold months to come. You will do this by collecting “sets” and “runs” of cards. So simple! But there’s a catch. Isn’t there always? In this game, that catch is the FOX.

Okay, so this is a MG novel that came out fairly recently. Oh, looks like 2020. Well, that counts as fairly recently. I’ve met Jen Reese now and then, so I noticed when this popped up on Twitter or somewhere, and it sounded good, so I picked it up and dropped it on top of my TBR pile.

I haven’t exactly been in a reading slump – not exactly – but when I’m working on stuff of my own and not reading a lot of other peoples’ books, this kind of produces a … not sure what to call this … an artificial reading slump, I guess, as I honestly lose interest in reading. It’s interesting how different this is when I’ve been reading a lot; I get into an alternate habit of reading all the time and go through a lot of books in a hurry. So I’m usually either reading almost nothing or reading a lot, and short MG novels are one good way to transition from one state to the other. This time I picked up this one, A Game of Fox and Squirrels.

Overall reaction: I liked it. It’s a very young MG story, very simple. The protagonist, Samantha, is quite young, maybe twelve or so. That’s how she comes across to me, about that age. That means that the story is aimed at readers a little younger than that, maybe ten or so. That seems about right.

The whole story is from Sam’s pov. She is a highly unreliable narrator, which is not to say that the reader isn’t going to understand what happened. Reese doesn’t come right out and announce at the beginning that the two girls have been removed from their parents’ home by Child Protective Services, but even a very young reader is going to have absolutely no trouble figuring that out. The main character arc is Sam moving from wanting to go back home to her parents where everything is familiar and she can go to school with her friends, to realizing how bad her parents’ home really was and how much better her new home with Aunt Vicky is. As I said, a very simple story. The simplicity of the plot and characters suit this particular story.

The Game of Fox and Squirrels comes into this because there is this card game where you’re playing squirrels collecting nuts for the winter, but there are Fox cards that create challenges. Almost at once the Fox himself turns up and immediately manipulates Sam into doing things for him. This is not a bit subtle. The reader, including MG readers, are going to understand just about everything from the first moment the Fox turns up. This is not actually a criticism. It’s interesting to me that Reese made this story work even when so much is so obvious. It’s obvious what Sam’s character arc is going to involve, it’s obvious how the plot is going to work out, it’s basically obvious how all the other characters are going to interact, from the older sister to Aunt Vicky to the squirrels. Oh, by the way, there are Squirrels as well as the Fox, and actually Maple, one of the Squirrels, may have been my favorite character. She isn’t exactly important – or she is – she is a little more complex than most of the other characters. Maple suffers a personal failure late in the story, which draws me toward her because I would like to fix that. This is the exact kind of situation where I see something in someone else’s novel and immediately want to pick up that character, integrate her into a novel of mine – in a different form, of course, but a character who comes to that precise sort of crisis– so that I can fix the thing that went wrong.

Okay, so, things I particularly liked: The excerpts from the rules for the game. How terrifying the Fox becomes as the story progresses. How quickly the Fox dwindles when the family comes together, and how the house rules for the game immediately reorient the game to one of cooperation and success rather than anxious struggling to collect nuts and appease the Fox. When the Fox turns up, every player may contribute cards so no individual player is too badly hurt. Yep, good rule.

Things that might have been handled better: It’s a puzzle how the three Squirrels got pulled into the Fox’s service in the first place, and why they haven’t been eaten. I think that could have been clarified quite easily. Also, I would REALLY like to know where the game came from and whether Aunt Vicky used to play it and DID SHE EVER ENCOUNTER THE FOX? ??? This is totally left out. The connection between the stuffed animals in storage and the Fox and the Squirrels is really vague, and honestly this vagueness is not a thing that worked well for me. Did Aunt Vicky know what she was doing when she put that game in Sam’s room? If so, my goodness, a little warning would have been nice. If not, then is Sam the only person who ever got pulled into the game this way? It’s clear the Fox really exists in the real world, that’s not vague at all, so … it’s a definite puzzle.

Overall: This story is message fic, but it’s message fic done really well. The story is about how abuse can be perceived in unhelpful ways by a child in an abusive family and how that child’s perception needs to shift so healthier relationships can be comprehended and accepted. This is not at all subtle; it’s not subtext, it’s right there in the text, with the Fox and the Squirrels added as decorations around the edges of the basic message. This works not just because everyone can pretty much get behind this kind of message, but also because, simple as this story is, it’s just a good story, well told and engaging.

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Kittens everywhere

Okay, so this happened:

Yesterday, very early in the morning, I took three dogs for a walk and guess what I heard? Loud mews of distress. Kittens! One … two … oh my goodness, a third … look, another one! Someone had dumped four tiny kittens in the woods and left them to get eaten by foxes. You know, I was thinking a few weeks ago that we haven’t seen as many abandoned kittens this year as last year. Well, here we are.

These babies were pathetically happy to see someone, anyone. I took the dogs off the road and threw their leads around a tree, went back and collected three of the four kittens. I couldn’t get the fourth: he was hissing and spitting and crawled back in some dense underbrush and my arms were already full of three kittens. So I took the three home and dumped them in the puppy room, now suddenly a kitten room. Then I went back to find the fourth kitten, who had vanished. So I got the three dogs and took them home and put them in the yard so they couldn’t bark at the door of the kitten room and went back again to find the fourth kitten. I had just about given up when MEW! MEW!

It was one of the gray tabbies and he was invisible on the gray tree stump he’d jumped up onto, but luckily he wanted rescue enough to exercise his lungs. Naturally he was on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence, and I will just say here that the last time I crawled under a barbed wire fence, I was younger and more agile. Anyway, obviously I got him, you can see there are four kittens in the photo.

The littlest is the tortie female. These kittens are SO young that she is unable to eat hard food. She won’t even try. She wouldn’t eat canned food either when I tried that. I tried puppy formula, which is not really suitable for kittens, but I had some Esbilac puppy formula in the freezer and by yesterday afternoon I was pretty desperate. Success! She sucked down 20 ccs of puppy formula and then, with that in her tummy, was willing to take some gruel made with canned kitten food. This morning she was willing to eat canned kitten food out of a dish.

Her three brothers are all fine with dry kitten food, by the way. They are slow, but willing to eat it. I’m not even sure how old they are given that they are obviously just barely weanable. Five weeks? Less?

The tortoiseshell kitten was absolutely frantic to find her mother, and no wonder considering how starving she was. But luckily, Naamah, the dog in the picture, is wonderful with babies. Naamah most of all, but also Morgan and Leda, are happy to act maternal and lick kitten faces, and it turns out the kittens were not a bit afraid of the dogs, so everything has calmed down now. They all got acquainted last night and then the kittens were out in the house all morning and by the time I went to work, they had all settled in the crate in the kitten room and gone to sleep.

Haydee is very cute and wants to play with them, but sorry, all the pictures of Haydee and kittens are blurry.

I would, as with last year’s kittens, greatly prefer to place them in pairs. I really do not like to think of kittens going to new homes alone. Pairs do SO much better. As with last year’s kittens, I’m very tempted to keep two. I’m quite partial to orange tabby, as it happens. We’ll see! There’s no rush as really they are too young to place just yet. I haven’t even set a vet visit up. In two weeks maybe they’ll be old enough for vaccinations. In the meantime, I’ll worm them tonight since, along with puppy formula, I have worming medication on hand.

From now on, I’ll also keep kitten food on hand, because there was a certain flurry about getting that together, especially when the little girl turned out to be unable to eat dry kitten food.

As for the distraction level … right. Dial the distraction up to eleven for the next little while.

We had a huge thunderstorm last night, by the way. Gives me chills to think of the one little kitten I didn’t get at first out there by himself in a huge thunderstorm. I’m so glad I kept looking until I got him.

Someone socialized these kittens. I think someone let their kid go out to the barn to play with them, then told the kid that tiny five-week-old kittens would be fine in the woods and took them off and dumped them. Can you imagine? Utter failure of responsibility all the way up and down.

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When is the best time to release a new book?

I have no idea, so when scheduling a preorder date, I usually just pick a round number far enough in the future that I feel I can make the upload date without dying of stress. I have come to believe it’s impossible to schedule a preorder date too far in advance. I’m feeling time pressure for INVICTUS now and it’s only July. Two months to go! It doesn’t seem like enough time. Of course technically I only have to get INVICTUS: CAPTIVE ready to go by Sept 11th, but I will feel pretty uncomfortable if I don’t already have INVICTUS: CRISIS ready as well. I have some revision to do and then there will be as many iterations of proofing as I can fit in. My goal in life — well, no, but a nice bonus — would be someday to release a book where no one catches anything at all.

Anyway, I never know whether it might be better to schedule a new release for, say, Saturday vs Monday or anything like that. I guess if I thought about it, I would think it might be best to drop a new book on the Friday before a long holiday weekend, but the kind of weekend that isn’t too much about family and therefore leaves people looking for something to do. I doubt I will ever put THAT much thought into this, but here is a post at Writers Helping Writers that is about that: When is the Best Time to Release a New Book?

Oh, no, it isn’t about that. Or not only that. It’s mostly about the best time of YEAR to release a new book:

The first quarter of the year is the perfect time of year for business, self-improvement, health, and writing craft books, as people are eager to stick to their New Year’s resolutions. Genre fiction also does well in the first quarter. For many of us, the first quarter means terrible weather (I’m in New England). We’re looking for new books to pass the time while stuck indoors. Also, many readers received new tablets, e-readers, or gift cards for gifts. Shiny, new books become irresistible. Peak reading and buying season are very much tied to the weather. February and March are generally good times to release a novel because the weather’s not great. Snow and ice forces readers to browse the web for their next adventure.

I find January and February are months where royalties drop significantly. I haven’t ever managed to schedule a new release for those months — it just hasn’t worked out that way. I have been musing upon the likelihood that I will be able to schedule something to drop maybe the end of January 2024, when people might have recovered from spending a lot during the leadup to Christmas. Not sure, but that seems fairly plausible. If SILVER CIRCLE looks iffy for a December release this year, then maybe January 2024 will be ideal.

Oh, I see this post is saying that December is a terrible time to release a new book. Hmm. Seems like that can’t be true. Look at the Christmas-themed mysteries that come out in December. I often buy one because I like Christmas-themed mysteries. Theresa Romaine has several. I like her novels. They’re generally sexier than I would really prefer, but I like them anyway. I see she has a Christmas mystery I haven’t read. Fine, I’ll pick it up now and hopefully remember it’s there next December, which is a fine time to buy books in my opinion. Anyway, maybe December is a bad time to release some books, or most books. Could be! Maybe January would be good for SILVER CIRCLE even if I think it could be ready by December. We’ll see.

Here’s something mildly funny:

October is a terrific month for horror, thrillers, and mysteries—these genres dominate the marketplace, the darker the better. A cozy mystery or HEA romance may not do well in October. Historical fiction, depending on the subject matter, or dark romance might be all right. Really think about your genre and when you tend to buy books. It will help you understand the best time of year to release your book.

Okay, how about that advice? Think about when YOU tend to buy books! That will help you understand when you should release your book! Is everybody laughing? When is the last time the month mattered to YOU when you bought a book? I mean, seriously? I may not have a lot of time to read right now, but that doesn’t do a thing to stop me from buying books (and, to be fair, downloading samples). Time of year makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever. I buy books when —

–Someone here recommends a book

–An author I love drops a new book

–Someone emails me to recommend a book

–I happen to be on Twitter and someone recommends a book in exactly the right way to catch my eye

It would do no one any good at all to look at MY book buying habits. But fine, moving on. How about day of the week? Looks like the linked post thinks that early in the week — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — work better than later in the week! I had no idea. Oh, that seems to matter only if you’re trying to hit bestseller lists. Never mind, I don’t care. Ah, early in the month for the same reason. Fine, maybe I will try to shift to earlier in the month eventually.

Oh, yes, I can see how that might help! I wasn’t thinking of this particularly, but you know how to get a bonus from KU? By having enough pages read in one month. I think it’s four million and change, which is way above what I’m going to see per month even this month, but I can see that dropping a book on the first of the month would certainly make that more plausible if you’ve got any chance at all. Hmm, now I’m wondering if TASMAKAT might have gotten a single-title bonus if I’d dropped it at the beginning of the month? Well, I’ll see what I can do with that in the future.

One final note from this post:

But if you’re releasing series novels and your readers are foaming at the mouth, you may want to publish as soon as they’re ready, regardless of the date.

We’ll go with that: a hope that readers are foaming at the mouth and planning to leap on your book with cries of joy the moment it drops, including the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year.

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Remarkable temple

Ethiopia's 'Abuna Yemata Guh' is arguably the most inaccessible place of worship on earth and has to be climbed on foot to reach. Located in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, this ancient rock-hewn church stands atop a vertical cliff, perched at an elevation of around 2,580… pic.twitter.com/Io7wZpeV3n

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 27, 2023

Mary Beth pointed me to this tweet a couple weeks ago because of a specific location we visit in TASMAKAT.

What makes Abuna Yemata Guh particularly notable is the challenging ascent required to reach it. Pilgrims and visitors must hike up a steep and narrow footpath, navigating rugged terrain and exposed ledges. The ascent involves scrambling up the cliff face, sometimes using ropes for support. This arduous journey symbolizes a spiritual pilgrimage, testing the devotion and commitment of those seeking solace and connection with their faith.

This really is remarkable! Click through and read the rest of the extended tweet. Would you climb up there? Barring knee and other joint issues, I would. A temple carved with this much effort deserves going to some trouble to reach it.

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Ilona Andrews: More on traditional vs self-publishing

Allan sent me a link to a recent post by Ilona Andrews, which certainly ties in to this particular series of blog posts about traditional vs self-publishing. Here’s the first post on this topic, here’s the one that links to Jennifer Crusie’s blog.

Here’s the one by Ilona Andrews.

As I read the article, I laughed a bitter jaded laugh. I’m going to send it to Jeaniene Frost so she might have a laugh. Update: I sent it and then we laughed on the phone in bitter solidarity. It was better than crying. As someone said on Twitter once, publishing is a breeze. After the first four of five nervous breakdowns, I barely notice them.

Terms: Editor, publicist, etc – lovely people who help to make the manuscript into a book. Publisher – the corporate entity that employs them.

I laughed too, with recognition. Yep — that’s also how I would define “editor” vs “publisher.”

You are a contractor. Your value to the publisher is tied to the amount of money your book can generate. Their investment in you and your work will be minimal. It helps to lower your expectations. All the way down. You will know you are there when you scrape the bottom.

Then Ilona Andrews notes the things you can expect from your publisher, with rather jaded comments about most of these items. You can expect a cover, for example, but maybe not a good cover or a cover that is in any way related to your book.

There once was an author whose covers made her a laughing stock of the industry. Years later, the publisher decided to redo the covers. The author asked for 3 elements on the cover: a magic design, a red carnation, and some flames. The author stressed that all three elements were very important and even made a sample cover. The author received several mock up covers, which included: a pink peony, a white peony, a white lotus, a pink lotus, a carnation at an angle that made the flower unrecognizable, two asphalt roses left over after a volcano eruption, a still glowing rose, a melted-asphalt peony, and three asphalt roses. …

And let me tell you, according to the publishers, if your books don’t sell, it’s completely your fault, but if they do sell, it’s 100% because of the efforts of the publisher. They will take full credit whether they lifted a finger to help or not. … Should you traditionally publish? Yes. I still reccomend trying. Two reasons.

One, the self-published field is very crowded. You have a lot of content being churned out, some of it by ghostwriters, some of it poorly edited, and now some of it is written by AI. An “author” can write 100 books via AI, upload them all to KU, and it might take an average reader 30 pages or so to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile the “author” got paid for all those read pages. The discoverability is very, very low. It’s easier to stand out through the traditional publisher.

Two, it [traditional publishing] is a learning experience. They don’t just give out book contracts like candy. Your writing must be good enough to qualify. It will make you a better writer. Once you are in, if everything goes well, you will get the benefit of the NY editor with decades of experience. Learn from it, apply it, and when you build your audience, take full advantage of your earning potential by going self published.

Overall conclusion: Ilona Andrews is famous enough and enough of a bestseller that traditional publishing is a better choice for them. They note that POD can’t meet their demand for print version of their books. But they also note that they’re not quitting self-publishing either. This post is definitely an indictment of publishers, which I think is definitely well deserved; but there’s also a lot of comments about how great the editors can be, which I also think is well deserved.

Anyway: one more take on this issue, and I guess I should figure out how to tag posts by topic in this newish version of WordPress and start a tag.

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Update: fiddling with this and that, also finally reading books

Okay, so one last thing for TASMAKAT: final-final-final proofreading turned up maybe, I don’t know, five typos or so plus two lines in the hardcover that were the wrong font. For just those two lines, the “modify styles” button didn’t believe me when I told the “normal” style that it was now Garamond 10 and therefore those two lines continued sitting pretty as TNR 12. I could explain what caused that, but whatever, doesn’t matter, the point is, I skimmed through all three versions after uploading the final-final-final versions of the files and caught that and fixed it. I think (I hope) that was the only remaining formatting tweak.

ALSO!

Oops, I accidentally hit “publish” on the paperback version of TASMAKAT, and since there’s no way to take it back, I thought whatever and went ahead and hit “publish” on the hardcover version as well.

I’m not kidding, by the way. That was an accident with the paperback. There’s no button that says “preorder” for the paper editions. The only choices are “draft” and “publish.” That’s why only the ebook shows up on Amazon during the preorder period. Once you hit “publish,” you’re stuck. You have to wait for that to go through and then hit “unpublish” and who wants to deal with that, so I am usually very, very careful not to hit the “publish” button unless I mean it.

I guess the back of my brain thought Whew, it’s definitely ready to go and hit the wrong button. I meant to hit the go button this coming Wednesday, thus dropping the paper versions about the same time the ebook goes live.

Well, it’s perfectly fine to make the paper edition available a couple days early, so as “oops!” moments go, this one is not a problem. Just letting you know, odds are good that if you would like to buy a paper copy, by the time you see this post, the paper editions will be live.

Let me see, what else was going on last week?

Well, World Companion stuff, of course. That will be ongoing for the next month, I suppose. I’m proofing an updated ebook version and when I have finished that I’ll make another paper copy and start over. I tried another recipe, one that was new to me, and it worked better than I expected and was quite good! It’s the sugar dumpling recipe. I looked around for a recipe that might work for that because of course we have heard of sugar dumplings here and there in the books, and I found one that looked plausible, but I had never made it before last week. Now I have, and I revised the recipe to match my actual experience. I want to make a couple different versions and add comments about those. You know, even though I would have been really glad to get the World Companion out before TASMAKAT, I’m glad I have more time to fiddle with it.

What else?

Oh, of course! I got first comments back on INVICTUS: CAPTIVE from one reader and that was super fast and also funny and reassuring. I mean literally funny, because the overall reaction was positive in a way that made me laugh. Also let me add — I have said this before — but yes, sorry, there is a major cliffhanger at the end of the first book. Sorry! I did say I was always, always going to break up long books! This one is just about 190,000 words in final(ish) draft and that means breaking it in half and that moment is a good one for the break. I will be so interested now to see comments for the second book. I expect a certain amount of smoothing everything out to be required, but hopefully (VERY VERY HOPEFULLY) this will not involve really major revision.

OVERALL I am in something of a lull for, I guess, the first time this year, so I am digging into the TBR pile. I think I caught it just before it started collapsing into a black hole due to the gravitational pull of all those unread books. I expect I’ll be posting comments about various books in the next couple of weeks.

Yes, I am also thinking of re-reading the back half of the Black Dog series, but honestly, if I can finalize the World Companion and maybe finish final revisions to INVICTUS first, that would be really nice. And if that gives me time to read another dozen or so books, that will also be a bonus. So not totally sure what I’ll be doing in the coming week, depends on whether I get comments back for INVICTUS: CRISIS and how much more I wind up doing with the World Companion.

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