Matthew

As I got into my current novel-in-progress, I decided I should do a little research on events that occurred in the same time period (Fall and Winter of 2016, as it stands at the moment. It may or may not carry over into the next year.). That turned out to be a good thing, as a major hurricane, Matthew, slammed Florida around the time I intended to send my two protagonists on a weekend jaunt to the Atlantic coast.

But that trip was to be a few days earlier, essentially the preceding weekend, so they suffered no bad weather. It did provide a topic of concern and conversation, and added interest to their visit.

It added even more interest to the week following as many hatches were battened! Although Matthew had no great impact on the Gulf coast where the story is centered, it was enough to give me a minor climax to finish out the first section (of four) of the story. And it provided all sorts of possibilities for what will follow; that part of the novel might have become pretty dull without the storm, and maybe a tad directionless.

In other words, Matthew was just what I needed. It was a good thing I decided on a little research, possibly for nothing more than to provide a detail or two.

Books In Progress

The 2017 poetry collection, 'Sunshine Land,' has largely been assembled in terms of choosing pieces and getting them into proper order. This includes much of the formatting for the print edition. EPUB and PDF versions in time; there is no great hurry as the release date will be in April. This book contains poems from different times in my career. Some are songs. Several are about Florida, hence the title.

I am also churning away on a novel, almost certainly to be titled 'The Complete Breath.' This would be 'contemporary realism' and a sequel to 'Asanas.' Not that it needed one; 'Asanas' holds up perfectly well as a stand-alone work. Still fairly early in the process and just short of 20,000 words at the moment. I'll try to keep an update going here.

And I am going to use this blog more for that sort of thing. I fully intend to finally divest myself entirely of any involvement with Meta. I've already left Instagram and Threads, and Face Book is going to follow. Soon. I've never felt it a particular good place to promote myself and prefer to concentrate on Mastodon, Tumblr, Bluesky, Word Press, and even here (Not that Google is perfect and doesn't live up to its promise not to be 'evil' anymore.  But Meta truly is evil.).

I may show you some covers for the new books in a while but that will do for now! 

Shallow Poet Proof

I have a proof copy of the print edition of 'Shallow Poet' in my hands, and have approved it. All is ahead of schedule for it official release on April 21. Now to get all the details of its release worked out, listing it here and there, getting the free ebooks up at Arachis Press, and so on.

Yes, the ebooks (EPUB and PDF) will be free, as with all my other books. Print will be for sale 'everywhere' as we are going for full distribution, with ISBN. To be honest, these poetry books end up overpriced with distribution and we are giving thought to selling them direct only. This is not so much of a problem with the thicker novels and such, though it still means tacking on several dollars more.

Here is the author himself with his copy of 'Shallow Poet.'