Hot New eBook Cover

 

 Photo by Emily Morter

Why place a question mark on a collection of short horror stories? I'm not. But since Draft2Digital bounced my old cover for murky reasons, I've been compelled to commission a new one. So far, I'm liking the new direction.

Still trouble with Facebook. Now it requires a new password every time I try to log in, insisting that the current p-word is old or unrecognizable. Every time. Even if I just changed it the last time I logged onto either my personal account and/or author page. Every stinking time.

Click Contact Me on my JP Mac website. Send an email and I'll fill you in on launch details. I'm still thinking an ebook release on December 26 on Amazon and Draft2Digital. Softcover books should be along around mid-January 2021.

Other than that, everything's dishy.

Fifteen Years Ago on Thanksgiving Day

Ancient Blogging: 2005

Yes, the Internet Existed Then

I was living in a house and training for my first marathon. I'd been blogging for ten days at this point and didn't think much of it.  Here's what I had to say:

This morning I met some chums from Team in Training. We ran a 5K (3.1 mile) race in La Cañada, a northern LA suburb. I'd driven through there several times. The little hills sloped gradually, so it appeared. I predicted EZ running. Oh, they were sly, unpleasant hills. Steeper than they looked. Finish-time eaters. If it were possible, I'd cuff them sharply. 

This was very much a neighborhood race: families, parents with strollers, teenage girls running five across, and people running with leashed dogs — which I don't get. Walk the dog or run the race. Later, Ronald MacDonald — clown, spokesman, bon vivant — led youngsters in a warm up prior to a children's race. After that, a child warmed up Ronald MacDonald prior to a fast food spokesman's race. In any event, Happy Thanksgiving!

Despite sore arthritic knees, I'm grateful for the many good things in my life. And I still wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Facebook-Writing-Running Updates Galore

 Let's be clear: Facebook still sucks. I believe my Ad Blocker is the reason they're giving me so much grief of late. (This would be the Ad Blocker I've been using for years.) I can no longer administer my JP Mac Author Page without being told I need a new email. Once I change the email, I'm informed I need a new email. They task me, these beetling tech people, skulking behind their algorithms.

Look to the right of this page. You will see the title for Death Honk. My collection of nine short stories will go live on December 26. What an excellent chance to use the Christmas gift cards received from relatives too busy to inquire what you actually enjoy. Amazon goes live on that date. But thanks to Draft2Digital, there will be a preorder sale starting next week for purchases on on Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo and other sites. In the next few days I'll provide compelling information on how to interact with these mysterious, weird, shocking, humorous tales.

Now let your eyes stray down from the book cover. You will see a listing for Pages. There will be two listings. One will read: On the Road with JP Mac. After many years, I've created a separate page for my running updates. Visit, note the incidents, comment if you will. Change is in the air and in my pockets, jiggling merrily.

Happy B-Day, Devil Dogs!

 

Here's a short article commemorating the Marine Corps on their 235th birthday. Best wishes to all Leathernecks past and present. (Photo: Acclaim Images)    

Note: A decade has passed since the above post, hence 245th birthday would be more appropriate. 

Facebook Sucks

My author page is flawed. Click on it and see if you're taken to JP Mac's Author Page. You might be. Or you might see a page for Facebook business. 

This nonsense has been going on for months. The page won't load. I'm not allowed to administer. A stinking Facebook business page appears. My password is not recognized. My new password is not recognized. Furthermore, I'm not alone. Many small independent businesses are not being allowed in to their pages and can't get a helpful word from Facebook. 

I probably can't get in to cancel my own page.

On Facebook, I AM THE PRODUCT. Here are other depressing reasons why Facebook is no good. 

For now, I'll direct traffic to my website. But there must be something better out there. I will investigate. 

Pinterest 

Conquer Catalina Island Virtual Challenge

Conquer Catalina Island Virtual Challenge: The Conquer Catalina Island Virtual Challenge is on Thursday October 1, 2020 to Thursday December 31, 2020.

I sneered at such activities as a virtual challenge. But in the absence of true road races, my wife, Joy, and I are onboard for a hundred miles. In return for our efforts, we receive durable electronic trophies plus a tee-shirt.

What's amazing is that even a fey virtual challenge goads my big ass out of the chair and onto the road. I'm running a bit more per week, gradually increasing speed.

So on we go. I'm over 30 miles, a quarter finished. Updates here on this fine blog. 

 

Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

 

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt is assassinated in Miami. Isolationism dominates American politics. The Nazis prevail in North Africa and link up with the Japanese in India. Russia collapses. Washington D.C. disintegrates under a Nazi hydrogen bomb. World War II ends in 1947 with Germany, Japan (and Italy) victorious.

Such is the world of 1962 San Francisco where curio salesman Robert Childan labors to please his mostly Japanese clients. Among them are Nobusuke Tagomi, an influential trade minister whose career is guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching.

Also dependent on the book's forecasts is judo instructor Juliana Frink. She lives in a puppet buffer zone between the Japanese West Coast and the German-controlled Mid-West, South and East. An encounter with a man claiming to be an Italian truck driver leads Juliana to read a fascinating—yet banned—book in which the allies win the second world war.

Using rapid POV shifts, Dick whisks us between characters as Juliana's husband struggles back in San Francisco to manufacture original jewelry while hiding his Jewish blood. At the same time, Juliana and the truck driver set off on a road trip to locate the banned book's author. Meanwhile, Tagomi facilitates a meeting between Japanese and German intermediaries working to derail a diabolical plot that could plunge the world into another terrible war.

Dick parcels out the backstory while keeping the narrative hot. His shifts in POV sometimes lost me, as did his stylized dialogue for certain inner monologues. And I wasn't sure what role the I-Ching played, other than to suggest the future is fluid, other worlds possible.

As one character mulls, "Evidently we go on, as we always have. . . . But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step."

Great alternative history with a tart blend of science fiction and mysticism.

View all my reviews

Book Review: The Disappeared

 

The Disappeared by Roger Scruton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In and around the Angel Towers housing project five lives intertwine: two men, two women, and a young girl. In a decaying society, these characters seek safety, freedom, love, and meaning. Around them, the customs and traditions of England are being overwritten by multiculturalism, as well as dark new practices that exploit the gaps in a society struggling with mass immigration from tribal cultures.

Powerful and disturbing, this fiction weaves together the characters' fates in a world where the past is fading and the future seems dismally opaque. As teacher Stephen concludes, "The Christian religion, he decided, was the heart of our civilization. This heart had grown old and weak, and culture had been put in the place of it. But the heart transplant didn't take, and our civilization, after gasping for a while, had died."

Stephen finds himself drawn toward protecting a young student, Sharon, from a rape gang. In doing so, he soon experiences emotional conflict that, if unchecked, could destroy his career and land him in jail.

At the same time, Justin, a rising star in the field of green energy, becomes enamored with beautiful intelligent Muhibbah. Having spurned her Afghan family's suffocating ways, Muhibbah seemed destined to excel in modern society. But Justin soon learns, that this enchanting woman is a hive of unwholesome secrets.

At the same time, accountant Laura flees the embers of a dashed romance, going to work for Justin. But her safety is jeopardized after a criminal element mistakes Laura for another woman.

Scruton's deep, well-crafted tale eventually comes full-circle. And while I had some difficulty with the time frame, and the puzzling use of second person for one character, the author's ability to forge empathy was excellent.

The writing is powerful. The imagery strong as in this passage describing Angel Towers: "All the surfaces were covered with the same black graffiti, a repeated pattern that, in its meaninglessness, seemed to exude a bestial anger. It was as though worms had been spat on this wall, spoiling its unclaimed spaces, and preventing any human thought from breeding there."

A suitable read for lovers of literature, as well as a good book for discussions of our post-modernist world.

View all my reviews

Awesome News Site Proves You're Always Right

Ryan Long introduces the ultimate news page that dispenses with old school truth, objectivity and facts to unearth what really counts online: always being spot-on politically. 

Ryan Long

Publishing . . . and Other Forms of Insanity and the Public Square

 Erica Verrillo puts out a blog called Publishing. . . and Other Forms of Insanity. I like this blog. I look forward to it every month. As a writer, I appreciate this trove of writing and publishing information, updated regularly. I sold a short story last year thanks to a tip on Erica's blog.

But this month on page one, instead of publishers seeking unagented manuscripts or best places to have a crime novel reviewed, Erica chose to editorialize. (And why not? It's her blog.) As Erica prefaced in "Art Does Not Apologize . . . And Neither Do I":

Over the past three and a half years, I have gotten a number of comments regarding my critical stance on Trump, expressed mildly at the top of my blog with the statement: ". . . in the interest of protecting the 1st Amendment, she did not vote for Trump." I've been repeatedly admonished, sometimes with a great deal of anger, to "just stick to writing." Politics, I have been told, should have no place on my blog.

Erica chose to believe she was being told to mind her own business and not speak out. Erica then proceeded to speak out.

I think she may've missed the point her readers were making.

The cobbler who repairs your shoes under a banner proclaiming his political opinions is inviting comment. The sign outside might say, "Cobbler Shop. Shoes Fixed." It probably doesn't say, "Cobbler Shop. Shoes Fixed. Plus Free Political Opinions." You want your footwear resoled. The political opinion, then, feels gratuitous, since you entered the shop for one reason and found yourself subjected to question-begging statements that had nothing to do with your original business.

George Orwell wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Erica is free to editorialize politically on a publishing blog.

Her readers are free to present their thoughts on such a mash-up.

If liberty is to mean anything at all.

Dark Anthology Finally Coming Soon

 MAC'S DONE IT!

Six years ago I was convinced that I'd publish a dark anthology. A dark urban anthology. In fact, I was writing like a dervish, churning out copy at a rapid rate. But then Old Man Cancer came a'knocking and my writing—along with my health—cratered.

Well, my health is much improved and the copy is finally churned; nine stories at the starting gate with an eye to a December release. (Ebook only with the softcover arriving—God willing—in spring of 2021.) The stories do not match my 2014 line-up. Not all the tales occur in an urban setting. Nonetheless, in many respects, readers will benefit, thanks to a half dozen more years writing practice.

Right now I'm hustling to finish the front and back matter as well as seeing the 31,000-plus word manuscript receives a copy edit. 

At the same time, I'm setting up preorders on Amazon and Smashwords.

At the same time, I hustle for reviews.

Here's a draft of the blurb:

Mayhem, Monsters, Madness! 

Trespass boundaries, stray into eerie dimensions, mingle with the sinister and the lost in nine peculiar tales by award-winning author JP Mac. 

 Meet a naïve publisher drawn onto a path that could lead to the annihilation of Earth. Witness a high school student pay a crippling price for popularity. Watch a struggling director’s pursuit of a mysterious woman lead to enslavement in a twilight realm. Travel to a bizarre sporting event where a desperate young man must choose between self-respect or cosmic absurdity. 

 Five stories were published between 2010 and 2019, while an additional four were written especially for this collection. So park your body and throw your imagination into drive as weird adventures await.

***

More on this latest publishing odyssey quite soon.

Oh, and, at the same time, I shall keep writing another short story. One single-spaced page a day.