Did I do it?

I stewed about breaking down my third act with too many section breaks. I managed to smooth away a couple of these, but some have to remain.

Today, I wrapped the story up with a bittersweet ending. I left a glimmer of hope for the future in the last two paragraphs.

This one kicked my butt, and took me longer than most stories, but I really like it. I used some new techniques, and learned by doing. That’s the most profitable part of this gig. Being a self published author isn’t about money. (Other than the funds going out the door.) Learning, improving, and getting better at what I do motivates me.

I’m a little bummed that it came in at just under 63K words, but it’s a complete story. I don’t see any sense in legging it out if there isn’t something substantial for another 10K.

Something fun involves the senses. Back in Once Upon a Time in the Swamp, I decided to focus on senses that might not get enough attention when I write. There was a big focus on the sense of smell. If you want to know what I’m talking about, see the link in my sidebar. Those who risked it left me some wonderful reviews.

In Tracks of Infinity, I wanted to focus on sound. It plays a role in every story, but I added a side character who wants to be a foley artist. The last time I mentioned this, I got comments about not knowing what that is. Cody Hughes wants to be the guy that adds sound effects to various kinds of broadcasts. I’m really happy with his character arc, and how his part of the story wrapped.

I don’t know what I’ll do for the other senses. As a visual person, I don’t see the need to focus on sight at any time. I might have a difficult time making taste or touch a focal point in a future story, but I’m going to think about it. I’m not brave enough to write a blind character without having experience with those special needs. There is such a thing as a super taster, might have some merit.

Jenny, Cody’s mom, is the main character, and I also like her bittersweet ending. Bai is an interesting side character, and she gets a suitable arc as well.

In other news, Old What’s Her Face and I scored tickets to see Samantha Fish when she comes to Boise in July. I like some obscure things, when it comes to music. This one makes me want to start the next story about Lizzie and the hat this afternoon. I’ll start soon, but need a breather after finishing this story.

https://youtu.be/7deWpfw-sHg?si=9sklecMkb9rcPZ3z

https://youtu.be/HEMnrnIqaEM?si=x2w5WkeqSq2D329U

Okay, I need to get back to Lizzie and the Pythons PDQ.

Having a little fun

Old What’s Her Face has the prettiest maple tree in our subdivision. I’ve been wanting to take a background picture for a week now, but it had been stormy.

I laid at the trunk and shot up through the branches. I wound up with four great pictures. One had an interesting cluster of leaves that dangled toward my phone. As wallpaper, that would be covered by the actual blog material. Two had varying levels of a sun flare that were also interesting. Wallpaper being what it it, those might have turned into light flare background and not left the Autumn colors I wanted.

In the end, I went with the simple but colorful one. How you read blogs will make a difference. It looks great on my iPad, but doesn’t show up at all on my phone. I like it and went with it.

We also decided to take the rest of the week off. We’re both feeling the strain in the workplace and have plenty of leave coming to us. Mine ties into the observed Veteran’s Day holiday, so I get more out of it than the hours I’m spending.

Then there was last night. About six months or so ago we bought tickets to see ZZ Ward. This was in the same small venue where we saw Larkin Poe last year. It was a great time.

She’s heavily pregnant right now, but it didn’t make any difference in the music. We had the balcony this time, but every seat there is great. If I had one gripe, we didn’t buy tickets to the drummer’s concert. Someone needed to adjust something so she was more of the main event.

She played her old songs, and some from her new album to give us a broad spectrum. I’m a bigger fan of her older stuff, but she teased a blues album coming out next year.

If you’ve never heard of her, she is worth checking out.

Maybe someday Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Ali Venable, or Samantha Fish will make their way out here. A couple of them landed in Salt Lake City and the West Coast. Boise is a happening place, so it will eventually happen.

Music History???

As authors we do all kinds of strange research. I’m no exception, and might be more extreme than most of you in that regard.

I have had a song in my mind for years. It’s a super well known tune, but in my mind, there were always two versions. I remember them well, but started wondering if my mind was playing tricks on me.

I’ve been looking for the less famous version for years now without success. Today I found it.

Some of this was caused by the song climbing the charts twice. It gained a second life after Tom Cruise was introduced to the world in the movie Risky Business. Everyone remembers that version and can name that tune in about two notes from the piano.

My mind works in mysterious ways. I am building scenes for a story I can’t even write for about two more years. I am who I am.

Imagine Lizzie and the Pythons on stage at a musical competition television show. The whole band is on stage with the exception of Lizzie. Shade, the saxophone player, is giving a brief mention of who they are over the long intro to the song. Lizzie appears at the last second (on purpose) just in time for the lyrics.

Listen to this amazing long intro and enjoy.

Lisa goes to Texas

Lisa Burton is visiting with Jan Sikes today. She’s there to talk about Goodbye Old Paint and is sharing one of her posters. Check it out and I’ll be surfing through the comments later.

https://jansikesblog.com/2023/10/19/goodbye-old-paint-the-hat-book-7-newrelease-virgilante/comment-page-1/#comment-180151?page_id=21688

A break from routine

Old What’s Her Face and I are both taking a vacation day today. My Christmas present from her was two tickets to see Larkin Poe live at The Knitting Factory in Boise.

We dragged our feet getting out of the house last night, but in the end it meant we didn’t have to stand in arctic temperatures in a long line. We had a reserved table, so fighting for a seat wasn’t part of the deal.

It’s a small venue, and we were incredibly close to the stage.

That’s the dance floor between me and the performers. The table area was slightly raised, so seeing over everyone’s heads was no problem.

This wound up being an incredible performance. The younger sister has huge stage presence and a wonderful voice. Her older sibling is a virtuoso on that slide guitar. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend seeing them. in an age of auto-tuners and synthetic background, it’s nice to see someone who does it the old-school way, and does it well.

At our ages, the hard plastic chairs became a little tiresome by the end, and we’re both expressing our aches and pains today. Thus, the reason for the day off.

If only we could get Kenny Wayne Shepherd or Samantha Fish to come here one day. They regularly tour together. I found out KWS is going to be in Bend, Oregon in May. We’d need someone to watch the bulldogs to pull that off.

As for me, I’ve vowed not to do a damned thing today. No editing, or other authorly gyrations. We’re watching The Last Witch Hunter on TV and the rest of the day will probably play out the same way.

Something for Halloween

October is nearly upon us, and in typical fashion I have something to share with everyone.

Life has been busy, and I’ve had to target what I can do as opposed to what I’d like to do. I still have company, and I’ve dedicated a large portion of time to being a good son.

One of the things I did was to silently publish The Midnight Rambler last weekend. I didn’t make a big deal about it, because all my promo posts are targeting the month of October. What I really wanted was the purchase link to send out with my tour posts.

Old What’s Her Face is taking Mom home tomorrow, meaning I’ll have the whole house to myself. I sent out the first week of promo posts to make sure I didn’t drop the ball.

This weekend I’m going to send something to everyone I have scheduled. I think I have a couple of extra posts and might contact some of you directly to see if I can put them to good use.

If you’d like like to go hunting for an ancient monster with Lizzie and the hat, I’d appreciate everyone giving it a chance. This one goes down during a major flood event, and Lizzie might even have a pseudo-boyfriend out of the deal.

This series involves stand alone stories that make sure you don’t have to read the predecessors to enjoy the story. They’re also short novel length and readers seem to appreciate that, too.

I’ll be sharing the blurb and a bunch of points about the book during my tour. For tonight, you get a cover and a purchase link. Then I’m going back to being a good son for one more night.

Get your copy here: https://mybook.to/TheMidnightRambler

Reporting in today

Plans didn’t change, but nature dictates what I can do.

I actually wrote that one into The Midnight Rambler, and got the cover ordered. I plan on releasing this one for the Halloween reading season. It’s a hat story, and I’m excited to share it with everyone. I wasn’t going to talk about it today, but this song is invading my head right now.

While Lizzie and the hat are chasing the Midnight Rambler, there is a major flood event happening. Naturally, the band drifts into songs about rain.

It was raining when I woke up. It rained all day. We have a first-rate thunderstorm brewing out there right now. Safe to say, spraying my trees wasn’t on the agenda today.

I wound up starting with Mari, back in the swamp country. This involves a big portion of world building in a town called Columbia. This is based upon a nuclear submarine that washed miles inland during the big war. The reason this is a post apocalyptic world.

The end of the war involved nuclear weapons and the subsequent wave brought it to rest. The town built up around it, and some wise person used the reactor to provide electricity to the town. They boast it’s the only town with electric lights in the whole world.

This next section is going to be hard to write. I need some time to think it out, because Mari is going to get herself in trouble.

I switched back to Goodbye Old Paint. Lizzie is dealing with the FBI and the file they have on her activity. I have some real problems in store for her, too. I need to get things moving and this always takes a bit of dabbling. Lizzie’s problems will be more humorous, while Mari’s are pretty serious.

Lizzie is sorting things out from the end of Midnight Rambler, like FEMA benefits. I swear this will still work as a stand alone.

I need to get her to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to see her problem first-hand. It’s going to be something she and the hat are ill equipped to handle. (Still coming up with things the hat can call this agency that are incorrect.)

Still, I added words to both stories. I’ll probably stick with Lizzie and the hat tomorrow. Assuming it’s still going to be raining. If the weather breaks, I may actually spray my trees.

Chipping away at it

Somehow, I managed today as my flex day. It hasn’t happened very often that I get a four day weekend out of the schedule, but I’m pretty stoked about it.

Tried my hand at some fiction this morning. It’s going slow. I’ve been dwelling on this story for years, but I still have to get post apocalyptic America on the page along with everything else. This involves things like transportation which is back to horse power, or in Mari’s case ox power.

It also involves a monetary system where barter is king, and salvage is a way of life. The currency exists in the form of quarters. These are more durable than old paper money, and people can sift through the rubble for them on occasion. Sometimes purchases are made by the coin count, other times by the pound. It’s +/- $20 per pound of coins. I looked it up.

I also have to work with geography and a few ideas from the fall of our modern society. For now, I’m sticking with “Once Upon a Time in the Swamp,” for a title. Something else may come to me as I write it out, but it functions for drafting purposes.

I’d like to start another Lizzie and the hat tale soon. Working on two projects at once really functions well for me. When I get in a bind on one, I can switch to the other and still earn word count out of the day.

I keep finding some pretty obscure music as part of my hat research. After so many volumes, I’ve covered a lot of tunes people are likely to recognize. I hate to use obscure stuff, but might have to start weaving some of that in.

This is something new from Samantha Fish. I think it’s a cover of an older song, but I can totally envision Lizzie and the Pythons playing it.

I’m thinking the working title for this story will be “Goodbye Old Paint.” That will probably be a line of dialog in the story. It will involve national security, and her being forced into helping. My motivator could go down in flames, though. It involves Lizzie’s unpaid student loans. If the president forgives those it might force me to change directions.

With any luck, I might start writing this one before the long weekend ends. Right now, Mari and the swamp need more of my attention.

Mountain Laurel Christmas

Let’s all welcome Jan Sikes to Entertaining Stories. She’s one of my longest term author friends, and a partner at Story Empire. She’s here to tell us about her new Christmas novella. Let’s make sure to use those sharing buttons for her today.

Failure and disappointment are two horrible feelings for anyone to handle. My character in Mountain Laurel Music struggles to deal with those feelings, most of the time attempting to drown them in alcohol. But when the effects of the alcohol wear off, he is left with the same hollow disappointment in himself.

My character had made a promise.

Excerpt:

I’ll never forget Papa placing his hand on my shoulder a few days before he died, making me promise on everything holy and sacred, to take care of Mama, April and Timmy if anything ever happened to him. Perhaps he knew.

It sticks in the back of my throat now like a bitter quinine pill.

I failed him.

I failed Mama.

And now I’ve failed myself.

I think sometimes the greatest disappointments we can experience in life are in ourselves. I have certainly been there, and even now, after many years, if I allow myself to think about it, I can conjure up the same horrible, disgusting feeling.

What about you? Have you found ways to deal with disappointment or failure? Please share.

Mountain Laurel Christmas Blurb:

Orphaned, his family torn apart by tragedy, Cole Knight has come a long way from a ramshackle miner’s cabin on the side of the Cumberland Mountain.

Daring to follow an impossible dream, he’s made it big in the music business. Now, he’s a country music sensation with a huge house, fancy cars, plenty of willing women, money, and adoring fans. He should be on top of the world. Instead, he’s drowning in a swirling pool of self-contempt and relentless guilt.

It’s easier to lose himself in a bottle than face the hard truth…he hasn’t delivered on a promise he made to his father.

It’s almost Christmas, and the sting of failure drives him back to that tiny cabin in the mountains. But has he waited too late to put the shattered pieces back together—to find himself and restore a lost family?

PURCHASE LINK:

https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Laurel-Christmas-Jan-Sikes-ebook/dp/B09KJYMVT9/

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Lisa Burton visits the Murder Blog

I sent Lisa Burton over to visit Sue Coletta today. Sue is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve read most of her books. She also has one of the most interesting blogs out there. Make sure you check out her blog and wares while you’re over there. I recommend all of them highly.

***

Join in me in welcoming Lisa Burton. Did I mention Lisa isn’t human? She’s a robot girl and spokesmodel for my buddy Craig’s writing career. Shawnee Daniels and Lisa go way back to when Lisa hosted her own radio show. If memory serves, I believe I had to drag Shawnee out of there before these two went head-to-head. So, if you’re reading the Mayhem Series, please don’t tell Shawnee she’s here. 😉

Welcome to Murder Blog, Lisa! Keep reading here.