Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 23
March 17, 2024
When does Anxiety = Love?
No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood. - Paul Auster, Leviathan
You worry, fret, and fuss about the people closest to you. Unless you’re totally unhinged, you won’t be scolding people on the street.
Remember - Audiobooks at no extra charge to our paid subscribers! Starting March 25.
Preacher Finds a Corpse - 41 chapters in 24 half-hour episodes released here on Thinking About Thinking. Coffee-break short!
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
March 13, 2024
Audiobooks at no extra charge to our paid subscribers - Asking for your input
A regular paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog is offered at the lowest rate Substack permits - $5 per month or a one-time annual payment of $30. The first audiobook offering would be Preacher Finds a Corpse, which Audible sells for a single-copy price of more than $20.
The 43 chapters of Preacher Finds a Corpse are bundled as 24 half-hour episodes - just the right length for your daily walk or gym session.
Or, after the episodes are posted, you could binge it all by accessing each of the posts in our Archive, but only if you’re a paid subscriber.
And if this experiment works - that is, if enough of you see value and decide to upgrade - there will be more audiobooks here, including selections from mystery, historical fiction, and romantic comedy.
Before the program kickoff, let’s have your input…
This brief survey should take just a couple of minutes. You’ll answer when and how often you expect to listen. Since Substack pushes out posts at a specific time, we must choose the day, time zone, and exact time of release - but the platform won’t customize those options for each listener.
Each post will open with an episode description for all subscribers, then the audio player link and the chapter text will be tucked below the paywall. Since you can read faster than you can listen, you’ll always have the text if you lose your patience or your earbuds.
So - please let us know what you think.
If you can’t wait, you can read all of the books in the series by clicking here. You can even buy the Audible audiobook of #1 or get it with your Audible subscription. The other books in the series haven’t been recorded yet.
If you’re viewing this post as a free subscriber, here’s how to upgrade to paid. Paid subscribers get all of the content below the paywall of limited-circulation posts - as well as access to all of our archival content, including podcasts.
March 10, 2024
Creative Ink Interview with Karina Kantas
Click here to watch the episode on Everydaywoman.tv.
New cover! The book was released on March 5 in trade paperback and Kindle.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
March 8, 2024
To my friends, fans, colleagues, and cousins...
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March 5, 2024
Please Post Your Reviews on Amazon Today!
The reviewer for BookLife commented about Preacher Stalls the Second Coming:
The one-time pastor of Missouri’s Evangel Baptist find(s) himself at his lowest ebb. “I’m unchurched, defrocked, and if it weren’t for the boundless generosity of one Zip Zed letting me housesit a broken-down little trailer rent-free, I’d be homeless,” Wycliff declares—and that’s not even touching on his separation from his wife, Loretta, and the loss of his beloved dog, Murphy.
Clearly - Evan needs your kind attention!
Please post here today:
https://www.amazon.com/Preacher-Stalls-Second-Coming-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0CRCFGLDP/
Some stars and a line or two (of text) will surely get him out of his funk.
All four covers in the series have a new look.
February 28, 2024
Preacher #4 Gets Rave Review from BookLife
As my colleague sometimes says after succeeding at a task, “I am humbled.”The standout fourth entry in Jones’ Evan Wycliff mystery series sparkles, despite its protagonist, the one-time pastor of Missouri’s Evangel Baptist, finding himself at his lowest ebb. “I’m unchurched, defrocked, and if it weren’t for the boundless generosity of one Zip Zed letting me housesit a broken-down little trailer rent-free, I’d be homeless,” Wycliff declares—and that’s not even touching on his separation from his wife, Loretta, and the loss of his beloved dog, Murphy. Even the new friend he just met, an aged German who drags him out of that borrowed manufactured home for pancakes and heady conversation at the C’Mon Inn, is quickly ripped from Wycliff—and this mortal coil—by a passing F-150. But as Wycliff looks into the accident, plus a missing girl and the arrival in his patch of southwestern Missouri of a cultish end-times commune, he can’t stop thinking about the German’s warning: that someone out there could be planning to fake the Second Coming of Christ, this time through advanced digital technology.
Release date March 5 in Kindle and trade paperback.
Like its predecessors, Preacher Stalls the Second Coming blends unusually humane and thoughtful procedural sleuthing with a brisk pace, winning local color, and ace scenecraft and surprises, all powered by a strong undercurrent of moral and spiritual inquiry. It won’t surprise readers of mysteries (or of newspapers) that Pastor Obadiah of the End-Times Retreat Center has secrets in his past and monetary and political entanglements with the politicians up in “Jeff City.” But Jones’s depiction of this milieu—of believers and belief, of trailer parks and superstores, of the tensions faced by the woman pastor who has replaced Wycliff—is always revealing and surprising, both warm and incisive.
Highlights abound, with a tense discussion of the Book of Revelation between Wyclif and Pastor Obadiah proving more gripping than many mysteries’ shootouts. The same goes for a scene of faith healing. Both author and detective are touchingly open to people’s better angels but not all that shocked by corruption, charlatans, and killers.
Takeaway: Standout mystery of faith, corruption, and a minister at his lowest ebb.
Quoted from BookLife Reviews.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
New cover!
February 25, 2024
Croctail Hour - A Short Story
Here I was, prepared to watch what predators do to weaklings in the wild. I failed to see how the experience could lift my spirits.
The tourist plan, which my friend Bryce had concocted, was for the two of us to be driven around in wildlife preserves in the lush parts of Kenya—protected places tucked amid the greenery and far away from the lingering drought in the savannahs this time of year—and all along the way to be cosseted and fed in the highest old British colonialist style, the lavish aristo life that even the most well-heeled English can’t find in England anymore. White-linen tablecloths with Sterling silver. Waiters in black tie. All set out in the open air at creekside.
The slick, muddy riverbanks, Bryce explained, were just steep enough to prevent crocodiles from climbing all the way up into the open-air thatched-roof cocktail lounge.
February 20, 2024
Get your free review copy NOW!
100 free Kindle / EPUB / PDF copies are available for immediate download until March 4. Click here.
Like its predecessors, Preacher Stalls the Second Coming blends unusually humane and thoughtful procedural sleuthing with a brisk pace, winning local color, and ace scenecraft and surprises, all powered by a strong undercurrent of moral and spiritual inquiry.
It won’t surprise readers of mysteries (or of newspapers) that Pastor Obadiah of the End-Times Retreat Center has secrets in his past and monetary and political entanglements with the politicians up in “Jeff City.” But Jones’s depiction of this milieu—of believers and belief, of trailer parks and superstores, of the tensions faced by the woman pastor who has replaced Wycliff—is always revealing and surprising, both warm and incisive.
Highlights abound, with a tense discussion of the Book of Revelation between Wycliff and Pastor Obadiah proving more gripping than many mysteries’ shootouts. The same goes for a scene of faith healing. Both author and detective are touchingly open to people’s better angels but not all that shocked by corruption, charlatans, and killers.
BookLife Reviews for Publishers Weekly
Click here to download the ebookClick here to post your Amazon consumer review (Amazon won’t allow before March 5)
And thank you for your thoughtful support of Thinking About Thinking.
Storytelling builds community.
February 18, 2024
Musicianship - What Is It?
Each of these five voices could easily overpower the others if he wanted to assert himself as a star. Yes, they take turns on the lead. But what we have here is a masterful blend, surrendering to a one-voice expression of desire.
I want to talk about musicianship.
Musicianship is a common theme of three different stories. The first is An Equal Music, a novel by Vikram Seth about a European string quartet. Another about chamber musicians in New York is the movie A Late Quartet. The third, and most unusual, is The Bear Comes Home, a novel by Rafi Zabor.
Musicianship is the first thing you notice about any band. Do you hear individual instruments and voices or a mellow blend? Inexperienced amateurs are too concerned with projecting their personal sound. Professionals know that listening to each other is a measure of not only artistry, but also of generosity.
In An Equal Music, a violinist who plays in a chamber quartet carries on a love affair with an accomplished pianist. The main issue with them is mutual trust, which is also the crucial element that binds a successful quartet. However, one of them has been slowly growing deaf and is hiding it from the other. As we learn, a relationship can work, for a while, even if it is not based on truth, but on a willingness to agree.
In A Late Quartet, the second violinist and the violist are married to each other. The violinist is having doubts about his playing, which leads a brief affair with a dancer. The arrogant first violinist is giving music lessons to his colleagues’ talented daughter. He betrays his bond to them by allowing the girl to seduce him. Again, it’s all about trust and cooperation, sometimes in spite of the underlying truth.
In The Bear Comes Home, the bear in the title is an alto sax player who is crazy about jazz, girls, and Shakespeare. He’s not a bearlike man, he’s a furry animal. And, he’s beset by the blues. Oddly, he blames his difficulties getting along with his human musician friends on everything except his essential bearishness. His situation reminds us how immigrants must feel, knowing they’re so much like the rest of us, while we can only see their differences.
Musicianship – it’s about collaboration, and what it takes for all us kids to play nice. Not just in music, but in personal relationships and even in international negotiations.
A community is a musicianship of souls.
In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
February 13, 2024
Preacher #4 Gets Rave Review from BookLife
As my colleague sometimes says after succeeding at a task, “I am humbled.”The standout fourth entry in Jones’ Evan Wycliff mystery series sparkles, despite its protagonist, the one-time pastor of Missouri’s Evangel Baptist, finding himself at his lowest ebb. “I’m unchurched, defrocked, and if it weren’t for the boundless generosity of one Zip Zed letting me housesit a broken-down little trailer rent-free, I’d be homeless,” Wycliff declares—and that’s not even touching on his separation from his wife, Loretta, and the loss of his beloved dog, Murphy. Even the new friend he just met, an aged German who drags him out of that borrowed manufactured home for pancakes and heady conversation at the C’Mon Inn, is quickly ripped from Wycliff—and this mortal coil—by a passing F-150. But as Wycliff looks into the accident, plus a missing girl and the arrival in his patch of southwestern Missouri of a cultish end-times commune, he can’t stop thinking about the German’s warning: that someone out there could be planning to fake the Second Coming of Christ, this time through advanced digital technology.
Release date March 5 in Kindle and trade paperback.
Like its predecessors, Preacher Stalls the Second Coming blends unusually humane and thoughtful procedural sleuthing with a brisk pace, winning local color, and ace scenecraft and surprises, all powered by a strong undercurrent of moral and spiritual inquiry. It won’t surprise readers of mysteries (or of newspapers) that Pastor Obadiah of the End-Times Retreat Center has secrets in his past and monetary and political entanglements with the politicians up in “Jeff City.” But Jones’s depiction of this milieu—of believers and belief, of trailer parks and superstores, of the tensions faced by the woman pastor who has replaced Wycliff—is always revealing and surprising, both warm and incisive.
Highlights abound, with a tense discussion of the Book of Revelation between Wyclif and Pastor Obadiah proving more gripping than many mysteries’ shootouts. The same goes for a scene of faith healing. Both author and detective are touchingly open to people’s better angels but not all that shocked by corruption, charlatans, and killers.
Takeaway: Standout mystery of faith, corruption, and a minister at his lowest ebb.
Quoted from BookLife Reviews.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
Gerald Everett Jones - Author
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