Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

The revolution will be supervised.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

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Author Jennifer Schiff – A Mocktail for Murder!

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Our featured writer today is our very own Jennifer Schiff.  (Her nym is J.)  Two books in one year!  Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

A MOCKTAIL FOR MURDER post for Balloon Juice (September 2024)

Hello again, fellow Balloon Juicers!

First of all, a big THANK YOU to every one of you who has purchased one or more of my books – and my Sanibel calendars — over the last seven (!) years. My book sales and sanity took big hits from Covid and then Hurricane Ian. And it’s been the support of my readers—and communities like Balloon Juice, which I have been reading since 2007—that has kept me going.  So, thank you. Now onto business!

As I wrote in my last post, I’ve had a busy year, writing and publishing TWO books, the second of which just came out. It’s called A Mocktail for Murder. And as the title suggests, it’s a murder mystery.

The book features the amateur sleuth from my Sanibel books, reporter Guin Jones. However, I wrote it as a standalone/sequel to those books, which you don’t have to have read to enjoy. You just need to like a good mystery or books that take place in New York City, where this one takes place.

In this book, Guin’s new husband is accused of killing his ex-wife, the founder of a new mocktail business (think Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel), but he swears he didn’t do it. Unfortunately, the police and a lot of other people don’t believe him. So investigative reporter Guin, who is now a business reporter for the FTFNYT, takes it upon herself to find the real killer and put him or her on ice.

With a cast of questionable characters (and some cute cats and dogs) and several twists and turns, A Mocktail for Murder will have you guessing whodunit until the end! (Or I hope it will!)

You can find Mocktail and my 13 other books on Amazon* (in paperback and for the Kindle), B&N Online, BAM, Bookshop, and in select bookstores. And if your bookstore or library doesn’t carry my books, they can order them for you via Ingram Distribution.

For more info about my books and me, visit Shovel & Pail Press and follow the Sanibel Island Mysteries page on Facebook.

*I know a lot of people hate Amazon, but they pay me the biggest royalty. (Ingram, the company that prints and distributes books to bookstores, is run by a bunch of TN Republicans who pay indie authors like me a pittance. But they are the only way I can get my books into bookstores and libraries.)

 

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Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)

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Besides gardening and other various home improvement stuff, I’ve used most of my free time these days making a video game with my friend. It’s been a massive undertaking. I’d heard that game development is fractally difficult–every sub-component just as tricky as its parent–and boy did that ever turn out to be true. We’re both pretty experienced programmers, so we were able to manage the scope creep, at least; no features we don’t absolutely need, no matter how cool they would be. Anyway: I’m happy to say we are finally at the point where we can start introducing people to it! Before I do, I’ll note that this is not really shameless self-promotion; we are looking to buy some fiction, but you need context first, and also the pictures are pretty and I want to talk about something I think is exciting. (The shameless self-promotion will come later when I do one (1) post about the Kickstarter.)

So without further ado, here’s our first piece of promo art.

Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game

Starspawn is set in the Cthulhu-mythos universe, drawing primarily from the works of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Rather than paraphrase myself, I’ll just quote from our website:

It’s shaping up to be a beautiful spring at Miskatonic University. Finishing your independent study is your only real concern. One night, you dream of a strange frozen wasteland full of monsters and ancient ruins. You wake up shaken, but not worried—until you realize that your classmates, too, seem a little less human than they did yesterday. To top it off, somebody’s ransacked the geology lab, ruining the project you need to ace to keep your scholarship, and stealing something irreplaceable–a deep core sample of very ancient Antarctic soil.

Were the things you saw in the dream real? Was the quest you received more than the hallucination of a stressed sophomore? And what are you supposed to do with the knowledge that your best friend is some sort of fish-monster?

Explore worlds magical and mundane while evading monsters, solving puzzles, and maybe finding love. Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery offers a game mode for everyone, with top-down exploration, arcade minigames, 90s-style point-and-click puzzles, dating sim elements, and visual novel storytelling!

This is a story-driven game with lots of point-and-click first-person puzzles, as well as areas to explore in a top-down 16-bit mode. There are also dating sim elements, where you have to manage your free time to develop your relationships (platonic or otherwise) with various characters, each of whom has a side narrative that changes based on the choices you make. We’re aiming for about ten hours of play time. I’m super excited to share more as we work our way towards the demo. It’s been incredibly challenging and rewarding and I have so many thoughts about the development process. And the artists we’re working with are amazing, too. We’re lucky to have assembled a great team.

Later this year, we’ll be doing a Kickstarter to make sure we can afford all the art we need to finish strong, but for now, I’m trying out something a little fun: we would like to do a short story anthology set in the game universe as a Kickstarter reward! Part of the backstory is a cool (imo) Cold War thing, and we thought it would be fun to let people play in that sandbox if they wanted to. I know we have some writers here, and people who know writers, so I figured I would share it with you all. Here are the submission details. They do contain some (marked) spoilers for the setting, obviously, so beware, if you care. We can only afford hobbyist-tier rates, unfortunately, but it is what it is.

Bonus Samwise and Momo, doing their best impression of a synthpop (or folk) duo liner notes pic:

Aaaand, open thread, naturally!

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Author Jennifer Schiff – Finding Gemma Lovegood!

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Our featured writer today is our very own Jennifer Schiff.  (Her nym is J.)  Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Finding Gemma Lovegood

by Jennifer Schiff

Hello again, fellow Balloon-Juicers.

I’ve had a very busy nine months, giving birth to two new books—that have nothing to do with Sanibel*—the first of which just came out in May. It’s called Finding Gemma Lovegood, and I realize I’m a bit biased, but I absolutely love this book.

If I had to categorize Gemma, I’d call it a contemporary romance. But it’s not your typical romance novel. Below is a short description.

Assistant editor Hope Halladay has less than a month to find bestselling romance novelist Gemma Lovegood, who’s gone MIA, and get her latest manuscript. But to do so, she must fly to Southwest England and do battle with Gemma’s prickly agent, Oscar Tennant, who doesn’t want to tell Hope where Gemma is.

It’s a battle of wills, with Hope determined to win. But the longer she stays in England and learns about Oscar and Gemma, her feelings change. And soon she must make an important decision that could change everything.

(Click on the image of the jacket for a longer description.)

1I like to think the book has something for everyone, including interesting characters, a horse farm for special needs adults and kids, a local pub, delicious scones, and a costume ball (think Bridgerton). If you enjoy books by Jenny Colgan, Emily Henry, and/or Abby Jimenez, or are looking for a relaxing weekend read, you’ll enjoy Finding Gemma Lovegood.

So where do you find this amazing book? The paperback, which retails for $18, is available wherever books are sold online, including Amazon (which pays me the most royalties), Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and BAM. Or you can ask your local bookstore or library to order it for you. It’s also available for the Kindle ($6.99) and on Kindle Unlimited.

For more info about this and all of my books, visit Shovel & Pail Press.

*I still can’t write about Sanibel (Hurricane Ian PTSD), though I’m in the process of writing a book featuring my amateur sleuth from my Sanibel books, Guinivere Jones, set in New York City. It’s called A Mocktail for Murder and should be out late this summer.

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Werebear – Writing a Book In 10 Days!

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This may be more of a writers or creatives post than our typical Authors in Our Midst posts, and I think it will be great fun.  Some might call the concept crazy, but you won’t hear that from me.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Werebear, who has been sorely missed in the comments!

And now for something completely different!

Writing a book in 10 Days!

by Werebear

I’m in the midst of a fascinating experiment. I’m writing a book in ten days.

The book which so inspired me was How to Write Pulp Fiction by James Scott Bell, writer of the Mike Romeo series. Five thousand a day until 50,000 words. The goal is creating what Monty Python called “a ripping yarn.” A spell-binding story.

Auto Draft 100

I’ve been healing up and my brain is working much better. Only, at unpredictable times. This makes conventional employment still impossible, but fortunately I’m not conventional. So I set myself the challenge. Ten days to draft, 2-4 days to let it cool, and then I turn on my editing mode.

This is rough copy, of course, especially since a lot of it I dictate on my nature walks or while sitting in the car once I get to the grocery store. By breaking up my writing sessions throughout the day, and making my scenes mostly dialogue, the words can flow between the characters I’m inventing as needed.

I’m using the dictation app JustPressRecord and the writing software Scrivener. The next step is collecting this mess into chapters, but any outline/mind map software can work.

Because I’m not writing it in order. I think of a scene it must need, and I start setting the scene and discover characters. This is the first time I’ve ever first drafted an entire novel. My next cat book is progressing with much more polished chapters. My fiction book is going well but is more advanced, though I can still use this technique to fill in remaining gaps.

I’ve always been a fan of draft, then edit. But never went to the tallest diving board before, starting a whole book with only a vague idea. It’s forming a satirical tone to match the outrageous premise. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing something. Maybe I need fun. Maybe my readers do.

This might be helpful for any writer who dreads staring at the blank page. Because drafts don’t have to be good. They merely need enough potential to be polished into something good.

At five days I was halfway, 25,103 words. Now I see a book. And I think, like the main character in Stephen King’s Misery, the last difficult years might mean I’ve been “Scheherazade for myself.”

This is such a general creative question: “Where do you get your ideas?” (For writing and anything else.) My answer is that ideas are everywhere. I think it’s really about: “How do you make them live?”

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Richard Roberts – Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Saved the World Again!

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Our featured writer today is our very own Frankensteinbeck.  Let’s give him a warm welcome!

I had to look up necromancer, wondering if a necromancer is someone who has sex with dead people.  Happy to say that it is not!

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN.

by Richard Roberts

Voice!

How many of you are already nodding?  Balloon Juice is full of authors.

For those unfamiliar, Voice is a major writing technique, but control of it is kind of advanced stuff.  It’s one of my strengths, so I thought it would make a neat lecture while everyone buys my new book: PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN.  It’s about a teenage necromancer and a cyborg.

Ahem.

Voice is the speech pattern of writing.  Characters have a Voice.  Narrators have a Voice.  If you can tell which character in a book is speaking just by what they say, then they have strong Voices.  If the text is fun to listen to, that’s a strong Voice.  Among commenters here, Betty Cracker, Rikyah, and Baud all leap to mind as having strong Voices.  When they post, you don’t need to read the byline, you know who it was.

So, how does Voice work?  I figured I’d share some of the strategies and gimmicks I use.  Some of it’s blunt.  Penny Akk said ‘criminy’ all the time and readers loved it.  Irene stuffed her sentences with alliteration and puns, and was never ashamed to make them forced and eye-rolling.  Magenta went in for bizarre, dramatic, extended metaphors.  Cassie constantly makes up new nicknames for people.  In my WIP, my main character imagines sound effects for people, so the text is full of woosh and crackow!

But it gets subtler.  The theme of Mirabelle’s life is feeling restrained.  When she speaks, she never uses contractions, and doesn’t go for exclamations.  In Wild Children I leaned heavily into the easiest trick to make text sound like a child – start lots of sentences with ‘and’.  Vanity Rose leaned heavily to sarcasm.  Even though her accent doesn’t show in her internal monologue, Avery Special uses southernisms like ‘expect’ and ‘mighty’.

It gets subtler than that.  Narrative text, even third person, reflects the personality of the main character.  What they notice, what they think about, creates a book’s voice.  Penny was kind, but self-centered.  She described things in terms of how they affected her.  In my WIP, popularity-obsessed Stella pays even closer attention to body language and clothing than my text normally does, and is always assessing what impression she gives.

Okay, other authors.  I’ve shared some of what I do.  Got any tricks of your own to share?  Non-authors, any examples of strong voices from books you’ve read?

We can also talk about this book in particular, too, if you like.  Conversation does not need to be limited to discussion of  “voices”!

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Kristine – Speculative Worlds!

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Our featured writer today is our very own Kristine.  Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Speculative Worlds

by Kristine Smith

Hello, Balloon Juice. I’m Kristine Smith—longtime listener, semi-regular caller. Many thanks to WaterGirl for the invitation.

I’ve been writing for publication since the late ‘90s. Novels and short stories, mostly science fiction along with a little fantasy and supernatural suspense. My science fiction series follows the evolution of a woman named Jani Kilian from fugitive to major player in the ever-evolving relations between humans and the alien idomeni. There’s an Earth-based government, the Commonwealth, overseeing over forty colonial worlds. The relationship between Earth and the colonies is rocky, as is that between the Commonwealth and the idomeni. Then there’s Jani’s health, which is rocky for Reasons. I describe it as socio-political SF with hard medical detail.

One of the cultural aspects of the books is that paper documents have made a comeback. Paper had been out of use for so long in the Commonwealth that humans adopted the system developed by the idomeni. Kilian was one of the first humans sent to study documentation at the idomeni Academy, and her skills with paper play a major role in the series.

I’ve also written two novels under the pseudonym Alex Gordon, supernatural suspense about witches in northern Illinois (Gideon) and western Oregon (Jericho). They tell the story of Lauren Reardon, a woman who learns after her father’s death that he had been far from forthcoming about his early life and that she is part of a centuries-old battle between good and evil.

First chapters and other info about all my books and short works are available on my website.

I started writing seriously rather late. My early work consisted exclusively of essays and the occasional bit of fiction for grade school and high school assignments. My single attempt at college-level creative writing ended with my dropping the class when the instructor encouraged me to join the pre-law students and stick to essays. After that, I didn’t think at all about writing until my early 30s. I was working as a chemist in a large pharma company and when a number of my co-workers returned to school for their MBAs. I decided to sign up for a writing course and call it my MBA. I hunted around and settled on a Writer’s Digest correspondence course in science fiction/fantasy novel writing. This was the early ’90s, so I wrote using my clunky electric typewriter and snail-mailed the assignments to my instructor.** Every so often I grew frustrated and gave up—as in crumpled up drafts and burned them in the fireplace—but I always wound up going back. The story that I wrote and rewrote again and again turned into Code of Conduct, the first book in my SF series. In 1998, a few months after my 40th birthday, I signed my first publishing contract. Code was released the following year. Four more books in the series followed. Then came a fallow period as I wrestled with Gideon, which was finally released in 2015, the follow-up, Jericho, came out in 2016.

My trad publishing career definitely had its ups and downs. I won the Astounding Award (formerly the John W. Campbell Award) for Best New Writer in 2001. My books garnered some lovely reviews. But sales weren’t where they needed to be, subsequent proposals were declined, and over time I realized the business side of things was killing my desire to write. That was when I decided to give indie publishing a try. Over the years I’ve gotten back the rights to all the books in my SF series. I also decided that Jani’s story wasn’t finished after all—I completed a sixth book, Echoes of War, this past December.

All the books have been released via Book View Café, a writer-run co-op. I’m hoping to get back the rights to the Gideon books eventually, and will re-release them via BVC as well.

Over the next few years, my goals are to wrap up the Jani and Gideon series, write more short stories, and maybe start on a suspense/women’s adventure tale that’s been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. No shortage of ideas.

Thanks again for giving me the chance to talk about my work.

 

**Her name is Katharine (Cat) Eliska Kimbriel and she’s written some dandy SF and a wonderful trilogy about a young witch named Alfreda growing up in an alternate 1800s Michigan Territory. She’s also a member of BVC.

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D.W. Brooks – Here’s To More Chaos

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Our featured writer today is D.W. Brooks.  Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Here’s To More Chaos

by D.W. Brooks

Hello, hello!

I want to thank WaterGirl for hosting this opportunity for me on Balloon Juice. I would also express my thank yous to all the Balloon Juice commentariat. I have been a lurker on this site since President Obama was only a twinkle in the nation’s eye. (nym: MomDoc) Here’s to 2024!

Becoming a writer was my original career choice. I was a big reader; fortunately, the library had limits on both the number of books and the number of books by one author in place or I might have checked out all the Nancy Drew or Agatha Christie books at once. While I enjoyed reading these books, there weren’t many characters that looked like me and my cousins in them and besides, at the grand old ages of eight and nine, we could likely write just as well, if not better, right? The arrogance of youth…

My cousins and I set out to write our own series of mystery novels. One cousin was in charge of the covers and illustrations, one was creating maps of neighborhoods and towns for our characters, and I was mainly in charge of writing the stories. We folded and stapled sheets of that dot matrix computer paper together to create “books” and we worked from there. Of course, with little plotting, the actual writing stalled out around halfway through. And given the attention spans of the participants, the entire project was pushed to the side for other interests. Within two years, I was chasing my MD dream and spent the next 16 years focused on becoming a physician.

But by the end, people started doubting how long I would continue practicing medicine. Earning my MBA, while interesting, did not lead me into health administration as I planned, and I shifted into medical writing. I worked as a freelance medical writer/consultant until my genetic kidney condition got worse in the early 2010s. I spent a lot of time sitting or lying in bed, but I hated wasting the time, so I found something I could do: Voila, I started writing again!

This was a true labor of love as I had several stops and starts—during my transplant recovery period and my caring for my father in our home (2017-2020), I didn’t write or edit at all. The pandemic pushed me into finally making a stand; I finally got this book published in November 2023.

Official Synopsis

A dead body in the parking lot of her family’s business, a killer on the loose, and a handsome detective asking a lot of questions…

Jamie Scott’s life fell apart four years ago when she broke off her engagement, turned down a dream job, and went overseas to run away from her life. Now she’s back, but the reunion is not without problems. She arrives home just in time to attend the soiree her mother planned, but she’s not prepared for what she finds—a dead employee in the parking lot.

Detective Nick Marshall is assigned to the murder case at the forensics lab owned by Jamie’s family. He meets the headstrong Jamie, but he has a job to do. And his attraction to her… well, he’s a professional.

Jamie knows the stakes are high. She has to face the past and save her parents’ business while dealing with her family drama and an uncertain future. She also has to deal with Nick, who wants her out of the way of his investigation. But fate keeps throwing them in one another’s paths… and into chaos that they both want to avoid, but neither can seem to escape.

Prequel

I wrote a prequel novella that takes place four years before the events in Homecoming Chaos. It’s called I Do CHAOS and is currently available for free on my website: Author D. W. Brooks. I do plan to move it to Kindle in a month or two, but you can grab it now if you wish.

So, now that I am an adult, what do I write about? I still love mysteries, but I have added some romantic suspense—basically a murder mystery with some romance in it. There is often snark (Thanks, Balloon Juice!) and family drama intertwined as well. I don’t plan to write books that will change the world. I want my readers to disappear for a few hours into someone else’s adventure.

Next up: Two novellas and one novel in 2024!

Editorial Review

D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

The blend of romance, intrigue, and family ties is well done. Brooks creates a compelling series of chaotic encounters in which disparate characters harboring their own special interests and prejudices grow from their mistakes as well as their successes.

At stake in Jamie’s decision-making process are the family business, the outcome of a murder investigation, a hot detective’s ability to love her, and a future that is determined not by past chaos, but present-day growth.

Brooks focuses on characters that evolve through desperation and surprising circumstances which test their moral and ethical mettle as well as their abilities to evolve and change. This creates an attraction that nicely supplements the investigative tone of the story, providing draw for readers who look for more than a murder mystery or romance alone.

Reader Reviews

There are several reader reviews on GoodReads and Amazon but my reviewer friends insist that we authors link to their reviews and not paste them willy-nilly on the Internet. I just do as I am told…

Where to Purchase

My website for an autographed copy

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Biography

The author is a doctor and editor who lives in Texas with her husband and children. She enjoys trying to stay in shape, sporadically cooking, reading (still), writing, and working on her blog. She is eternally grateful to the woman who donated a kidney to her over 5 years ago and continues to advocate for organ donation as much as she can.

To learn more about D. W. Brooks and future publications and events, visit this site.

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