The calendar says Spring and that’s exactly what it feels like up in Hershey: cool, wet, and gloomy. It’s Glasgow with grass.
At home, we’re busy working on a lot of projects that you’ll hear about later this year. After the rush of releasing three books in three months, I’m working on revising a novel I started in 2001, and Teresa has a number of books in the pipeline as well.
APPEARANCES
If you’re in the Hershey area, come visit the Art on Chocolate fair on Saturday, May 14, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Peschel Press will have a booth at Chocolatetown Square. Come meet Bill and Teresa!
RELEASED INTO THE WILD
The only thing to announce this month is the ebook publication of “The Illustrated Life and Career of William Palmer.” This is the 1856 “quickie book” that came out to capitalize on Britain’s fascination with the Rugeley Poisoner. We finished the trade paperback last month and released it through CreateSpace (available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble). Now the ebook version is available as well.
I’m especially happy to get this book out. It’s an amazing account of Palmer’s crimes, supplemented with stories the London Times’ reporter dug up in Rugeley and elsewhere (some of it even true!). I’ve also added essays by Charles Dickens on Inspector Fields, the former Metropolitan Police detective who investigated Palmer on behalf of an insurance company, and an excerpt from Punch magazine that humorously describes the life of a London medical student in mid-Victorian England.
For more information, visit the book’s page at Peschel Press.
COMING UP UPDATE
Here’s what we’re planning for the rest of the year, with a few notes about their current status:
Ride of My Life
I’m working on this comic sci-fi novel at last! I just finished inputting corrections from the last edit, and I’ll start fleshing out the story this week based on my recent research into the space shuttle program.
The story follows Bill Prescott as he wins a contest in which first prize is a million dollars or a seat on the shuttle. To the surprise of nearly everyone, he chooses the shuttle. As he trains for the ride of a lifetime, he has to battle skeptical in-laws, a suspicious press, hostile NASA officials, and train hard to earn his seat. There is also the spectre of Project Icarus, a secret program with a mysterious purpose also going up on the shuttle that lead to a new future for Bill, if he prepared to go on the “ride of his life!”
I had started this novel in 2001, when space tourism was just picking up speed. There was a reality show proposed that would follow a “class” of civilian astronauts with the grand prize being a trip to the space station on a Mir rocket. Nothing ever came of it, but I used the idea as a seed for my book. I had been fascinated by space and the space program ever since the Apollo days, and I had great fun reading NASA shuttle manuals and learning how they trained the astronauts.
I worked on the book for awhile, then set it aside when life, including two infant children, intervened. I picked it up again in 2007 when Amazon held its first contest for unpublished manuscripts and finished it. The book did not gain enough votes to win, but I promised myself that I would finish the story, and now that’s come true.
Stay tuned for developments!
Sherlock Holmes parodies, vol. 4 (1910-1914)
Waiting patiently for its turn as soon as “Ride” is finished. The parodies have been scanned and typed in, so the month (July at this moment) will be devoted to writing the introductions and the footnotes, so once it’s started it’ll be out fairly quickly.
* Her Martian Tiger (Claudia Moon’s first science-fiction romance)
Readers of “Suburban Stockade” will know that my wife, Teresa, is interested in resource depletion, global warming, environmental issues, and how societies rise and fall. She’s always told herself stories, but now she’s combining her interests and developed “The Steppes of Mars” series. In an engineer-designed world set on a terraformed Red Planet 300 years from now, the Martian race face the challenges of a world made by hand, where railroads and radios exist, but not enough energy exists for day-to-day living. Where wealthy families have created a new aristocracy free from the interference of their Earth masters (who have troubles of their own), but who must prepare against their return.
Teresa has been working on these stories for more than a year and already has at least a dozen novels in various stages of development. She’s created a rich and varied culture extrapolated from the Martian climate and culture would allow, and a cast of characters who struggle for dominance and survival on this amazing world.
A draft of “Her Martian Tiger” is finished, but I need to edit it and go from there. No publication date is set, but we hope to get it out there year. Stay tuned!
* Suburban Stockade, based on the webposts by Teresa Peschel
Teresa’s done a second pass on the manuscript. She’s removed most of the sewing posts and set them aside to be published separately, and cut the repetitive material. That still left a manuscript of 160K words. I’ll be making an editing pass over it, and we’ll see what happens next. We hope to get it out this year.
* Career Indie Author
Based on my experiences with Peschel Press and publishing “Writers Gone Wild” with Penguin, I want this book to be a collection of best practices for writers who want to publish more than one book. There is no one path to success. There are writers who are more interested in getting their books out, and those who are entrepreneurs who want to maximize their profits.
“Career Indie Author” is aimed at both types, and those in between. It covers everything about the writing life except how to write. There are plenty of books that cover that part of the process (although I do say a few things about it). Instead, I cover how to set up your company, what name to choose, how to keep track of sales, and who to hire and how much to pay them.
Heck, let me include a link to the page with the table of contents and you can see for yourself.
Frankly, you should not try everything in the book. You won’t have enough time in the day. Instead, think of it as a cookbook. Pick what is appealing to you and see what happens.
“The Career Indie Author” is intended to be published by the end of 2016.
* Sherlock Holmes parodies, volume 6 (1920-1924)
* Sherlock Holmes parodies, volume 7 (1925-1930, and we’re done!)
* The Best of 223B Casebook
These books are awaiting their turn.
I8Media
What has Bill been watching and reading lately? Let me tell you.
“The Japanese Mind,” edited by Roger J. Davies and Osamu Ikeno, 2002.
Japanese culture can be mystifying and maddening to Westerners, just as we are to them. They can be seen as too formal, too polite, too reserved, too quiet and therefore untrustworthy and suspicious. We are too loud, too abrupt, to rude and wildly inconsistent. What is going on here, and can we learn to get along? “The Japanese Mind” is a great place for us to start. Its 270 pages is broken down into 28 chapters, each devoted to a specific behavior, how it developed, how it is expressed, and how modernity has affected it. Each chapter ranges from four to 10 pages, but it is packed with information on topics such as modesty, personal communications, male-female relationships, the role of silence in conversation, arranged marriages, gift giving, and funerals. Western readers of manga will be able to draw connections between the genre’s tropes — the exhortations to do better, the silent panels showing natural beauty, the depictions of a rigid hierarchy — and their place within Japanese culture. It made me understand why they must think we’re crazy.
Hardcore History, podcasts by Dan Carlin.
I’m a history buff, so coming across this was a revelation. For nearly a decade, Carlin has been producing this podcast in which he delves into the extremes of human history, usually involving war. He admits that he is not a historian, but he is a great storyteller. He has a casual style that involves frequent comparisons to pop culture (such as comparing the assassination squad trying to kill a pretender to the Persian throne with “Force 10 From Navarone”). Most of his shows sell for $1.99 each, but his last 10 episodes are free on iTunes. Look for the two-part “King of Kings” (dealing with Persian and Greek ancient history) and the monumental six-part “Blueprint for Armageddon” that tells the story of World War I in 14 hours. I heard two episodes and immediately spent $60 and downloaded the first 39 episodes. That’s how good he is.
152 Minutes with the Priestess of Creativity, New York magazine.
A profile of Julia Cameron, the author of “The Artist’s Way,” a book on sparking and maintaining your creativity that has been a best-seller for the last two decades. I had never heard of her, so this was a revelation. I’m already trying to follow her technique of writing three pages a day when I wake up (and get the coffee started). I don’t do it every day, but when I do, I get some good inspirations for the day’s work (and when I don’t, I least express opinions I don’t want anyone to see).