Two of the nicest folks you’d ever want to write for, Shelley Kubitz and Lawrence Allan, today released the cover image for DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime fiction inspired by the music of The Monkees. I’ve got a story in the anthology and I’ll tell you more about it on or before, as they say in legal documents, the book’s publication on September 29. (Or slightly after, depending on how my September goes.)
The table of contents for this anthology is a dream team of crime writers, and I’ll get into that at a later date also.
I’d hoped to have a story in four crime fiction anthologies in 2026, but that was not to be, for reasons too sad to get into here or almost anywhere.
So in 2026, a year in which I definitely de-emphasized short stories to work on novels, I’ve got stories in FIGHTING WORDS, BAD INTENTIONS and DAYDREAM BELIEVER and I couldn’t be happier about that.
The experience of writing short stories in any small bit of spare time I wasn’t working on getting my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS ready for publication by our Constellate Publishing – link at the end of this post – and working on my next three novels, I was inspired me to write an upcoming article for CrimeReads interviewing seven – count ’em! – seven crime writers about what they preferred to write, short stories or novels, and where they love to see their short stories published.
I’ll write more about that and talk about those seven wonderful authors closer to the time the CrimeReads story comes out.
Here’s that link to Constellate Publishing, by the way. We’re still looking for manuscripts of all kinds to consider for publication. We’re offering various editing and marketing services as well.
Despite that Britannica drawing of beautiful Lake Ontario, I’ll reassure you up front here that I won’t rehash every element of the idiotic and juvenile threats the current occupant of the White House has made against Canada. I won’t even repeat the ones from just today. Before 2015, I didn’t think it was possible to live in both the stupidest and most depressing and dangerous timeline but that’s the situation we find ourselves in.
But I will note this, and as far as I know, this isn’t the fault of anyone except some nameless, faceless mid-level manager or bureaucrat. I haven’t yet found a simple explanation of why this is the case, but it’s annoying as hell to me and a writer friend who tried to buy a copy of SEVEN ANGELS, my crime novel that came out June 1.
This writer friend in Canada had happily told me that she’d ordered a copy of the book either well before or sometime not long after it went live on Amazon as well as bookshop dot org and Barnes & Noble and many other sites I’d urge anyone to use before considering ordering from Amazon, whose owner has profited from harming smaller, indie booksellers and at the same time undermined democracy with his craven support of the current U.S. president.
Anyway, at some point my writer friend, puzzled, asked if there was any reason why Amazon Canada would be taking so long to send the book. Not that I know of, I replied. Every time I checked, either the American or Canadian Amazon sites, SEVEN ANGELS was available for sale.
Weeks and weeks passed. I checked with her periodically and she still hadn’t received her copy. She’d show me a screenshot of her order form with an inevitably far-future delivery date. And the date slid backward.
This is the status quo last week, ar the end of August, when my friend told me that Amazon Canada was now forecasting a delivery date of October 2 – four full months after the book’s publication date. (Amazon Canada is also charging way more than any U.S. bookseller, but I’m assuming that’s either standard operating procedure or the result of the Rancid Babyman’s tariff tantrums.)
In the meantime, as Amazon Canada was predicting an October 2 delivery for an order placed on August 24, the U.S. version of Amazon was forecasting an August 31 delivery date.
Also in the meantime, my Canadian author friend, after I told her I was going to write a piece titled “Another Reason for Canadians to Hate Us,” replied, “Maybe I should follow up with an article saying We love Americans and would love our neighbours to kindly read our books.”
We love y’all too, my Canadian friend. And we love how you sneak those extra u’s in American words. (Kidding.)
But what’s the reason for this bizarre difference in how this works for Canadian readers?
In November 2024, the site Cybernews reported, “It turns out that if you live in certain countries, you won’t be able to order certain books from Amazon’s US storefront – especially if they revolve around sensitive subjects like erotica, Christianity, the occult, and LGBTIQ issues.
According to The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a laboratory focusing on the openness and security of the internet, Amazon deploys a special system on its “amazon.com” storefront to restrict shipments of certain products to specific regions.
While researchers found more than 17,000 such products, the most common product category restricted was books, especially the ones related to the aforementioned subjects.
In February 2026 on the Amazon forum site, Amazon reported that some ebook purchases are geographically restricted (although this isn’t an e-book issue; the e-book of SEVEN ANGELS isn’t even out yet and will come later this year). A Reddit post also notes that its a roll of the dice to determine if you’ll be able to order some items: you have to enter your Canadian address and then see if your purchase would be deliverable.
A Quora post outlines the absurdity of this situation, advising that while Canadians can order from the U.S. version of Amazon – recognizable by the .com suffix rather than .ca – “If, however, you want to get Amazon U.S. prices and save on customs and brokerage fees, you can do what many Canadians do: time your shopping so you can have the products shipped to a U.S. address while travelling in the U.S. Many hotels, for example, will accept packages for guests (make sure to check first). Along border cities there are many businesses on the American side that simply accept packages for a client and hold them until they can be picked up.”
None of this explains why Amazon Canada continues to offer the books and promises a delivery date that it constantly fails to make.
So do we live in a global economy or not? And can ridiculous threats complicate matters even more?
BTW, I’d have long since just mailed her a copy of SEVEN ANGELS, but the shipping cost would be multiples of the cost of the book itself. And my friend is waiting to see what happens this time to delay her order. But she’s committed to getting her hands on SEVEN ANGELS.
And that’s the sign of a friend, a highly valued thing to have in a time when U.S. leaders seem to be going out of their way to offend as many friends as possible.
