Critiquing books while you're querying

I run a blog where I analyze books from a writing perspective to find a lesson, of sorts, for other writers. Mostly the posts show what a book did right, but occasionally they highlight where (I thought) the book went wrong. How careful do I need to be about highlighting negative aspects? I'm passionate about what I read, good or bad, and that (should) show in my writing. But I don't want to alienate a potential agent if I disliked a book they repped- especially since the main point of my posts isn't to review a story, but to learn from it.

You're right to know this is squishy territory. I am very fond of my clients, and the books they write. However, I do not confuse that fondness with the idea that all the books they write are perfect.

A judicious post, pointing out what worked or didn't, is generally safe ground.

What ISN'T safe is drawing any kind of conclusion about how the book got that way. To wit "the author phoned it in" "the editor was asleep at the wheel" "the agent lost her mind when she signed this one."

You have no way of knowing what went on behind the scenes creatively or editorially.

Focusing on the book is your best plan.

You should also remember that if I love your work, and sign you as a client, all my OTHER clients will be skulking around your blog to learn about you. A lot of my clients are in a mutual admiration society, which I strongly encourage.

What that means for you is:  Make sure the author of the book you're talking about will recognize it as a thoughtful, well-written piece, not some sort of hatchet job (at least after the first read!)

What you're also not going to do -- EVER --  is tweet or link to the author or editor or agent about this review.

It's one thing to know there are critical reviews out there; it's another thing to have someone put a reference to it in your timeline.

Your very hesitation on this tells me you'll err on the correct side of caution.

And remember; all the books I sell are AMAZING!

Orphan X flash fiction writing contest

Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I read the ARC last year and it blew me away. I emailed the editor with my version of a rave review: "holy fuckamoli!"

I have a brand new finished copy of Orphan X to give away as the prize in this week's flash fiction contest!

(Sorry, the author is not included in the prize)

The usual rules apply:

1. Write a story using 100 words or fewer.

2. Use these words in the story:

ore
fan
ex
her
wits


3. You must use the whole word, but that whole word can be part of a larger word. The letters for the
prompt must appear in consecutive order. They cannot be backwards.
Thus: ore/bore is ok, her/hear is not

4. Post the entry in the comment column of THIS blog post.

5. One entry per person. If you need a mulligan (a do-over) erase your entry and post again. It helps to work out your entry first, then post.

6. International entries are allowed, but prizes may vary for international addresses.

7. Titles count as part of the word count (you don't need a title)

8. Under no circumstances should you tweet anything about your particular entry to me. Example: "Hope you like my entry about Felix Buttonweezer!" This is grounds for disqualification.

9. It's ok to tweet about the contest generally.
Example: "I just entered the flash fiction contest on Janet's blog and I didn't even get a lousy t-shirt"

10. Please do not post anything but contest entries. (Not for example "I love Felix Buttonweezer's entry!")

11. You agree that your contest entry can remain posted on the blog for the life of the blog. In other words, you can't later ask me to delete the entry and any comments about the entry at a later date.

12. The stories must be self-contained. That is: do not include links or footnotes to explain any part of the story. Those extras will not be considered part of the story.


Contest opens: Saturday 2/6/16 at 10am EST

Contest closes: Sunday 2/7/16 at 10am EST

Is the contest closed yet?

If you'd like to see the entries that have won previous contests, there's
an .xls spread sheet here in my Dropbox account: http://tinyurl.com/gm73669

(Thanks to Colin Smith for organizing and maintaining this!)

Questions? Tweet to me @Janet_Reid
Ready? SET?

Not yet!

Sorry, contest now closed!


 

List of craft books-updated

Last week I mentioned a new book I was recommending (Beautiful Sentences by Barbara Baig) and asked if readers had other favorite, tried and true craft books.

Of course you did!

I thought a complete list would be a good idea, so I fired up the Excellerator and herewith. The books that are highlighted are ones you didn't mention, to my utter shock and dismay! I'm a devoted fan of Natalie Goldberg's books, and the Shawn Coyne book is one that is also high on a lot of writers' lists. (It tells you something interesting about me that I remembered the title as Kill the cat, not Save the cat.)

And if you want to download the list: click here for the google doc.

Updated list that includes books from the comment section: Updated list

Holiday gift suggestions for difficult people

I'm everyone's least favorite person to draw for Secret Santa. For years, I told my family to forgo buying anything other than gift certificates for me. I'm just the worst about what I like and what I don't. And nothing is worse than getting something you know the giver tried hard to get right. So, in the spirit of the holiday season, if you have someone like me on your list, here are some ideas.

THING EXPLAINER by Randall Munroe.

I love love love this book. It explains complicated stuff (how does an elevator work, how does a plane fly, how do pens work!) which is always interesting BUT il it explains all this stuff in "simple words" ie the most common thousand words, or really the most common "ten hundred" words.



You can read this book with little kids, or give it to big kids because even though the language is simple, it's not patronizing or talking down to the reader.

It would also be perfect for anyone for whom English is a second (or third!) language and is still on some of the basics.



Also by this author: WHAT IF: serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions which is perfect for your conspiracy minded uncle, or everyone you know in 4th grade.

Blame Robert Crais (for why the WIR is late)

Normally I tackle the week in review on Saturday morning.
It's one of my favorite things to do, so not much can divert me from it.

This week, one thing did.

I got an ARC of THE PROMISE by Robert Crais.

Now, I've known Bob Crais for a long time, and I am a DEVOTED fan of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. I've read all of the early Elvis Cole novels more than once.

In recent years though, I've been a bit of a slacker fan. I'd discovered other writers that I needed to know to stay current, and I don't have as much reading time as I wish I did for authors I love as a fan.

But, when Jon Jordan extolled the THE PROMISE on Twitter, I tweeted back with a sad face that I didn't have a copy of the book. And Jon, being a VERY nice friend, sent me his ARC when he was done.

And that, dear reader, is why the Week in Review is going to be late.

THE PROMISE is like reconnecting with a beloved old friend. Like going home for Christmas after years away. Like rediscovering a favorite restaurant that has only gotten better in the years you've been off sampling fusion cuisine.

I may have been a slacker fan in years gone by, but never again. Robert Crais is the cat's pajamas. Elvis' cat's pajamas in fact.

Have you rediscovered an old favorite after a time away?

2014 Sox Knocker list-first item

It's time for the list of things that just knocked my sox off this year!

First up is THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK: The Battle for James Joyce Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham.

Frankly, this guy could probably write about paint drying and I'd be fascinated. He's got a real gift for exposition and it serves him well in this complex story of author, publisher, smut laws, and anarchists.

If you're a writer, you'll want to read this to learn more about James Joyce and the novel. If you're on the other side of the desk, you'll want to read it for the story of how hard it was to publish difficult books in the early part of the last century.

And if you're neither of those, you'll still want to read it cause it's just a great story, well told.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs (there were many)

[Despite all of this] she [Sylvia Beach] decided that Shakespeare & Co. a company of one, after all, of a thirty-four-year-old American expatriate who was until recently sleeping on a cot in the back room of a diminutive bookshop on a street nobody could find--would issue the single most difficult book anyone had published in decades. It would be monstrously large, prohibitively expensive and impossible to proof read. It was a book without a home, an Irish novel written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, to be published in France in riddling English by a bookseller from New Jersey.

The highest praise I can think of for this book is that it made me eager to read Ulysses.

Vacation Reading!

Ranchero by Rick Gavin was a hoot.

A little short on plot, but I barely noticed cause the writing is so good and the characters are beyond memorable.

Here's an example of a total throw away character, a dog who appears exactly once in the book:

The neighbor off the back has some kind of short-haired dog with three legs and one eye and a sour disposition.  He looked like a veteran of the Great War.  I know him a little. His name was Rusty.  I'd made his acquaintance a few months back when he'd spent about thirty-six straight hours barking at a stump.  I think Rusty's remaining eye was clouded with cataracts, and just generally Rusty had lost all interest in caring what was what.

The main character Nick Reid is a repo man. He's hunting the ne'er do well who got the drop on him and made off with his borrowed coral colored Ranchero.

Here's what happens at one critical juncture:

Weary now, I raised the shotgun barrel toward the ceiling, more or less aimed it at an orange and black MOWING AHEAD sign, and squeezed off a shell without really thinking just what I was up to.

[I should mention here that the MOWING AHEAD sign is on the ceiling, not on the street.]

Lead pellets would have punched on through, and we'd have been left with just some instructive racket, but the little rubber balls I was shooting stayed in the house and went everywhere fast.  They hit that sign and came back down, bounced all over the place. They filled that room just like a swarm of hornets.

Those pellets hurt so much through my clothes I was doubly glad I wasn't standing around naked. Tommy [who was standing around naked] for his part, balled up on the couch and ducked under his filthy blanket while Eugene [also naked] couldn't think of a thing to do but wail and leap and dance.

"What the hell did you do that for?" Luther wanted to know.

"Crazy son-of-a-bitch," Percy Dwayne added.

Tommy came out from under his blanket to add a few choice words as well. Eugene just whined and flopped around on the floor.

Like most rash things I get up to, that one hadn't been helpful.

Even Desmond, after a great while, told me, "Let's don't be doing that again."

This book conveys place (the Mississippi Delta) so beautifully that I felt like I lived there. The rhythm of the prose is gorgeous, nary a misstep.

It's funny without being comic or over the top, and gorgeously written without standing around admiring itself in the mirror.

I loved it.  You might too.

Ordering books from international authors

 The second book by Marie Phillips (she wrote the hilarious Gods Behaving Badly) doesn't have a US publisher yet. This strikes me as 1) a goddamn travesty, and 2) an opportunity for you to help writers and readers Read and Sell Without Borders.

How should readers buy books from international authors when publishers in their own countries haven't seen the light?

Shop on Amazon.co.uk  and pay international shipping?

Please become Queen of the Known Universe ASAP and address this grievous humanitarian issue.
 

oh my dears, I weep with shame that I have not mentioned BookDepository.com where one can order all sorts of books and get free shipping.

However, unless my eyes deceive me, I can't find any other books by Marie Phillips.  

I'll see your Florida, and raise you the Atlantic!

I thought Warren Richey's story of  the Ultimate Florida Challenge, a water race around the state of Florida (recounted in WITHOUT A PADDLE) was pretty darn amazing. Seems like the stakes for amazing just got raised!

Adam Rackley's SALT, SWEAT, TEARS: The Men Who Rowed the Oceans, fewer people have rowed across the Atlantic than have climbed Everest; the author is among them; for 70 days he and his rowing partner ate, slept and rowed in a boat seven metres long and two metres wide, in one of the world's most extreme environments; this is his story of adventure, endurance and self-discovery and the history of those that came before them, to Patrick Nolan at Penguin, for publication in Fall 2014, by Kate Burton at Penguin UK on behalf of Alex Christofi at Conville & Walsh (NA).

And here's some video of them just for fun (it's almost an hour long but well worth it)

What I'm Reading: Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

 

"One would need to return to the Dark Ages or the depredations of Genghis Khan to find a war as devastating. By point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe--colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars--and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. 

"Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number.  

"In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks.  In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of it's military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913-1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven.  

"So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day's casualty rolls--with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded--it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world--and judge that the numbers "cannot be considered severe."

"The effect of all this on the collective European psyche would be utterly profound. Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.

"In the process, though, the European public would come to question some of the most basic assumptions about their societies.  Among the things they would realize was that, stripped of all its high-minded justifications and rhetoric, at its core this war had many of the trappings of an extended family feud, a chance for Europe's kings and emperors--many of them related by blood--to act out old grievance and personal slights atop the heaped bodies of their loyal subjects. 

"In turn, Europe's imperial structure had fostered a culture of decrepit military elites--aristocrats and aging war heroes and palace sycophants--whose sheer incompetence on the battlefield, as well as callousness toward those dying for them, was matched only by that of their rivals. 

 

"Indeed, in looking at the conduct of the war and the almost preternatural idiocy displayed by all the powers, perhaps its most remarkable feature is that anyone finally won at all."

Happy Sunday Reading

The incoming mail turned up a nice note recently from a blog reader:

"Since I recently provided an unintentional assist in a club soda purge of your nasal passages (removes stains from carpets and table linens, TOO!) I thought I might be forgiven for bringing a favorite parable to your attention. (I confess to being a bit disillusioned that you admitted in cold print to have been drinking club soda - which I think of as Vodka-Helper™).

I know from reading your blog that you read widely outside your cherished (felonious, blood-spattered) genres, so while recently re-reading Jean Giono's "The Man Who Planted Trees" for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that you might appreciate this taut and lovely little tale.

I expect that it is likely that you have already read it, but on the off chance you haven't, I include a link."

http://www.aprendendoingles.com.br/ebooks/the_man_who_planted_trees.pdf

I had not read it, but have now.

A lovely lovely story for a Sunday afternoon.

Happy Reading!

"I became a reader of the exiled books"--Jonathan Lethem

Here's my favorite Jonathan Lethem story.  Long before he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, or the MacArthur genius grant for being ..well...amazing,
Jonathan Lethem was an author on book tour.

I met him out in the hinterlands when he was touring for AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE.  I'd read about 30 pages of it.  I loved it. It was full of physics and science and it was hilarious.

I nattered on about physics and various physicist's books I'd loved but Jonathan Lethem didn't have much to say. Well, maybe he's just bored with people talking science to him, or he's tired I thought. No matter.

He signed the book and off I went.

Only as I continued reading did I realize the book is a satire.  All the science is made up stuff. Jonathan Lethem didn't know a quark from a quack.  When I figured that out I laughed so hard at myself I had to go out and buy the rest of his books.

And when I ended up reading MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN about two blocks from the epicenter of the novel, well, that became one of my all time favorite  Why I love Living in NYC moments.

Here's a great interview with a wonderful author about how he works.  There's a series of these at the Daily Beast that are worth your reading time as well.

Meowmazing!

Sorche Fairbank, one of my most treasured colleagues has an amazing ability to spot interesting and unusual books.  Her office shelf (I should snap a photo next time I'm there!) is a treasure trove of books I've loved.


The latest book is Whiskerslist: the kitty classifieds!

I love this book so much I'd purr if sharks could.

Angie Bailey the author was kind enough to include an entry from me as well so the book is extra fun (when you buy it, you'll know which one it is.)

160 hilarious classified ads written for cats, by cats, whiskerslist reveals the inner lives of our favorite furry friends like never before. With categories ranging from "Personals" and "Gigs" to "Lost & Found" and "Help Wanted," the varied posts in this entertaining cat community provide an imaginative and entertaining look into what cats are really up to when left alone. 

Hurray!

I love publishing success stories, don't you?

I particularly love the ones that arrive in my mailbox with some kind words for this blog, Chum Bucket, or QueryShark!



Thus it was that Christi Corbett made my day with this:

 During the 13 years it took me to go from initial idea to contract I searched for all the publishing information I could find, which is why I'm a long-time follower of your blog. I sincerely appreciate you sharing your knowledge through your posts, the Chum Bucket, and QueryShark. Thanks to your feedback, I knew it was finally time to quit fiddling with the query and go for it.

I got 55 rejections before I queried Astraea Press, and then five more after I signed the contract, two more the week before it released, another on release day, and then another the day it hit #1 on the "Hot New Releases in Westerns".

It took so long because I had so much to learn, but I never gave up on my dream. Here's a link to "My Not So Glamorous Story of How I Got My Book Deal".  

I love the part where Christi holds a yard sale to fund her trip to a writer's conference.  Talk about tenacity!


I skedaddled over to Astreaea Press to buy the book.

Books by blog readers!

Some time back I posted a call for mystery submissions by a small Oregon press. And whaddaya know but one of the blog readers responded and will now have her debut novel published.

Am I happy about this?  Why yes I am!

And because I know you will be too, here's the link to pre-order a copy of TIP OF A BONE!

One of the best opening scenes I've ever read

 You want to get my attention? Write the first 3-5 pages of your novel with this kind of elegant full-tilt-boogie action and I'm all yours!



What the big accounting firms forget is, if someone's rigging the books, they're already lying to you. And the longer they've gotten away with it, the better they're going to be.

A good audit isn't a playdate with calculators. It's a hostile interrogation.

The Clay Micro offices were on the second floor of a converted industrial building.  Pittsburgh's local rust belt was right outside but state development funds had paid for a nice rehab, all exposed brick and granite columns.  Across a range of cubicles I could see interior glass overlooking the line floor.

"Sir? Sir?" A young woman behind the chrome reception desk, wireless earpiece blinking, tried to wave me down.  "Do you have---?"

"Here to see the chief." I smiled and finished removing my cap--I'd stretched it out an extra two seconds.  Long enough to keep my hand, and the hat itself, in front of my face while I crossed the ceiling camera's field.

"Is he expecting you?"

"Sure." I kept moving.

"Because I don't--"

"Thank you, Sharon." And I was in, headed for the executive suites at the end of the wing.

Hearing her name puzzled the receptionist an extra moment even though I'd simply read it off the nameplate on her desk.  But she was fast enough to dial up help.  Two young guys in suits arrived at the CEO's office the same time I did.  Not security but willing to pitch in.  One had a coffee cup in hand, and it spilled down his shirt as I shoved past and banged open the door.

The CEO twisted around in his leather chair, reading glasses falling off his nose, staring in pasty surprise.  "Wha--?"

I slammed the door in the face of my pursuers and said, rather loudly, "False invoices for ten point one million in Q4.   Your boss sent me, Brinker."

Then I opened the door again, stepped to the side and waited.

I'll give him this, Brinker was quick. He gestured at the two eager beavers bursting in and said without hesitation, "It's okay.  I need to talk to him. Back to work."

And five seconds later we were alone.  That told me something about his style.  He confirmed that our conversation was going to be harder than necessary when his next words to me were, "You're full of crap. The audit committee passed on those statements, and I've got signatures.  Understand?"

I sighed.

"You think I'm an accountant," I said.  "Here to cross-check invoices, review the bank reccs, that sort of thing.  Right?"

Brinker picked up his glasses and laid them on the gleaming hardwood desk, perhaps comforted by its vast size and width.  The office had that hushed, opulent feel of a hundred-grand interior design contract.  Thin gray light filtered through the windows, which must have created a glare problem on his plasma monitor, but which lit the room pleasantly.

"You can pound sand," he said.  "That's what I think."

I drew my Sig Sauer P2267 from its around-the-back holster.  It's a nice workaday handgun, pricey to be sure, but heavy, reliable and intimidating.  The suppressor made it look like something out of Hitman. Brinker, showing nice reflexes, immediately dove under the desk.  Without really aiming I shot out the monitor, his telephone console and for good measure the framed Harvard diploma on the wall.

Destroying the phone must have triggered an intercom or something.  The door flew open as Brinker pulled his way back up from the floor, glaring.  The two young men outside peered in suspiciously, but between the suppressor and the high-class soundproofing, I doubt they heard anything.  The Sig was already back under my jacket.

"Sorry, private meeting." I pushed the door shut again.

"All right." Brinker brushed broken plastic from the desk.  "You're not an accountant."

"Actually--well, never mind.  Ready to talk about revenue recognition?"

He was a tough nut. After several fruitless minutes, I opened the door and called out, "Where's the supply closet? We need a paper cutter."

The two men were still in the hallway, along with the receptionist.  The three of them stared back at me, uncertain.

I looked at Brinker.  "You want them to hear what we're talking about?"

He frowned and said past me, "Just do what he says. Sharon, you."

"Uh, sir, are you sure--?"

"Don't worry."  The son of a gun was getting confident again, which began to annoy me.  When Sharon brought up the paper cutter--a nice big one, a grid-marked platform with a two-foot swivel  blade--I locked the door and dumped it on Brinker's desk.

"Drop your pants," I said, and opened the blade.

--FULL RATCHET by Mike Cooper

Think Jack Reacher with an abacus.  FULL RATCHET is the second Silas Cade novel; the first, CLAWBACK, is damn good too.

ThrillerFest week haul

Lois Lane looks darn good for her age!

I swam uptown tonight to attend a reading for Brad Ricca and his new book SUPER BOYS: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster--The Creators of Superman.

It was a full house (sorry, I didn't get pictures, I was busy swilling a mocha frappucino, no whipped creme!) with lots of interested Superman fans.

I didn't get a chance to ask the question I'm always interested in knowing about authors who work with a single subject for many years: When you turned the book in to the editor for the final time was it the Empty Nest or "Hallelujah I'm done with those guys!"

The reading was really good, and that's not a given at these things.  Brad Ricca asked the audience if we wanted to hear about the NY Worlds' Fair in 1940 (the first time someone dressed up as Superman in public) or how Lois Lane got started.  The vote seemed even to me but Lois Lane was the winner, and Brad read a passage starting with this:

Across town, a girl pins her hair back, looks at her younger sisters and her tired, scrubbing mother, and wonders what her own future will hold. There is not much money, but she goes to the movies and sees a world that somehow seems more real than her own.  She writes for school newspaper and brings the papers home to show her dad, named Mike, who is covered in black from the steel mill.  His job will end soon. Her name is Jolan Kovacs, but nobody at school can say "Jolan" (her parents are Hungarian), so she goes by Helen.  That too will change.

She lives in Cleveland and times are tight and has little sisters so what she does is think as big as she can.  Even though she has no experience at this sort of thing, how hard could it be?  She's seen the movies and read all the magazines.  So she takes out an ad in the local paper and announces that she is a model and wants work.  She is really that interested, that desperate or just that something.  When her ad shows up in the paper, she reads it and laughs out loud.  She then gets a little scared.

The letters fly in.

Most of them are from guys looking for dates.  That makes her grimace but also smile just a bit. One is really bad.  She eventually gets to one letter that actually sound genuine.  It is from an artist, a cartoonist, who has been published, won contests and is seeking a model for a cartoon strip.  She likes the funnies, especially on Sundays, and thinks that wouldn't be too bad at all.  That might be perfect, actually.  She is impressed, so she writes him back.  His name is Mr. Joseph Shuster.

If I already hadn't grabbed a copy when I came in, I'd have hustled out to get one right then.

I started reading on the subway home, and this book is terrific!

Of course he's got blurbs from Neal Adams, a comic book artist, and Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man and X-Men.  Those are go-to guys for a book about comics.

But the blurb that caught my attention was from Tracy Daugherty cause Tracy Daugherty writes books I love.

"Super Boys details how two 'underdog' high school buddies seized the future and then lost it through their creation of Superman, a hero who ultimately could not protect them from the injustices at the heart of American business.  No square panels or word balloons can contain Ricca's gripping effervescence: It's headier than a bird or a plane or a speeding bullet."

You don't need to be a comics fan to find this book fascinating!

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

I got an advance reader's edition of FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL by Sheri Fink at the BEA Buzz Panel.  The presentation by her editor Vanessa Mobley led me to instruct  Trusty Minion Lizz to grab this one first.

I'm pretty sure this book will be on my year-end list of sox-knockers, and I'm only up to page 152 so far.

Here are a couple things to know:

1. I've had to stop reading it in public places like on the train to DC and the hotel breakfast cafe cause it's embarrassing to start weeping in public.

2. It made me want to  learn to fly helicopters.

3. It made me want to take up triage as a profession.

4:  "Green stood up and walked over to another patient.  She couldn't stand to watch this lady die on the ground, in a parking garage, in an American city, because nobody came to get her.  She didn't want to know this lady's name."

Music

There's a wonderful post at Crimespree by Steve Ulfelder on Five Albums That Changed My Life. I always like getting a peek into my clients lives this way, but the real revelation was the last album.

Here's what Steve says:

 
 Joe Ely – Satisfied at Last
"This is art by a full-grown man examining his life with, by turns, bemusement and sadness and pride. Ely lists his regrets great and small; he considers God and the afterlife; he tells stories with economy and heart. Every number is perfect.





Here’s the highest compliment I can pay: If Conway Sax, my series protagonist, were one hell of a talented musician, this is the record he would write. In fact, I hereby declare “I’m a Man Now,” the album’s next-to-last song, Conway’s theme:

I’m a man now, I ain’t no kid

I done some things I never should have did

I paid the price – my weight in pain

I’m a man now, I’m free of shame

I’ve been a runner for decades. I was once pretty serious about it, but I find myself running less and slower. For the past few years, if you want the truth, I’ve done nearly all my running at the local middle-school track, and only in warm weather.

So on the one hand, my runs are a sad sight: a fiftysomething man scuffling around, logging 12-minute miles.

But boy, do I love that track, my town, the view. There are the pretty ballfields, of course, and a wetlands area below. There’s the handsome school itself. And on every lap, I catch a glimpse of the steeple of my longtime church.


To run laps in a place you love. To run them slower and slower as the years pass. To reflect and recall and regret as you run, and to laugh at yourself about all of it.


I listen to Joe Ely as I run. I believe he would understand."




Steve's next novel in the Conway Sax series SHOTGUN LULLABY will be published on May 14. You can pre-order it here