It’s hard to believe two months have passed since my last newsletter detailing our adventures here at Peschel Press. If you are new to us, thank you for signing up! If you’ve been with us for a while, thank you for sticking with us!
We appreciate it. We really do. Publishing books is like sending messages out in bottles, cast adrift into the vast ocean. Books need to be read, just as toys need to be played with and appliances need to be used. It’s their function. If you ever saw the charming, creepy, scary animated movie “The Brave Little Toaster,” based on a Thomas Disch novel, you’ll understand. It’s well worth your time.
I always like to lead off my newsletter with a public service announcement. When we’re between newsletters, I wonder what there is to write about and then the universe delivers, right on cue.
This is odd, because the universe doesn’t actually care; it is massively indifferent to us. Yet, here we are.
So this is what happened in our Hershey neighborhood Swatara Station (otherwise known to long-time residents as Little Italy). We’re a quiet, pocket neighborhood bordered by Chocolate Avenue, the Reese Factory (home of peanut-butter cups and KitKat bars), and the railroad. Traffic is restricted to local residents, employees of the Reese Factory passing through, and the occasional lost tourist. It’s a quiet, low-rent enclave. Nobody here gets their knickers in a twist because of the non-traditional way I garden, even if we do attract rabbits and groundhogs that eat the flowers.
That quiet was shattered a few weeks ago. A gang of car thieves came through in the middle of the night, checking the doors on cars to see if they were locked. Sadly, some were not. Those vehicles were robbed of small change, electronic hand-helds, and anything else left lying around. The shiny new pickup truck, with its keys in the ignition, was stolen. So was a vintage WWII jeep, which also had the keys handy.
Nothing happened to our car. I always keep it, along with our front door, locked. My dad (still with us although he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease to add to his medical woes) was a police officer for twenty years. His constant mantra was: Lock your doors! Lock your doors! Lock your doors!
Don’t make it easy, folks. Leaving your car or your front door unlocked is dumb. It’s even dumber to leave your car running, keys in the ignition, while you run into the Kwik-E Mart. Don’t do this.
I understand starting your car in the winter and letting it run to warm up the engine. I’ve done it myself. I also use a SECOND set of keys for this purpose so even though the car is running, the door remains locked, and it can’t be easily stolen.
Like everyone else, burglars are lazy. Ask any police officer and they’ll tell you. If your house or car are locked, they don’t waste time trying to break in. They go next door. Burglars have been known to stroll down the street, trying each car door, hoping to get lucky. If they do, it’s not lucky for the homeowner.
Same with homes. If someone really wants in, they’ll get in. They’ll take a sledgehammer to your front door or a concrete block to your front window. Easy and fast. You have to live in a concrete castle with bars on the windows to avoid such a fate, along with a pack of dogs, sentries, and an alarm system. A shark-filled moat helps, too.
However, this kind of home invasion is very unlikely. Keep your doors and windows locked and you won’t have a problem. Keep your car locked and you won’t have to deal with the insurance company trying to explain why your teenager left the keys in the ignition of his new unlocked, $30,000 shiny silver pickup truck. Believe me, the insurance agent won’t be sympathetic. Neither will the cops. They may pretend to be sympathetic to your plight because their job requires it, but they really aren’t. They know damn well you could have avoided the issue by locking the vehicle.
I spent an entire chapter in my book, “Suburban Stockade” (https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Stockade-Strengthening-Against-Unsure/dp/1546380280) discussing ways of getting burglars to go next door without making yourself crazy-paranoid.
So that’s my public service announcement for this newsletter. We’ll see what the universe reminds me about for January 2020’s issue. There will be something!
Coming from Peschel Press
Here’s what we’ve been up to.
Bill, our founder, president, head of IT, and chief formatter, just finished designing the print edition of “Sew Cloth Grocery Bags.” I’ll look it over, making sure all the photos are in place, and it covers everything my beta-sewers demanded. It will be a beautiful, comprehensive, clear and understandable book. We’re hoping to have it ready for sale by Oct. 5, when we’ll be at Indian Echo Caverns in Hummelstown for their Fall Fest.
In the meantime, Bill’s back on “The Complete, Annotated Murder on the Links.” This is Agatha Christie’s second Hercule Poirot mystery, set in a French chateau next to a golf course (although, mysteriously, golf doesn’t figure into the plot). What does figure into the plot is the intricacies of the French police force, a very saucy flapper, and why there were herds of English running around France in the 1920s. Bill has been plowing through books like “When Paris Sizzled,” “The British in France,” and “That Sweet Enemy” and will have some great stories to tell when we publish the book later this year.
Bill has also finished a draft of “Man Out Of Time,” a time-travel romance novella, and wants to finish the (hopefully) last draft by Sept. 10, when I’ll be visiting my father and mother in Dover, Del. Bill’s also been writing a weekly (or so) essay for the “Career Indie Author.” Here’s the handy link: https://careerindieauthor.com/
Once “Cloth Grocery Bags” gets published, along with “Murder on the Links,” and “Man Out Of Time,” he’ll be able to edit “The White Elephant of Panschin,” my second book in the Steppes of Mars series.
After that comes the next Agatha Christie novel to come out of copyright: “The Man in the Brown Suit.” This is a thriller, loaded with passion, cruise ships, and high adventure in Southern Africa. It introduces a character Ms. Christie didn’t use very much for some reason, although she should have. That would be the dashing Colonel Race, international man of mystery and gentleman adventurer.
As you can see, we keep Bill busy, so he’s not churning out his books as fast as he would like.
As for me, “Cloth Grocery Bags” is taking far longer than it ever should have. That said, it will be a much better book than what we started with a few years ago. Once it’s published, I’ll turn my nonfiction attention to “NotQuilts.” I’ll tell you about that project in the next newsletter.
As Odessa Moon, I’m publishing “The White Elephant of Panschin” a chapter a week at both Wattpad (go to https://www.wattpad.com/story/181751952-the-white-elephant-of-panschin to read it) and at Archive of Our Own (AO3) (go to https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144470/chapters/42902963 to read it).
The online serialization will not be the final form of “The White Elephant of Panschin.” It is being beta-read right, and when my beta-readers tell me what I did wrong, I’ll rewrite it, making the necessary improvements. Then, Bill will edit it down considerably from its current length of 230,000 words.
I started Steppes of Mars #3: “The Vanished Pearls of Orlov.” I’m up to chapter nine. Our heroine is named Yilanda, Lannie for short, which is not quite what I provided in my last newsletter. I came up with the idea several years ago so I know the broad outline. However, the story is writing itself in quite a different manner than I anticipated. Characters are announcing themselves and demanding that they be “real”, fully-formed, and not cardboard cutouts being put through their paces. It’s interesting. When I get far enough ahead, I’ll post “Pearls” on Wattpad and AO3 as I have been doing with “The White Elephant of Panschin.”
Skye is slaving away on the divination book. She insists it will be ready around Halloween. Even if she delivers the manuscript early, it won’t be published (because of the backlog discussed above) until the spring of 2020. After that, she might move onto mythological beasties but not the common ones.
As to our public appearances: we have currently got four on the schedule:
Saturday, 5 October, 10 a.m.- 4 p.m.: 8th Annual Fall Festival at Indian Echo Caverns in Hummelstown. Visit https://www.discoverlancaster.com/event/details/24421 for more information.
Saturday, 19 October: Wellsboro 9th Annual Book Festival, sponsored by From My Shelf books in downtown Wellsboro. Visit https://www.facebook.com/WellsboroBookFest/ for more details.
Saturday, 2 November, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.: Hershey 34th Annual Winter Arts and Crafts Fair inside Hershey High School
Sunday, 3 November: 2nd Annual Shippensburg Book Festival sponsored by the Thought Lot. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/the-thought-lot/2nd-annual-shippensburg-book-festival/2250547191925177/ for details.
We may also do flash signings at Cupboard Maker Books or the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop if we’re invited and other events may appear as well. Visit Peschel Press’s website (https://peschelpress.com/) for the latest news.
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Thanks again and happy reading!