I’m writing this in Delaware, back with my parents again, but thanks to the miracle of online computing, Bill will fix my mistakes and get this out to you, dear reader, on time.
My dad’s hanging on. My mom is coping. We’re managing.
I’ve mentioned before that we are living the dark side of the miracle of modern medical care. I am no longer surprised when I’m told that nursing homes and hospitals drug dementia patients or strap them to beds. The alternative is having them get up by themselves in the middle of the night and fall, tripping over those damned Foley bags and injuring themselves.
The other choice is the care facility assigns nursing staff on a one-to-one basis round the clock, because if Nurse Laura is assisting patient A, then she can’t be coping with patients B, C, and D, who are all up and screaming. No one wants to pay for that level of staffing: three or more aides per patient because the aides want to go home after an eight-hour shift and get a day off now and then.
There are reasons why care facilities do what they do and we’re learning them.
But we’re coping as best we can.
In the meantime, Bill and I are getting some things done.
First, we’re running a sale on Career Indie Author! The eBook is 99 cents for one week only, Monday, 21 March 2022 through Sunday, 27 March 2022.
If you’ve been hesitating to purchase a copy, here’s your chance. We’ve made a zillion mistakes teaching ourselves how to be indie authors so you can learn from them and save yourself money, time, and life energy. The eBook doesn’t have as much art as we stuffed into the trade paperback (file size issues) nor do you get all those wide margins to write notes on, but it’s all there, from the one-page-business plan to why you need to put your intellectual property in your will. You’ve done that already, right? If you haven’t, get thee to your lawyer.
By now, Bill should have published another find unearthed from the past: Harry M. Marks’s book An English Reporter in Gilded Age New York. It was originally published in 1882 as Small Change; or Lights and Shades of New York but we updated the title to make it clearer what the book’s about and easier to sell.
The Complete, Annotated Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie is out, in eBook and trade paperback. It’s loaded with art, footnotes, and everything else needed to enhance Anne Beddingfeld’s African Adventure. This piece of international intrigue and romantic suspense is not our last complete, annotated novel.
That’s going to be The Complete, Annotated Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Bill’s working hard on getting Roger Ackroyd done in time to debut it at Malice Domestic!
Yes, we’re going to Malice! If you’re unfamiliar with Malice Domestic, it’s a celebration of cozy mysteries for writers and readers, held annually in Bethesda MD. It’s hosted by Sisters in Crime. We attended for the first time in 2019 and had a great time. We expected to return in 2020, but, well, you know what happened. The world has reopened so we’ll be at Malice from Thursday, 21 April 22 until Sunday, 24 April 22. Look for us in the dealer’s room with all our books.
We’ll be featuring our complete, annotated series and debuting (if the fates allow) Roger Ackroyd. If you attend Malice, you’ll be able to examine our books in person and see why we call them complete and annotated.
This being Malice, we’ve got some specials ready. You’ll get a cloth tote bag (I sew them myself from remnants and they’re all limited editions) with your purchase and, new for Malice, a cloth bookmark (something else I sew and each one is unique) to mark your place.
We’ll also be testing a book bundle. We’ve got plenty of the 223B Casebook series. We usually sell individual titles at events for $15 each but exclusively for Malice, if you buy the complete set of eight volumes (Punch, Victorian, Edwardian I, Edwardian II, Great War I, Great War II, Jazz Age I and Jazz Age II) the cost is $80. That’s only $10 a book for trade paperbacks. If you want to ship your complete collection of vintage Sherlock Holmes fan fiction home rather than carry them on the plane, another $10 will cover the media mail shipping anywhere within the U.S. This is a great deal, and yes, we’ll throw in a tote bag and a bookmark.
We also need to do some inventory reduction on a few of our other titles (we changed the covers), so they’ll be heavily discounted.
Visit us in the dealer’s room at Malice and take a look! We’ll be bringing copies of all our books so you can see our range. We’ve got much more than annotated classic mysteries and vintage Sherlock Holmes fan fiction.
Next, on Saturday, 7 May, we’ll be somewhere in the sea of canopies surrounding the Cocoa Beanery in Hershey. Yes, it’s time again for the Hershey Arts Fest! This is a terrific, juried arts show and each year, it’s bigger than the one before. Come for the top-notch arts and crafts and finish out your weekend at Hershey Park. There’s always something to do in the sweetest place on Earth. Hershey Art Fest is just the beginning.
So that’s what’s coming up for the next two months. We’ll keep you posted on our website, in the newsletter, our Instagram feed, Facebook page, and Twitter so if something changes, you’ll know.
Thanks again for joining us. Writers are nothing without readers. Tell the people you love that you love them because we only get a short while on this earth.