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Am I getting annoying?

To those who know me in real life, that might seem like a rhetorical question, but I’m serious. Well, “serious,” with air-quotes, because I’m rarely serious. As those who know me in real life already know. (Didn’t I just write that phrase? Who’s editing this stuff, anyway?)

This week’s contest is MYSTERIES WITH HUMOR! This BookSweeps giveaway will give two lucky winners 30 Mysteries with Humor (as I just mentioned—am I still repeating myself? I gotta hire an editor) and an e-reader! That’s a $350 value, all for the price of a few clicks! (And please follow me on BookBub once you click those coupla clicks…)

bit.ly/MysteriesWHumor-July2020
CLICK HERE: bit.ly/MysteriesWHumor-July2020
Ooooh, pretty cover! So… spy-ish!

You can access the contest easily by clicking here: http://bit.ly/MysteriesWHumor-July2020

I’m not allowed to enter the contest (plus, I own more e-readers than I have a right to—I only have two eyes and very little free time). But I can participate vicariously through my loyal readers (or the disloyal ones—hey, I’ll take any sort of readers I can get!), so please go enter on my behalf. And let me know if you’re one of the winners! It’ll be the high point of my otherwise dull, dreary, locked-down existence if one of you wins. I don’t get out much these days (or the previous days, or all the days last year, or… well, never mind. Now I’m just depressing myself).

I know I’m turning into a sort of contest-slut these days (and there are two more coming up after this one!), but it’s fun to participate in contests. Except that I’m not allowed to enter them (wait, I’m STILL repeating myself? I need serious help), and I have to pay to participate in them, and all I get out of them are some new subscribers and followers, and… gosh, apparently I don’t understand how contests are supposed to work, do I?

Well, before I sink into despair over this, please go enter the contest and lift me out of the mire of everyday thrills like contactless grocery pickup and pizza deliveries dumped on our front porch without our knowledge.

Seriously, I’m desperate. Just enter the contest here!

http://bit.ly/MysteriesWHumor-July2020

Geez, I’m still repeating myself! <——And I’m repeating the fact that I’m repeating myself…

Goodbye! I’m leaving before my head explodes with a pointless, uninteresting infinite regression.

Turtles all the way down…

Stay safe out there! And don’t forget to enter the con—crap!

( bit.ly/MysteriesWHumor-July2020 )

Contest ends tonight! Totally not kidding!

Nearly 60 e-books.
A free e-reader.
Enough reading to get you through the summer and beyond.

Because it’s not like you’re going on a cruise any time soon, right?

Clickety-click right here: —-> https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/june-2020/women-sleuth-mysteries/

There’s a different contest starting on Monday, so don’t miss this one while it lasts (the rest of today/this evening)!

No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. All rights reserved. Lather, rinse, repeat. No parking without permit. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Phrase your answer in the form of a question. Bridge freezes before road surface.

Big Contest! Free Books That I Didn’t Even Write! Free E-Reader That I Didn’t Even Have to Purchase Myself!

Today, I have a fun surprise to share with you…

No, no that.
Guess again.
Nope.
One more time.
Aw, c’mon! Read the title of this post!
Well, okay, maybe the title of this post gave it away. Yes, it’s a big giveaway! You’re so smart.

I’ve teamed up with 55+ fantastic authors [NOTE: that doesn’t mean we’re all 55+ years old—it means there are more than 55 of us participating] to give away a huge collection of Female Detective Mystery series starters to 2 lucky winners!

Oh, and did I mention the Grand Prize winner gets a BRAND NEW e-reader? 👀You can win my novel The Scarlet Letter Opener, plus other first-in-series mysteries from authors such as Hope Callaghan and Traci Andrighetti.

Enter the giveaway by clicking here 👀 Women Sleuths June2020 Contest

The contest runs until July 1—but enter now while you’re right next to the big shiny button!

It would be pretty awesome if one of my readers won this contest! Good luck and enjoy! You’re welcome!

Secret Agent Manny: AUDIOBOOK!

I’m so excited! My humorous (that’s debatable) fiction (that’s also debatable) work, SECRET AGENT MANNY, is finally available in audiobook form through Audible (that’s not debatable)!

I can’t say enough about my amazing narrator, Janice Wright, whose perfect amount of snark had me laughing at my own book as I listened to each chapter. (And I don’t usually laugh at my own stuff once I’ve published it. By then I’ve nitpicked it into the ground so much that I never want to see it again. Kinda like my ex.)

Janice was a CBS news anchor for a bunch of years, and she even costarred with Tony the Tiger in a national TV spot. (That alone won me over.)

There’s one spot where she has to say “BOING!” (because doesn’t all espionage fiction have the word “BOING!” in it?), and she reads it like a Looney Tunes character: “Boing-oing-oing!” I wasn’t prepared for that. I spit coffee all over my keyboard. It wasn’t pretty. But it was funny. So, you know, be prepared and listen while wearing a bib.

Go HERE to nab your own copy of Secret Agent Manny on audiobook:

https://amzn.to/30ZWzQT

You can even hear a snippet from the book! (I didn’t get to pick which snippet, so it’s a tad random.) And, while you’re there, you can also click around and order the Kindle or print edition. Something for everybody! You’re welcome.

On Monday (June 22), a HUGE promo/contest begins, but I’m going to save that announcement for, well, Monday. Mondays need something exciting, right?

Today’s excitement, though, is right here:
SECRET AGENT MANNY ON AUDIOBOOOOOOOK!

“Alexa, do stuff…”

Welcome to your future! Mwa-hahahahaha!

If you don’t own an Amazon Alexa device yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s an obvious statement, isn’t it? Of course you don’t. You don’t own one.

Or maybe you DO know what you’re missing, and you don’t miss it. Some days I can’t blame you.

We’ve all heard the Tales Beyond the Echo Dot! stories of Alexa laughing maniacally for no reason, or mishearing something you said and asking you to repeat it fourteen times, or ordering twelve dozen packages of Oreo Double-Stufs without your consent. (Okay, in my case, that WAS with my consent, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)

Some of you purposely don’t own these devices because you’re afraid she’s listening to you 24/7, taking notes on your conversations and reporting them to Homeland Security. (Okay, she IS, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)

You’re perfectly safe, though. Seriously. Quit laughing. Amazon even has this graphic on the pages of their Echo/Alexa products.

I don’t know how the copywriter got through this description without giggling.

Seriously. Quit laughing.

Here at our house, we currently own five Alexa devices: one tall Echo and four Echo Dots. They’re scattered at strategic points around the house (just don’t ask me why we have one in the bathroom), so she can hear us every time we cough or breathe or think. Wait, no… I mean, so we can get the information we need without having to walk across half the square footage of our large Victorian house. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

Plus, they were on sale.

When you buy one of these smart-alec devices—I mean, smart devices—you envision yourself doing all the cool things they suggest:

“Alexa, what’s the square root of pi?”

“Alexa, translate this phrase from Swahili into Olde English…”

“Alexa, teach me how to install a carburetor in a 1972 Chevette.”

You get the idea. Until the box shows up, you can dream of the things you’ll do together once she arrives…

But then the box shows up.
And reality sets in.
You’re never going to do any of that stuff.

If you’re me, though, you’ll do at least ONE thing: check the weather. I ask about the weather every single day. Sometimes two or three times in the same day. In fact, asking about the weather comprises about 99% of my interaction with Alexa. The irony is that I never go outside. I just want to know what it would be like out there if I did.

Another 1/2% of my interaction is made up of setting alarms (for waking up at ungodly hours) and timers (for cooking food that I just should have given up on long ago).

That last 1/2% of my interaction with dear ol’ Alexa is made of stuff like this:

“What is a bindle?”

“How much is a first-class postage stamp?”

“What’s the humidity?” (Technically, this is a subset of the weather question, but I ask it separately so it counts here.)

“Play notifications.” (These are notifications of packages Amazon delivered three hours earlier and that I’ve already unpacked and started using.)

“Play music on XYZ station.” (This rarely works on the first try because I haven’t enabled the right skill yet or added on the right music app or whatever. I then give up and default to, “Play ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” after which she plays the same five or six songs from the 1980s that I know by heart.)

Oops, I forgot that an Amazon Echo is like playing Simon Says. None of those would work because I forgot to put “Alexa” in the beginning. Because, you know, if you don’t, she totally isn’t listening to you.

If you’re new to the Alexa experience, here are some fun things to try:

“Alexa, tell me a Chuck Norris joke.” (This one really works.)

“Alexa, where the heck is my husband?” (Spoiler alert: The answer is, “Home Depot… He’s always at Home Depot. Stop asking.”)

“Alexa, why can’t I lose weight?” (Cue the maniacal laughter I mentioned earlier.)

“Alexa, does this dress make me look fat?” (If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll remain silent. My husband could learn a trick or two from her.)

“Alexa, what should I do for a headache?” (Her answer is usually, “Let me read you a chapter from ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies.’ The Kindle edition is only $2.99. Would you like to order it?”)

If you’ve been playing along with our home game, you already know that my husband is an electrical engineer. So, he doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about the weather or how much a stamp costs. He uses his Echo Dot to configure (and endlessly reconfigure) our smart-home devices… mainly light bulbs, which he groups into categories with names I can never remember. So, when I want the living room lamp to come on, all I have to do is say: “Alexa, turn on the living room lamp.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”

Maybe I got the syntax wrong. “Alexa, turn on the lamp in the living room.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”

Maybe I got one word wrong. “Alexa, turn on the living room light.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device…”

“ALEXA, just turn on ANY LAMP IN A 50-FOOT RADIUS OF MY VOICE!”

“I’m sorry, Dave, but…”

Alexa, I swear, I’m going to throttle Jeff Bezos with my bare hands, smash your little plastic face in with a ball peen hammer, and go buy a Google Assistant!

Suddenly, every light in the house comes on…

“Alexa, go screw yourself.”

“I’m sorry, but you haven’t enabled that skill yet.”

Today I taught my parents… (Part 4)

Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to use a webcam.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents that she can carry a jar safely.

After months of nothing more than emails, phone calls, and random Facebook messages (my parents still have a flip phone, so you won’t see a post with me teaching them how to text anytime soon), I finally got to SEE my parents—live and in person!— about a week ago. We defied the Supreme Highness Governor Wolf’s orders when my parents invited me to pick up some takeout and join them for lunch.

They’d wanted to come to my house since the restaurant is closer to me (“It takes twenty minutes to get to our house—the food will be cold!”), but I reminded them that my husband works with hundreds of other snot-nosed math brains at the nuclear power plant, making our house a sort of ground-zero for germs. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but you get the point. My parents did too. We wisely opted for their house.)

Of course, when I picked up the takeout order, the food was already waiting for me packed up in a bag. That added five minutes to the ticking clock of food-warmth. Then the cashier rang up the wrong order and had to wait for a manager to zero it out on the cash register so she could start all over and ring it up again. That added another ten minutes. I’d be lucky if this food was even lukewarm by the time I got it out of the restaurant to my car.

I took the shortcut to my parents’ house, up the long and winding Wildwood Road. One lane in each direction. No passing zone. Guess who was in front of me? Some woman driving about ten miles an hour with her blinker on the whole time. After four or five miles of this, I was convinced she was headed to my parents’ house too. But she wasn’t gonna get any of our food, no matter HOW cold it got!

After finally arriving and pretending to hug each other—and reheating my parents’ cold French fries in the microwave (“I told you the food would be cold!”)—we settled in for a yummy and fun lunch and gab-fest that lasted three hours.

As I was getting ready to leave, my mom foisted upon me a quart-sized mason jar of homemade spaghetti sauce concocted by my daughter. They loved her sauce (and so do I!), but it was a tad spicy for their delicate, retired, old-person insides. So they wanted to donate their remaining jar to me. I was glad to take it off their hands. (What else would a devoted daughter do, right?)

But then I caught my mother wrapping the jar in about twelve plastic Walmart bags and stuffing it into an Amazon box.

Here’s a picture of the jar, with salt-and-pepper shakers for scale:

[SPOILER ALERT: This picture was taken after I got home.]

“Mom, what’s with the package?”

“It’s the sauce. So it doesn’t break.”

“Mom, I live a few miles away. I think it’ll make it. Besides, with the pandemic, I have my own collection of Amazon boxes in every size.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side…”

“And, with the pandemic, I can’t use my reusable grocery bags, so I have my own collection of plastic Walmart bags too.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side…”

“I’m pretty sure I can carry one quart-sized jar to the car and then into my house without breaking anything.”

“Just. To. Be. On. The…”

“…Safe side. Yes, I know. Please unwrap it.”

She blinked at me. Twice. It was now officially a standoff.

“Mom, I just turned fifty-nine. I realize I’m not QUITE a grown-up yet, but give me the benefit of the doubt here.”

She stared at me and didn’t move. So, I walked to the counter, took the overwrapped jar out of the Amazon box, and started peeling off the layers of plastic Walmart bags like I was peeling an onion. And just when it started to feel hopeless, I saw glass and, through the glass, spaghetti sauce. Eureka!

I physically hugged each of my parents (like the rebel I am) and headed out to my car.

Score: Linda, 1; Mom, ZILCH. I had won.

Or had I?

While standing my ground against my mom, my dad had been outside putting several empty mason jars into my car to give back to my daughter. I didn’t think much of this gesture until I got home and took out the bag of empty jars.

Each one was wrapped in a half dozen plastic Walmart bags and had several more stuffed down inside them.

Just to be on the safe side.

Coming to an audiobook near you!

I recently interviewed myself about the upcoming audiobook release for Secret Agent Manny. Nobody else was clamoring to do it, so I just wrote down some questions for myself and then answered them.

What is the title of this book?

I’m excited about my first audiobook, Secret Agent Manny, a comic pseudo-spy novel (more comic than spy, although the pseudo part would probably be the best adjective of the three, if I’m being perfectly honest).

I have a hard time getting into a project (especially a large project) until I have a good title, and although I’m sometimes open to suggestions for titles, it boils down to this: I’ll know it when I hear it. And then I can move forward.

I’ve been told I’ve got a knack for coming up with great titles. When another project, Do-It-Yourself Widow, placed as a runner-up in a national novel contest a few years ago, I was told that my title was the best of them all.

Now, if only I could get similar praise for the other 75,000 words in that project.

*

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Secret Agent Manny started as a National Novel Writing Month project. The idea has to be credited to two writer pals of mine, James Watkins and Fara Linn Howell. While at a writing conference with them, I got a disturbing phone call from my husband, about a burglary at home. As the writing conference progressed and I heard more about this burglary, Jim and Fara poked and prodded me into believing that my husband was actually living a double-life as a spy.

Because Jim and I are both humor writers, and because Fara, though much more spiritual than I, has one of the best senses of humor in these parts, we escalated my poor husband’s imagined double-life to outrageous proportions during the rest of the conference.

By week’s end I knew I had to adapt their crazy ideas (or not-so-crazy—you decide!) into a novel—a novel that starts out with a phone call strangely similar to the one I had with my husband: “There’s been an incident at the house…”

*

What genre does your book fall under?

I’d be more worried if you asked me what TABLE my book fell under. But, to answer your question: It’s a comic pseudo-spy novel. Weren’t you paying attention earlier?

*

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I don’t think there’s enough real spy action for this to be a James Bond movie, and I’m not sure the comedy translates all that well outside of book form … but since you ask, I’ll have to go with Oliver Platt for Manny and Mary Louise Parker for Amanda—but only if she’ll eat a sandwich or something first. That woman is too thin.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A bored writer with too much time on her hands begins to suspect that her quiet, mild-mannered husband is really a spy … and she inadvertently turns their lives upside down in her quest to discover the truth.

*

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

After years of telling myself that it was all right to self-publish the humor-essay books but not the novels, I realized that I have a direct path to self-publishing even the novels: I’ve worked in the prepress world for decades, and I have professional skills as both a typesetter and proofreader. Why would I wait to see my book in print for years while going the traditional publishing route when I can wear all the prepress hats myself? And everybody loves hats, right?

Life is too short to be traditional about this. Besides, within the next few nanoseconds, the term “traditional publishing” won’t mean the same thing anymore.

*

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first 50,000 words were written in November 2012, as part of NaNoWriMo. But, once I’m on fire about a project, I can churn it out quickly. The rest took another few months, but those two sets of time weren’t consecutive, so …

*

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Ha ha ha. “Genre.” “Compare.” You’re so funny.

*

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

More kudos to those pesky friends of mine, Jim and Fara, for the inspiration. And once I went from having fun with friends coming up with reasons my husband is a spy to actively taking notes for a novel, the ideas just wouldn’t stop coming.

*

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

You’d be amazed at how differently you’ll look at your spouse when you realize just how many common things about him you can call into question. All you need is a paranoid, suspicious nature and a little creativity, and all hell breaks loose.

*

SECRET AGENT MANNY is coming to an Audible audiobook near you SOON!

Today I taught my parents… (Part 3)

Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to order food online.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents how to use a webcam.

I’m sure that, back in April 1960, my parents weren’t standing next to that cake thinking, “Gosh, we can’t wait to celebrate sixty years together in 2020 during a global pandemic by looking at family and friends through a big screen, many miles away from us.” I’m reasonably certain that wasn’t their thought at all that day.

If it were me, I would have been thinking, “Mmmm, CAKE!”

But let’s not use me as a yardstick … for anything. Instead of a Big Party, I got to help them celebrate the only way we could last month: through a webcam.

My parents both use desktop computers, not laptops, so of course they didn’t own a webcam. That would have been too easy. And, by the time I got the bright idea to order them a webcam online and have it delivered to their house, every webcam within a 5,000-mile radius had been snapped up, along with a million shares of Zoom stock.

I own a few ancient laptops with webcams, but I typically use a dedicated webcam and microphone on my desktop computer when I need to attend a virtual meeting. Back around 2010, I’d gotten a crappy blue plastic webcam for free with rewards points from entering a bajillion code combinations from the bottle caps of many Diet Cokes. MANY Diet Cokes. Let me tell you, it took a LOT of Diet Coke, imbibed by both me and my husband, to get that free crappy blue plastic webcam.

It has a built-in crappy microphone and a built-in crappy suction cup on the bottom. (I’d say the suction cup sucks, but that would be paying it a compliment. It does NOT suck. Hence the problem. The thing tends to skitter across your desk if the cord isn’t positioned just right.)

But, it served me well for nearly a decade, considering the price I’d paid. (It was worth at least twice what I paid for it!) And anyone who uses technology knows how long a decade is. Most electronic equipment needs carbon dating after about five years.

The Big Problem presented itself when the Big Party I had been planning for my parents to celebrate their 60th anniversary ground to a halt. I thought I’d been pretty good at predicting the various obstacles we might encounter trying to pull off a surprise party for my parents: airline flights and schedules for family to the east of us, work schedules for all the grown grandkids here, traffic issues getting those same grandkids to my house from 50 miles away, nap schedules for their great-grandson (and, let’s face it, for me too), food choices for so many of us on different diets…

But I had somehow neglected to add “global pandemic and worldwide shutdown” to my list of possible roadblocks. Now what? No in-person face-to-face party. After 60 years of surviving each other, my parents now had to survive COVID-19 and a complete lockdown, with nobody to entertain them but each other. If they hadn’t killed each other in the past 60 years, this just might do it.

But what to do about that Big Party? In typical noble, altruistic fashion, I gave my parents that free crappy blue plastic webcam. Because that’s how I roll. I’m nothing if not self-sacrificing.

But even that simple gesture turned into a Big Production. I wiped down the free crappy blue plastic webcam with sanitizing wipes, put everything in a small cardboard box (because I’ve got an entire collection of a dozen of every size box Amazon makes), and delivered the box to my parents’ garage (while waving at them through their kitchen window). I felt like an honorary member of the bomb squad. (Should I cut the blue wire or the red wire?)

They let the box sit in their garage for two days before touching it.

A few days later, we did a test run of the webcam and microphone, using Facebook’s video chat feature inside Messenger. I chose that over Zoom because my mom was already familiar with Facebook Messenger. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to walk her through setting up Zoom from scratch over the phone. This was the same woman who used to call me for impromptu tech support by announcing, “It won’t let me! The thingy is blinking!”

With Facebook Messenger, all I had to do was hit the little blue video camera icon in the upper right of a group message—and all she had to do was answer the incoming video call.

You know, once the camera was plugged in, and the microphone was plugged in.

What could go wrong? Well, what greeted me first were my mom’s neck and one of her hands, and a lot of loud crackling noise as she fiddled with the webcam and the microphone, trying to find good spots for them on her desk. And then both my parents tried to find spots for two chairs close enough to the camera for me to see and hear them. And for them to see the computer monitor that would soon be filled with loving faces wishing them a happy 60th.

The Big Day for the Big Party arrived. I’d divided the groups of people who wanted to cyber-attend into two time slots. For one thing, Facebook Messenger video chat accepts only eight cameras at a time. For another thing, I still had those pesky schedules to contend with.

I started a group message with the first time-slot folks, and then I “called” everyone. One by one, to my delight, folks popped up on my screen.

But where were my parents?

They were still in the two-person Messenger chat I’d set up with my mom. I typed in our two-person chat window: “Hey, I’m setting up our ‘party’ with a few folks…. We’re setting up now and I’ll add you once we’re ‘live.'”

Then I added, “I added you to our small group. You’ll get the video ring thing in a second.”

Suddenly I heard a loud phone-ringing noise and realized that, in another browser window, my mom was “calling” me in our two-person Messenger chat window.

Brrrrring… bbbrrrrrringgggg… Boy, that noise got annoying really fast.

I kept apologizing to the friends and family waiting for my parents in the group video chat… and kept hearing that bbbrrrrrrrinnngggg from the two-person chat window.

My parents tried to call me a total of five times before they figured out their error. I think my all-caps response of “GO TO THE GROUP MEETING NOT THIS ONE” probably helped nudge them in the right direction.

Of course, once they actually got to the group chat, they were greeted with friends, a nephew, a kid (okay, that was me), and some grandkids and their significant others. They were wearing their matching T-shirts, which said, “I Survived 60 Years!” They seemed delighted with the turnout, and we had a one-hour online party with them both.

And later that day, a second wave of kids, grandkids, friends, and a great-grandkid swept in for a second virtual party.

And, aside from the usual glitches with cameras, microphones, cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, background noise, and technophobia, it went surprisingly well.

It was the best we could do for them, given the restrictions. We’re planning a Real Party sometime in the fall. Of this year. We hope. Unless the murder hornets and a sharknado show up. Can’t rule out any possibility these days.

And, because my upgraded webcam finally arrived from Amazon a few weeks ago, I’m gonna let my parents keep that free crappy blue plastic webcam… because that’s what a noble, self-sacrificing daughter would do, right?

I still haven’t been able to give my parents a true happy-anniversary hug yet, more than a month later, but you can bet I’ll be the first one in their driveway when our state relaxes some restrictions.

You know, after I shower in hand sanitizer and sit in their garage for two days.

You get a book! And you get a book!

Yay! Charlotte’s Website, the third book in the Red Ink Mysteries cozy series, is finally available for preorder here. If you order now, it’ll mysteriously drop onto your Kindle on May 22. I don’t know how that works. I think it’s some sort of magic. It scares me a little. And excites me too. Kinda like my husband.

For you old-school types, the print edition of Charlotte’s Website should also be available on May 22. Although this whole pandemic thing has meant no in-person book signings or book festivals, I can still send you an autographed bookplate sticker thingy to put inside a print copy of any of my books. Ask for one (or more!) here. I won’t even make you beg… much. Just remember: these are for print books. Don’t put a sticker on your Kindle. It will end badly.

Next week, you can easily (and economically) catch up on the entire Red Ink Mysteries series by taking advantage of sales on both of the previous books in the series. Can’t you feel the excitement?

https://amzn.to/35S1lAF <—-Find The Scarlet Letter Opener HERE!
https://amzn.to/35SDLDK <—-Find The Tell-Tale Heart Attack HERE!

Mark your calendar. Set an alarm on your phone. Tell all your friends. Throw a socially distanced party. Drive around your neighborhood with banners attached to your car.

Whatever you do, don’t miss these sales!

And while you’re buying and reading and buying some more, I’ll be feverishly working on more books. It’s not like I have anything better to do these days. It’s either more writing… or quarantine baking… or <shudder> housecleaning.

I’ll choose the writing every time.

And you, my friend, should choose to read. I can think of a few books you might be interested in…