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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

People are complicated. Love is not.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Not all heroes wear capes.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

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Authors In Our Midst

You are here: Home / Archives for Authors In Our Midst

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post)

by Tom Levenson|  April 22, 202512:55 pm| 122 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Books, Open Threads, Science & Technology

Hey, everyone…

You may have noticed that I’ve been conspicuous by my absence lately. (Narr: for “lately” read “the anthropocene.”) It’s been for a variety of reasons–some health stuff (now OK, thanks for asking); some mental health/self care as we confront the barbarism of the US today; and, more than anything else, seemingly inexhaustible deadline pressure.

Some part of that pressure is finally getting its release–which is the longwinded way of saying that the publication date for my new book So Very Small is upon us. One week from today (4/29) in the US; 5/1 in the UK. (UK info here.)

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post
(Venice) Philosopher with book by Guercino

It’s good, I think. Early readers and reviewers seem to think so. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus both gave it starred notices, which is very comforting, and the blubbers  blurbers (I do love this autocorrect flub) wildly exceeded my imagination.* For example:

“So Very Small is very large and fascinating. Thomas Levenson expertly combines storytelling and big questions, most notably: Why not? Why wasn’t the germ theory of disease formulated 200 years earlier? Why, in general, are huge scientific discoveries delayed until they happen? This is exactly the sort of book that a literate citizen, keenly interested in science, reads for enlightenment, perspective, and fun.”—David Quammen, New York Timesbestselling author of Breathless

(Quammen is one of my writing heroes, so when he has something nice to say about my work, I kvell.)

One more:

“By peering through the lens of the modern germ theory, and our protracted battle with disease, Levenson has crafted a vivid, engaging, and timely reminder that we are not as omnipotent nor as clever as we often believe ourselves to be. So Very Small is a deeply researched and thoughtfully compelling exploration of our successes, failures, and precarious future with deadly pathogens.”—Timothy C. Winegard, New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito and The Horse

I blush! There’s more like this at the Random House link. ;-)

As these two blurbs indicate, So Very Small is ostensibly a history of the discovery that microbes cause infectious disease. The story of the results that added up to germ theory is usually told as a tale of a compressed explosion of discoveries in the second half of the 19th century, but when I started on this project I found myself wondering about what happened to get to that moment. Microbes were first observed in the 1670s, after all–and yet it took almost exactly 200 years to get to the first conclusive demonstration that a particular bacterium lay behind a specific diseases (Robert Koch’s identification of B. anthracis as the pathogen causing anthrax, achieved in January 1877.)

As I tried to piece together why it took so long to get from point a to point b, I realized I was onto a bigger story–one that extended forward from the discovery years to the present day. I argue that the biggest obstacles to making the connection between microbes and disease wasn’t scientific. They were cultural, religious, and social. And those same roadblocks obtain (in different form but recognizably kin to the ideas that went before) still–and help explain why so much of the benefits humankind gained from the insights of germ theory are now at risk.

I have to say that when I started to work on this book (first discussion in 2012; work in earnest starting in ~2021) I had no idea it would be so timely. I wish it weren’t. But with RFK Jr., wreaking havoc on the US public health and biomedical research infrastructure, So Very Small definitely looks forward by looking back.

If y’all are interested, I’ll ask Watergirl if we can set up a post and/or Zoom book talk sometime after the pub date. In the meantime, if you’d like to hear more about it, the excellent Sean Carroll and I talked about it (at length, but what else would you expect from me? ;-) on his Mindscape podcast.

That’s enough. To make up for such naked self-promotion, I promise a good food/cooking post a bit later in the day (maybe tomorrow if the rest of the afternoon eats me alive.)

And with that…this thread is as open as a Hesgeth Signal chat.

*The question of blurbs and blurbing is a vexing one, and some publishers (and lots of authors) want to get away from the practice. Happy to talk about this issue in another post if there’s interest.

Image: Guercino, Philosopher with book, 1635

PS: one more thing. As is their wont, my US publisher, Random House, and my UK folks, Head of Zeus, chose radically different cover designs. Got a preference?

(Images below the fold)

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US: So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post 1

UK:

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post 2

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post)Post + Comments (122)

Authors In our Midst – Vicki Delany (Canadian Author)

by WaterGirl|  March 20, 202510:00 am| 85 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Foreign Affairs, Politics

We usually run our Authors and Artists posts on the weekend, but this one with Vicki Delany will be the exception.  We have featured Vicki twice here on Balloon Juice, and she is a member of our Balloon Juice community.  (Links to those posts are just below.)

The Enduring Appeal of Sherlock Holmes

Medium Cool – Cozy Mysteries

Vicki is Canadian, so as you can imagine, she has some things on her mind.

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Elbows Up

by Vicki Delany

I am a Canadian, and in the 20 years since I became a full-time author, I’ve travelled to the United States many, many times. I love meeting readers and fellow authors. I love listening to their stories and talking books and brainstorming promotional efforts. Of the three major mystery conferences (Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, and Bouchercon) I’ve gone to at least one every year, many years all of them. (COVID years excepted, naturally). I’ve been to smaller festivals and conferences, to libraries, to bookstores. I’ve done a signing in a bowling alley and one in a gym and have been a guest speaker at the Pennsylvania Tea Festival. I’ve toured with wonderful American authors many of whom I now consider good friends, and I’ve spent before and after event time enjoying a vacation.

Is all that over? Possibly. I posted the following to my Facebook author page in February.

With much regret I wrote to the Malice Domestic Board today to tell them I will shortly be cancelling my registration and hotel booking. As a proud Canadian, I can not in good conscience travel to the United States as long as the President continues to insult our Prime Minister and our country and is threatening Canadian sovereignty,  either by destroying  us economically, or invading militarily. I will miss getting together with my many American friends and readers. I hope, but do not expect, that the situation will change and we can meet again.

I believe Canada, and the entire democratic world, is at an existential crossroads. The current regime in the United States is determined, for whatever demented reason, to eliminate Canada as an independent country, by whatever means necessary.  The insults from the President and other members of the regime against our Prime Minster personally (and yes, Governor is an insult and meant as such) as well as the country as a whole  are relentless. The tone and much of the wording is exactly the same as used by Russia prior to its invasion of Ukraine. (Trump: Most Canadians want to be 51ststate. Peter Navarro: Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels. Elon Musk: Canada is not a real county).

We don’t for a minute believe, even if this comes to pass, we would be a “51st state.”  We wouldn’t be a state, with voting rights and government investment, but a colony, a vassal to be exploited for resources.  We believe this intended exploitation is the entire purpose of this out-of-nowhere threat.

In 2019, the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico negotiated a revised free trade treaty called CUSMA (CanadaUSMexicoAgreement). This treaty is up for renewal in 2026. 2026. Not today. Showing that the word of the President of the United States is meaningless, Trump has overturned the agreement and slapped steep tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

The pretext Trump is using to impose tariffs on Canadian goods (in violation of a treaty he himself signed) is that supposedly Canada is allowing fentanyl to “pour’ across the border. That is an out and out lie.

According to the CNN on Feb 3, 2025 :  Fact check: Canada makes up just 0.2% of US border fentanyl seizures | CNN Politics

Federal statistics show US border authorities seized 21,889 pounds of fentanyl in the 2024 fiscal year. Of that amount, 43 pounds were seized at the Canadian border — about 0.2%

Only a month later, on March 4, 2025,  then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quoted data from US customs and border protection:

“..fentanyl seizures from Canada have dropped 97 per cent between December 2024 and January 2025 to a near-zero low of 0.03 pounds seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

Near zero. Down from a very low figure to begin with.

Therefore, there is literally nothing Canada can do, as the PM pointed out, to fix a problem that does not exist.  (As an aside there are no customs and immigration checks upon leaving either Canada or the US for the other country.  Is it not, therefore, the responsibility of US customs to stop illicit goods coming in? Never mind attempting to solve the fentanyl problem in your country yourselves.)

Why then does Trump keep repeating the lie? Because it isn’t about making trade ‘fair’ or fixing problems that don’t exist, and thus cannot be fixed, but creating circumstances to permit the annexation of Canada’s Arctic, natural resources, and water.

Trump and some of his sycophants keep repeating that Canadians want to be taken over by the US.  (Again, echoes of Putin to Ukraine). It’s a lie.  Here’s a poll reported  March 12, 2025 by the respected Canadian pollster Angus Reid.  The categories are by voters of the federal political parties.

This isn’t a trade dispute; it is an outright attack on our sovereignty and Canadians are coming together in a way they haven’t since WWII.  We are well aware that a trade war hurts everyone, but the Government of Canada believes appeasement will accomplish nothing, so Canada has imposed tariffs on a wide range of US goods.

As well as retaliatory tariffs, Canadians are fighting back in other ways. Stores are posting stickers on shelves indicating Canadian goods. Apps are being created to indicate the nationality of companies and the source of their product, and Canadians are taking those apps shopping. The world’s largest purchaser of alcohol is the Ontario liquor stores – all US products have been removed from the shelves and the same thing is happening in other provinces.  The province of Ontario (where I live) announced a 25 percent surcharge on exports of electricity to the US (now on ‘pause’ pending further developments.) Substantial numbers of Canadians are cancelling holidays to the US, or, like me, forgoing optional business trips. The list goes on and continues to grow.

Ontario Liquor Store – March 2025, photo by Vicki Delany

We’re not interested in the game of ‘on-again, off-again, on-again’ Trump is engaging in. As long as the threat exists, Canada will retaliate.

Our new Prime Minister, Mark Carey, has been very clear. “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the US,” he said on March 14, 2025.

It has been said that Canadians are prepared to sacrifice much in this fight and Americans nothing, so we do have the upper hand. Which of course, considering your President, might not matter.

We will see how things pan out, but I am encouraged by the solid and vocal support we are getting from our many American friends.

There isn’t much I can do, as an average Canadian citizen, to resist these threats, other than make my position public, shop mindfully, and refuse to grace the United States by my presence, definitely not spend any money.

Others have different opinions. Some say it’s important to engage Americans, and point out that despite propaganda from the US leader and members of his party and administration, the overwhelming number of Canadians are firmly against any take-over.  I’d argue in return, we have social media on which to present our case and a substantial number of my American friends approve of my choice to make this clear stand.

I will admit the decision to forgo travel to the US is easier for me than it might be for self-published or small press authors and particularly for writers just starting their career. I have a solid social media following, I have a strong reader base, I’m active in two prominent online cozy mystery groups, I’ve been building my newsletter distribution list for twenty years.

It’s up to each of us to decide what’s best for us and for our country. I’ve made my decision.

Elbows up.

Protect yourself and your teammates.

***

Vicki Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than fifty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy.  She is currently writing the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, the Year-Round Christmas mysteries, the Tea by the Sea books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates).

Vicki is a past chair of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival.  Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the CWC Awards of Excellence. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Let’s have a chat with Vicki in the comments.  I, for one, would love to hear her thoughts on what her American friends here on Balloon Juice can do.  Elbows up!

Authors In our Midst – Vicki Delany (Canadian Author)Post + Comments (85)

Authors In Our Midst – Chris Gerrib – A Novel This Time, not Science Fiction

by WaterGirl|  December 22, 20241:00 pm| 41 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

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.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Chris Gerrib, who has a new book available for order.

Author posts for two previous books: Pirates of Mars and One of Our Spaceships Is Missing.

My name is Chris Gerrib, and I’ve been reading Balloon Juice since John Cole was complaining about how we were in the process of hosing up the occupation of Iraq.  When I comment (very occasionally now) it’s under the nym of cgerrib.  (Yeah, original).  This is my third appearance as an Artist in Our Midst, so hopefully I’ve got this thing figured out. I will let you be the judge of that.

My previous appearances were for my science fiction novels, of which I have four published.  Now I’m here to shill talk about my first non-SF novel, Strawberry Gold, out this week.

I blame my dad for this novel.  Don’t get me wrong – he’s a great person and dad, but not much of a reader.  He finds science fiction especially difficult.  So the first two or three times he told me “you should write a regular book” (meaning not science fiction) I ignored him.  But one day I thought, “you know, he taught me how to use a spoon.  Maybe I ought to humor him.”

I grew up in and my parents still live in Westville, IL, a small East Central Illinois town.  On one of my visits back home, my parents suggested that I should visit the Westville Il Depot and Historical Museum.  The museum is in a small railroad depot and there’s not much to see.  However, I did learn something from that visit, namely that the earliest mention of Westville in the broader world was a one-paragraph news article from 1894 about a railroad strike and the strikers blocking the tracks.  At the time I thought it was just a neat bit of trivia.

Then, in March of 2018, I got laid off and was unemployed for nearly eight months.  One fine summer morning I found myself in the Geneva, IL Public Library with Don Hunt, leader of my writing group, participating in a Writing Jam.  This is, for the uninitiated, an event when writers get out of the house, go somewhere, and write.

Sitting in the sunny main reading room, I wrote what is now Chapter One of this book. A gunman, externally presentable but full of violence, is taking a suitcase full of gold coins to Chicago.  We don’t know why but given the man’s past it’s presumably not entirely legitimate.   The striking railroad workers have put up a barricade to block the tracks, with a handful staying nearby to prevent the train’s engineers from clearing it.

Our gunman’s not happy – what he thinks is indigestion is bothering him – but to move things along he decides to get off, walk past the blockage, and resume his journey.  Unfortunately for him, it’s what’s ailing him isn’t indigestion – it’s a heart attack.  He dies and is buried in an anonymous grave, but not before he hides the gold.

The rest of the story revolves around that gold, hidden somewhere in Strawberry Creek.  In 1986, Patrick Kowalski needs that gold to prevent his parent’s house from being foreclosed.  Vincent Bisceglie III thinks that gold represents money that was stolen from his grandfather.  (Note to self: next time, pick an easier name than “Bisceglie” to type!)  Neither young man is sure the gold ever existed, let alone if there any of it left. But they’re both desperate enough to give it a go.  During this hunt for the gold, both of them, high school seniors in the fictional small town of Eastville, learn a lot about their respective family histories.

Authors get asked two questions.  The first one is “where do you get your ideas?” and I’ve hopefully answered that.  The second one is “how did you get published?”

When I get asked this question, I always feel like the person asking me is expecting an answer that involves eye of newt, candles, Latin, and a moonlit night.  The reality is much less exciting.  I paid for a subscription to Doutrope, a site that lists agents and publishers.  I searched for people who handled mysteries, then went to their websites and followed the instructions on how to submit.

Looking at my records, I sent this out to eight publishers.  Finally, Karen Fuller, owner of World Castle Publishing accepted it in January of 2024.  We’ve never met in person or even had a phone conversation – it’s all been via email.  This slow and unglamorous process is how most books get made.

There’s some salty language and violence, so the book is not for little kids, but Juicers and high schoolers should be able to handle it.  I hope the gang here finds it to their liking.  You can visit my website to buy this book and my other books via Amazon or Indiebound.

Thanks to John Cole and Watergirl for this opportunity and keep up the faith!

 

Authors In Our Midst – Chris Gerrib – A Novel This Time, not Science FictionPost + Comments (41)

Authors In Our Midst – Richard Roberts – Skip School, Make Dragons

by WaterGirl|  October 26, 20241:00 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

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.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Richard Roberts, who has a new book available for pre-order.

Let’s talk genres!

by Richard Roberts

It’s a topic on my mind, with my book Skip School, Make Dragons in preorder on Amazon.

I have two settings as a writer.”I will write this and somebody else can figure out the genre. “Those books are usually pretty dark. The other is “I can have fun with this genre.”

Because it turns out, I do love genres. They have expectations! Tropes! Things that I love, which usually don’t make a lot of sense or are inherently goofy. Superhero comics have all kinds of wacky weapons, right? It’s fun to put the glue gun in and make it actually make more sense than a regular bullet gun.

And so a lot of the time I say “I want to try this genre and see what I can wring out of it. “Skip School, Make Dragons is one of those. I wanted to try science fantasy. Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, and more importantly, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

So I went “Okay, let’s have a world where magic was arranged by ex-scientists. “My main character is a bioengineer! Yes, she uses a magical soul forge. You know, those fancy cages that float inside each other in layers with a glowing crystal in the middle. That’s the kind of thing you get in science fantasy. And what else are ex-scientists going to want?  Well, they’ll do their best to recreate smart phones, and if magic won’t do telecommunications, you can put a list of practical spells for average people.

And of course it’s not science fantasy without something like a dungeon. There have to be places with monsters in them to adventure. So I said “What if, when technology stopped and magic started, all the big cities came alive, burrowed into the ground, and now pop up occasionally to spit out fake dungeons like an architectural LLM, complete with the weird mistakes?”

I could go on and on and on, but this is long enough. What genres do you love, and why? Writers, why do you work with your genre, and are there tropes you treasure and make sure to put in?

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, click here.

 

Authors In Our Midst – Richard Roberts – Skip School, Make DragonsPost + Comments (26)

Authors in Our Midst – Ray Ingles – Colossal Geek Writes His First Book

by WaterGirl|  October 20, 20241:00 pm| 30 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

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.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Ray Ingles, whose first book comes out in just 3 days!

One survivor of our timeline. And it’s the wrong guy.

by Ray Ingles

Humble and fulsome thanks to WaterGirl for the invitation to talk about my debut novel, SECONDARY! I’ve been lurking here on the daily for years, posting a handful of comments. I really appreciate this community, and the chance to hear about news and stories that don’t show up elsewhere.

Anyway, right up front: I’m a colossal geek. The first book I ever checked out of a public library, back in kindergarten, was Space Cat. I’ve read voraciously ever since; mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a preference for the harder stuff. In particular I love when an author takes ‘one impossible thing’ and works out the realistic consequences. (Cheap teleportation? Sure, okay. Are you ready for places to crash like a webserver handling too much traffic?)

This gave me a fundamental inability to dismiss weird ideas without pondering them. In detail. Thinking about how actual humans would respond to some crazy phenomenon. Or technology. Or curse. It always annoys me when the story works the protagonist into an impossible situation… and then just ends. “Well, they’re screwed.” Okay, sure, your time meddling saved your brother but now Germany won WWII. What are you going to do about it? Why even tell a story about this character if how they respond doesn’t matter?

That said, it’s simplest to just give the back-cover blurb for SECONDARY:

Everybody has bad days. Jim McAllister’s having one that spans two timelines.

For an anthropologist, joining the Time Eye project is a career-making dream. He’s hardly above pulling strings–especially for a chance to pull photons from the Bronze Age and directly view ancient cultures. Then rogue scientists hijack the Eye, sending an engineered virus back thousands of years. Jim, the last person interfaced with the system, can only watch as reality warps around him.

Now he’s the sole remnant of the old history: a conspicuous, bizarrely-dressed young man who speaks no recognizable language. Thanks to the virus, anyone with two X chromosomes is a living, and potentially lethal, taser. Men have never been a significant threat to women–quite the opposite.

To have any chance of getting home–to even survive, in a world where men’s concerns have been secondary for all of recorded history–Jim will need to find allies. He’ll have to apply his skills to a uniquely unfamiliar culture, where much more than the gender signifiers are radically different. He must figure out who might listen to his story… a story that’s clearly impossible, deeply offensive, and just as a bonus, heretical.

Credit where credit is due: I heard about Naomi Alderman’s THE POWER, and I began to ponder. Her book was focused on our world, and what might happen here given a radical shift of power across genders. (She won awards, bestseller status, and an Amazon series, so it seems she did an excellent job.) But I was struck when I read about the novel’s framing device. Set millennia in the future, when our world has collapsed and been forgotten. A world where new norms have become so settled no one imagines they could ever have been different.

Now that’s a hella interesting premise for a science fiction novel. It almost demands a ‘hard sociological fiction’ approach. I mean, there are plenty of matriarchal – or just non-patriarchal – societies in history to draw from. What do they imply about a world where women (and others of the double-X persuasion) have a huge advantage over men when it comes to violence? What does anthropology and sociology tell us about how culture influences gender, and vice versa?

SECONDARY is available for pre-order and will be released on Amazon this Wednesday, October 23rd. The first four chapters are posted on my blog already, and the fifth will be posted Tuesday. If that sample doesn’t pique your interest, I completely understand. But I hope you’re curious about what happens after the Twilight Zone ending.

(Full disclosure – SECONDARY is a story for grownups. It doesn’t shy from the darker implications of the premise, any more than Alderman did. The situation Jim’s in is virtually unsurvivable; things get very bad for him before they get any better. He’s rather far from a genius, omnicompetent Heinlein hero. But he’s sometimes smart enough to ask the right questions, and he’s more resilient than he imagines.)

 

Authors in Our Midst – Ray Ingles – Colossal Geek Writes His First BookPost + Comments (30)

Dorothy A. Winsor – Dragoncraft, and a Favorite Character

by WaterGirl|  September 21, 20242:00 pm| 50 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

Dragoncraft comes out today. A writer spends a lot of days working for a handful of days like today.

Dorothy A. Winsor’s New Book – Dragons, Defiant Workers, and a Secret Theme!

Dragoncraft is a sequel to Glass Girl, though I tried to write it so it could be read independently. In Glass Girl, glassmaker Emlin was the sole point of view character, and Addy was her love interest. We never saw into his head, which is good, because he’s a trickster and a liar and those work much better if we can’t see what he’s really thinking.

Addy’s heart is in the right place though, and several readers told me he was their favorite character. He’s my favorite character too. As a matter of fact, he’s my favorite type of character-a trickster. I love clever characters whom everyone underestimates, people like Miles Vorkosigan or Gen (from Turner’s The Thief).

I should say that this puts me out of step with much current YA fantasy which often features domineering male characters, so much so that there was a discussion of it on Reddit in which one commenter asked why we were still valorizing toxic masculinity. Maybe I’m too old to appreciate the trope, but these domineering characters make me want to shout “Run!” at the girl character. I felt that way all the way back to Bella in Twilight. Edward snuck into her room to watch her sleep and disabled her car, and the book treated that as romantic. Ack!

Given the affection for Addy, I split the point-of-view between him and Emlin in Dragoncraft. And of course, then I had them keeping secrets from one another. Addy enjoys doing that, but Emlin is deeply uncomfortable, poor thing. It was fun to write and I hope it’s fun to read.

Dragoncraft is available on all the online sites in both paperback ($14.99) and e-book ($3.99) format. The last time I looked, the e-book of Glass Girl was temporarily on sale at Amazon for $1.99 if you want to read the story in which Addy and Emlin first meet.

Dorothy A. Winsor’s New Book – Dragons, Defiant Workers, and a Secret Theme! 1

Amazon

Barnes &Noble

Discounted version of Glass Girl

 

Dorothy A. Winsor – Dragoncraft, and a Favorite CharacterPost + Comments (50)

Author Jennifer Schiff – A Mocktail for Murder!

by WaterGirl|  September 15, 20245:00 pm| 23 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst

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.)

 

Author Jennifer Schiff – A Mocktail for Murder!Post + Comments (23)

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