Author: Scott William Carter

New Book Published: LOOKING FOR LITTLE RED

I hope you’re all doing well as the summer winds down. With my son back in high school (his junior year), and my daughter soon returning to OSU, the house should be a bit quieter heading into the autumn months. Well, except for Rosie barking at our mail carrier, but everyone has a job to do, right? Hate to deprive her of her sense of purpose. Most of the time, she’s content to curl up in my office as I work. The perfect writing companion!

Speaking of writing, I’ve got a new book out! While Looking for Little Red doesn’t neatly fit into any one particular genre, it’s the kind of story that combines a lot of the elements that I love as a reader – a mystery with a twist, a touching love story, and a new take on a time-honored fairy tale all rolled into one – so I’m hoping you enjoy it too. 

More information about the book, including links to where it can be purchased, is below. The ebook is available right now from all major retailers. The print version, a nice case laminate (a hard cover with a glossy cover instead of a separate jacket, which fits the fairy tale feel, I think) is currently only available from Amazon, but that will probably change soon. Global supply issues have slowed down the shipping of the print version, so keep that in mind if you’d prefer paper. It may take a few weeks to get to you.

What if all the old stories turned out to be true?

On a rainy night at a tiny Oregon college, a shadowy figure at the back of the hall interrupts Bullwick Farley’s mythology lecture: “Little Red Riding Hood has done something terrible,” he says, “and I desperately need your help before it’s too late.”

Just another story in a class all about stories? A myth, a fable, a tale told and retold? The students might think so. But ten years after leaving a life where even the strangest stories turn out to be true, Farley faces a choice. Stick with his comfortable, if lonely, life as a professor. Or risk it all to go looking for the woman who broke his heart.

A mystery with a twist, a touching love story, and a new take on a time-honored fairy tale, Looking for Little Red provides rare insights on the power of stories to shape our lives, and the importance of memories, even painful ones.

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

Hardcover:
Amazon 

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Brookings, Oregon

Just a quick post, since I’m barely getting this one in under the wire. Where did July go anyway? That’s a picture in the hills just outside Brookings, Oregon, on the most southern end of the Oregon coast. We decided to make a quick foray into the Oregon Redwoods Trail, the only forest in Oregon with any significant number of old growth redwood trees. It’s not the California Redwoods, to be sure, but it’s still worth a visit … if you don’t mind the four miles of narrow, windy gravel road into the hills at the end.

With temperatures bumping up against 100F in the Willamette Valley, Heidi, Rosie, and I escaped for a week to a fun Airbnb just north of Cape Sebastian, literally connected to the Pacific Coast Trail. The temperatures there hovered around 60F, with heavy fog that came and went, so it was a pretty stark difference. (When it’s that hot in the valley, it’s a good bet it’s going to be foggy on the coast.) Some days we were perfectly comfortable in shorts and T-shirts; others we dressed in multiple layers. In addition to just hanging out and reading, we also hiked Thunder Rock Cove down to Secret Beach (something I’ve wanted to do for a long time), saw Arch Rock, the Natural Bridge, Pistol River, Chetco Point, and even kayaked out of Brookings into some ocean coves near the bay, where we made friends with playful seals, black oystercatchers, pelagic cormorants, and plenty of other wildlife. A few other pictures are below, at the end of this post.

Right now, I’m working on the third Karen Pantelli book, as well as a few other projects. The second Pantelli book, Lethal Beauty, is now available in audio, once again narrated by the fantastic Jennifer Pickens. Speaking of audio books, I’m doing a few experiments with narrating some (and only some) of my own work. The good old WIBBOW test (an acronym I coined years ago that stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?) has generally kept me from attempting this, since I used to manage a university digital media center and have no illusions about how much time it takes, but I finally decided I wanted to at least try it. If I enjoy it, and feel it also might help me become a better writer, then the trade off in time and effort might be worth it as long as I feel like I’m giving my readers (or in this case, listeners) a quality product. We’ll see how it goes. 

Stay cool out there!

Have We Reached the Era of Peak Entertainment?

A few nights ago, Heidi and I watched the new Downton Abbey movie, Downton Abbey: A New Era, on Peacock TV. A big Downton Abbey fan, I’ve been wanting to watch the movie for a while, but not quite enough to go see it in a movie theater. It only cost $10 to subscribe for a month to Peacock premium, the streaming service plan from NBCUniversal that’s free of commercials, which is less than the cost of one movie ticket. Plus I figured it would give us a chance to sample what else Peacock has to offer for a few weeks, something I doubt I would have done otherwise.

I loved Downton Abbey: A New Era in the way I love catching up with old friends. It really feels a fitting way for the show to end. Will it, though? With so many streaming services competing for a finite amount of viewer attention, everyone is desperate to build a catalog of “must see” shows or movies to keep their subscribers from bailing. But how many “must see” shows can there really be? Back in 2015, John Landgraf, the president of FX Networks, coined the term Peak TV, saying that with such a huge explosion in scripted content, we would begin to see a decline in quality in the following years because the talent needed to create them was spread too thin.

Did we? There’s definitely more bad stuff. There’s a huge sea of dreck, in fact. But there’s just more of everything — the good, the bad, and the vast, vast quantities of mediocre. I’ve always been fairly picky about what I watch (we dropped our cable years ago and just went with on demand entertainment, rotating through the various services depending on what’s available), but I find myself getting even pickier because of the huge selection of quality shows. When I was a kid, I would have thought The Book of Boba Fett, on Disney+, was amazing, but I still haven’t gotten around to watching the last episode. It was just . . . so-so. 

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New Book: ASK HAGAN

I’ve got a new book out! ASK HAGAN is a collection of six short stories that originally appeared in such diverse places as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Pulphouse, and Fiction River. It’s a short read, but it also won’t set you back much, so if you’re looking for some twisty tales that pack an emotional wallop (my usual fare), please consider buying it. Sooner rather than later. I have a daughter in college, you know.

Just kidding. Kind of.

Oh, and one last thing you might find interesting. The lead story (about a struggling writer who hits it big when he invents an obnoxious Ann Landers-like advice columnist named Hagan T. Stone, hence the title Ask Hagan) actually did start out as column idea. I pitched it to an editor of an edgy, genre-crossing magazine, basically saying “What if someone like Hunter S. Thompson wrote a Dear Abby column?” Hagan T. Stone would be completely made up, of course, but nobody but me and the editor would know it was me. And while the editor liked the idea, he decided it wasn’t quite the right fit. Undaunted, I even toyed with the idea of starting a website myself, going so far as obtaining a domain name before sanity (or maybe it was my wife?) thankfully prevailed.

But the idea stayed with me. Then one day I wondered what would happen if the column not only became a huge hit, but one day an imposter showed up on the scene to reap all the rewards, and before you knew it I was writing. As usual, the story went in a completely unexpected direction, with a whiz bang ending readers will hopefully enjoy as much as I did. Janet Hutchings certainly thought so when I sent it to her, buying it for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where it appeared last year. I hope you enjoy it too.

More info below, including where you can buy it. And thanks for reading!

Ask Hagan anything. Anything at all. Even how to outwit a madman …

Once a promising young novelist with big literary dreams, John Winsley wakes up on the other side of forty as a third-rate hack with a perpetual hangover. Fueled by bitterness, he creates an obnoxious online persona as something of a lark—a funhouse version of Ann Landers named Hagan T. Stone with mad eyes, a black beard shaped like a spade, and an irreverent wit. The Ask Hagan advice column becomes a surprising worldwide hit. And it makes Winsley a very rich man.

Wracked with guilt about the wife and daughter he abandoned, Winsley feels conflicted about his anonymous success … until an imposter claiming to be Hagan T. Stone shows up to reap all the rewards. Now Winsley only has to answer one question: How far will he go to get what he deserves?

This taut, suspenseful tale kicks off Carter’s latest collection. From a mysterious elevator in an Iowa cornfield to a crowded superstore where android spouses are bought like toasters, these six provocative forays into Carter’s wide-ranging imagination never fail to surprise.

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

Paperback:
Amazon