Murder in Soft Words is complete and available as an e-book. You can buy it, and all my books, over at my new storefront on Curios. If you prefer to purchase it at one of the "major" stores, this universal book link will take you where you want to go. If you're looking for paperbacks, they're still available at my site here.

Curios is a great site for purchasing books, audiobooks, and video. You get DRM-free art that you can use on any device. Creator get to keep 100% percent of the sale and know who their supporters are. (Amazon, Apple, Kobo, etc. don’t provide use with names or emails of purchasers.)

So, my prices are lower on Curios and you get DRM-free copies of books, instead of a "license" to read (or listen) inside someone's app.

The paperback for Murder will be available in a few weeks.

Story Ideas Are Easy

So, with Murder done, it's finally time to start on the first book in the new series I'm currently calling Project Alemanni. While I plan on returning to the Great War of the Worlds in the future, I need a break from that world.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard published authors say that ideas are easy, it's execution that's hard. Back before I wrote my first few books I thought they were wrong. I believed ideas were rare and that once you had one, a book would spring into the world fully formed, like Athena bursting from the forehead of Zeus.

But those writers were right. I had to fail to finish one novel and take a couple of years to finish a second to learn my lesson. Or to be more accurate, live it.

I'm haunted by ideas. Dogged by them. I have a collection of notebooks filled with characters, scenes, plots, and worlds. Every week ends with an assortment of unread emails to myself, each filled with one or more incomplete sentences describing another cool concept. Sometimes they're about my current work in progress. More often, they're tempting me to set the current project aside and move on to another, shinier, thing.

Fortunately, I've been able to ignore their siren calls and finish one story before moving on to the next. Switching mid-book is a great way to never finish anything. Chase two rabbits, catch none.

On The Run

But let's get back to ideas versus execution. Imagine you want to tell a story with two timelines. One is the present day, in a world very much like ours. The other is Europe back in the 1500s.

Cool, huh? All kinds of opportunities for juxtaposition. Marvel at how things have changed. Sob quietly as you notice that more haven't.

This setup is easy to describe, but difficult to flesh out into a cohesive tale. Let's say you want to have your characters on the run for a few scenes in the second act.

Hey! You could do that in both timelines! Your little idea factory says. In the present, they're on the run from a government teetering on the edge of totalitarianism. (I wonder what that looks like.) While in the past, your heroes are fleeing from the soldiers of a tyrannical city-state. It's not just a recipe for dramatic tension and insightful commentary, it's efficient, too! You're a coder. You love efficient!

Is it, though?

Staying hidden today is nigh impossible. Go ahead, ditch your phone, use cash, and head for the woods. But you still need to avoid cameras on everything from doorbells to gas pumps just to get to the woods. And many of those devices are connected to cloud providers that will happily turn over footage to the police, who in turn funnel those images right into facial recognition databases. Oh, and you need to flee to the trees without triggering all those Flock cameras, too. And, even if they don't get a license plate, they might be listening to your conversations.

Meanwhile back in the Renaissance, it's the opposite problem. Walk or ride out of town. Keep going. Wear a hood. Grow a beard. Cut your hair. Stay away from, uh, portrait artists with photographic memories? Done and dusted.

So in one case, you need to create a believable way for your characters to make any kind of run for it at all. How do you create dramatic tension when, by all rights, your character shouldn't be able to make it across town? In the other, you need to create a reason for your characters to not just ride right out of your book.

To be clear, this isn't a lamentation about how tough it is to write a book. Solving these problems is fun and just writing these couple of paragraphs already helped me come up with some answers.

Holiday Shopping!

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're here, you like reading. So how about some holiday deals on books?

Shadows of the Past, is available as part of the Smashwords 2025 End of Year Sale! This is a chance to get my book, along with books from many other great authors, at a promotional discount.

You can find the promo here: http://smashwords.com/sale

Smashwords is the OG independent online bookstore. Like my shop, books you buy there are yours. You get DRM-free copies that you can read on any device you want.

And, if you wouldn’t mind lending a hand to me and the other indie authors taking part in this sale, you can share this promo with your friends and family. Just forward this email to anyone who would love a chance to find their next favorite book!

Free Ebooks

What's better than "on sale"? Free!

The Jingle Bells and Magic Spells giveaway is on right now, and there's a ton of great reads in there! Grab a few over here to read over the holidays, or as gifts for your favorite reader!

Happy Holidays! See you next year.