Author: Scott William Carter

News & Muse (November 2020): First “Issue,” and the Return of the Run of the House Comic

I’m starting a new feature, News & Muse, to be published on this site the first of every month. As most of my readers know, I’ve been a very irregular blogger over the years, and my social media activity can be described as erratic at best, but I thought it would be fun to try more of magazine-style approach to this blog that combines lots of “features” rather than spreading them over many individual posts — the piecemeal method certainly being more the norm, and what most SEO gurus recommend in this age of supposed short attention spans. But hey, if the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that you should try to find a way to do things your way. (Cue Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It May Way.”) I also don’t think attention spans are all that short, really. Otherwise, who are all these people buying my books? So I can at least say that my readers have longer attention spans, and those are the people I’m most interested in anyway.

I’m going to let News & Muse evolve over time, but for now this is the basic structure: 1) A short news update or “muse” on a topic; 2) A Bit of Whimsy: Usually pictures or random drawings, occasionally a second cartoon, but be prepared for lots of gratuitous photos of my pets or other random stuff; 3) Scott Recommends: At least three, and possibly more, books, videos, lectures, comics, websites, or anything else I’ve really enjoyed recently that I think you might enjoy too, usually with a few sentences of commentary. You’re about to find out exactly how eclectic my taste is, and how out of step I usually am with whatever is popular at the moment; 4) A new Run of the House comic. This is the cartoon strip I started last year that went on hiatus because, while I was enjoying it, I’d become disenchanted with the way I was distributing it (on a separate site or via social media, giving it all away for free). I’m glad to bring it back here at least once a month, kind of like the comic section in a newspaper. I’ve got some other ideas regarding the strip, but I’ll save those for later. I want to mull it over a bit more.

Other news? Nothing big, just working on a new book, of course. Can’t say much more than that, which is usually the case. Just got back from a quick getaway to Sunriver, Oregon with my daughter and Rosie, where we visited with my father, went on some nice walks in the woods, rode our bikes, and binge-watched Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. Both of us like the scary stuff, which isn’t the case for other members of the household. A fun time, though driving through the devastation from the Santiam Canyon fires was very sobering.

A Bit of Whimsy

Rosie at 5.5 months.

Rosie, at five and half months now, has discovered the joys of a warm fire as the weather in the Willamette Valley turns a bit cooler.

Scott Recommends

GRANT by Ron Chernow. I think the best compliment I can give this mammoth, mesmerizing biography is that I truly hope someone makes it into a miniseries, much like HBO did with David Mccullough’s John Adams, another presidential biography I really enjoyed. He was not without his flaws, but I don’t think anyone would be tearing down statues of Grant if more people knew the kind of character this man had, and how ahead of his time he was in his treatment of African Americans, even compared to Lincoln.

SQUIRREL SEEKS CHIPMUNK by David Sedaris. When he’s at his best, Sedaris is both witty and poignant, and he is certainly both in spades with this “bestiary” of fable-like tales involving very anthropomorphized animals. Funny enough, even though I’ve been a fan of Sedaris’s writing for years, having read pretty much all of his collections, I missed this one when it was published and stumbled across it in a Little Library in our neighborhood. Hooray for Little Libraries!

LUANN by Greg Evans. I came to this comic strip pretty late (considering it’s been around 35 years), but I stumbled across it one day and ended up getting hooked on the slowly unfolding dramas of the titular character, her brother, parents, and everyone else connected to Luann’s life. You can read the latest strip online at gocomics.com/luann, or do what I did and get into the strip through one of the major storylines, which you can find at http://luannfan.com/. Or even better, buy one of the print collections. To me, it served as a reminder of how easy it is to become emotionally invested in a bunch of squiggly lines, if there are characters you care about.

New Garrison Gage book: A DEEP AND DEADLY UNDERTOW

As if dealing with a global pandemic wasn’t enough, here in Oregon we’re also suffering from a series of wildfires wreaking havoc across the state. While my hometown of Salem is not in any danger, the air for the last few days has been so toxic that it’s not safe to be outside without a mask for long. We’ve literally had some of the worst air quality in the entire world. (Fortunately, as my kids pointed out, we already have plenty of masks lying around!) The fires have blanketed the city in an ash-fog that’s lowered the temperature at least twenty degrees. But cooler temperatures, shifting winds, and a coming rainstorm should hopefully bring an end to the worst of this over the next few days. 

But despite what a crazy year 2020 has turned out to be, I go on writing. It’s now my full-time job, after all, but I also find it helps me not focus on everything in the world outside my control. Disappearing into a book as a reader also helps, of course, which brings me to my latest offering: A DEEP AND DEADLY UNDERTOW. This is the seventh book featuring Garrison Gage, and it’s a doozy, one that will leave both Gage and others in Barnacle Bluffs forever changed. More information about the book, including links to retailers, is below.

As usual, the book is available in paperback and ebook first. The audio version will hopefully follow before too long. Thanks for reading!

A Deep and Deadly Undertow

A Garrison Gage Mystery

What kind of treasure is worth dying for?

Years after his wife dies in a mafia hit gone wrong, Garrison Gage finally pieces together a life for himself in the Oregon coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs. Some days the cranky private investigator with the bum knee and the caustic wit could even call himself content. Maybe even happy. But marrying again? Never.

Yet not long after quirky Rita Rodriguez enters the scene, Gage can’t imagine life without her. Unfortunately, when dark secrets violently emerge–involving first loves, tragic loss, and, strangest of all, a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1642 loaded with treasure–their relationship enters turbulent waters.

 Worse, the same deadly undertow that drags Gage into the darkness also threatens everyone around him. His friends. His enemies. Even the town itself . . .

Ebook: Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | Google Play 

Paperback: Amazon | Indiebound

Cover for A Deep and Deadly Undertow (Gage #7) and a Brief Update

Garrison Gage fans will be happy to know that the seventh book in the series, A Deep and Deadly Undertow, is now with the copy editor and should be out in early September. That’s the cover on the right. (You can click it for a larger version.) Book description will follow soon, but needless to say, this is probably the most consequential Gage book yet. Ghost ships, sunken treasure, dashed hopes and dark betrayals . . .  Even a marriage proposal. It’s got it all. 

If you want a tiny clue of some big changes in Gage’s life, be sure to read Throwaway Jane, the first Karen Pantelli adventure, which features a brief cameo from the curmudgeonly detective. And if you enjoy the book, please do write a review on Amazon or elsewhere. I get a lot of emails from readers who never write reviews, and while I do appreciate your kind words, online reader reviews are even more important these days than reviews from major trades, I think. It’s the new word of mouth. So if there’s one thing you can do to help an author (other than buying his or her books, of course), it’s to write a review of why you liked the book. It doesn’t have to be long. Just a sentence or two is perfectly fine.

More on the Gage book soon. I’d planned to write a few short stories between books, but I’m already hard at work on a new novel, an idea about a local amusement park I’ve been toying with for years. I often find that ideas I mull over too much often turn to mush, or become overly forced and stilted, as opposed to ones I come up with from scratch, but this one’s stayed fresh. I also think I might finally be ready to write it, which I think was the problem with the Big Epic I flamed out on a couple years ago. Just wasn’t ready to write it yet. Though I’m thinking I’m going to take another crack at that one, too. 

My plan right now is to alternate between series books and one-offs, but we’ll see how it goes. Other than that, life in the era of Covid-19 goes on here on Carter Hill (what I’ve taken to calling our 90-year-old Tudor-style house up on a little rise). Our Subaru Forester, which we bought almost 20 years ago, finally had to go, with so many repairs due that we couldn’t justify it for what the car was worth, despite how good the car has been to us (we brought our daughter home from the hospital in it, so it had lots of

sentimental value). We replaced it with a 2016 Nissan Juke, pictured there on the right. We already had a Nissan Pathfinder for bigger family trips, so this is a little town car that can hold four people in a pinch but I think is really intended for two. It has AWD, too, something I pretty much insist on these days, as well as a sunroof and a great sound system. While we bought our Subaru Forester new, I’m a big believer in buying slightly used cars, so someone else pays for the steep depreciation that cars see in those first few years. 

Kids are looking forward to going back to school in a few weeks, such as it is. It looks like it will be almost completely online. I’m typing this on the new flagstone patio I put in over the summer in the backyard. Rosie, our now fourteen-week-old Irish Setter, is sitting at my feet on a beautiful summer morning. The vet cautioned us not to take her off the property much until her series of shots are finished, so we’ve been settling for lots of backyard play, but I’m looking forward to the two of us getting out for some long walks (and eventually hikes!) in the months and years ahead. 

I’ll end this with a recent shot of Rosie. Back before too long. Stay safe out there.

Meet My New Office Assistant: Rosie

I’m coming to end of the next Garrison Gage book, though my writing productivity took a bit of a hit the last few weeks. There’s a good reason for that. I took on a new office assistant, and I’ve had to spend quite a bit of time training her. You see, she’s not so good at typing, editing, filing, cleaning, or really anything most office assistants might do. But boy, is she cute. Her name is Rosie:

She’s a 10 week old Irish Setter. I think she’s about 15 pounds there, so as a female she’ll end up about four times that weight. When I started writing full-time, I promised Heidi and the kids we could get a new puppy. Belle, our Boston Terrier, is still with us, of course, though at 13 years old she’s starting to slow down quite a bit. Our first two dogs were both Humane Society mutts, usually the best kinds of dogs, but this time I had my heart set on an Irish Setter. When Heidi I visited Arlie Winery last summer, on one of our trips to the coast, the owners had a couple of sweet Irish Setters wandering around the property. I said that if we ever got another dog, I think that’s what I would want. My wife found a fantastic and very conscientious dog breeder up in Washington state, one who raised mostly Golden Irish, which are half golden retrievers and half Irish Setters, and for a while that’s the way we thought we were going, which would have been perfectly wonderful, but they ended up having a few pure Irish Setters available and it seemed like fate.

So after a quick, one-night trip to the Puget Sound area, which included a lovely stay just outside of Olympia and a near-perfect evening stroll through the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, we returned home with a new member of our family. She’s been handful, of course, but as I told a fellow writer who said dogs were too high maintenance for him, and he’d stick with cats (we love cats too), dogs offer their own special kind of rewards usually commensurate with amount of attention and effort you give them.

I’ve never had a puppy before, so I’ve had to do a lot of reading. Even Belle was a year old when she came to live with us. So this has been quite the learning process. While Rosie has certainly thrown a wrench into my productivity lately (and just when I thought I was getting a handle on this whole full time writing thing), she’s also provided something more meaningful to focus on rather than … well, you know. It’s been a heck of a year, and we’re barely halfway through it. Stay safe out there. More soon.