Category: books

My Free Books

A while back I decided I’d rather give my ebooks away than give Bezos a cut. Therefor, they are free to download at the Arachis Press site (arachispress.com). The print versions do remain available for purchase. At this point, relatively late in my life, I’m not at all concerned about making money from the books.

Indeed, I am considering applying a Creative Commons license to the writing, allowing the public to have ownership. I do intend to do this with any and all music and songs I’ve created. There are no direct heirs I need be concerned about, though I am tempted to name a niece or nephew as my literary executor. Let them decide what to do with the stuff!

One thing is certain, none of my music will be registered with a performing rights organization. I have been a BMI member for a long time but never listed but one song with them. I’d remove it if I was willing to take the time to figure out how.

I create, and that is fine of itself but it is better to share what one has created. This I shall do, with no strings attached, with no payment involved. I can hope some will enjoy the work, that it might even prove meaningful. If they do, I also hope they will share it with others, and perhaps spread the word. Reviews are always nice. The books were written to be read.

Blogs and Sites

I was giving serious consideration to dropping this blog in favor of one at Blogger, integrated into a site hosted there. There are—as with most things—advantages and disadvantages to doing this. I decided the latter outweighed the former. That is, in part, because my stephenbrooke.com site is about more than writing. Blogger also felt a bit inadequate to my needs for a site so I’ll be concentrating on getting the existing one up to speed (among other chores).

And I shall continue to write about writing here. I may mess about with other Blogger pages for other purposes, including perhaps one dedicated to my worldbuilding. And poetry and reviews and personal bits do show up at eggshellboats.com.

I am currently plugging away on the next Wilk spy adventure. Admittedly not very hard and I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted by other projects. One of these was to complete and update the Arachis Press site. All my books are linked up properly there now and there is a page of free downloads for the ebooks. Yes, all of them, in both EPUB and PDF format, and including those written under pen names.

Ramblers

My parents were driving around the Hocking Hills—and elsewhere in Ohio—in the early Sixties in a Rambler much like this one. I would have written one into my novel THESE REMEMBERED HILLS, set in 62, if I could have come up with any good reason to! But then, there’s always the sequel…

Considering how often we moved in those days, I guess we were a family of ramblers.

Bicycles

Ian Fleming may have gone on about the cars his James Bond drove and the handguns he carried, but he never got into bicycles. I have avoided that sort of oversight in my own fiction.

To be sure, anyone who knows me should not be surprised that bikes pop up in some of my stories (including some written under pen names). I have Jim Fry, the protagonist of the first Hocking Hills mystery “These Remembered Hills,” bringing an English Pashley three-speed home to Ohio when he leaves the service. Yes, like the one Father Brown rides in the television series. I didn’t have him ride it, though, as the hills and gravel roads are not ideal, and it simply didn’t fit into the story. If I could have found a reason, I most definitely would have let him pedal around some. I have pretty much decided he will stash it near the university—some twenty miles away—and use it when he begins taking classes in the sequel. I’ll definitely have an excuse then.

I have touched on bicycles in some of the Ted ‘Shaper’ Carrol stories, including the three surf-and-crime Cully Beach novels. I’ll admit some of the incidents and details I’ve slipped in come from my own experiences, especially those riding about as a kid in both Columbus Ohio and Naples Florida. And I did include that bicycle patrol the Cully Beach police department has going up and down the beachfront. Yes, it actually plays a role; it’s a convenient way to let Ted interact with the police.

Then there are the Wilk novels. I touch on the fact that Wilk’s family imported Belgian-made bikes into Danzig both before and after the First World War, to sell in Poland and the Baltic region. This not only sets him up for a career in engineering, but also helps give him a fairly privileged upper-middle class background. His interest in gadgetry and mechanical devices of all sorts (yes, including guns) is rooted in that upbringing. I expect to expound a little on Wilk’s connection to bicycles in the novel-in-progress, set in 1966 Saigon. Maybe not deeply, but I can’t help throwing in some details!

Finally, those pen name works. I don’t really hide the fact that I’ve written two Women in the Sun novels as Sienna Santerre. This is not the place to get into them, but I will mention that everyone is riding about on bikes in 1968 Naples, the setting of both. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they still are in any sequel.

Along with surfing—that shows up in my fiction too, where I can fit it in. I’ll have something to say about that some other time.

Mainstream

My novel “Asanas” is the most ‘mainstream’ book I have written (under this name). I don’t much like the term mainstream; a literature instructor or teacher of writing might be more likely to call it ‘contemporary realism.’ Whether some of it is all that realistic is a different discussion.

Anyway, “Asanas” is set about six years ago, now, in a fictional Southwest Florida town. That town owes to more than one real location. There’s some of Venice and some of Bonita Springs and bits and pieces of other places. The nearby beach town Leawood definitely has something of Englewood to it, but then something of Fort Myers Beach too. None of that matters much. What does matter is that I wrote them as real places, ordinary places with reasonably ordinary inhabitants, who don’t do anything extraordinary but have their own problems, their own questions about life.

My only other ‘realistic’ novel (again, writing as Stephen Brooke) is the Young Adult title, “The Middle of Nowhere.” That was also my very first completed novel, one I shopped around for a couple years and rewrote several times. I find I don’t need to do that so much anymore. I learned enough on my first couple efforts that I can turn out a ‘first’ draft that is pretty close to a final draft. It was simply a matter of finding my process.

Right now, we are in the process of getting out a new edition of “Asanas.” That is mostly new typesetting but, of course, we found a handful of typos that had eluded us previously. No matter how many we fix, there always seem to be more when we give a book another look! I do intend to write a sequel one of these days. There are certainly enough loose ends left dangling I can take up (not that it doesn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion). Love lives, careers, successes and failures. That’s the important stuff in any work of fiction, whether mystery or science fiction or, yes, mainstream.

Lulu

My first self-published work (not first published—I’d had a fair number of articles and poems in magazines previously) was created in-house, printed locally, assembled and stapled by hand in my studio. This was to give me product to sell at poetry readings. A year or so later, I gave Lulu a try.

I have stuck with them ever since, through over fifty published titles as an ‘indie publisher.’ There are other print-on-demand companies around but I am satisfied with their product (despite a rough patch a few years ago when they totally revamped their website). It should be pointed out that they and other POD companies do not own printing facilities—they all rely on pretty much the same printers so do not expect the product to vary much from Ingram to Amazon to Lulu.

Lulu remains free to publish and distribute (they do charge a small fee to distribute epubs, which are not their main business). Yes, one must first buy and approve a copy to distribute print but that is it. No other fees. They also provide a store page from which I (as Arachis Press) may sell the books (as well as ebooks). Incidentally, we keep the ebook prices (epub and pdf) pretty low.

Print is admittedly a bit expensive. That’s true of print-on-demand in general. Moreover, Lulu does set a little higher price than some other companies so they can offer regular ten and fifteen per cent discounts. It works out to about the same after those are applied. I suppose advertising those discounts attracts buyers—or at least they hope it does.

The point of all this is that I intend to stick with Lulu, at least for print books. It is possible I’ll explore some other options for ebooks. Not Amazon. I tried Kindle for a while (and before that, had Lulu distribute the ebooks to them) but I no longer deal directly with the Amazon company at all. That is partly a matter of principle and partly a matter of frustration! My print books are distributed there (as they are ‘everywhere’) but I have nothing to do with that.

The Arachis Press ‘Spotlight Store’ is at the Lulu site, for any who might wish to browse: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/arachispress

Hemlock Map

Although I did not include it in the book, I created a simple map of the Hemlock Creek Valley for my mystery novel These Remembered Hills. This was, to be sure, as much to help me visualize and keep track of locations as anything else. The approximate locations of the Sever Caves and the Fry and Bone farms are shown but not the contour of the hills. The Pell apple orchards would probably be located on the east (right) edge of the map if included. This invented valley is loosely based on a real one in the Hocking Hills, where I spent part of my childhood.

Foundational Science Fiction

These are five foundational science fiction novels, the ones that set the stage for the genre’s flowering in the Twentieth Century. They are great reads, too.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — Some label Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel but science fiction had been around pretty much as long as fiction had existed. Nor was it genre science fiction as we know it today; that took half a century and more to appear after Shelley wrote. It is the first important science fiction novel in the modern Western tradition, raising questions and exploring themes that have been frequently revisited since.

The idea of overreaching and creating a monster was certainly not new with Shelley, but she was the one to join it to scientific experimentation. That takes the concept from the fantasy end of the speculative fiction continuum to that of science fiction.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne — Verne’s submarine story is not his best (that would be Around the World in Eighty Days) nor his first (Five Weeks in a Balloon), but it is the most influential. Verne’s novels are where genre science fiction begin, with their emphasis on the science aspect of the stories—even if the science is not always that good!

We might say the novels are the original ‘hard’ science fiction. Verne’s science fiction needs science. It is the reason the tales exist; they grow from scientific concepts. That is frequently not true of the work of those who followed.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells — This short first novel by Wells truly set the stage for science fiction as we know it today. It carries us into the future. That was something new; the work of Verne and others was generally set in the present. The science, as typical of Wells, is not hard. It simply exists as a plot device.

But what a plot device! The time machine does not really need a scientific explanation. It is what it allows Wells to do that matters—explore a frightening future.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle — Lost worlds in general were popular in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It was an age of exploration into unknown parts of the earth (unknown to Europeans). The idea pops up in the books of Haggard, Burroughs, and many others. Doyle’s undiscovered land has dinosaurs. That right there is enough, isn’t it?

The science is nothing much and the whole premise of so many prehistoric creatures surviving unchanged is not at all believable. No matter; it’s a great story, a true science fiction adventure.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs — ‘Science Fantasy’ some call it. Burroughs’s tale of adventure and romance on another planet truly opened the gates of modern science fiction, much of badly imitative of his concepts. Burroughs, however, was a pretty decent and inventive writer, with a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor in his novels.

It begins with what is truly a fantasy device, the protagonist’s body transported to another world. We could imagine scientific explanations for this if we wished or simply look at it as another example of portal fantasy. Burroughs—wisely, perhaps—chose not to explain. What is important is that it carries him (and us) away.

Mainstream

The novel ‘Asanas’ may be the most straightforwardly mainstream book I have written—or that has my name on it. Other fiction might tend toward that sort of realism but can be tucked into various genres, action, crime, etc. The one exception is the ‘The Middle of Nowhere,’ which is certainly mainstream realism but aimed at the Young Adult market.

There are also a couple novels written under a pen name. The fact that they are set more than fifty years ago could allow one to call them historical fiction, but they are not intended to fit into that genre.

Incidentally, I do not particularly hide the fact that I use that pen name but I don’t draw attention to it either. It does allow me to distance myself some from the work, which is desirable both because it is set in the time and place I grew up, and is more graphic than my other fiction.

I will certainly write more mainstream work. A sequel to Asanas may appear as well as more books with a pen name on the cover. However, my ‘realistic’ fiction is more likely to tend toward mysteries and adventures—the Wilk books, the Cully Beach series, and now the Hocking Hills mysteries. These are not aimed at the ‘commercial genre’ market but have more of an ‘up-market’ vibe. Indeed, some of the books I mentioned could probably be styled ‘women’s fiction,’ though I would prefer not.