I’m not going to make this site yet another unheard voice with a political bent. Detective Sergeant Shmuley Myers has too many real-world situations in my books to deal with for me to get distr—ooh, squirrel! My ex-brother-in-law is a constitutional law scholar, who’s been involved in several of the pivotal cases put before the . . .
Category: Shmuley Myers Mysteries
On fiction, reality, and fantasy
The Shmuley Myers books are in an alternate reality, where a constitutional amendment in America means that citizenship is awarded at the time of conception. Those folks of the XX chromosomal variety can see how this turns every non-term or non-live pregnancy into a murder investigation. And that follow-on legislation broke the separation of church . . .
Publishing In a Milieu Resembling My Fiction
A Day at the Zoo focuses on the subject of the unintended consequences of violating the barrier between church and state. It was intended to show the absurdity of trying to assign citizen to non-living tissue. (If this sounds like “pro-life” or “anti-abortion” flag waving, it’s not: it’s a point of view from someone who . . .
Publicity and Current Realities
I was speaking with someone from a publicity agency and, after they reviewed some of the materials, the told me they were pro-life and was that a problem. A main premises of the book is the Constitutional Amendment that “life begins at conception, and citizenship is awarded at that time.” The series deals with what . . .
Cover and Art for A Question of Allegiance
The editor has yet to return my manuscript (it’s not due back for another week or three). In the meantime, it’s back to figuring out how to create the cover for A Question of Allegiance (AQoA for short). I messed up. When creating the cover for A Day at the Zoo, I envisioned something with . . .
Lurching Back to Life
Restart with a Goal Being an author with both a life and another full-time job makes adding the social media aspect hard. Add to that writing a series as well as working on other manuscripts, and you’ve got one overloaded human. But I’m going to try anyway. Starting with getting a team together: I’ve started . . .
Release, oh sweet (pre-)release! [edited]
While I’m currently wrestling on getting the paperback edition up, the kindle version is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’ll be on KDP for the first 90 days at least. Gudrun did a great job on the inside — much slicker than I’d expected, and I did have expectations, thankyouverymuch. The aforementioned paperback grappling was, . . .
Closing in on Launch!
Pagesetting is complete. Gudrun, who did the book’s cover, did the internal layout as well. ; here’s a sample from the beginning of the book: The walking man icon is taken from the cover, and appears at the top of each chapter. I’m a bit worried about the Hebrew-esque font for chapter and scene headings, . . .
Cover Reveal
The cover’s done. It was an interesting evolution. If you’re looking for plot or characters, this isn’t the post for you. It hopefully shows the evolution of a cover from simplistic ideas to a finished, professional product. I learned a lot, most importantly that while I’ve got some very small graphics skills, and initially was . . .