T.A. Moore's Blog

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State of the TAM - 19 Jan

What’s Up

Dirty Work, first book in the Dirty Deeds series, is up for pre-order now!

May be an image of book and text that says

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Crime Scene Cleaner [kraɪm siːnˈkliːnə] - Cleans up crime scenes…before the cops know there is one.

People always say ‘you can’t go home again’. It turns out that doesn’t count as a guarantee…especially not during a global pandemic.

After the jobs in LA started to dry up, crime scene cleaner Grade Pulaski was forced to pack up and move home. He loves his family, but the last thing he ever wanted was to face the ghosts he’d left back in Sweeny, Kentucky.

Also, the place just sucks.

He certainly isn’t going to stay any longer than necessary. The plan is to save up enough money to move back to LA and give his business a kick-start. The problem is that, as previously mentioned, Sweeny’s a hole and the locals are anything but professional.

Now a body has gone missing, Grade’s reputation is being held hostage, and people keep asking whether his Dad really did run off with 100 grand of meth in the back of Dodge. Plus, even though you shouldn’t sleep with your employers, crime lord Clay Traynor is exactly the sort of bad idea that Grade can’t resist. Tattooed, bad news, and dangerous.

…oh, yeah. Grade’s job is to clean up the crime scene before the cops know someone’s dead. That’s why he needs to sort this out before he gets a bad review on dark net Yelp.

Pre-Order Now

ALSO! Yes, a little bit late. I definitely underestimated how tired I was going to be stumbling home at half-nine with an over-stimulated pup and just…just covered in cheese and livercake. I mean, you leave the house with the treats all cubed up and neat. Then you’re trying to wrestle Jax away from the purse that’s been left at the side of the hall and there’s food on him, on me, on the purse…

Sorry! But I’ll try and get it done on Monday next week! Then I can schedule it.

What? You say, don’t you do that already. Now, you’re just insulting both of us. You know I don’t, that I am not a planner and am instead chaos covered in cheese cubes. So…

Free Audio Chapter of the Week

‘Shift Plan’ by TA Moore is a Night Shift short story and a prequel to Split Shift. Find out more about who Kit Marlow was before he joined the Night Shift, and how he became the man Cade Deacon gets to meet in the books! Chapter Two up now!

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Written by TA Moore
Narrated by Michael Fell

Listen Now

If you prefer to read rather than listen, you can get Shift Plan in mobi and epub on the website.

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Off to the Commons in Donaghadee today! He walked through the town as well, had a nice meet and sniff with a schnauzer.

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It was very windy!

Enjoy a $1.99 eBook by Rhys Ford. Sale Ends January 31, 2022. I would like to point out that I was the one who kept saying ‘Call the book Ramen Assassin!’ and everyone was all ‘Tamm, you’re drunk again.’ Turns out I was not, and you’re all welcome!

I’ve also never had Ramen. So that just means I was being even more brilliant!

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When life gives Kuro Jenkins lemons, he wants to make ponzu to serve at his Los Angeles ramen shop.

Instead he’s dodging bullets and wondering how the hell he ended up back in the Black Ops lifestyle he left behind him. After rescuing former child star Trey Bishop from a pair of thugs in the middle of the night, he knows it’s time to pick up his gun again. But it seems trouble isn’t done with Trey, and Kuro can’t quite let go… of either the gun or Trey Bishop.

Trey Bishop never denied his life’s downward spiral was his own fault. After a few stints in rehab, he’s finally shaken off his Hollywood bad-boy lifestyle but not his reputation. The destruction of his acting career and his relationships goes deep, and no one trusts anything he says, including the LAPD. When two men dragging a dead body spot him on a late-night run and try to murder him, Trey is grateful for the tall, dark, and deadly ramen shop owner he lusts over—not just for rescuing him, but also for believing him.

Now caught in a web of murders and lies, Trey knows someone wants him dead, and the only one on his side is a man with deep, dark secrets. Trey hopes Kuro Jenkins will stick around to see what the future holds for them once the dust settles, but from the looks of things, neither of them may survive to find out.

Amazon

Dreamspinner

Depressing but illuminating read from Jack Monroe (who is amazing and you all should follow them!)

jack monroe @BootstrapCookWoke up this morning to the radio talking about the cost of living rising a further 5%. It infuriates me the index that they use for this calculation, which grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least. Allow me to briefly explain.

January 19th 2022

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I am fascinated with the idea of things that are missing. Really, best way to hook me into anything is a mysterious photograph that can’t exist or a document that has been mutilated to remove important information.

So this article is just right up my alley!

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Holes are full of potential. We can only imagine what was in them before they were emptied out, why they became nothing instead of something. Like a kaleidoscope, the picture made by holes is always changing. Like history or art itself, holes are never finished. Archaeologists use soil analysis to identify postholes, the marks of ancient settlements. They excavate sewers at the Colosseum to find things the Romans thought not worth writing about. Holes leave space for projecting both forwards and backwards in time.

Museum and library collections are full of holes. Some are the product of hungry bookworms and moths. Others are deliberate, made by humans. These holes are, arguably, the most crucial bits, even though they are missing. This is the hole’s paradox. A hole points, through absence, to importance. The object wasn’t just used; it was used up. Philosophers struggle mightily over this question: is the hole something or nothing at all?

In his small artist’s book Hole Theory (2002), the American artist William Pope.L lays out the case for holes. The spiral-bound book is annotated with handwritten notes (denoted here by square brackets) and the text is crossed out in places, making its own black holes on the page. In this text, which is a hybrid poem-manifesto, Pope.L embraces the paradox of the hole.