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News & Muse (October 2021): Throwaway Jane in Audio, A House That’s a Bit Emptier

Paisley, trying to soak up a few rays between showers.

As I write this, it’s cold and drizzly and gray outside my office window. After a months-long record dry spell in the Willamette Valley (everything climate-related seems to set a record these days, doesn’t it?), it’s nice to see the rain again. Some fall color on the trees is nice too. We got our daughter off to college a couple weeks ago (a trying all-day ordeal because of some poor planning on OSU’s part), so the house does seem quieter. Since we live just a few blocks from a 2000-student high school, however, our street is definitely bustling more than usual, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s nice to see the vast majority of kids in face-to-face school again. On the other hand … well, it was nice not to have all that traffic on our street a couple times a day during the school year.

But hey, it’s a minor inconvenience, and the way the world’s been going lately, I’ll happily endure a whole bunch of minor inconveniences if we can get some semblance of normality back again.

For those of you who love audio books (and I count myself among you!), Throwaway Jane, the first Karen Pantelli book, is now available in audio. You can find it at both Audible and iTunes. Thanks to the excellent Jennifer Pickens, a top notch narrator, for bringing the story to life.

As far as other news, I’ve got a middle grade fantasy that should be heading off to the copy editor in the next few weeks, a little change of pace, and I’ll be talking about that soon enough. I took down the Run of the House comic website for now. The website was hacked and it was just easier to take it down. Unfortunately, this sort of hacking seems to be pretty common these days, even for small fry websites like mine, and I’ve had to add a couple more security tools to my main website to project it.

I was never really happy with having the comic strip be so separate from everything else I do, anyway.

Working on the next Gage book now, which I know a lot of you will be happy to hear. As I joked to a friend of mine, it would probably be a lot better for my bank account if I just wrote Garrison Gage books, but then, I wouldn’t be me. C’est la vie.

Nothing else to report as of now. Back before too long.

News & Muse (September 2021): Orcas Island, 25 Years of Marriage

Writing goes well, productivity is up quite a bit, and fall is in the air. Even when it gets warm, it’s a very different kind of heat when the mornings are crisp and the days are shorter. September is one of my favorite times of year in the Willamette Valley.

That’s a picture above of Buck Bay, or at least the part of it we could see from our cozy cabin in Olga on Orcas Island, where Heidi and I spent a wonderful week. We drove up from Oregon and took our little Nissan Juke on the ferry from Anacortes, bringing Rosie along for the ride. It was her first experience on any kind on a boat, but the ferry is so large I’m sure she thought she was just on some kind of island. Here I am trying to explain what an archipelago is to her. Or maybe I’m just pointing at a seagull, it’s hard to remember the exact details of our conversation:

The occasion was to celebrate 25 years of marriage, and we couldn’t have asked for a better place to spend a few lovely days. While we drove up Mount Constitution (picture below, the highest point in the San Juans, see if you can pick out Heidi and Rosie for bonus points), hiked Turtleback Mountain, walked around Eastsound, took Rosie out on a rowboat on Cascade Lake in Moran State Park (also pictured below), and had a wonderful anniversary dinner at the Rosario Resort, among other things, the best time for me was just spending many quiet hours looking at the bay with Heidi. What a special place.

Of course, the best part was getting to do it all with my best friend and the love of my life. It makes it a lot easier to leave home when you bring the best part of home with you.

News & Muse (August 2021): There Are 17 Million Ebooks on Amazon, And More Than Half Haven’t Sold a Single Copy, But Please Buy Mine

We’re supposed to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit for three straight days this week, so another heat wave is on the way here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I’m writing this from my back patio, where it’s a pleasant 80 degrees, a bit warm but nice in the shade. I’m hoping this is the last major heat wave of the summer, but experience tells me there are more hot days ahead before the cooler Fall weather arrives in earnest. And of course, if we listen to climate scientists (and we should), who knows what kind of weather extremes we’ll see going forward. 

The second Karen Pantelli book, Lethal Beauty, is out in the world. Those are my author copies up there pictured above. While I sell far, far more ebooks these days than print books, I have to admit that the former bookstore owner in me still loves holding that print copy in my hand. Even after publishing a couple dozen books, it never gets old. More familiar, maybe. But never old. 

For those of you who read the book and left a review somewhere, thank you. Even for those of you who didn’t like the book and wrote a review somewhere, I appreciate you too, because in a world where there are somewhere in the vicinity of 17 million ebooks on Amazon alone, more than half of which have not sold a single copy,* I appreciate that someone would care enough one way or another to share their opinion about it. Attention is the new coin of the realm, as they say, and if someone gave some of their finite attention to something I created, I am very grateful. 

I wish more writers thought this way. Heck, I wish I thought this way more of the time, but paraphrasing what my friend Kristine Kathryn Rusch once told me, most writers are a combination of ego and insecurity. And why wouldn’t we be? It takes ego to put something out in the world and think someone should read it. And only a writer who never risks making any part of themselves vulnerable would not occasionally feel insecure. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be, at any rate. Call me whatever you like, but just don’t call me bland. 

In any case, I’m writing something a little bit different right now, a book aimed at younger readers (and as I like to say, the young at heart), then I’ll be back to my cranky friend Garrison Gage for a bit. More soon.

*While 17 million may seem like a gross exaggeration, it might even be on the low side. Amazon does not make finding this information easy, but I arrived at this with some deft Google searching, both including terms that appear on every Kindle page and then excluding those that have ranks (since only ebooks that have sold a copy have a Kindle rank). Amazon’s Kindle ranks go up to about 7 million right now. I was frankly astonished that so many books haven’t sold a copy . . . until I started looking at them. Yikes. But still, they couldn’t even sell a single copy to their own mother? A more important question is, do I have too much time on my hands?

New Book Published: Lethal Beauty

I’ve got a new book out!

I don’t know about you, but it sometimes feels to me like the whole world’s gone crazy. In my second full book featuring Karen Pantelli, Lethal Beauty, I try to capture a little of that feeling. Weather, politics, a world slowly recovering from a pandemic, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s normal any more. What better way to take a look at that world than through the eyes of a “professional drifter,” right?

Set “just a bit” into a possible future, the book starts when three big guys in suits walk into the family pizza joint where Karen’s currently working. What do they want? She’s about to find out . . .

More info about the book and links to various retailers are below. While these books can be read independently, check out Throwaway Jane if you want to start with Karen’s first full-length adventure.

Thanks for reading!

Lethal Beauty
A Karen Pantelli Novel

Never mess with a woman with nothing left to lose.

Another state. Another city. Another dead-end job. A stellar FBI agent until tragedy set her adrift, Karen Pantelli finds herself working at a pizza joint in Billings, Montana, trying to ignore the increasing global unrest dominating the news, when three armed men walk through the door. Soon a shocking turn of events launches her on a cross-country quest for a former college classmate, an alluring but manipulative woman with just one goal in life: to marry rich. Very rich.

But what happens when this stunning beauty ensnares the richest, most powerful man of them all? He may have a singular ambition of his own … with lethal consequences for a world already in turmoil.

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

Paperback: Amazon