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.

I’m such a keyboard slut

What can I say? I finished Lanternfish and took a break that lasted almost 24 hours. I started a new project on Sunday, and since today is my flex day I added to that.

I’m already 10,500 words into my next story. This might give you some hints as to what I’m up to. Oh, and turn the speakers up. This woman has some chops.

Not the day I planned

I woke up to about eight inches of snow today. Nothing I haven’t seen before, but there were sidewalks and the driveway to deal with.

Old What’s Her Face has permanent dibs on the good snow shovel. It’s one of those push shovels that works like a snowplow. That leaves me with an old square concrete shovel that won’t empty because the snow sticks in it.

I did the sidewalks while she worked over the driveway. At the end, everything got finished, but my shoulder hurts for some reason.

On the bright side, Frankie loves the snow. She likes to stick her head under it, then wander around bind until she runs into a tree or something. Then she rolls over and wriggles her way for a yard or two. This is the same dog that hates the rain, but she seems to love this.

I laughed so much that I forgot to take a picture. Some blogger I am.

I intended to write, and did to a small degree. Mostly, I worked up a chapter for my critique group and sent it off. I also worked over a section for one of the other group members.

My writing involved more of a slice of life for Lizzie, but it seems to work. I’m right down to the end, so I need the next section to be creepy and scary. That’s one of the tricks to The Hat series. I need some humor, some slice of life, plus a bit of horror and intensity. Shifting back and forth has to feel right, but as the author, I need to get in the right frame of mind, too.

Eventually, I broke down and listened to some music. Maybe that will help. This kind of music:

Time for our weekly teaser

I suppose nearly any of my books might loosely fit into the Halloween theme. I’m still hoping to publish one on October 1st. At the time of this writing, I got a peek at the formatted manuscript and identified a few glitches. It’s all progressing according to the schedule.

For this little teaser, turn up your speakers, and enjoy the all-star assembly. Check out the Lisa Burton poster to get some ideas about what Halloween means at Entertaining Stories. Have fun.

 

Kicking it into Overdrive

It’s September now. The best month of the year is just over the horizon. I can taste the pumpkin spice in my beer, and detect the crispness of the occasional morning. We’ll still dabble with the occasional 100 degree temperature, but October will be here before we know it.

It’s been my favorite since I was a small child. All the spooky Halloween oriented things. The changing colors, I love all of it.

Late summer was busy. It seems like Lanternfish sailed all over the world in the last month. We visited a lot of old friends and managed to get Lisa Burton out of the writing cabin. I’m hoping that my free promotion of the first book will walk some new readers into this series. It’s time to send the ship to dry dock now. She has holes to patch and barnacles to scrape before I take her back out for her last cruise.

I’m going to be popping up here and there this month to promote Murder They Wrote. This is an anthology of seven different short stories with a theme of murder. My character, Jason Fogg, is a private detective on the trail in my story.

I’ll be on the lookout for review posts. With Lanternfish’s free days, plus the new book, plus the anthology, one or two could pop up. If I find them, I’l try to share them here.

You might be thinking, Craig’s had a busy year. He’s probably going to relax for a while. That’s just not the case this year. I try to have a Halloween themed promo of some kind every year, and 2020 be damned, I’m doing it this year, too. I have another book I hope to release on October first. I only have part of my promotional artwork, but I have a cool cover. I’m sure the rest of the art will arrive in time. I don’t even have the formatted MS back, but it will be here.

I decided to post some teasers this month. Simple, visual and auditory at the same time. With this post, I’ve officially promoted three new books in one week. Take that 2020. Check it out. Are you teased? Are you intrigued?