Tag Archives: book-review

It’s a Friday free-for-all i.e. emptying out my inbox

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It’s Friday – it is Friday, right? – and let’s escape the ugly realities of the real world by sharing some quick-hit news reports about books and publishing, shall we?

As Carl Kolchak would say …

Item: To paraphrase the old joke, I don’t get Kindle Unlimited here. I see it, but I don’t get it. (Sad trombone sound.) Writer friends are on it and another writer friend explained to me that it works by offering some small amount of renumeration for each page of a book read. So in the oddest move since the then-executives of HBO renamed the streaming arm of HBO as Max before changing it back to HBO Max, Amazon in its very puzzling and unlikely decision has renamed Kindle Unlimited as KindlePlus, or Kindle+. No we don’t know why.

Item: Everybody is naming their best books of the year. Even though it’s still October. And yes, I know that all the major releases between now and December 31 are already in the hands of said tastemakers and arbiters of the best of the year. One reason might be that they want to get people prepared to buy books for the holiday season. Maybe the idea is to find ten books that have as much heat about them as Marlon James’ THE DISAPPEARERS.

Item: Eddie Muller, knowledge-laden host of the indispensable Noir Alley on the indispensable TCM, has scored a three-book deal, Publisher’s Marketplace reports. Muller, who has previously authored books, has a contract with Running Press (working with Turner Classic Movies) to publish three crime novels, THE DISTANCE, SHADOW BOXER and BIG LEFT HOOK. I have no qualms with Muller getting this contract, but it emphasizes that celebrity and a national platform are not drawbacks to getting books published.

Item: Here’s a link to an exhaustive survey about the business of indie writing and publishing by William Duryea and his site Beyond Heat Death. It’s long and I haven’t read it yet but I’ve already bookmarked it and I’m ready for some insights.

Item: Here’s another link, this one to a piece on literary scams and why writers are perfect targets. You might remember that I wrote recently about how I – like most writers online – was targeted by a scammer. Mine was pretending to be author Freida McFadden.

Item: Romantasy. Some writers and readers love it. Others loathe it. Here’s a Goodreads wrapup of the genre right now.

Finally, here’s a new little note that I’m going to include with each of these posts, noting who the hell I am. I’m including it because readership on this page is steadily increasing and I figure it doesn’t hurt to explain who you’re reading.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

Ten years of true crime books! It’s the anniversary of our book WICKED MUNCIE

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Ten years has flown by.

Ten years (and two days) ago, History Press published our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE.

My longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I had, in 2015, finished working on long articles detailing the history of our town, Muncie, Indiana, for The Star Press newspaper to mark the city’s 150th anniversary. I’d written about 150 years of facets of the city like the local hospital and local industry and he’d written an article that touched on the city’s long history of crime and murder. (I say touched on because there’s too much crime to fit in one article.)

Walker got a cold call from an editor at History Press, based in South Carolina, who asked him to consider turning the article into a book. History Press was and still is a publisher of books detailing cities and regions’ histories, including colorful characters, businesses and industry and crime and they wanted a history of Muncie crime, which is as colorful as it is gruesome. He asked me to collaborate with him.

Because we’d been newspaper reporters for decades, we knew what kinds of stories we needed to tell, from infamous people to sensational murders to crimes that rocked the community.

We contracted with History Press and, in all of our spare time away from covering crime, corruption and government for the newspaper, wrote WICKED MUNCIE. The book was published on October 17, 2016.

The title, by the way, was mandated by History Press. They had a whole series of “WICKED” books, spotlighting cities all over the country.

We wrote three followups for History Press, MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM in 2018, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS in 2021 and COLD CASE MUNCIE in 2023. The later was named after a series of articles about unsolved murders we’d written for the newspaper.

The books are truly self-produced works; we did all our own research, often working from clipped and yellowed articles in files in the newspaper’s library. We begged and borrowed photos to illustrate the book and dropboxed the photos to our editors at History Press to meet their deadlines.

The books were considerable work, in no aspect more than in finding the illustrations. Muncie newspapers had not kept prints or negatives of photos over 150 years, so we had to make do with what we could find.

With the History Press books, it was not uncommon for me to dropbox 120 or more photos to find a third or half that number that would meet History Press’ technical requirements.

Producing four true crime books focusing on the same city and county was a natural – Muncie was and is a hotbed of crime and corruption; we counted about three dozen unsolved murders as we were writing a Cold Case series of articles – but a lot of work.

As I’ve noted here, the true crime books still sell and sell well for History Press and booksellers like Muncie stores including the Orchard Shop and Aw Yeah Comics and sell well online, everywhere from Amazon to Walmart.

I’m inclined to urge people to buy their copies from bookshop dot org because they contribute to indie booksellers like Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie.

Here’s the link to my books on bookshop, including the four true crime books:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Keith+Roysdon

My close encounter with THE HOUSEMAID author Freida McFadden … actually, a Freida imposter! Plus, it’s ‘me me me’ all the way down in two new features

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Authors know that book-oriented scams are plentiful. Most of us regularly get emails or private messages on social media from people purporting to be literary agents or publishers or even well-known authors. Most of them are pretty easy to see through: No, James Patterson or Lee Child is not messaging you to offer input on your novel in the works.

Here’s the story of the time Freida McFadden private messaged me on Bluesky and tried to connect me with her publicist.

The whole scam would have gone a lot better but at the time … I had no idea who Freida McFadden was.

It was a couple of years ago and I got a message on Bluesky purporting to be from an author, Freida McFadden. Freida really, really wanted to talk about books and how great a job her publicist had done for her and how I should contact that publicist.

Freida’s pitch was that this publicist had made her career and could do the same for mine.

The biggest drawback to the scheme: At the time, I had no idea who Freida McFadden was. I’d never read one of her books and had never heard of her. If I were gullible, this would have been incredibly exciting.

So in my ignorance of Real Freida, I had no idea why it would have been such a big deal if the author herself contacted me.

No, it wasn’t my suspicions that undid the Fake Freida. It was that she was incredibly pushy.

I’d answer politely when Freida would cite her publicist by name and tell me in glowing terms how great he was.

“Okay, fine … thanks,” I’d reply, little realizing that I was blowing off a “bestselling author” who wanted to bring me into the inner circle of the publicist who had changed her career.

“No, you don’t understand,” Freida would come back, trying to impress upon me how important it was to hire this publicist. “He will make your career!”

“Okay, Freida, I got it,” I’d reply. I was being polite but had no plans to contact this publicist who worked for this incredibly pushy author.

“No, please you must understand …” Freida would insist.

“Jesus, why are you being so pushy?” I asked. “Is this some kind of scam?”

At this point, I hadn’t even googled Freida McFadden. When I did, I’d see that a movie was in the works adapting her novel THE HOUSEMAID.

That pretty much settled it. No way was someone who wrote books and had a movie development deal going to spend hours messaging me to insist that I should work with her publicist.

I didn’t delete the thread of messages, were of course not from Freida or even any publicist who’d ever worked for her but from some scam artist who just wanted me to believe that Freida had reached down from author Olympus to beg me to contact him.

Very quickly after, the Fake Freida account was expunged from Bluesky and, along with it, the details of the thread of private messages. I wish I could tell you the name of the publicist Fake Freida was so urgently recommending because that was almost certainly the person sending the messages.

Just their luck that they private messaged somebody who couldn’t be impressed that Freida McFadden was contacting them.

I thought of all this today because Sourcebooks, publisher of McFadden’s nest novel, THE SLEEPWALKER, would be coming out in March. Sourcebooks noted that McFadden’s 29 books had sold 90 million copies.

Confidentially, I heard she owes it all to her publicist.

By the way, the folks at Writer Beware have created an exhaustive list of book impersonators and scammers.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

I’m all up in your email inboxes today, even more so when the subscribers to this post receive email notification of it. But you don’t have to wait until you get this notification to tired of me in your inbox, as I’m the subject of two features today.

Friend and fellow writer Andrew Careaga graciously allowed me to answer his Friday Five questions for today. Here it is.

And as part of the promotional tour for the great BAD INTENTIONS anthology, editor Michael Downing wrote about my story, “Sunset Stakeout,” based on the Warren Zevon song “Looking for the Next Best Thing.” Here it is.

True Crime: Five years later, ‘The Westside Park Murders’ still draws readers

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Version 1.0.0

The past two weekends, I’ve been selling copies of my books at East Tennessee events, first the Harvest Moon Festival at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, then at the Fall Book Fest put on by the Knoxville Literary Legends book club. I’ve sold some books, happily met some other authors and learned a lot.

What I’ve learned is that true crime sells.

I know you’ll greet that with a “well, duh.” There are millions of true crime books, documentaries and even entire true crime channels/streaming services. I’m told that the latter is the case, at least; I haven’t watched a true crime program since we began writing our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE, which was published ten years ago by History Press. (If you’re wondering what Muncie is, it’s the East Central Indiana city where I’m from. It’s famous as where David Letterman went to college, where Ball canning jars were created, where the first half of Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND took place (it was not filmed there), where Garfield the cartoon cat was created and produed and for countless pop culture references.)

The Westside Park killings of September 1985 are, as the book’s subtitle says, Muncie’s most notorious cold case. No one has yet been charged in the killings. Our book, for the first time, revealed the name of the police investigators’ main person of interest.

Longtime writing partner Douglas Walker and I wrote four true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE (published 2016), MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM (published 2018), THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS (our pandemic baby, published months later than intended, in February 2021) and COLD CASE MUNCIE (published 2023).

I think all the books did pretty well for History Press. For me in particular, they assured me that I could write at book length, which I began doing in earnest in 2019 when I wrote my crime novels SEVEN ANGELS (published June 2026) and THAT OCTOBER (2025).

One of the things I noted Saturday to potential buyers of the Westside book is that the Crime Junkie Podcast did a segment on the case and (thankfully) credited our book and research.

I’m proud of the true crime books, but after moving away from Muncie to East Tennessee in 2022, I couldn’t find a lot of interest in the true crime books down here. I mean, I could understand that, because the four true crime books all took place hundreds of miles and three states north.

But when I talked to fellow members of the Sisters in Crime group here in Knoxville (they’re the Smoking Guns, and they’re a great bunch of accomplished writers) they urged me to bring, in addition to copies of THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, copies of some true crime writing for possible sale at Cumberland Gap and additional festivals.

“True crime always sells,” they told me.

“But they’re true crime books set in Indiana,” I said.

“True crime always sells,” they assured me.

So for two weekends in a row, I’ve sold about as many copies of THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS as I’ve sold of THAT OCTOBER or SEVEN ANGELS or anthologies with my short stories.

I didn’t think this would be the case, but the nature of the crime in Westside has drawn attention and continues to draw attention.

On Amazon as I write this, WESTSiDE has 165 reviews or ratings with an average of 4.1 out of 5. (No, I don’t read the reviews.) The other three books have fewer than 100 reviews or ratings and similar ratings out of 5.

In other words, ten years after our first true crime book, the books sell (for History Press and for me, hand-selling copies that I purchased from History Press). They sell to strangers. They sell to people who’ve never been to Muncie or heard of Muncie.

A woman who bought the book on Saturday had been past my table earlier in the afternoon, looked at WESTSIDE and came back to get it later. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I came back and got it,” she told me.

It’s pretty fascinating to me. I’m glad to think that, as with all our true crime books, WESTSIDE draws readers and helps keep the case alive for survivors of those killed, who hope that they’ll one day find closure.

If you’re interested, below is a link to WESTSIDE on Amazon and through that you should be able to find other books I wrote or contributed to.

None of them has the appeal of WESTSIDE, however.

Watch your language? Um, 5*#& no!

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The potential book buyer looked mild-mannered and it turns out he was.

At a recent book selling and signing event, a man talking to the author next to me asked if there was any bad language in his books. My adjacent author friend acknowledged that there was some but that he didn’t use a lot of it and used it only where appropriate.

The man went on to complain about the cursing (by the Frank Castle/Punisher character) in the new Spider-Man movie and said it soured him on the film. (And yes, as my fellow writers know, people who are ostensibly there to consider buying a book will tell authors virtually anything that’s on their mind, even things far less relevant than cussing in the latest Marvel movie.)

I’m not sure if the man ever bought a book from my friend. I know he didn’t buy one from me, and that’s a good thing because I do include cursing in my fiction.

He sure didn’t buy a copy of FiGHTING WORDS, the Leonardo Audio anthology that has my story “A Fighting Life” in it. In my story, set in 1948, three siblings – the youngest only about 9 as the story opens – decide they can make money by staging “Nickel Fights,” charging neighborhood kids a nickel to fight them.

The siblings, especially the youngest, Marie, are pretty spectacularly foul-mouthed. One of the brothers even comments on it.

“Little sister, you cuss like a muleskinner,” Peter, (the oldest brother) tells Marie.

“She gets that from the Old Man,” Saul said.

I gave him the finger.

It was interesting timing, the guy at the book event, because author Linda Sienkiewicz’ latest newsletter showed up in my inbox this morning. “The Power of One Well-Placed “F*ck”: restraining profanity for character, tone, and impact in fiction” was the title.

Sienkiewicz argues, with merit, that a few – or even one – well-placed curse word can be more effective than a constant barrage of curses.

Also interesting timing because yesterday saw the publication of my short story “The Damn Train” by the nice folks at Roi Faineant Press (link at the bottom of this damn post). In it, the two characters, LeeLee and 10-year-old Birdie, discuss Birdie’s tendency to curse. Birdie has some elaborate rules about cursing, passed down from her mother, as you’ll see if you read my story.

By the end of the story, LeeLee has cursed, brought on by the stress of the moment.

Why do I curse, in real life and in my fiction?

I’m not entirely sure. I think I always have. Maybe my tendency to curse is brought on even more by 40 years of writing for a newspaper, which didn’t print cursewords most of my career. And I knew that and didn’t try to use them. (The most notable exception in the newspaper was when a feature writer filled in for our courts reporter in covering a murder trial. The inexperienced reporter noted in her article that one of the participants in the trial dropped the F bomb. She did more than note it: She reported it, without censoring the trial testimony or herself.

The editors didn’t catch the use of “fuck” and it got into the paper. This was an afternoon paper and the problem was caught right after the paper came out. The press run was stopped, the word was excised and papers were destroyed – with the exception of some collector’s items. And the editor who let the word past later swore she’d been on vacation that day.

I didn’t learn cursing from my parents. I don’t think I remember my dad cursing much and the only curse I can remember my mom uttering was a well-timed “Dadgummit.”

So I cant chalk it up to the way I was raised. Maybe peer pressure? “C’mon, goddammit, Keith, everybody is doing it.”

I guess we’ll never know.

Here’s a link to my story “The Damn Train.”

https://www.roifaineantpress.com/post/the-damn-train-by-keith-roysdon

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys meet Bob Mackie

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How about a two-for-one today? Okay then, buckle up for quick items on my citation of the late fashion designer Bob Mackie in a new short story as well as the Mystery of Why Public Libraries Didn’t Carry Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Books. Lets start with the vintage stuff first:

I’m on the record about my love of juvenile mysteries like those featuring the Hardy brothers, Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators. Six years ago – and I can’t believe it was that long ago – I wrote a piece for CrimeReads about devouring those juvenile mysteries when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s and specifically credited my school library and beloved librarian in encouraging young readers to read a little bit of everything. Here’s a link to that CrimeReads piece to check out after you’re done here.

So considering how my school library encouraged us to read everything, including the Hardys and Nancy, I felt sad to see a September 10 post in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries Facebook page that noted that libraries – public libraries certainly but sometimes school libraries – didn’t carry the books. And many librarians considered them trash.

I think – I hope – the prevailing sentiment in recent years has been to encourage young readers to read, no matter what, because instilling a love of reading is more important than being a snob.

The Facebook post has hundreds of comments from people who said that, yes, unfortunately, their libraries didn’t carry the books.

This wasn’t just a coincidence, scholar James D. Keeline wrote. There was, particularly in the first half of the 20th Century, a coordinated effort by some to keep those books and other series books out of libraries.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, the librarian school programs had an organized method to exclude popular series books from school and public libraries. They started to exchange lists of books “not to be circulated” in “standard libraries.” These were published in regional library journals. These lists were devoted to series authors and series.

Even in the late 1970s through the 1990s this practice continued in SOME libraries. Other libraries were led by people who had grown up reading books like Nancy Drew and did not find them harmful, despite the librarian training. So the practice of excluding series books reduced but was still present in places like San Francisco in the late 1990s.

Keeline produces a list of dozens and dozens of series books authors from 1949, published by the University of the State of New York, an umbrella organization that oversees educational and cultural institutions.

If you’re a fan of the books, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Facebook page is well worth following.

On the Bob Mackie front, the veteran clothing designer died September 14. He was best known for outfitting Cher and other celebrities in the 1960s and 1970s in flamboyant gowns festooned with feathers and sequins.

As a kid who absorbed everything to do with Hollywood and show business when I was growing up, I always paid attention when a talk show host or celebrity credited Mackie with a gown. I knew – and still know – nothing about fashion, but Mackie designed outfits that looked like wild, sexy science fiction universe clothes to me.

His name got stuck in my brain, of course, and I name checked him in “Sunset Stakeout,” a short story I wrote for BAD INTENTIONS: Crime Fiction Inspired by Warren Zevon. (The Literary Garage anthology was edited by Michael Downing and has a great cover by Frank Vatel. Link to it at the end of this post.)

In “Sunset Stakeout,” which was inspired by Zevon’s “Looking for the Next Best Thing,” I wrote about three hapless guys moving through the Hollywood backwaters in January 1979. They’re the producer, co-star and novice screenwriter for “Sunset Stakeout,” an action/crime drama that really wanted to be “The Rockford Files” but was really more like “Riptide.” When the show is on the brink of cancelation, they team up with Hollywood’s most dangerous drug dealer to find a path forward.

I don’t write a lot of stories like this – it’s set in Hollywood, for one thing, and for another is a little more humorous than my usual – but I’m proud of it.

So with players in Hollywood in the mix, you just know I had to namecheck Mackie.

“I asked you to give me some time to think, Jimmy,” she said. Corbett looked like an unmade bed but Melody wore a sequined hot pink pantsuit. Hornblow recognized a Bob Mackie design from going to every awards show for the past 20 years. When you’re always a bridesmaid, you gotta have something to concentrate on.

I hope you enjoy “Sunset Stakeout” and all of BAD INTENTIONS. It was a labor of love and proceeds go to Philabundance, a non-profit food bank.

Here’s more about BAD INTENTIONS:

https://literarygarage.com/bad-intentions-anthology

Which book genre is stuggling now? Nonfiction books.

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Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman probably wishes he’d monetized his famous phrase, “Nobody knows anything,” because while Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” “The Princess Bride”) painted a wide swath with that statement, he’s surely as correct as correct can be. If we’ve learned nothing from watching movies, books, politics and, well, every damn thing, in the past decade, it’s that uncertainty is the norm.

I’m enjoying paying more attention to the publishing industry lately as I’m doing some editing for Constellate Publishing and working on three – count ’em – three novels. I get a lot of insights from the several-times-daily email from Publishers Marketplace and I’m enjoying learning which books and genres are going to be populating bookstore shelves in a year’s time.

But the more information I have, the more I need. I’ve got a William Goldman-level lack of knowing anything about the book industry and I’m trying to remedy it.

So today I was fascinated with a new piece by editor Sean Delone – link at the end of this post – in which he looks at some trends in publishing, specifically about non-fiction book publishing.

Before I get into details, here’s a picture I just took of one of my several shelves of non-fiction books, very specifically in this case books about movies, TV and entertainment, but we’ve accumulated hundreds of non-fiction books in the past few decades. Pictured above, my copy of Denis Gifford’s “A Pictorial History of Horror Movies” was published in the early 1970s. My copy was published around 1974 and it’s not even the oldest non-fiction book in the house.

It’s accurate to say that I love non-fiction books, history or news or photography or films or Saturday morning cartoons or whatever, and while I don’t buy as many as I used to – I think my latest might be “TCM Underground,” the cult films book released right before TCM canceled the Saturday night/Sunday morning program – but while dozens of boxes of fiction going back to the 1960s are still stored in boxes here, our non-fiction books are mostly but not entirely displayed. Yeah, I love ’em.

And there’s no doubt that online sites have decimated the need for nonfiction magazines and books. Why buy an authoritative book when you can look something up on some possibly totally erroneous online site?

Anyway, Delone’s article, “The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing,” carried disheartening news.

The gist of it:

First, the entire industry boomed in Covid—writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years1 is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.

Delone emphasizes he’s not writing an Atlantic-style “end of reading, end of books” essay. If you remember, that one alarmed at lot of writers, editors, publishers and readers a while back.

Delone notes that media – which used to be a few big newspaper book review sections and late-night talk shows, where even a Midwestern rube like me could see important authors interviewed by Johnny Carson – is much more decentralized than it used to be and there’s some emphasis placed on book influencers and book accounts on social media. (I follow a bunch of them, for enjoyment more than education, but information nonetheless.)

But he also notes a colossal fall-off in demand for the kind of information we formerly turned to non-fiction books for:

No amount of platform is going to change that interest across the board in nonfiction from celebrities down to science has been slowly disappearing. Even if nonfiction is stable and more predictable than fiction in the abstract, it’s by far worth taking the risk on an unknown novelist if the return is potentially 4x as much. Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week—The Calamity Club in its 15th week on-sale and Yesteryear in its 19th week on-sale—sold 52,000 copies. It’s not inconceivable that on the right week, one fiction hardcover with first week sales could outsell the entirety of the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

Welp, as the young people used to say.

Want another gulp moment?

The tide going out on nonfiction sales and reading is entirely reshaping the power balance in the industry. Not overnight, but slowly, the money is flowing to fiction and away from nonfiction. It is causing quite a scramble. Fiction is unpredictable, it requires taste, it does not favor the solid metrics or predictability which, if you are running a publishing company, are much more preferable (businesses tend to prefer predictable growth and low volatility or at least high growth alongside high volatility). Fiction is also an easier category for the big publishers to capture and corner the market on. For instance, a handful of talent agencies represent nearly all A-list actors, and therefore a significant supply of big nonfiction bestsellers. The capture in supply carries over to publishers—when is the last time a big celebrity has published a huge bestseller with an indie press?

Delone has a lot of interesting thoughts on the industry. You can find some very thought-provoking posts here:

https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfiction-book-market-is-collapsing?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The year of anthologies for me – three of ’em, anyway

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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.

Constellate Publishing

Another reason for Canada to hate us – book sales category

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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.

Thinking the unthinkable (literally): A Black Swan event

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I’m by nature an optimist. This might surprise some people when they hear me talk about the seemingly bottomless well of depression and pessimism some people have felt over the past few years. A friend and I were texting this morning and she was more pessimistic than me about the events of the next few weeks. I’m so goddamn optimistic, according to her, you’d think I was delusional. (She didn’t say that, but I’m taking all this to its local extreme.)

The balance of optimistic and pessimistic was already on my mind this morning and I posted on Bluesky that if people could stand the emotional stress they should do an online search for “Black Swan event” and then I asked, “How long is it until the election?”

My friend and I were gaming out what might happen between now and the midterm election in November and I was, admittedly, more optimistic than her. And I cited the reasons I was. And she cited the reasons she wasn’t feeling optimistic.

And the whole thing got me to thinking about research I did in 2025 about a Black Swan event.

I hadn’t heard of a Black Swan event until a few years ago, so I did some research into what exactly it is. I found “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.,” a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

What Taleb wrote is that Black Swan events can have either overall positive or negative outcomes but in my mind, a Black Swan event is a negative event.

Over the past 100–plus years, Black Swan events are generally marked by some big, world-changing happenings:

The events leading to and including the outbreak of World War I.

The rise of Adolf Hitler.

The rise of the Soviet Union and the threat of the Cold War.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Covid-19.

Some people would add other developments to that list, but the key to Black Swan events is understanding, as Taleb wrote:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Some people consider Covid at worst a Grey Swan event and argue the onset of a global pandemic was not at all impossible or unpredictable. It had happened in history, more than once, and countries led by leaders who can reason and think prepared for it.

And Taleb notes:

A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Ever since we left the Pleistocene, some ten millennia ago, the effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

I was so fascinated by the topic of Black Swan events – and remain so, obviously – that in 2025 I began outlining and writing a book that includes, as a (hopefully) unexpected plan to precipitate a Black Swan. Even though I shelved the book – it’s not one of the several novels I’m working on now – I still think about it. (I shelved it because I chose an unwieldy format in which to write the book that I couldn’t pull off – but I might be able to pick it back up someday and finish it.)

While a Black Swan event might sound science-fictional to people – and there are classic works of science fiction that fit the Black Swan mold, including the arrival of aliens (the topic of many, many SF tales, books and movies, but one that has stuck with me in the decades since I read it, Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End,” a 1953 novel about the impact of the sudden arrival of extraterrestrial beings. – we can see from the examples above that sometimes a Black Swan event can be engineered by a small group of people.

Which brings me back to my conversation with my friend this morning. Because whether any possible Black Swan event is planned by a small group of people – a “false flag” operation can lead to or be part of a Black Swan event – or it’s the sudden arrival of beings from another planet, we can all prepare for the shock of a Black Swan event to greater or lesser degrees. Some people might prepare by laying in a supply of water or non-perishable food. Some want to secure their finances. Others will undoubtedly take other steps.

But knowing that Black Swan events can exist – even if another never comes – is a useful thing.