After participating in SPSFC twice (#1 and #3) with Daros and Kenai, and lacking a book to enter this year, I decided to try my hand at judging. I’ll be part of the Peripheral Prospectors team this year, led by Athena over at OneReadingNurse.com. Our team home will be over at Athena’s site, but I’ll be posting my reactions and reviews and anything else I think of here. I’m excited to join the team, and we’ll have more information on the team and our books in the coming days.
I’ve been looking at the list of books we’ve gotten, and as a teaser, here are the genres (as reported by the authors) for the books in our group. We currently have 31 books in our group, and they can list multiple subgenres. (Note: allocations are not finalized yet and could change.)
So, I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past five years, and I’ve written a whole bunch during these Novembers, the majority of four books and a good chunk of Daros (my college was trying to illegitimately sack me during November 2020, so writing suffered that year).
The official NaNoWriMo organization has screwed up some things pretty hard recently. One of those was keeping creepy teen community forum leaders in place despite complaints, squelching some complaints, and then not really being open about any of it. Another was promoting a predatory fake publishing company to their users. Today, they posted a policy saying that it’s fine to use AI for your writing project, which is the opposite of the point of the event. You can write 50,000 words in seconds (at the expense of a chunk of global warming) with ChatGPT, and that isn’t special at all. They also asserted that it’s ableist and classist to criticize the use of ChatGPT, which convoluted argument has further pissed off a bunch of economically disadvantaged disabled writers who have been doing just fine.
A bunch of people are abandoning the organization for these and other issues, which is appropriate – people get to respond however they want, and there’s more than enough to justify some action.
Some others are promising to block/ban/cancel anybody who still tries to do a lot of writing in November and gets excited about doing so, which, like many overheated cancellation attempts, strikes me as an overreach. I wish we could point out the wrong in something these days without also self-righteously threatening the choices and needs of other people just trying to get by.
For my part, I’m going to leave behind the official NaNo site and no longer enter my projects or progress there. I never used it much for community or anything else, although it was fun to hit the achievements as I wrote each year. But there are plenty of word-counting sites available elsewhere. I’m still going to do a bunch of writing in November. It’s fun for me, and a good annual habit, and it’s been rewarding each year I’ve done it.
I want to read stories by people, not computers. Having an algorithm cobble together a miasma of stolen sources, math, and bullshit creates soulless fakery. It bears no resemblance to the long tradition of storytellers, from those sitting around a fire in the Stone Age to those with fingers flying over keys today, sharing their experiences and imagination with other humans.
Here’s a recap of how it went for my first attempt at selling books and games at a convention. I was at Crash City Con 2024. The registration was easy, the hosts were kind and helpful, I met cool people, and it was overall a fun experience.
In terms of how the business end went, here’s the skinny:
Books sold: 31 Games sold: 12
Total Revenue: $341
As far as direct event costs, I had the following:
Vendor space: $100 Hotel: $263 Gas to Roanoke: Maybe $18 Credit card processing: $7
Total event costs: $388
So, that gives me this:
Direct event return: $341 – $388 = $47 loss
Nearly breaking even that way. But now let’s look at cost of goods:
Cost to me of books sold: $198 Cost of games sold: Calling it zero. I have a ton of these still, and I’ve already more than made back printing costs for all five print runs, and I’m unlikely to do another print run, so each one sold is effectively pure profit for me. Just trying not to die with 2,000 games in my basement.
Not counting food or my time, because my job is this now, and I’d have eaten anyway.
Net return with goods costs: $341 – $586 = $245 loss
That’s not super sustainable, but it’s not too terrible for a learning experience, given this was mostly a trial run for doing this kind of thing more.
Lessons learned:
This particular convention had just moved to a bigger venue, and the vendor room was in a side space and pretty dead for most of it. Other sellers with more experience doing this were disappointed in their sales relative to other events. People who’d been to this one earlier said they’d had a better experience before.
I should probably find a convention that’s broader interest, not primarily RPG gaming like this one, since the books and puzzle games were only a side interest for many.
I should bring more books. I sold 7 of Daros and only had a few left. If the sales were stronger, I’d likely have run out of a couple titles.
I probably discounted the books too much. I was below the prices from other authors, and I didn’t leave myself much of a margin if people bought 3-4 books or more.
Very few people, even kids, wanted the cool stickers I printed up.
On the intangible benefits side, I got to meet some cool authors and made friends with my booth neighbors. I participated in a comically tragic author panel (the audience was nearly 100% wives of the panelists). I got to meet some new readers and spread the word about my books, even if they didn’t buy anything. The ones who bought one or two books might be back to buy more.
Most wonderfully, a reader who’s read and reviewed almost all my books tracked me down at the con and brought a stack of her paperbacks for me to sign. Once she introduced herself, I knew exactly who she was – she writes wonderful, warm reviews of all my books. So great to meet her in person. We talked about books and other stuff for 10-15 minutes.
All in all, an interesting experience, and it seems worth trying again with these lessons learned. I bought some shop and display supplies that I can use again, and the logistics I set up mostly worked.
I landed a BookBub featured deal about a month ago for my mystery novel, What Grows From the Dead. I’ll abbreviate the book as WGFTD for ease in typing from here on out. BookBub featured deals are competitive – I’ve been applying for them for five years since my first novel came out, and I only started landing them last year, despite applying with most of my books every month. This was my sixth, my second world-wide (as opposed to just non-US markets), and my first free deal (a giveaway). Because it was a deal for free books, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the hefty price tag, $712, because I wouldn’t earn any direct income from the books being claimed and downloaded.
Still, every other BookBub has either made me a positive return on book sales or come close, and they’ve all had a big response, so I decided to try it out.
Costs
I had five days I could set the book for free. I decided to use the BookBub promotion as my first-day promo and then add other book newsletter announcements afterwards. This is called “stacking” – doing announcements on successive days to keep your book being downloaded by new people, to make the most of your promo. I’ve seen a number of people recommend this, although I have no way to test if it’s better or worse than just one big announcement, or putting all your announcements the same day, but I figure I’ll listen to people smarter than I am. I set up the following announcements with the following costs:
Day
Site
Cost
1
BookBub
$712
2
FreeBooksy
$100
3
Book Adrenaline
$30
3
Book Cave
$49
Total
$891
These are all promo sites I’ve had some luck with for giveaways in the past. I also ran a set of smaller free newsletter announcements through KDROI, a Firefox plugin I bought a while ago that submits to about 30 smaller newsletters for free.
So, let’s go with an $891 total cost.
Results: Downloads
The results of my five-day free giveaway period were way beyond what I expected. I’ve done free giveaways before, promoted with FreeBooksy and other stacked promos, and I’ve had never more than about 5000 downloads, often more like 2000 or 3000. For this one, with BookBub, I had 20,000 downloads on the first day, and a little over 30,000 overall over the five days. Here’s how it looks for that one book with the others stripped out (they weren’t free, so they don’t show up here even though it says All 10 books).
To put that in context, for all my books, over five years, I had about 47,000 downloads. In five days, I got another 30,000, all of one book. Here’s how that looks on my Amazon history graph, with the blue bar at right being this five-day giveaway.
Note: The vast majority of these “units processed,” 93% of them, are free giveaways run at various times over five years. I only have about 5500 actual sales, and a good chunk of those (maybe 3000) are from $0.99 promos.
So, I definitely moved a ton of books. A crap ton, if I might be so bold. And that earned me precisely zero dollars. However, there were some other benefits to doing this. These are benefits I expected, but I had no idea what the magnitude of them would be.
Results: Page Reads
The primary way I was going to make a return on this promotion was through page reads in Kindle Unlimited. I’ve chosen to put all my books but two (my children’s book from 1998, which is traditionally published, and my promo novella, which I use as a reader magnet) in Kindle Unlimited, and it generally makes up about 2/3 of my total income from the books any given year.
The page reads for What Grows From the Dead soared as the promo got going. This has happened for me in the past with other free promos. I’m not entirely sure of the mechanism for this, but I think it’s an algorithmic response within Amazon’s system and/or with readers. My book certainly jumped to the top of the main Amazon rankings for free books (see below) and to the top of its categories (mystery/thriller, cozy mystery). So, anybody searching for a book like this (or, actually, for any book at all) probably had a much easier time finding it while it was famous from all the downloads.
Here’s what’s happened with the page reads. I included a good chunk of June to show a before and after. The teal blue is the promoted book. The growth in page reads starts up on June 28th (the first day of the giveaway) and then peaks from July 2-8, and then starts to drift down.
There’s a little bit of read-through to my other books as well, although not a ton, which you can see if I take out WGFTD:
The book that gets the clearest boost is Got Trouble, in red on the bottom graph, which makes sense – it’s the closest match in genre to WGFTD, so the next logical one of my books to read. I think it’s fair to say that nearly all of my other books (epic fantasy and sci fi) do a little better following the Jun 28 promo.
Results: Rankings
When you do a promoted free giveaway, you’re looking for a jump in rankings. WGFTD got that, reaching as high as the #2 overall free book on Amazon, and the top mystery and cozy mystery, a status that lasted for a couple of days. Once your book is no longer free, it blinks back to the paid book rankings, which don’t include all the free downloads, so your sales rank plummets back to about where it was before the promotion, maybe boosted a bit from follow-on sales after the promotion from recommendations or other readers who notice it.
However, the Sales Ranks listed on the book’s public-facing Amazon page aren’t the whole story. On your Author Central dashboard, you can go to the Reports + Marketing tab and see your book’s sales rank history. This is clearly some kind of amalgamation between free and paid sales, plus maybe KU page reads, because it doesn’t have a sharp drop-off after the book switches back to paid. So, it’s a kind of overall ranking, although I have no idea what the math behind it is. Here’s what WGFTD’s sales rank looks like over the past four months since publication:
You can see the clear and sustained spike at the right side as the promo begins, staying high for a while afterward.
One problem with these graphs is that they don’t have a consistent Y axis scale, so it can be hard to compare one book to another. WGFTD has a broad scale, going to 1.25 million at the bottom. You can see a bit of a response following the June 28th promo in the rankings of my thriller, Got Trouble, but note this graph only goes down to 1 million at the base, so it’s a bit more stretched out than the previous one.
None of my other books show a clear June 28th inflection, so the carryover ranking effect for them is likely small, maybe within the noise of individual sales for those books. That’s what I think those sharp peaks are on the graphs – individual sales, or maybe page-read clusters, that peak and then get smoothed back to baseline.
One thing to note here is that I haven’t promoted these two mystery/thriller books in many other ways this year. I’ve done essentially no promo for Got Trouble, and I’ve done a GoodReads giveaway (which seems to have had no effect on sales rank or on much else) and a small LibraryThing giveaway for WGFTD earlier this year, plus some promo for the release on March 9th, but no ads or anything else. So, whatever’s happening on the right end of these ranking graphs is almost certainly from the BookBub free promo.
Results: Sales
There was a little bit of sales activity for the book during and following the giveaway, probably in response to the high ranking, or maybe some word-of-mouth from people who read it right away. As you can see below, where WGFTDis yellow, I only had one sale in June prior to the promo, and afterward, I have 16, two of them paperbacks that were bought during the promo itself. This isn’t a huge return cash-wise, as I only make about $2.75 per book sold, but it’s definitely a bump. Call it $40-45.
Results: Ratings and Reviews
The other big boost from having so many books out there is that people actually read them and offer reviews. This isn’t a cash return on my promo investment, but I think it’s still important. I should have made better notes, but I think WGFTD was at about 35 ratings on Amazon before the promo with maybe 15 written reviews. On Goodreads, you can go back and track those stats on your author dashboard, but they don’t match the page exactly, and it’s hard to know why. I think I had about 30 ratings on GoodReads and 25 reviews.
As of right now, I’m at 334 ratings, 29 written reviews on Amazon, and 226 ratings, 38 reviews on Goodreads.
So, if we’re willing to assign all of these new ratings to the promo, which is probably not exactly true but is mostly true, it looks like this:
Site & Type
Before promo
After promo
Change
Amazon ratings
35(?)
334
+299
Amazon reviews
15(?)
29
+14
Goodreads ratings
35(?)
226
+181
Goodreads reviews
25(?)
38
+13
So, there’s been a tremendous increase in ratings on both platforms and a smaller but still significant increase in written reviews, both of which offer reader testimony as to the book’s quality. The readers you reach in a free giveaway like this aren’t likely to be as attuned to your work as the fans who find your books as they come out, so you’d expect the ratings to drop with this wider, less die-hard audience. That happened a bit, although not by a lot – WGFTD was about a 4.6 on each platform before the promo, and it’s now down around 4.5 on each. Interestingly, most of the new responses were ratings-only, not written, which is different from the readers I generally attract, who are more likely to write a review when they rate.
As a bottom line, in under three weeks, WGFTD has now exceeded the number of ratings for my most popular book, the epic fantasy detective story Flames Over Frosthelm that’s been out since 2019.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
As I’ve shown above, I have some degree of economic return on my investment in this promo from page reads and increased sales. I also have intangible returns in the form of higher sales rank and more visibility on Amazon, more ratings and reviews, and more readers who’ve now experienced one of my books and might get a nudge when I release another (or, if I’m lucky, might follow me and eagerly await a next release). It’s very hard to put a dollar value on those intangible returns, so let’s skip that and see how the world of cold, hard cash looks.
To do that, I’m going to attempt to figure out what my baseline book income was before the promo. Using KDP’s Royalties Estimator, that looked like this for about three weeks prior to the promo:
That averages out to about $6.94 per day, composed of sales and KU page reads.
After the promo, it looks like this:
That averages out to about $37.17 per day, with the majority of it being KU page reads of WGFTD.
If I subtract out the $6.94 per day baseline and multiply by 22 days since the promo started, I get $30.23 x 22 = $665.08.
By that math, I’ve lost $891 – $665 or $226 on the promo. A net loss. However, the revenue hasn’t stopped – I’ll bet my page reads stay elevated for a bit longer, although it’s hard to know how long. That will help close the gap, as will sales from word-of-mouth recommendations or the higher sales rank I now enjoy.
Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.
Writing past your headlights
It’s late, and your trip’s been long and difficult. You’re off the main road, trying to follow directions, but they aren’t detailed enough. You’ve never been here, you’re not familiar with the territory, and nothing looks familiar in the dark – just shadows, hints, only coming into focus for an instant as your lights cross them. There’s paint on the road to show the lanes, but some of it is worn away, and the intersections and turns aren’t marked.You’re going too fast for your lights, and if something’s in the road, you’re in for a few moments of either terror or panic as you try not to run headlong into it.
That’s my writing process. I’m what writers call a “pantser,” somebody who writes by the seat of their pants. That’s in contrast to a “plotter,” somebody who has reams of backstory, character profiles, recipes, history, and a massive, detailed plot outline, somebody who knows what’s happening in each chapter, what beats they need to hit, as they progress towards the plot’s conclusion, along the route they’ve already worked out and carefully crafted step by step.
Those two styles are wonderful in that they both can lead to terrific work. J.R.R. Tolkien was clearly a plotter, almost more excited about creating the details his world’s history and language and legend than he was in the story on which the book rests. Donald Westlake, author of countless mysteries, legendarily hated outlines and just wanted as he wrote to find “what’s next?”
How it works for me is I just start writing, page one, and usually I just write until the first draft of book is finished. I usually have no more than a couple sentences of concept, not a plot, just a setup. I often don’t know who my characters are, or even how many they will be, until I begin to discover them on the page. A pattern I often follow is to write for a bit and then throw myself a curve at the end of a chapter – a twist in the plot, an unexpected appearance, a secret revealed. I certainly don’t try to make every chapter end on a cliffhanger, but those seem to me to be natural moments of heightened interest, nice punctuation marks in the narrative. Often I don’t know what they are or even when they’re coming until I write them. If I’m doing my job right, they also serve as little nudges to keep reading – the reader saying “what’s next?” right along with me.
In What Grows from the Dead, one of those moments that turned out to be central to the story was a “what’s in the box?” moment, one that readers of the book will surely remember. I had no idea starting the chapter what was in the box. I hadn’t even known there was going to be a box until I threw it in as another twist a couple chapters earlier. I certainly didn’t know that the contents of the box would be critical to how the story played out. I did know it had to be something important and maybe a little unexpected given that I’d kind of hyped it up some, but beyond that, I didn’t know until I wrote the last sentences of the chapter what was in there.
I’m sure that sounds chaotic, and it is, but I have a good bit of background in thinking this way. I’ve been doing improv comedy for the past 18 years with a group at a local comedy club, and my love for that feeds perfectly into my writing style. With improv, you start a scene without knowing what it’s about, without knowing where you are, who you’re with, or even who you are. All of that gets solidified as you go, ideally early on in the scene so you can build the relationships and the drama that make the scene get moving and have a more appealing (and if you do it well, amazing and funny) plotline. You’re doing all the elements of storytelling there in the moment, while people are watching you, without a chance to edit or go back or rethink, and it’s just magical when it works. The basic tenet of improv is “yes, and” – meaning I accept what you’ve just added to our world, and here is something else I’m giving back, something that hopefully expands and defines the world, our characters, our relationships, our desires.
When improv succeeds, it’s absolutely enchanting. In part, that’s because the expectations the audience has are so low – they know you’re making up a scene and a story and a world on the spot, and if you pull it off, even halfway, they’re with you, impressed or even amazed. If you fail, you can just go on to the next scene, and you’ve only wasted a few minutes of people’s time. With books, however, it’s totally different. You’re asking people to spend hours in your world, and there’s a strong expectation going in that the book will be good, that it will be polished, tight, meaningful, lyrical. You don’t get the grace that an improv audience will give you, and you shouldn’t get it. Even if you write a book using the principles from improv, the book still needs to be just as good as what you’d get from somebody with fifteen notebooks full of outlines, backstory, and character sketches.
That’s where editing and rewriting come in for me. I can improv a first draft, see what happens, get to know my characters, come up with a plot and world, emotional beats and a satisfying ending. Once I’ve done that, I get right back in my car and drive that route again, this time in daylight, where I can see appreciate the colors and the leaves and see everything coming. That’s when the world truly takes full shape.
This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.
Writing to genre – challenges and shortcuts
I’m here to talk about my mystery book, but I have been publishing books for about five years now, and I’ve branched out from fantasy, where I started, to sci fi, and more recently, to mysteries and thrillers. I love to read in all these genres, but writing them really reveals what different ingredients are needed for each.
With my fantasy novels, most of which are actually also mysteries, I feel like I have the most freedom. I can create new worlds, new cultures, new populations. I can mess with reality using magic and weird forces. I can create people who are very different from people in the real world, and give them all kinds of interesting skills and quirks. I do a lot of research to try to understand how people lived with less technology and in a feudal society, and I try to represent that to the extent that it fits into the story. Medicine and laundry are two areas where I’ve done a deep dive, along with different styles of fighting, because fighting is central to lots of stories.
Sci-fi has a bit more constraint. You need to respect the rules of physics and reality, or at least most of them, and, more than with fantasy, you need to justify where you’re breaking these rules and how. Sci-fi readers can be more unhappy when your worlds don’t make sense or violate basic laws. With the sci-fi books, and with the scientific elements of my thriller, I’ve enlisted physicist and biologist friends to check my work and make sure what I’m saying is at least in the neighborhood of plausibility. There’s also a kind of common lingo with sci-fi that fans know and accept, some of it real, some of it sci-fi – nanites, wormholes, that kind of thing.
With my novels set in the real world, there is, paradoxically, a sense of relief but also a sense of even more responsibility to get things right. The relief comes from not having to invent or explain everything about the world. Readers understand cars and cell phones and cultural references and how people in the modern world live their lives, so you don’t have to explain the society your characters live in at the same time as you’re trying to tell a story. That can make the storytelling much more focused, because you don’t have to digress to explain who the Knights of the Imperial Boot are, or how mineral magic works, or how space warp travel works and is possible. These mysteries and thrillers can be leaner, more efficient, and hopefully more relatable right at the start.
The responsibility part of writing in the modern world is that people can almost instantly tell if you’re getting something wrong. You can’t just make up how something like a hospital or a police station works, because your readers, or at least some of them, will find your errors and be unhappy about them. I should know – as a geologist, I am often annoyed when shows get things like lava and quicksand and Earth history wrong.
That responsibility is a duty, but it’s also an opportunity. When starting to write Got Trouble, I made my main character, Glynnis, knowledgeable about guns, something that I wasn’t at all. That meant I had to learn and research to get that stuff right. I read up whatever I could find, and I watched a ton of videos, which helped not only with factual stuff like loading and unloading and effective range and all that, but also with a culture of gun owners that I hadn’t had much contact with. I also have a friend (and reader) who gave me some great feedback both on how the guns would work but also how somebody comfortable around them would think of them and act. I also had some friends who work in emergency departments help me with how the intake of a patient with gunshot wounds would work. When I wrote a story set on an old sailing ship, I consulted with sailors to make sure I was getting the sail names, the equipment, and the basic operation correct.
With What Grows From the Dead, I made the main character somebody who had worked as a professor, a life I know very well. But the stuff that happens to him and the things he chooses to do were not familiar at all. I needed to research how police procedure works with search warrants, arrests, defense counsel, and a county jail. I also spent a whole evening learning how to run a meth lab, something that will raise concerns if anybody’s watching my search history. With all the poisons, swords, and other questions I’ve done with the fantasy stuff (e.g. how long would it take somebody to die if stabbed in the gut?), I’m sure I must look like a seriously troubled Google user.
There is a lot that’s common to books no matter whatever genre you’re in. You need relatable characters who act believably, who make choices that fit their situation and their personality. You need the words they say to make sense, to mesh with their values and background, and to be what actual humans say. You need excitement, secrets, humor, longing, adventure, sorrow. Those are the fundamental elements to any human story, going back to tales around campfires long ago. If I do my job, then my readers will find something to relate to as they sit there in the firelight, imagining other lives and keeping warm.
Vampire Steve is a character in What Grows From the Dead. This was a character guest post as part of that book’s blog tour, originally posted here.
Transcript of Taped Interview: Stephen Janewicz, session #2
Date: November 3, 10:45am
Background on the Drummond case
Interviewer: Det. Gerald Palmer, NCSBI
Palmer: Mr. Janewicz–
Janewicz: You may call me Steve, mortal.
Palmer: Sorry, Steve. We’ve covered the facts of the case in our conversation earlier this morning, so now I want to turn to what you know about Morris Drummond. I’m trying to get a sense of who the guy is.
Janewicz: To what end?
Palmer: [breath noises] He’s not in trouble. At least, not yet. I’m just trying to corroborate the things he’s said while we unwind what’s going on in Baxter County.
Janewicz: Very well. You may continue.
Palmer: So, you’ve known him a while?
Janewicz: The fleeting lives of your kind do not always impinge upon my memory.
Palmer: Right. But you know Morris better than that?
Janewicz: He has served as my chariot-master these past six moons.
Palmer: The chariot in question being his mom’s Chevy?
Janewicz: [no reply]
Palmer: How often did he drive you?
Janewicz: When the sun was at its height, and at its most dangerous to me, and again when the gloom of night reigned.
Palmer: Can you put that in, er, mortal terms? With hours?
Janewicz: My shop opens at noon and closes at midnight.
Palmer: So he drove you there and back?
Janewicz: And sometimes other places, when I was in need of sustenance.
Palmer: What’s a guy like you eat?
Janewicz: I favor pork rinds. And other foods darker and more mysterious.
Palmer: Right. So, you and Morris are friends?
Janewicz: I sensed there were none closer to him than I during his time of darkness, though others became entangled. I hope his curtain of shadow may yet lift.
Palmer: That was kind of a yes or no question, you know.
Janewicz: [no reply]
Palmer: This curtain of shadow thing. You mean the business with the Baxter County sheriff’s department?
Janewicz: In part. But the pall cast over Morris began well before that. He dwelt in shadow, sucked dry by his employer and then by the loss of one he loved.
Palmer: Who’s that? That he loved?
Janewicz: The one who cast him forth into this sorry world.
Palmer: His mom, you mean?
Janewicz: [no reply]
Palmer: So, he was, what, depressed?
Janewicz: His soul shed tears of blood from a wound that would not close.
Palmer: Right. [Breath noises. Papers shuffling.] Do I have this right that you were in the military?
Janewicz: I served in the ranks of blood and strife, once. It was a time long ago, before I became as I am now. I almost feel that was a different man.
Palmer: [chuckling] I bet. Can’t see you pulling off this, uh, whatever this is, in basic training.
Janewicz: [no reply]
Palmer: Did you ever know Morris to be violent? Use guns?
Janewicz: Morris is a man of peace. Weapons of war and violence were alien to him.
Palmer: How do you know this? Did you talk about it?
Janewicz: He told me he had to watch YouTube videos to even figure out if a gun was loaded.
Palmer: Right.
Janewicz: I must needs depart? My place of business opens anon.
Palmer: Sure, just one more question. When did Morris get agitated about all this… this situation he found himself in?
Janewicz: I think it grew with each new insult to his honor, each new threat to his life and safety.
Palmer: Right. Can you maybe put a date on that?
Janewicz: It was when he found that which his mother preferred buried.
Mindy is a character in What Grows From the Dead. This was a character guest post as part of that book’s blog tour, originally posted here.
An essay about a family member? Are you kidding? That’s soooo sixth grade. No, I don’t think I’m special. No, I don’t want detention. Duh.
Ugh.
OK, here you go.
Mindy Drummond AP English 3rd Period Mr. Jones
My Beloved Father
(Of course I’m going to give it a stupid title if you make me write a stupid essay)
My dad, Morris, is a college professor. Well, sort of. He’s on a leave of absence now because of the business-ification of higher education administration. That all happened last year. Well, last academic year, in like February. Well, I think some of it was going on before that, but that’s when he told me, during one of our weekly phone calls. He doesn’t usually say much during those calls because I talk so much, but I could tell he was unhappy, so I asked. I think talking about it made him more unhappy, maybe, but it also seemed like he felt better telling somebody. I wish he’d find a girlfriend, but I think he needs to get through this stuff first.
Anyway, it sounds like the college where he works, Riggson, was a bunch of XXXXs (fill in strongest insult that won’t get me detention). Well, the administration, anyway. They closed his department and fired him, even though he has tenure, and even though he’s worked there for years. It sounds really sketch. He said he’s protesting, going through an appeal, and that he can sue them for breach of contract and improper termination. Maybe that will work, I don’t know. Do I look like a lawyer? No, I do not, is the right answer to that question.
That all was hard on him. Like, really hard. I don’t remember too much from when he and Mom divorced, because I was little, but I think it might be like that. Like, he pledged himself to this stupid institution, gave it the best years of his life (well, so far), and then they cheated on him and fired him, and now he’s left feeling hurt and betrayed and angry and sad. I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve been divorced. I’m sixteen. But it seems like that might be what it’s like.
I go out to see him summers, and I convinced Mom to let me stay a little longer last summer. It wasn’t fun, because Grandma (his mom) was sick. Serious sick, stage 4. With dad just terminated from the college and dealing with all that, and Grandma dying, he was pretty much a wreck. I mean, we all were. Grandma physically, him emotionally, and me too, trying to help, even though there wasn’t much to be done. I mean, Dad was cool even with all that going on. He’s funny, and nice, and he really cares about me, unlike certain other supposed father figures who live in Alpharetta I might mention. He’s really dorky too, but in that kind of cool way dads can sometimes be. He also buys me milkshakes all the time, which is nice – the divorce dividend, you know? They destroy your home life and fracture your family and your identity, and you get delicious ice cream.
Anyway, Dad took Grandma’s death even harder than I thought he might. I think it’s because of the job thing, like everything being stripped from him at once. He’s pretty strong, usually, and stays happy, but this was as dark as I’ve seen him go. He put on a brave show at the end of the summer, when I had to go back, and he acts like things are OK when we talk, but I can tell he’s not really holding it all together. I really don’t know what he’s going to do next, and I worry about him.
In conclusion, this is my essay about my dad. More than 500 words, which is what was required. If you find it boring, remember that if you let us do cooler stuff, like multimedia or TikToks, you would have more interesting things to grade than this dead-tree old-school drivel, so it’s kind of your own fault. Get with the 21st century, Mr. Jones. We are the youth of tomorrow, not the youth of 1960 or whenever you went to school.
Jane gave the book five (5!) kitties, which is enough to make everyone’s day better. For this blog, I also did an author piece on writing in different genres, if bloviation is your thing. There’s even a giveaway for a paperback of What Grows From the Dead if you want to enter.
More dates on the tour here – there is a lot coming!
To celebrate the tenth running of the SPFBO, in which my own The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar is entered, I decided to read the first bits of each of the 300 entries and celebrate them in a silly way. Using the samples provided by Amazon (or any reasonable substitute I can find) I picked (based solely on my stupid opinions) the best name and the best word I found in the opening parts, and I composed a dreadful, inexpert haiku about what I read.
I randomized the order I did them, but they are listed in reverse order here because I was updating as I went, and because it’s far too much work to change that now. One author whose book didn’t make it past the SPFBOX participant lottery was sad to have missed out on this silly project, so I went ahead and haikued their book as well as a special guest stupid haiku.
Thanks so much to Mark Lawrence for running the SPFBO all these years and also to the judges whose hard, selfless work makes the competition possible.
Heartfelt gratitude also to the wonderful authors whose works I enjoyed reducing to seventeen syllables. I so enjoyed spending time in your worlds with your characters and savoring how you told their stories.
