Tag Archives: THAT OCTOBER

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.

Bouchercon in Canada, eh? Have fun, be safe and take off, you hosers!

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Tomorrow, October 21, is the official start of this year’s Bouchercon, the longtime world convention of crime and mystery writers and readers, this year in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

(And I hope you recognize the “take off you hosers” reference in the headline to Bob and Doug McKenzie, the Canadian brothers that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created for SCTV a million years ago.)

I’m not at Bcon this year but quite a few friends are up there, pre-gaming for the festivities and seeing the sights, including some of the best scenery in the world.

As a veteran of the two most recent Bcons, in Nashville and New Orleans, I’d offer some helpful tips if you’re attending, but I’m sure anybody who’s there or soon will be won’t see this until after they’re home – if they ever see it at all.

So maybe just some observations, based on my own experiences:

The facility can have a huge impact on your enjoyment. The hotel and conference rooms in New Orleans in 2025 were just about ideal, and that was especially welcome after the awful venue at the Opryland resort and conference center in Nashville in 2024. The Nashville site was, at more than 3 million square feet, way too big. It was hard to run into other writers and readers in that behemoth, even around the hospitality area and book marketplace. If you were seeking coffee, you had a slightly better chance of finding your people.

Speaking of which – your people, not your coffee – you’ll find yourself staring at people’s name tags if you have face blindness or don’t recognize people easily from real life or social media. Everybody does this awkward scoping out of credentials. That fact doesn’t make it any less awkward, but at least people understand why you’re peering at their midsection before you look up at their face.

And please, by all means, find your people, even if they only become your people during the course of the hunt for coffee, bull sessions in the bar and quick conversations between panels.

After the first day of Bcon in Nashville, I was ready to go home. I wanted to leave first thing Thursday morning. I was miserable. I was unable to connect with anyone and I wanted to make like a tree and get out of there.

I couldn’t, though, because I was on a Friday afternoon panel.

Luckily, author and all-around great person Shelley Kubitz, who I kinda knew from Mystery Writers of America Midwest, invited me to hang out with people and through Shelley I met more people.

That’s my biggest piece of advice: Find your people.

Enjoy the panels. It’s so cool to hear people talk about writing and the industry and, in my standard once-a-year panel service, I’ve made connections that continued long after everyone went home.

Attend the annual membership meeting and vote! One of the best things about Bcon is that by virtue of attending, you’re part of the Bouchercon general membership and you can vote on issues to be decided by the general membership. For example: We voted to approve Indianapolis as a future Bouchercon site. Making your voice heard and your vote count is not only applicable in the real world.

And the books! Around the edges of meeting old and new friends, enjoying the panels, making connections and being a tourist in that year’s city, you get exposed to hundreds of books written by Bouchercon authors and the best crime, thriller and mystery writers in the world. Traditionally, Bcon attendees get tickets to pick out a handful of books to keep, but there are so many great books for sale in the Bcon bookstore.

And … if you have your own book, the thrill of seeing it in the Bcon bookstore is something I’ll never forget.

My first novel, THAT OCTOBER, had been out for a few months by the time of the 2025 Bcon and I’d made arrangements with that year’s bookseller to have if offered for sale in the Bcon bookstore. My novels have since been picked up by a few brick-and-mortar bookstores – and they’re available online, of course – but seeing it displayed alongside other authors, including the top talents in the business, is an unforgettable thrill for me

So I hope all you folks, writers and readers, enjoy Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary this week and get home safely. I’ll have FOMO big time for not being there. If the world is still turning, I hope to go to Bcon in Washington DC in 2027 and Indianapolis in 2028.

And if I see you staring at my front, I’ll probably assume I’m wearing part of my lunch on my shirt until I remember you’re just trying to figure out my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be doing the same.

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

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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.

Trick or treat? Treat, I hope. My first crime novel, THAT OCTOBER, is great spooky season reading

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Thanks to my Constellate Creatives cohort Jill Blocker for reminding me that it’s almost THAT OCTOBER.

I mean, we’re speeding toward October with a strong tailwind and it’s a good time to remind people that my 2025 novel, a YA thriller that I’ve more often than not referred to as a high school crime novel, is out there in the world. Poor little THAT OCTOBER, which has been out for 15 months-plus now, has taken a backseat to my promotion of SEVEN ANGELS, which came out three months ago.

But THAT OCTOBER – set in October 1984 – is a good fall season read, with Halloween, Elvira Mistress of the Dark on MTV, football, the TERMINATOR and peak 1980s pop music as the mood overlaying the crime story at its heart: When a classmate is killed and another disappears, six high school friends – frustrated by how lackadaisical the adults in town are acting – decide to investigate on their own with the hope of solving their friend’s murder and bringing another friend home.

Along the way, they stumble upon dark secrets not only in their town but also in their own families.

The wonderful author Heather Levy said THAT OCTOBER was “perfect for fans of STRANGER THINGS,” although the only monsters in my novel are the human kind.

You can find THAT OCTOBER literally anywhere books are sold. Here are some salient spots:

Ink Drinkers Anonymous, the Black-woman-owned bookstore in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, through bookshop dot org.

Barnes & Noble has THAT OCTOBER.

So does Amazon, which offers it in paperback or ebook.

And The Hive Bookshop, my friendly neighborhood bookstore here in town. The Hive has signed copies, as does Ink Drinkers and Aw Yeah Comics, the latter two in Muncie, Indiana.

I hope you enjoy THAT OCTOBER.

Indie authors can take steps to help get their books into bookstores. A few ideas:

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For most authors, especially indie authors, getting your books on bookstore shelves is a huge end goal.

It can seem like an impossible goal because brick-and-mortar bookstores have only so much shelf space. Your book is competing for space with books by masterful writers and the most hyped – many times rightfully so – books in print.

So as someone who’s recently placed my second crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, on the shelves of the Hive Bookshop, a local woman-owned store here in Knoxville, I can tell you what steps I took that might have paid off and landed a spot on those shelves not only for SEVEN ANGELS but also my first crime novel, THAT OCTOBER.

(And yes, I say “might have paid off” because, ultimately, who can say why a bookstore owner or manager decides to stock the books they stock? I’m sure there are as many reasons for carrying a book as there are books.)

First, write your book. Finish your book. And work on it, with friends who are willing to read it – not to mention a pro editor, if you can afford it – until you’ve got a good book. Yes, I know that’s highly subjective, but in my case, the Hive owners asked if I could drop off copies of my two books so they could check them out. A few weeks later, they let me know they wanted to stock the books. One of the owners apparently read them, or at least enough of them to know a few customers might consider buying them.

And when I say “work on your book,” I’ll note that I outlined SEVEN ANGELS around 2009 and then returned to that outline to write the novel in 2019, after I’d taken a buyout from the daily newspaper business and could devote time to writing it. I added major characters and subplots years later, in 2022 and 2023 or thereabouts, that made the book more well-rounded. This isn’t a typical book-writing timeline for me, although it did take me about a year and a half to write THAT OCTOBER.

Secondly, timing is important. The Hive is literally a new bookstore, as opposed to the long-established other local indie bookstore that didn’t even respond to my request – in person and through their formal process – that they carry my work. Is a new bookstore less hidebound? Is a new bookstore more willing to take a chance on a new author? Certainly the Hive emphasizes that they’re very focused on community and local authors. Maybe your bookstore is new or they have a new decision-maker or they’re just willing to take that small gamble.

Third, cultivate relationships. I didn’t do a lot of that with the Hive, but I don’t think it hurt that I visited their store during their soft opening and bought a book, DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, which I’d been wanting to read. Nothing’s better than when your bookstore knows you’ll not only support their store but also recommend their store to others.

Fourth, be understanding and don’t be pushy. Understand what an investment opening and maintaining a good bookstore is. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t “circle back” to the bookstore during the weeks after they had copies of my books and before they notified me they’d carry my books. I figured the owners had enough on their hands without having to respond to multiple email inquiries with an “are we there yet?” type message.

(I have traditionally been pushier with two stores back in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. The wonderful folks at Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics have been receptive not only when I ask if they’ll carry my books but also when I ask if they need more copies.)

Fifth, have good packaging and presentation. My cohort Jill Blocker and I published THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, the latter through Constellate Publishing, Jill’s book imprint spin-off of her Constellate Creatives company. (Link to Constellate is at the end of this piece.)

Sixth: Try to copy edit to avoid typos – we didn’t manage to have no typos, but I see professionally published books that have typos – and have someone – Jill in this case – who can format the book in an eye-pleasing manner.

Seventh: Have a good cover. I’m lucky that my artist friend Sara McKinley drew the cover for THAT OCTOBER based on my suggestion that I wanted something reminiscent of a dramatic X-Men comic book cover pose for the young protagonists. With SEVEN ANGELS, I knew I wanted a cover that paid tribute to those Robert B. Parker covers for the Spenser books that had one or two or three elements on a background. I found the three elements – a lipstick, a bullet and a badge – and Jill executed the cover.

Eighth: Your book might be totally bookstore-worthy but never find its way onto shelves. I thought that would be the case with mine. I didn’t give up, but I was pretty resigned to never seeing my cover in a bookstore.

And I was doubly thrilled when it happened and hope it happens for you if that’s your goal.

Here’s that Constellate link:

Constellate Publishing

Celebration: Local bookstore carries my books – and what that means for other indie authors

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I had the coolest experience I’ve had in a long time on Saturday: I signed copies of my novels SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER for a bookstore. And not just any bookstore, but my local indie bookstore The Hive, which opened this spring.

(Link to the Hive site at the end.)

I’ve had books in local bookstores for 10 years now, since 2016, when the first of my co-written true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, was published. Each of the three true crime books that followed were also placed in Muncie bookstores (and in displays at Walgreen’s and other stores) by the History Press. Whatever else you might say about History Press, but they have the juice to get books in stores in and around the area that’s depicted in the book.

Since publishing my first novel, THAT OCTOBER, in June 2025, I’ve tried to get it in stores here in Knoxville, where I’ve lived for not quite four years. The long-established indie bookstore here turned up its nose at my request they carry that first novel. And by turn up its nose, I mean that I brought the book to that store and went through their formal online process for requesting that the store carry a book. I heard crickets back. They just never responded, and it’s been 16 months. 

And yes, I know all about how much of a premium shelf space in bookstores is. Spare me that factoid, please. Because even though Barnes & Noble replied to my request that they carry the book locally with a refusal to do so, at least THEY REPLIED. (They carry my books online, as does virtually every other bookseller, so I appreciate that.)

So I didn’t have high hopes for the Hive, even though pretty early on it was obvious how they liked to focus locally, with space on shelves and book clubs and talks and signings. I asked.

So when the Hive responded a few weeks ago with a “we’d be happy to carry your novels” and this past week said, “Your books have arrived, would you like to come in and sign copies?” I was just incredibly, pleasantly surprised.

(When I vague-posted on social media about this, some people thought I had interest in my books from TV or movies and, yeah, I have gotten a nibble in that regard but I’ve yet to see follow-through and yet to ensure it’s legit. So we’ll see.)

I’ve been lucky since THAT OCTOBER came out that not only libraries back in Indiana but two of my hometown bookstores, Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics, have been happy to carry my novels. And it was a hell of an experience in 2025 when THAT OCTOBER was carried in the bookstore at Bouchercon in New Orleans.

So the Hive carrying my novels and asking me to sign them and even marking them with a “local author” tag was the best thing yet.

In this “all about me” celebration and back-patting here, I’ll note that there’s a slightly larger issue here. I self-published, through the good work of my friend Jill Blocker, THAT OCTOBER and Jill and I published SEVEN ANGELS through Constellate Publishing, the indie publishing imprint and spinoff of Jill’s company, Constellate Creatives. 

So three things can be inferred from my personal victory of The Hive carrying my books: Indie bookstores are the best. Decisions about what books to stock are best made locally.

And indie authors and small imprints should be heartened by the fact that small potatoes book publishing can get your book into bookstores. 

Here’s the link for the Hive on bookshop dot org

https://bookshop.org/shop/hivebookshop

What a week: More AI discourse, book news and … am I dominating your inbox?

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Some of you are old enough to remember July 24, where on this very site I said that I’d unsubscribed from a “help for authors” newsletter because they’d pushed out 14 newsletters in a month and that seemed like a lot.

How many newsletters is too many? Well, we’re about to test that number. This entry that you’re reading now is the eighth new piece I’ve posted here since that July 24 column. Those posts have been fueled by a lot of commentary on AI and some book self-promotion.

Each new item I post results in an email to those of you who subscribe, so it’s almost as if I was sending out some kind of … well, newsletter.

So I’ll be keeping track of how many I post and we’ll see if I exceed 14 in a month. And y’all can keep track too and blast me in comments or social media if (when) I blow past that milestone of 14 in a month.

But today, here’s some housekeeping stuff. As Carl Kolchak of “The Night Stalker” fame always says, item:

Item: Shoutout to Andrew Careaga, in the latest edition of his newsletter today, for citing my August 5 piece on the blog here about AI. You should subscribe to Andrew’s newsletter, Friday Five.

Item: The Publishing Confidential newsletter by Kathleen Schmidt has rapidly become one of my favorite newsletters.

Item: Also essential are the various daily newsletters for subscribers to Publishers Marketplace. There’s an expense to the subscription – basically a dollar a day – but I’m feeling more plugged in to the industry as a result of Publishers Marketplace, newsletters like Schmidt’s and Careaga’s and some others I’m going to cite here from time to time.

Item: As someone who has maintained a Facebook page, Wicked Muncie, for 10 years and this site, which began life as a WordPress blog something like 15 years ago and has now amounted up more than 1,100 posts about pop culture, books, Halloween vintage costumes and a bunch of other stuff, I wanted to mention that it’s hard to maintain an active site or blog or social media account and in particular I wanted to cite Mark Evanier’s News from Me site. Evanier, a veteran writer of comics, TV and books, posts pretty much every day, sometimes more than one post a day. He knows a lot about entertainment and he knows a lot of old Hollywood types and his annual Mel Torme Christmas post is reason enough to check out his site. I’ll include a link at the bottom of this post.

Keep me in your thoughts. I’m editing manuscripts from friends and upcoming books from us at Constellate Publishing and I’m doing a lot of reading for a super-secret project that I’ll detail around the middle of 2027.

And yes, I’ll post here this weekend or early in the week because something very cool is happening in regard to my novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS. No it’s not a movie adaptation. (Although … no, I’ll tell you that story someday.)

Here’s that link:

https://www.newsfromme.com

My little foul-mouthed scrappers will return in my novel GHOST SHOW

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I’ve noted in this space before that most of my books and short stories occupy the same universe that mostly varies from the town of Seven Angels, Tennessee, to the small city of Middletown, Indiana. The former is the focus of my newest novel, SEVEN ANGELS, and the latter is the setting of my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER.

I’ve plotted references to those locales in most of my fiction, including my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW, which is set in Middletown in 1948 (THAT OCTOBER was set in Middletown in 1984).

And there’s been a few times I’ve had characters cross over from stories to novels. I’ve previously mentioned here Butcher Crabtree, who pops up in SEVEN ANGELS and a few stories.

But in GHOST SHOW, when it shows up this winter, you’ll see some characters I introduced in “A Fighting Life,” a short story in the 2025/2026 anthology FIGHTING WORDS, edited by Scott Bradburn and published by Leonardo Audio.

Four of the Anderson siblings, who are the focus of GHOST SHOW, are in “A Fighting Life,” which is also set in Middletown in 1948.

They’re pretty different characters in some ways, and very much the same characters in other ways. In “A Fighting Life,” siblings Marie, Saul and Peter get into vacant-lot-punchfests when the three, all of them teens or pre-teens, discover they can make money by letting other neighborhood kids fight them for nickels. They’re foul-mouthed little bastards, as Courtney Fabrizio, the marvelous narrator of my story for Leonardo Audio, alludes to. (You should read the story, but you really should get the audio version of the anthology, particularly for the amazing work of Courtney.).

In the story, Marie, Saul and Peter take on all comers – and get rescued by their big sister Rachel as they’re about to be busted by the cops – and it’s a story that is, by turns, fun and dire.

In GHOST SHOW, Marie, Saul and Peter are still the youngest members of the Anderson family and Rachel sometimes rescues and sometimes needs rescuing. GHOST SHOW is a story that’s very, very loosely based on my mother and her siblings when they were young, and the four are based on one of my aunts, two of my uncles and my mom. There wasn’t as much mayhem in real life as I injected into either the short story or the novel.

I’d encourage you to buy FIGHTING WORDS not just for my story “A Fighting Life” but also for the really crisp and tough writing by the other writers in the anthology. And it might tide you over until GHOST SHOW arrives.

The link to buy FIGHTING WORDS:

Where to find our words and signed books (scrawled in my case)

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If you’re in or near Muncie, Indiana, and missed out last week when Jill Blocker and I were in town, you can find signed copies of our books at:

Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore

Aw Yeah Comics- Muncie

EB and Bertha C Ball Center

The Orchard Shop at Minnetrista Museum & Gardens

Book touring. Touring with books. Book talks. Talking about books, I’m kinda tired, can you tell?

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Okay, so this post won’t make any sense because even though I had a good night’s sleep I’m still kinda brain-fried. So prepare yourself. Head-scratching is not only likely, but recommended.

My longtime friend and fellow author Jill Blocker – she’s one of the masterminds behind Constellate Creatives and Constellate Publishing – just held two days of book talks and signings in Muncie, Indiana. We’re still groggy, and Jill has only just begun her extended book tour.

Two days, you scoff. That’s barely any tine at all.

On the contrary, we packed five book talks and signings and an afterparty event at a local martini bar, RoHo’s, into those two days. We spoke at the Ball State University-affiliated EB and Bertha C Ball Center, Carnegie Library, Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore, Aw Yeah Comics and the Orchard Shop at Minnetrista, all in Muncie, where I was a newspaper reporter and editor for 40 years and Jill attended Ball State and interned at the newspaper. That’s where we met, a little less than 20 years ago, and we kept in touch. When we published our novels WHAT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, THAT OCTOBER, SEVEN ANGELS and HAPPILY AFTER EVER – the latter two newly out this summer – we decided we’d publish books by other authors who wanted to work with us. We’ve published one other so far and have others in the pipeline – and we’re looking for more authors. Go to the Constellate Creatives website for more. (Link below.)

Anyway, the sadist who set up the Indiana portion of our book tour (raises hand) didn’t leave much room for seeing family and friends or even breathing while we were in the Hoosier state, yet we somehow managed to.

Now Jill is off to Seattle and NYC and back to her home base of Zurich, Switzerland.

At a couple of events, we were joined by our talented friend Sara McKinley, who painted the beautiful cover for THAT OCTOBER. That’s Sara on the right there.

And we’ll be doing all this again, probably next year. Hopefully with even more books by other authors.

Nest year? Man, I better get some sleep.