Some 99 Cent Special Offers this Summer

Over the next few weeks I've scheduled reduction in price of some of my novels to 99 cents for a week at a time. The first which started yesterday and ends June 7 is for The Fat Cat. I began "The Fat Cat" as a noir novel, but I never know the conclusion of a work when I start. I don't think it ended up as a noir piece. I don't know what it is. I hope a good read. Ellie ran away from the city where she worked as a TV reporter because two things happened. Now, managing a gentleman's club, one of those things is happening again. (You know you're curious what goes on at a strip club, now aren't you?) By the way, cat fans, Gibson, an orange tabby, is the mascot of the strip club called "The Fat Cat." He's also saves the day.

June 8 to 15 StopTime is at 99 cents. It's set in an alternate future history in the Kansas City Plaza Enclave. The barbarians are outside the walls. Also living in Scumtown is a Wiccan healer who has a spell that stops time. And that could change everything. Especially for a student artist living inside the Enclave.

June 15 to 22nd is the 99 cent slot for Dark Side of the Museum. Set in an unnamed art history museum somewhere west of New York City, Dark Side offers a touch of paranormal and a pinch of time travel for an outrageously fun read. Objects conservationist Edgar finds an strange object inside an antique piece of furniture that will take him on a ride he could never anticipated. Meet the Director and curators of the museum who are cast of unforgettables in their own right. Don't miss the cheesecake contest day. (You know you're curious about what goes on behind the scenes at an art museum, now aren't you?)

July 4 (my birthday!) to July 11 Crazy About You is on sale for 99 cents. Write about what you know, they say. I grew up on the grounds of Larned State Hospital because my father was the dentist for that 1,500 patient nut house and the State provided housing on the grounds. My first job was working in the cafeterias dish washing room. Crazy relates one week in the life of a high school junior that will grow him up faster than he could have ever wanted. Several readers have asked me how much of it is real. Upset me at first. Did they think it was just journalism or memoir and I had no creative imagination. Then I realized it was a high compliment. The writing created a reality for them. And that's always been my goal with fiction.

July 11 to 18 I'll feature Very Quirky Tales, a collection of sci-fi and other, well, quirky tales. Tell Us Everything is my kind of homage to Philip K. Dick. It's also centered around an unnamed academic medical center and health professionals should find it fun. It Was Me (I) would have made a neat Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode. The Notebook is a story no reader yet as foretold the ending. The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley is my homage to H.P. Lovecraft and one reviewer said it "out-Lovecrafted Lovecraft." A Match Made in Heaven is a tale of the Mormons emigrating from Earth to the Planet Moroni where they discover their destiny. By Pain Possessed: Can the weakest human save us all. It has an ending which the sci-fi writer James Gunn actually provided me when I submitted the story for his class.

STOPTIME, a post-apocalyptic tale, now published, set in an alternate Kansas City

StopTime had a really tortuous creation path. I don't keep logs on my writing. I think the idea of the novel was planted in my head when I read an item in The New Yorker that I used to open the novel:

We are not poor as a people, yet somehow we have become bankrupt as a society. We are—to use an old-fashioned word—ruined. And yet how this ruin is possible—how it has come about—no one can explain.....we have come to accept that...violence, impoverishment, squalor, and cruelty will rule, and that the most we can do is to keep them at bay...

Notes and Comment

The New Yorker

Aug. 5, 1991

It really felt in 1991 that things were falling apart. I envisioned a post-apocalyptic story, which are now rampant, but mine would have an odd twist. Inside a protected enclave―and of course I chose the Kansas City Plaza area―would be a student artist, a realist painter, who suddenly encountered a stop time experience. Everything around him had stopped in time. The only other example of using that device in fiction at that time that I knew of was John D. MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything.

If you have a stop time event, there must be some plausible reason and I chose a Wiccan healer outside the walls of the enclave that is called Scumtown. She casts a spell using one of the longest palindromes in Latin, a special candle, and a particular painting. It turns out the student artist in the enclave painted the canvas and thus is unaffected by the spell.

In fiction, when you create a world instead of describing the world we are in things get tricky. You want the new reality to be believable. That took time to figure out. The number of characters also grew and that gets complicated, too. Then I had to throw in a steam engine train expedition out of the KC Enclave into the wilds of Kansas where it goes through Herrington and encounters a different kind of Roman Catholic community and finally reaches Hutchinson where in the salt mine storage spaces it finds unbelievable treasure.

Creating the society of the KC Enclave, the warring factions outside, the odd events that can occur during and after a stop time event, well, it took a long time. I finally finished it (although the ending seems to beg for a sequel) last summer. And just let it sit. I had, have, many doubts about it. We'll see what the response is. If there is a response to StopTime.

Meanwhile I'm deep into another work that looks promising. A sort of comedy I've tentatively titled Dark Side of the Museum, set in an unnamed art museum somewhere west of New York City.