1.) What are you reading? Is it fun?
2.) What are you writing? What new technique or skill are you trying this time?
3.) What was the last thing you published?
I built two new bookshelves today. (Yesterday, by the time you read this.) Not because I go that many more books, but because the recent rains rose high enough to flood part of the house, and soaked the base of a very old chipboard bookshelf that had survived 8 moves and 20 years, but despite all reinforcements, was on its last legs already.
So while I’m moving moving books before they imitate the walls of Jericho, tell me what you’re up to.
Mad Genius Club 
36 responses to “Open Bookshelf”
the last thing I published: The Light of Caliburn, Amazon, $7.85,
What if the legends of King Arthur have survived for a thousand years because of the secret they hold, hidden in plain sight? What if the legends have survived for a thousand years because they’re true?
Geo is a painter capturing the wild beauty of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in oil on canvas as he hikes its rugged mountains and rocky coasts. Alette is a scientist and chemistry professor at Michigan Tech University, where she unravels the mysteries of nature. When a hidden secret from ages past unexpectedly comes into their hands, together they are thrown into an ancient battle against an evil from the dark mists of legend. Following a trail of clues strewn through history and myth they will need to solve the puzzle of King Arthur and Merlin and Nimue’s Gift if they are to survive, and conquer.
Set in the present day along the ancient shores of Lake Superior, where the signs of The Rock Wizards are still present, The Light of Caliburn is a fantasy adventure into the heart of Arthurian lore. Winner of an Honorable Mention from the Catholic Media Association book awards.
Normally we don’t allow posts that are 90% sales copy, unless people ask first, but this IS a direct answer to the main post, so I’m making an exception.
Thanks, and duly noted for the future.
Congrats on getting that one out! I see you’ve done a book of poems, too. What technique or skill are you focusing on improving?
Thanks! I’ve done four books of poems and I love both prose and poetry–trying to improve them both!
Reading serialize stuff on line. John Ringo’s take on a 13 year old superhero is interesting. I may have to dust off my Geriatric Superhero and write a sequel.
Writing? I had a spate of short works all about . . .well basically “origin stories” for characters I may use sometime, when I figure out the next big bad guy.
The last thing I published was Wild West Bar and Grill, next up . . . the Origin story for my current in-series head of Intelligence.
Oh, please do. The geriatric supers book was great!
I just finished The Honor Of the Queen by Weber. Now I’m reading The Downing Of TWA Flight 800.
I’m listening to Elric of Melnibone in the car.
Otherwise I’m just working the day job and doing yard work and laundry
We’re heading for the finish line for International Agatha Christie, She Watched. Or, to be more accurate, we’re almost finished watching foreign AC film adaptations. Our last film is a weirdy: a Thai horror flick (Fad or Alone) loosely based on Elephants Can Remember. A review to follow, naturally, plus assembling the book.
I will be so grateful to have a break from two reviews a week until probably January of 2025 when we begin the Jane project.
When we began the Agatha project, I had NO IDEA how much time it would take or how it would cut into my available headspace for writing my own fiction. They’ve been cutting into Bill’s headspace too. I just can’t switch back and forth easily.
I’d really like to work more on The Bitch Queen of Atto, but we’ve got immovable, rock-hard deadlines for International. So, it comes first.
It’s also why I’m rereading (for the first time in 35 years) The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha so I can compare it to the Indian remake. I’d forgotten what a great mystery it was.
When I’m finished, I’ll return to Roberta Rogow and The Eyes of Lorr, a sci-fi mystery with an obvious homage to Nero Wolfe buried inside. After that, the mile-high TBR stack beacons.
My reading is currently bouncing between Dinosaurs of Darkness: In Search of the Lost Polar World, SOG Codename Dynamite: A MACV-SOG 1-0’s Personal Journal, and That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon.
I was also listening to a 3-hour interview of Tom Spooner, until he started accurately describing something I’ve witnessed before, and I noped hard right out of that. I will skip forward about 5 minutes and resume, but it’ll take a minute. That’s where the last book came in.
That Time I Got Drunk is… the romance version of cotton candy for the frazzled brain. As long as you wanted light, fluffy, airy, and makes no more sense than the current immediate laugh and how can we top that silliness next, it’s delightful. If you want steak instead of cotton candy, it would be awful.
I have learned that I need a certain amount of calm in my life to write. Having a husband recovering from two surgeries in two weeks, with the aim of being recovered enough for surgery 3, is not below that threshold of calm. On the other hand, I’m getting plenty of other things done. I hope to resume good progress on the regency in space with Kraken, but given the next surgery is two days before I leave for a con, I am giving myself grace.
Be excellent to each other, dudes.
Arcane Casebook #8, Hostile Takeover, by Dan Willis
Essentials of Compilation, An Incremental Approach in Racket, by Jeremy G. Siek
Essentials of Programming Languages, 3d Edition, by Friedman & Wand
I haven’t been reading much of anything lately.
I see the stuff you all and Sarah are doing, and it makes my efforts small. I’m trying to get past first full edit – taking out unneeded adverbs, filler sentences and on the nose writing.
At this point, I’ve published nothing. I’ve tried, but only silence. Can’t seem to get much interest from beta readers to check out my work. I have no money for professionals, or to self publish. Writing and getting things sold is harder than it looks.
In rocket science, getting a rocket the first 100 feet off the ground is the hardest part, and takes the most power, with the highest chance of things going wrong.
Writing isn’t much different… starting from zero and trying to build your network, your skills, your abilities, and your budget with no inertia and no feedback is the hardest thing you’ll ever do in this field.
Your efforts right now, though the result may seem small, are harder than mine, and your results matter, Don’t give up, but do try to take time to refill the well with something that makes you interested, or just makes you smile.
There’s a reason I’m queuing up the cotton candy for the brain’s sequel, That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf. Because all work and no play is a recipe for burnout.
Keep going; you got this.
Thanks for the encouragement. I do have other things to do. Mostly keep the house clean and taxi service the wife and kid. 🙂
(1) We all start off small.
(2)Don’t over edit.
(3) No Beta Readers? What genre? The people here read all sorts of stuff.
Pam,
I’ve done a few different things. Short stories: westerns; a series of depression era stories about a hapless small time comic hood; a crime drama based on Edward Hopper’s “Night Hawks;” and a cold war era thriller. I’ve done four novels: a short western, and a full length western novel/character study; two science fiction stories. Sarah has graciously offered to read one, but I know she’s busy. My latest one is an 84k word science fiction adventure story.
I have A Literary Horde on groups.io, but sometimes it’s a bit slow. It’s for Ace of Spades HQ commenters. I’ll take help from anyone. Can’t do this by myself. Thanks.
You may want to check out scribophile.com – it’s been saving my literary butt. You can post about 3K words at a time for other writers to comment on. It runs on a points system – 5 points to post, which must be earned about 1.25 at a time by commenting on other people’s stuff.
I write MUCH better and faster when I have somebody to squee with as I go, so it’s been a lifewaver for me. Basic account is free but limited to two posts a month, and the $15 premium has been worth it for me.
I’ve heard of that site. It’s in the back of my mind for later. I think my critiquing skills need some work before I can help others.
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Princess-Mary-Catelli-ebook/dp/B0B8XXS4CF
Funny, it let me number the items in a list while editting. . . .
I got the auto-list when I typed in a number and period. WPDE and so on.
Mountain settlements where transhumance is not possible. Notice it’s rather specific but not geographically. . . .
The list is long. I’ll try to keep it short-ish.
Is it fun? Yes, but the ending engages in a hoary old pulp cliche I was tired of several books ago, albeit Wellman does it better than most.
Is it fun? Yes, although the main character is a bit shockingly morally flexible in the early going, considering how mightily most of the pulps strove to be morally upright and clean.
Is it fun? Ye gods, yes!
Is it fun? If you like noir with amoral characters constantly crossing each other, then yes, it’s damn well written and enjoyable. (Plus, there’s a bit where the characters stop briefly in Itchy Paw.)
Is it fun? I’m basically always a sucker for Hamilton, so yes. The stories are earlier works of his, though, and therefore more clunky than Planeteers.
Is it fun? The prose feels less antique than the other book of Ogden’s I’ve read and published, The Baron Of Diamond Tail, even though that book was written later. So far, yes, but I’m still trying to make up my mind how much I like Ogden or not.
Is it fun? It is just as clunky and goofy as anything else by Cummings, so if you enjoy that, yes, and if not, no. (As Ben Yalow once said to me: “You found a character in Ray Cummings? I don’t believe you!”)
Is it fun? It’s supposed to be, but the sentence-by-sentence writing is so godawfully bad that I doubt I’ll ever finish it. I swear, it’s like he read the worst examples of “chatty” business nonfiction, and then decided that, yes, he could do that in a harem fantasy format. It makes my editor muscles twitch, badly, and if I were a masochist I would use the first chapter as an example of what not to do and how not to do it.
A Martian Foreign Legion story for the coffee anthology, and Ex-Ministers of Fate.
Max Brand’s The Gun Tamer, which might be the strangest book he ever published. (And he wrote a super-science lost race story set in the Arctic with a civilization populated by refugees from medieval England.) Writing a western called The Gun Tamer, publishing in a western pulp, and making it about a middle aged mother trying to prevent her only daughter from marrying the Wrong Sort Of Man, while still having it be a western, might just be certifiably insane.
I’ve been reading Perry Mason mysteries, T. E. Kinsey’s Lady Hardcastle, and rereading a lot of MGC. The last thing I published was a novel, Jessamyn’s Yarn, about a girl fleeing to her uncle’s sheep farm to get away from a cult. It’s a gentle story. But it has meteorites! I wrote two short sci-fi fantasy stories but they aren’t published. I’m working on a book titled The Science Fair Murder. What I’m trying to learn is how to manage a large cast of characters (it’s in a school) and how to write something that could have a sequel. Trying to work out the arc of more than one book and still keep just one book’s arc complete is … challenging.
I’m also working on reworking my two ‘RTN’ short stories for release on Amazon now that the rights have reverted.
For Scott G. – Self publishing on Amazon really isn’t that hard. There is a very good guide for this here on MGC. Maybe you could try putting up one of your shorts as an e-book to start with.
I swear there were numbers on that list before I hit ‘publish’. WPDE, as usual.
It ate mine, too. WPDE.
There probably were. WP is doing something strange. I’d like to blame the waning moon, but this IS WP we’re talking about.
WP is conspiring to frame the moon.
2) I’m between writings at the moment. I just finished with a cat-themed mystery for the Raconteur Moggie Noir anthology, and I haven’t come up with my next project yet. I’m toying with a story called “The Black Cat and the Churchyard Dog,” as well as trying to plan Book 10 of my Seelie Court series. So far I have a setting, a couple of villains, and some scenes and bits of dialog, but they haven’t coalesced into a plot just yet.
3) That really depends on what you mean by “last thing you published.” If I personally have to be the publisher, it would be The Wedding of Light and Shadow. If we mean the last thing I wrote that has appeared in print, I think it’s a story about intelligent prairie dogs called “The Underground City.” If we mean the thing I wrote with the most recent publication date, I just found out today that a horror story I wrote last summer called “What Did You See?” finally had its anthology come out!
What am I reading? Just finished the latest Carlisle and Holbrook novel, Old Bermuda Passage and just started on Demon of Unrest. Both review books. I love it when I get paid to do something I would be doing anyway.
What am I writing? A New Vanguard titled Atlanta-class Cruisers, 1941-1949. It’s about 11 cruisers the US Navy built during World War II. They are now famed as antiaircraft cruisers, but they were built to be destroyer flotilla leaders. A fascinating book to write because they were intended for one purpose, but ended up being used for something entirely and unexpectedly different – for which they were superbly suited.
Last book published? Tokyo 1944–45: The destruction of Imperial Japan’s capital came out in February and US Navy Pacific Fleet 1941: America’s mighty last battleship fleet is coming out in July. D. A. Brock, you might want to read the latter before finishing The Lone Star, the Red Banner, and the Rising Sun. It’s pertinent to your book. Your Lone Star Navy series is one of my reading pleasures.
Reading: The Quiet Gentleman; the Georgette Heyer everyone is meh on but me.
Writing: sequel to most recently published. At around 30K of a book projected to run 48K-50K.
Most recently published: at the tail end of 2023: https://www.amazon.com/Wolfs-Trail-Hunter-Healer-King-ebook/dp/B0CR81P9QP
One of my favs.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who likes it! It seems to take a lot of flak for the slow-burn romance and the too-obvious mystery angle, but if people are willing to cut Brat Farrar slack, with a similarly obvious baddie, a similar tripwire attack on a horseman, and much less likable protagonists, I’m not sure why Quiet Gentleman gets so much grief.