Killing the Beast

I'm working, albeit deliberately, on a sequel to The Hero of Gucci Gulch.  Called Killing the Beast, it features plenty of murder and mayhem just outside the halls of Congress and implicates leaders at the highest level.  Who are the murderer or murderers?  And who or what is the beast of the tale's title?  That, of course, is the mystery that drives the action in this coming book.

I'm on chapter 22 now, with another few chapters yet to conceive. As is usual with mysteries, mine at least, even I don't know how it will end or the culprits will be found out. But that's the fun of writing!

Like The Hero of Gucci Gulch, now in production for an audiobook, I'll be releasing via Audible.com when it has been published, sometime later this year.  I'll announce it here when it's available.

Update on My Audiobook

As I mentioned previously, I began the process of converting my first novel, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, into an audiobook.  I'm pleased to report that I received seven auditions for the narration before I made a final selection.  I could have gone with any of three of the narrators.  The one I chose, A. Bran Peacock, has both the voice and the interpretive skills that will bring my novel to life.

Over the next several months, he and I will review his initial performance to identify any pronunciation and performance issues.  After that, he'll narrate the entire story.

I'm hoping the fully-narrated novel will be ready for release sometime this fall.

The Hero of Gucci Gulch, a murder mystery set on Capitol Hill, features a public interest lobbyist as amateur sleuth.  It's an easily read novel with a lot of action that I think will translate easily into narrated form.  When it has been released by Audible.com, I hope you will agree.

The Story Line of Gucci Gulch

The Hero of Gucci Gulch features Henry Wright, a milk-loathing dairy promoter turned environmentalist, who is naïve, unsure of himself, sometimes quirky.  Now he is caught in the political fight of his life—to get a climate change bill passed by a Congress riddled with the scheming pals of polluters.  But this test of his political skills is no match for his fight to escape his own seemingly inevitable death. The Hero of Gucci Gulch is set in the halls of Congress, where anti-environmental skullduggery mixes with mayhem to create exciting twists and turns sure to entice any fan of mysteries.  

Henry befriends Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern whose passion for environmental justice matches his own. But youthful impetuosity leads her to ignore Henry’s warnings and she digs too deeply into the nefarious plans of the powerful opposition.  When Henry finds her strangled body in a lonely Washington garden, he becomes the number one murder suspect.  He tries to plow his anguish into his legislative campaign, but the unsolved murder weighs heavily on him and he can’t leave it alone.  He stumbles onto clues that point to his anti-environmental enemies, and when the police are slow to act he takes matters into his own hands.  His increasingly daring amateur investigation gets him crosswise with the police but he persists until violence and still more death force him to live on the run. Henry faces both personal threats and political challenges as he claws his way toward the surprising conclusion. 

The first novel in a series featuring the lobbyist amateur sleuth is rich with Washington and political insider details and explorations of environmental policy and the need for climate change legislation . It will appeal to mystery fans, environmentalists and lovers of political intrigue alike.  But climate change-deniers should probably not apply!

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is available at Amazon.com and in the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is in the works.  I'll announce it here when it becomes available.

And Now Available on Amazon.com!

Today I discovered that The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel set on Capitol Hill, is available for sale on Amazon.com.  They had promised it would become available in five to seven days; they made it in one!   It is even available for free shipping by Prime, if you subscribe to that service, so you can have a copy by Monday if you order today.

As I said in my last post, the book will also be available in a Kindle version, but converting the file will take me a while so I can't yet predict when that edition will be ready.

At Last I'm Published

My murder mystery, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, passed all of CreateSpace's hoops as well as my own critical review (for the umpteenth time) and I approved it for release yesterday.  So now it's published!

Copies can be purchased immediately at the CreateSpace eStore.  It takes CreateSpace another week to release it on the Amazon.com web site, where it will be more readily available to the buying public.  A Kindle edition is also in the works, but that involves a fair bit of reworking of the text to make it readable in the scalable Kindle format.  However, because Kindle reaches a different audience--and a large one at that--I will make the necessary changes and get it posted there as soon as possible.

You can read the synopsis and my bio statement at the CreateSpace site.

On Ice

Today I'm in a holding pattern.  I've submitted The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel, to CreateSpace for review and it passed all their tests.  Then I ordered a review copy, paying extra to have it delivered quickly.  It is due to come today.

But will it come?  Yesterday we caught the tail end of a major snowstorm that afflicted much of the east coast.  We did not get the predicted 10" of snow--at least, not so I can tell with it blowing around in the high winds.  But we did get maybe 5".  Why is this important?  Because it will disrupt package deliveries. 

The book is coming via UPS.  I live atop a fairly steep hill and have an unplowed, gravel driveway.  UPS will not come up my driveway when it has snowed any amount and certainly not through the drifts that have accumulated in the driveway.  Instead, they will fling my packages at the foot of my mailbox.  That is, if they come at all.

And if my book does arrive today, as expected, then the issue is whether it will pass muster.  The small  photo of the cover I viewed on-line suggested that the book title may be shifted somewhat to the left of the page.  If so, I'll want to repair the cover and send the book back through the review and reprinting process, something I would be very unhappy to do because of the delays it will entail.

But until the book arrives, I don't really know what I'm faced with.  I want to release it for publication so I can start marketing it and--I hope--generating royalties.  But I also want it to look right.  So, until the physical copy arrives, I'm literally on ice.

How I Write

Writers have all manner of ways to turn out words.  Many, in the current era, employ the keyboards on their laptops or desktop computers.  A few dictate directly in Dragon Naturally Speaking and then edit their dictation.  Probably even fewer--like historian David McCulloch--resort to the time-honored practice of  banging the keys of a standard typewriter.  I myself used an upright Royal, as well as an Underwood, for years, churning out hundreds of pages of text that became articles, monographs, books and a Ph.D. dissertation.

But I do none of that now.  I am, I must confess, a lover of fountain pens.  There is something about the intimate relationship of ink, paper and thought that seems only achievable when hand writing with a good pen.  And so, when I write anything of substance--and this includes my novels--my invariable practice is to first set down my words in curive script.  Lengthy documents--again, my novels are a case in point--I then dictate into Dragon Naturally Speaking, which converts them into computer-editable text.  Dragon has gotten to the point where it is proably 99 percent accurate, so this is a quick and easy way to make the ink to digital conversion.  From there, I print out the text and begin the process of seemingly endless edits until it is polished to my satisfaction.

Why do I write this way?  Writing by hand introduces white space into my thoughts and allows them to develop and mellow while they are in process.  Often, I will find my characters and plot evolving from one sentence to the next, something that might less readily occur if I were typing at rapid speed (which I am well capable of doing).  Frankly, I relish the time to allow my thoughts to ripen, something that the more relaxed pace of hand writing permits, even encourages.  And, I enjoy the tactile sensation of the ink flowing from the pen's nib onto quality paper.  It is one of life's genuine pleasures; why should I deny it to myself?

What works best for you may be different.  There is, in the end, no right or wrong way to write, just a variety of ways that work for each writer.  After all, it's the quality of the writing--the strength, clarity and sensitivity of expression--that really matter.  How you get there doesn't.

Publishing My Novel

Over the last several years, I've been polishing a mystery novel--The Hero of Gucci Gulch--that I started now several years back.  Or, in reality, it has mostly been lying about untouched because I did not know how to go about getting it published.  But recently, my friend and cousin Jim Crawford, under the pen name of Mokuri, published a short volume of poems by Li Po via Amazon's CreateSpace. This gave me the idea that I would be far better off using this free service to get my book out to the world than fretting over the difficulty and costs of publishing it by other means.

CreateSpace is a print-on-demand service that sells books when purchased via Amazon.com and by offers them to other booksellers and libraries in the U.S. and Europe.  Books can also be made available in Kindle editions.  Although you can pay CreateSpace to set up your book for you, it is quite possible to submit a final edited text and cover design of your own making.  The cost of doing it yourself is nothing.

Books can be printed in any size, include color illustrations and artwork if desired, and run to any length--short or long.

Royalties can be paid out automatically to your bank account or sent via check.  A user dashboard allows you to check in and watch your royalties as they accumulate.

There are many other epublishing services out there, but most that I've found charge fees for even basic services--sometimes astonishly high fees!  While my book has not yet been published, it is in the queue for review and may be available in a few days.

I'll announce it here when it appears.