Month: May 2018

The Secret Is OUT!

It’s ready!
It’s available!
It’s for sale!
It’s… well, you get the idea!

What, exactly, is “it”? Well, see, it’s this little story. It kinda goes like this:

Bored empty nester Amanda Charles has too much time on her hands. After an “incident” at the house while Amanda is away, she begins to suspect that her husband, Manny, is not really an engineer, but is instead a spy… and she inadvertently turns their lives upside down in her quest to discover the truth. Does Manny really work at the nuclear power plant… or is he a spy? Does Manny really take endless trips to the hardware store for power tools and plumbing parts… or is he a spy?

Amanda enlists the help of two of her friends to find out what’s behind Manny’s increasingly suspicious behavior. And, she’s going to find out what’s going on if it kills her.

MANNY AVAILABLE RED BACKGROUND

And now, just in time for National Sea Monkey Day gift giving (What? Doesn’t everyone give gifts for National Sea Monkey Day? You totally should!), you can get your very own copy of Secret Agent Manny! Both the paperback and Kindle editions are available now!

You want the Kindle edition? Click here: Secret Agent Manny Kindle edition.

You want a paperback copy? Click here: Secret Agent Manny paperback edition.

You want 200 copies for your closest friends and family? Click here: No, seriously, click here!

I’m so excited about this book release I could wet my pants! Seriously, I—oh, dear, excuse me!

 

Eclectic (read: weird) Reading Tastes

Whenever I publish a new blog post, I spend inordinate amounts of time clicking back on the post, just to make sure nothing exploded, or to make sure I didn’t misspell the word “public” without the “l.” (Note to everyone: Never misspell “public.” Your spell-checker won’t catch it, and you will never live it down.)

pexels-photo-261909.jpeg

So naturally, this morning I clicked onto my own site yet again and glanced at it yet again. Then I saw it: my “Currently Reading” section on the right-hand side of the screen. What kind of freak reads Lake of Destiny, The Last Word, Not That I Could Tell, and Haunted at the same time? (Oh, and toss in Daily Rituals since I just started that one too.)

That’s largely a rhetorical question. Obviously I am that kind of freak.

Then I felt defensive that I had just called myself a freak, and my first thought was that I really oughtta cuff myself upside the head for calling myself a name. (Clearly people who work alone from home for too long must miss workplace bullying and start making up their own versions to compensate.)

But I got over the urge to beat myself up for calling myself names, and instead I made a trip to Home Depot to buy lumber and a nail gun to build myself a cry closet. Wayne won’t notice if I put it in the middle of his home office since nobody can see half the room anymore due to the boxes of ancient tech gadgets he never unpacked when we moved in … in 2012.

Anyway, one or two back-and-forth motions with a handsaw and I gave up on the cry closet (because the project itself was making me cry and because I already cry every time I go in that office) and sat down to take a coffee break. While I was sitting in the middle of the stuff I’d just bought, wondering how long it would take Wayne to notice large pieces of wood behind his desk chair, it dawned on me that I wasn’t really a freak after all.

No! In fact, I was a genius! I never read those sorts of books literally at the same time. I read them concurrently but not simultaneously. Well, okay, I just checked in the dictionary and it uses each of these terms to define the other, so maybe I’m not the wordsmith I thought I was. Anyway, my point is that I never quite know what mood I’ll be in when I read each day. Sometimes a fun Spellman novel is the right choice. Other days I want the creepy Palahniuk story. Still other nights, a love story set in the Scottish Highlands is the way to go. Or, that Strawser story that’s firing on all cylinders for me.

So, really, instead of being freaky for reading such disparate stories simulcurrently (ha ha, dictionary! I win!)… I’m brilliant for always having the right story to match my mood.

Do you do this? Do you juggle a Currently Reading pile of different genres? Are we all freaks, or are we all brilliant? Feel free to confess here. Besides, I really need the personal validation.

Can You Keep a Secret?

5-SecretAgentManny_PrintProof2-FRONT (LindaHPLaptop's conflicted copy 2017-01-11)

Today I’m ordering a proof copy of this book—Secret Agent Manny—so I can make sure it looks pretty and beautiful and marginally correct. Wait, I mean, to make sure the margins are correct. We typesetters care about these things.

This book started as a dare (as most great books do) … by two writer friends of mine, Fara Linn Howell and Jim Watkins. The first line of the book (“There’s been an incident at the house”) was spoken to me over the phone by my electrical engineer husband while I was at a writing conference … and Jim and Fara thought it was a perfect jumping-off point for a story. Then again, bungee jumpers think high bridges are perfect jumping-off points, and I think they’re all insane.

That year, their idea turned into my NaNoWriMo novel, written on my IBM Selectric. And I’ve been tinkering with the story ever since. This past autumn I spent five wonderful days at Forest Edge Cottage in Kane, Pa. (in the Allegheny Forest), where I wrapped up the story on my Smith Corona Coronamatic.

Yes, I use typewriters to write fiction. Don’t get all up in my face about it. If these particular typewriters were good enough for Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and Charles Bukowski and John Irving and James Baldwin, they’re good enough for me.

Plus, I have no real hobbies to speak of.

Anyway, now Secret Agent Manny is edited, typeset, and proofread. And it’ll soon be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s website. (Don’t panic. I’ll post direct links once the book’s available. Take some deep breaths into a paper bag or something before you faint. I said, don’t panic!)

If you’re going to see me at a conference or festival this year (like this one, or this one), I won’t mind if you wait till then to get a copy (so I can sign it for you and make it worth ten or fifteen cents more than you paid for it).

Otherwise, watch out, world! Secret Agent Manny is coming your way—sometime in May!