A Blog of a Different Color

I write several other blogs, all hosted at Blogger.com. But they're nothing like this one. One of the newest ones is called Random Retro Reviews of the 20th Century and it's coauthored by Baby Boomer Boy.

It has nothing to do with my books, or writing or publishing, or any of that boring marketing stuff. We simply cast a critical eye back on the last century, pick a topic or an event at random, and let the words flow. You'll get a lot of researched facts at this blog and a lot of social, political and news commentary, as well.

My Next Favorite Readhead

Katie Banks Palmer is another strong-willed female character that I created for my Science Fiction for Thinkers collection of sci-fi thrillers.

In The Dreamer Never Sleeps, my fourth novel, she's the "fortysomething" wife of Russell Palmer, the main character, and a capable hospital administrator who must re-apply for her own job under a new CEO title. But that's just one side of Katie Palmer.

Another side of her is being the wife of a man who is haunted by memories of his past and disturbed by dreams of the present and by the uninvited, flesh-and-blood presence of a visitor from the dreamworld. For Katie, this means an awakening she will never forget.

Authors Note: This outdated front cover is no longer available on my sixth novel "The Dreamer Never Sleeps" because all my books got new covers in 2012. I chose to not update this image here, in order to preserve the integrity of the original blog post. To see what this book looks like, as of 2012, just click on the image. 

Truth in Advertising

My sci-fi thrillers don't have the kind of "Mature" content that would disallow a teenage reader from having access to them. While there is some strong language once in while, it's not enough to make it "Mature". Any "Mature" content in my books would be in the form of the intellectual exercises required as readers ponder the speculative science or the historical and cultural references included in my fiction.

But the Science Fiction for Thinkers collection is not just for "Young Adult" readers, either, as some people erroneously label them. They're actually for "Older Adults" who know a little something about 20th Century history, American culture and the human condition, but who also thirst for 21st Century excitement, especially in the form of speculative science and the classic conflict between "Good" and "Evil".

That typically means Generation Xers and Baby Boomers. And older, but not necessarily. There are some bright and inquisitive young minds out there and my sci-fi-thrillers are most certainly for them, as well.

Where's a black hole when you need one?

I went to bed last night a middle-aged man of 54 and woke up today a senior citizen of 55.

Linear reality kind of sucks.

My Favorite Brunette

My favorite brunette is Verona Petrov, a female character who is Earth's first Ambassador to another planet in Time And Time Again, the second installment of The Evermore Trilogy.

In the third book of that trilogy, Providence, Verona Petrov is a brilliant Russian para-scientist, researching the afterlife and teaching basic para-science courses at a small Pennsylvania university.

In her mid-forties, beautiful and brilliant, she shines as a dynamic protagonist battling a dangerous government-sponsored cover up of the truth about life-after-death. There is a secret reason why this same female character is in two books in The Evermore Trilogy.

But only readers will find out.

Why didn't I make her a typical, redheaded Russian woman from the Republic of Georgia? Because everyone expects a Georgian Russian woman to have red hair and that's why I made hers jet black. To match her "atypical" personality.

Author's Note 1-19-13: I didn't update the front-cover images for the books mentioned in this post and on many other old posts because I didn't want to ruin the look and integrity of the original post. You may also find other old posts on this blog and on my other blogs where I didn't update images to the current versions and that only means that I didn't want to or I just overlooked the opportunity to do so. If you click on the book images you will see the 2012 front covers for these novels at Amazon.com. 

Home Boy Disclaimer

For the record, I don't write about real places or real people in my novels. All the characters in my novels, as well as their names, are fictitious and the towns, townships and counties in which they live are fictional places in Pennsylvania and do not really exist.

In addition, there are no composite characters in my books, no "take-offs" on or "rip-offs" of people I have known, although I occasionally give certain "tics" and eccentricities to older characters for humorous effect and in gratitude for the source of childhood wonder they provided. However, in my novels I never write about Snow Shoe, my hometown, or Centre County, my home county, or any of the people who live there now or who ever lived there before. The only similarity between those places and the places I write about is the coal and lumber history, which is fairly commonplace in much of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

In my novels, my focus is on a quadrangular, fictional part of Pennsylvania that would lie somewhere between the following real places: Smethport in McKean County and Wellsboro in Tioga County as the northern border and between Clearfield in Clearfield County and Lock Haven in Clinton County as the southern border. This is the fictional vicinity of the Pennsylvania I write about. I picked this part of the state for my fiction because this is the part I know the best and love the most.

The only exception to this rule is in Deeds of Destiny, my 5th novel. The first half of this story takes place in a fictional part of southeastern Pennsylvania that would lie somewhere between York and Philadelphia, if it were real. The second half of this story takes place in a fictional section of the above-mentioned area of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

So, while my novels are fiction, they also pay homage to the rich history and the beautiful topography of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

link to same post in Thinck Tank

Psychic Tidbit

When I was in my mid-twenties I was pretty skinny and also fairly psychic (as if those two conditions were somehow related). Anyway, I once demonstrated to my father and to my girlfriend at that time that I could place a playing card against my forehead without looking at it, facing out so they could see the card, and tell them in a few seconds what the card was. I was so good at it that one day I correctly identified all 52 cards in a poker deck (that's a 100% score).

Now, you scoffers can make whatever you want of this, because I know there are a lot of people who have nothing better to do than make fun of what other people are saying, but this is the honest truth. Now, I have no idea why I could do this at that time in my life and why I haven't been able to do it since. And, you know what? None of that matters to me anymore.

Science Fiction for Thinkers

I don't write comic book SciFi. And I don't write Fantasy, although all my works contain some elements of fantasy in them. But there are no capes and swords, no hooded ghouls or space knights in my books.

When you unmask real life, what you see is a lot spookier and astonishing than anything purely imaginary, and that's what I do. I take an average American town or an average day in the life of an average man or woman and I peek under that rock and expose the supernatural roller coaster ride that runs beneath it all.

And on that roller coaster ride many battles are won and lost and many unlikely heroes emerge and all of it seems so real. And that's because most of it really is. And that's because there's a lot more to life than what we see, hear, smell, taste or feel. And much, much more than we think.

My Favorite Redhead

For me, it just has to be Karen Smitrovich, the major female character in my trilogy, consisting of Evermore, Time and Time Again and Providence.

Karen is twenty-seven and single when The Evermore Trilogy begins and her hair is actually auburn, not red. She is also the sole heir to a coal mining fortune in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region. When she meets Jack Rand and gets involved in his mysterious, bewildering life, her own life is changed forever.

All my novels have strong female characters in them, each one a main character. Two others are redheads, one is brunette and one is bald. Yep, bald as a cueball.

"Deeds of Destiny" Now Available

My fifth novel is now available to the public. Deeds of Destiny is a story about the myth of free will and the reality of cosmically-orchestrated life events.

Parallel Universe, USA

There's at least one parallel universe that I know about because I've lived in it most of my life and still do. I enter it through a hideous black hole every time I wake up in the morning.

It's an unrealistic realm where no one reads a book unless they see an ad for it on TV, a place where learning ends on high school graduation night and Madison Avenue tutors the young who have been nursed on fairy tales about happy consumers living in sit-com houses.

Nothing goes "bump in the night" in this parallel universe because all the bogeymen carry cell phones and PDA's and MP3 players and you can spot them coming a mile away.

Manhattan Wormhole

I was actually lost in a wormhole once, repeatedly trapped in it for over two years. It was a twisted and horrifying time corridor between Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania and Manhattan Island. I entered it each time I went to the post office to mail a query to a literary agent, along with a bio, synopsis and the first three chapters of a novel manuscript or whatever it was that their listing indicated in the current volume of Writer's Market.

Then the strangest things would happen. Via the same wormhole I would get back letters from the agents I'd queried, telling me about the books they had written and where to buy them, with no further mention of the book for which I was trying to secure representation. Well, I knew I wasn't in The Twilight Zone because that was merely a figment of Rod Serling's fertile imagination.

The wormhole suddenly closed one day and I stopped receiving replies from agents altogether. I eventually forgot all about it. But, I was walking past the post office in Snow Shoe today and I saw the dark spiral of twisted time descending again like a waterspout.

Then I ran.

Evermore Anniversary Date

One year ago today I self-published Evermore, my first novel, and became a published author for the first time. The book had a different cover back then. I began this novel (my very first book) in early January 2002 and finished it on March 30, 2002. Yep, it only took me three months to write my first book.

Then, for the next two years, I peddled it to 45 of the Great and Powerful Publishing Wizards of America, most of them located in Big Apple City, and to 47 of the Literary Agent Gnomes of America who serve them. But, being an unknown author and an independent author to boot, the big bad Wizards and their pet Gnomes were just chewing me up and spitting me out without even tasting me.

It took me two years to finally realize that Americans hate indie authors more than anybody else in the whole wide world because indie authors don't guest star on talk shows or sign books on C-Span and you can't find their mass market paperbacks at Walmart. So, if it's not on TV, no one in America knows anything about it and they don't want to know anything about it. In America, if it's not on TV, it's not real.

While I hawked my first science fiction thriller, I wrote two more, undeterred by American shortsightedness. By May 2003 I'd completed The Evermore Trilogy and was unsuccessfully hawking the entire trilogy to traditional publishing houses for the next year or so.

Would I do it all over again? You gotta be kiddin'. I know when to stop beating a dead horse. Besides, I'd rather be vivisected by extraterrestrials than subject myself to the galling snobbery of my fellow Americans, half of which are "upscale" snobs and half of which are "rube couch potatoes" who get all their information and entertainment from TV.

So, why didn't I try to get published outside the USA? I did. But after mailing two or three queries to Canadian and British publishers who then threw out or else stole my material along with the Self Addresses Stamped Envelope (SASE) and who used for their own purposes the International Reply Coupon (an international stamp called an IRC that I had to purchase and include in the query) I decided that's it's better to be snubbed by your own countrymen than to be robbed by foreigners.