Most of my life, however, I had dogs. When I married Nita, I not only gained a stepson, I gained a stepdog. While I still miss Toonces (I feel tears whenever I think about the day he had to be put down.), I found when I remarried that I really missed dogs. There is nothing like the unconditional love a dog can give you. They can be needy, and walking them can be a bit messy, but dogs are incredibly loyal. In fact, except for a seventeen-year break, I’ve had a dog since birth. Who were they?

Duchess – This black shepherd lived with me and my parents at their first home in rural Chatham. She was this big, sweet black dog who went to live with my grandparents when mom and dad opted for a more suburban lifestyle. We spent every Sunday with my dad’s parents when they still lived near Cleveland. Part of those visits was always hanging out with Duchess, who reminds me an awful lot of my current dog.

Hercules – I have fading memories of this rambunctious beagle. Mind you, I have some sharp memories going back before I was five. I called him Herky. My mom gave him to a hunter, however, when Herc got excited and wrapped his chain around my neck (which I don’t remember.) I missed that dog.

Rags – We didn’t have this shaggy mutt for very long. He was white with a bit of sheep dog in him, and I think he was the dog we had when Ziggins was born. Rags, however, liked to fight other dogs and once picked a fight with the neighbor’s docile beagle mix. (That’s like picking a fight with Mr. Rogers.) Dad gave him to my uncle, who in turn gave him to his kids. So now my cousins think of Rags more as their dog.

Noodles – My parents picked up a Samoyed mix pup for the cousin of one of my classmates. We had her the longest of any dog my family ever had. We raised her almost from birth, and I actually potty trained her. My parents went to get Noodles fixed, only she got pregnant with her first litter before it could happen. So they waited six months, during which… Well… She had three litters of pups before my parents could get her fixed. She was a wonderful dog, however, an outdoor dog. Every winter, we would stuff her doghouse with straw almost to the point where she couldn’t get inside. She was comfortable in all but the coldest weather. When she died, we didn’t wait long to get…

Spanky – I’m pretty sure this pup we got a few months after Noodles died was part Australian shepherd. She also had a love of mud, which drove my mother crazy. And it wouldn’t be our house if mom and dad didn’t miss getting a female pup fixed before she had that first litter. In getting rid of the pups, we met a woman who insisted we give her Spanky and all the pups. My mom refused. The next morning, they were all gone except for…

Seamus – Spanky’s pup and one Ziggins took a shine to.  Seamus got his name from the Pink Floyd song. I would blast Pink Floyd whenever possible, and every time Meddle played, Seamus would come running, probably to the sound of the titular dog barking in the background. Soon, if we sang the song, he would come running. The night Spanky and her pups were kidnapped, Ziggins had taken Seamus to bed with him. So Seamus became our dog. Seamus was not the brightest dog I’ve ever owned. For a time in the late 1980′s, we lived out in Amish country, and Seamus had a habit of chasing Amish buggies. The horses had a habit of leaving horseshoe prints in Seamus’s ass. Seamus had the additional habit of nursing his wounds for a week before going right back out and chasing the horses again.

Gurl – For seventeen years, I didn’t have a dog. Then I married Nita. Now I have Gurl. She was four years old when Nita and I married. When we were dating, I’d left my cell phone at her place after staying over. I got sick at work and had to leave. We worried how Gurl, a very territorial dog, would react to me barging in unescorted. Gurl didn’t do boyfriends well. However, once I had my phone, Gurl looked all depressed that I was leaving. I called Nita when I got home and said, “Honey, I have to marry you. The dog will be depressed if we don’t.”

Of all the dogs I’ve had, Gurl is the most loyal. She’s extremely well-behaved, though definitely a watchdog. Step into our yard, and she’ll go berzerk, but out on a walk, she is (usually) friendly and ignores other dogs. One memorable exception happened when Nita took her out for a walk and happened upon a deer. Gurl wanted to fight it.

As I’ve said, I’ve had my share of cats. However, I’ve always felt more love and loyalty from dogs. They can be needy sometimes, but there’s nothing like a dog, especially a female dog, who will look after you when you’re ill or sad and is always happy to see you when you walk in the door at the end of the day.

Mary Shelley

We all know the story. An arrogant scientist raids graveyards to sew together a superman only to be disgusted and horrified by his creation, which then turns on him. We also know all the film variations: Victor Frankenstein screaming, “Alive! It’s alive!” The bolts on the neck. The Tesla coils. And of course, “It isn’t Igor. It’s Eye-gor.”

But let’s go back to the original 1821 novel, written by a very young Mary Shelley. She was only 18 when she started work on this novel. And contrast its prose with that of contemporary and later novels of the early nineteenth century. In an era when Melville and Dickens wrote thick, wordy prose, Shelley shook up the literary world with a lean piece of work. Frankenstein in print barely reaches 300 pages, often falling short depending on which edition you read.

Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t the mad scientist played by Colin Clive or parodied by Gene Wilder. If anything, he’s the eighteenth century equivalent of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Medicine is changing, dammit, and Victor Frankenstein is going to use it to change the world. Only Steve and Bill gave you the mouse and friendly graphical interfaces. Vic played with dead bodies and lightning (Shelley is intentionally vague and suggests alchemy is involved.) and realized he went too far. As for his monster, hideous he may be, but he’s not the flat-headed mute played by Boris Karloff and Peter Boyle. He is a large caricature  of a man with super strength and speed, as tragic a figure as the creator with whom he shares a mutual hatred.

What’s amazing is how well this story holds up, and maybe that’s the secret of its appeal. It is written in the warm afterglow of the Enlightenment, and Frankenstein shows the dark side of that period.

But if Shelley’s human, bare-bones version of this classic tale is not your speed, well…

How about something more recent?

Microsoft: The First Generation

Cheryl Tsang

As with Apple, Microsoft was built by a group of passionate workaholics. Cheryl Tsang takes eleven of Microsoft’s first generation of employees and paints a portrait of a startup where 16 hour days and seven-day work weeks were the norm. It wasn’t really expected. With the exception of two of Tsang’s subjects, they were young men and women who got caught up in designing and building technology that did not yet exist. The company began as a startup in New Mexico creating computer languages for microcomputers, moved into applications when Apple began work on the Macintosh and, once Windows, Xenix, and OS/2 (jointly designed by IBM) were established, pioneered CD ROM multimedia.

To a person, everyone Tsang profiles had a hand in taking Microsoft from a small shop of seven employees to a juggernaut that eclipsed IBM and Hewlett-Packard. And they all retired young when the long hours and grueling effort took its toll. They left with few regrets, and all of them give insights into the personalities of Bill Gates – sharp, confrontational, and occasionally so wrapped up in his work that he had to be steered toward his gate at the airport – and Steve Ballmer, a man so busy Sunday mornings were the only time to get a meeting with him.

I was disappointed there wasn’t more about Paul Allen, Microsoft’s cofounder. Allen left in the early eighties to deal with an illness, but it still would have been good to hear more about him. Like Steve Wozniak at Apple, Allen remains something of an enigma to many.

The other thing Tsang manages to capture was the almost pirate mentality at Microsoft even after the company went public. There were no memos, no agendas, no committees. People discussed projects in the halls, even poking their heads into Bill Gates’ office to pitch an idea. That disappeared some time in the 1990′s when the company became so large that bureaucracy set in. It’s a different Microsoft now.

I kick off the month with three 87th Precinct novels, Like Love, Ten Plus One, and Ax. Two or three times a year, I read a pair of McBains, but this time, I have a trio in a hardcover released some time in the 1970′s. I follow that up with my first ever LeCarre novel, The Constant Gardener.

Then I have an ebook I’ve been wanting to get to for a long time, Nathan Singer’s In the Light of You. It’s been a while since I read Nathan’s work, so this will be a treat. He’s paired up with Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude.

Next month’s Stephen King entry will be Skeleton Crew. This is the collection that gave us “The Mist.” It also has a bizarre – even for King – short called “Survivor Type” where a castaway discovers an unusual food source to keep himself alive. It’s one of the few stories King could not sell after he became successful because… Well… Go look it up.

I plan to round out the month with a biography of the exciting and dynamic President William McKinley. Yeah, I’m still in the Anonymous Dull President phase of American history. At least Teddy Roosevelt is up the following month.

Can’t tell you what I’m listening to on audio because I generally don’t know until a few days before I finish the audiobook I’m listening to at the moment. For instance, I had no clue until I was down to the last disk of a book on Microsoft that I’d be listening to Eric Clapton’s autobiography. Fascinating stuff Eric’s done, but the narrator doesn’t sound like Clapton. He sounds like a BBC announcer. A little jarring to here the life story of a guy from Ripley, England narrated in the RP.

It took me a while to come to the decision. Part of it was I had no idea if this ebook thing would take off. Another part would be sales. The numbers for Road Rules and “A Walk in the Rain” aren’t exactly burning up the charts. But then ebooks require no cash up front to publish, and they have forever to find their audience. For that, I have nothing to lose.

But there’s more to it than that.

Northcoast very likely would have ended up at a major New York press if I had waited two weeks before signing my contract with a small press east of Baltimore. As it was, I was shocked someone wanted to take a chance on the story, so I signed. Too bad. I was faced with the prospect of having to create a new novel for an agent while fulfilling the contract I’d signed. In short, impatience and naivete got the better of me.

I was stoked. I’d published a novel. I had a second one in the can and in the process of editing. I had a draft of a third novel. Finish this contract, and I could probably move up the ladder to the next step.

Then the bottom dropped out. The publisher went out of business, and like a lot of small presses that fail, there was a lot of denial about the situation. I got my rights back but…

What?

Given the state of publishing then (2006), I couldn’t just turn around and resell the books to another publisher. And I had trouble finding the magic I found with the first three Kepler novels. A story called Devil’s Dance had a more unlikeable protag. Road Rules started making rounds about the time publishing started to get skittish about new authors. And several new projects fizzled on the pad.

Then I started on Holland Bay, what I called my “magnum opus.” That’s a book that’s going to take a long, long time to get right. I’m stoked when I work on that project, but it’s so big that I need time to make it work properly. The writing career that seemed so promising at the middle of the decade suddenly seemed like a waste of time.

About the time I moved in with Nita, I found the box of copies the publisher sent me as a “peace offering.” (I’d told him to destroy them.) I was so disgusted with the experience that I dumped them in the bins out back and sent them off to Mt. Rumpke. A couple months later, I blogged a request that anyone who owned a copy destroy it.

I might have been a tad bitter. Just a tad.

Then I put out Road Rules as an ebook. The six people who’ve read it generally liked it. So why not Northcoast? It’s edited. It’s already out of print. Redoing it as an ebook cost me nothing. I asked Erin O’Brien to get me some photos of the Cleveland skyline for the cover, and it’s her photo that provides the basis for Northcoast‘s new cover.

I plan to bring out the follow up, Second Hand Goods this spring. I also will write a new third Kepler novel, one that more logically follows on the consequences of the second book. But will I try print again?

I think it’s stupid not to try print. This term “legacy publishing” is really shit. I don’t have time for the rantings of some failed midlist writer who’s now complaining no one wants to buy his books anymore. (Really, dude? Try writing better books and telling us why we should read them. Thumbing your nose at New York isn’t a sellling point.) Yes, the ground is shifting beneath our feet in publishing. But last I checked, the only ones saying print is dead are those trying to hawk ebooks. And many of them are selling fewer copies than I am. I’m all for going indie now that it’s feasible. I’m doing it. But not going traditional? Why would you narrow your options?

It’s not either/or. Either/or is suicide. But Kepler will remain an independent endeavor. It’s wholly mine, and I want to control it end to end.

First up is Gerald So. I’ve known Gerald since about 2002 or so, when he first took over for Victoria Esposito-Shea as fiction editor of Thrilling Detective. Gerald and I became good friends over the years, kvetching about various foibles in the writing community, bouncing ideas off each other, and even critiquing each other’s work. Gerald’s moved on to doing a poetry site and put out the poetry mag The Lineup with various other editors for a few years. Gerald often retweets some of my inane promotional tweets for Northcoast. I can’t thank him enough.

I also can’t thank this guy enough. Anthony Neil Smith published my first short story in 2001, “A Walk in the Rain,” in one of the early editions of Plots With Guns. He punished one of the later drafts of Northcoast Shakedown before it landed in bookstores. Neil is a good bud and a terrific writer, and it was Neil who convinced me to try the 99 cent route with Road Rules. I try to promote anything of his that comes out (I read it first, but it’s always a good risk.) and have yet to be disappointed. Neil’s taken a little ownership of Northcoast as he gave me some of the most detailed notes on the early manuscripts. I never asked. He just does it.

Joining him is his former partner in crime at PWG, Victor Gischler. Vic writes some strange, strange shit, starting with his debut novel, Gun Monkeys, the finest novel involving exploding pastries ever written. Vic was among those who looked over my early work and passed judgment upon it. He also gave Road Rules a blurb and has been tirelessly pimping Northcoast.

There are more, of course. Early on, Les Roberts and Steve Hamilton took an interest. Ken Bruen was probably my first die-hard fan. Laura Lippman has provided me with several much-needed reality checks over the years.  JD Rhoades not only wrote the intro to Road Rules, but he even tried to get me in with his agent at one point. And I can’t forget Li’l Sis, whose help and support go back long before I started writing seriously.

Still, Gerald, Neil, and Vic have been getting the word out about Northcoast, and I wanted to recognize them for their help. Thanks, guys. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

I am nothing if not ambitious.

So I began the year with a routine:

Weekdays are for writing, revising, and submitting short stories. As it is, I’ve subbed two so far and am working on a third.  Weekends are for the novel projects. I just finished one outline, and will revise the outline to another project this weekend. The advantage is that I have more time on the weekends, so why not devote it to longer work? One of the frustrations I had with Holland Bay, and the reason you aren’t downloading it or buying it off the shelf, is time. I frequently tried to write the novel and do homework at the same time. One term, I had four classes. I ended up repeating one of those classes.

Evenings are usually best for short fic. At least with crime, I tend to write under 3000 words. It’s a little harder for science fiction, but to get a short out in a week, week and a half, that’s ideal. The prose is fast and has energy. That’s the way it should be.

Of course, my schedule changes as the year goes on. I’ll have to take two classes in the spring and again starting in the fall. We plan to take a couple of vacations. I may or may not go to Bouchercon this year. (I need to justify the expense, and I just can’t seem to do it anymore.) AJ graduates and will be in drum corps this year before heading to college. I might get sick. Nita might get sick. AJ might get sick. The dog might get sick. The system I work on at ye olde day jobbe might get sick. You never know. When that happens, I’ll have to be able to adapt on the fly.

But I am realistic. I don’t promise myself I’m going to turn out the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy during NaNoWriMo. Not happening. But I’m not going to let production slack off. I’m a writer. Writers write.

STARDOC

SL Viehl

Cherijo Grey Veil leaves Earth behind for a job as a trauma doctor on distant Kevarzanga 2. Why? In short, her father’s an overbearing control freak. Not just a control freak, but one angora cat away from being a James Bond villain, at least in personality. So when Cherijo arrives aboard an off-record interstellar shuttle, she is accused of incompetence by her new boss without having met him before, and thrown into an understaffed, underequipped free clinic. In the meantime, her father “orders” her back to Earth, to which Cherijo has to remind him he can’t do to an adult. In the meantime, she manages to deliver the babies of a killer alien species, become engaged to a man from a warrior race, pick up a telepathic stalker, and detect and cure a bizarre plague. So she’s found her new home, right?

Well, this is Book 1 of Viehl’s Stardoc series, so no. Stardoc, without giving too much away, ends with the start of an interstellar war over Cherijo. Of course, it’s her father’s fault. Told you he was an ass.

DEAD MONEY

Ray Banks

This nasty piece of noir originally appeared a few years ago as The Big Blind by Blasted Heath‘s spiritual ancestor, Point Blank Press.  Ray Banks’ debut concerns Alan Slater, double glazing salesman and harmless douchebag. Really, his main sin is cheating on his wife with a college girl he met while pub crawling. His real problem is his best friend, Les Beale. Les is a hopeless drunk and gambler. Problems begin when Alan hits a dog on his way to see his girlfriend. The honest thing to do would be to tell the owner “Hey, your dog ran out in front of my car. Sorry, mate.” So naturally, Slater throws the dog in the drink and says nothing. Unfortunately, he’s dented the car, left his trunk stinking of dead dog, and kept a liquor store receipt from the wrong part of town. He’s able to blow all this off until Les calls him in the middle of the night. Seems a poker game did not go the way Les wanted, and now he has a corpse in his apartment.

Slater should have hung up the phone, but it’s only then he tries to do the decent thing and help Les out. Instead of making Les’s problem go away, it only draws Slater deeper into Les’s death spiral. He soon finds himself on the hook for a huge sum of money Les owes to a Pakistani gangster, and the gangster doesn’t care that Slater never consented to the deal. From there, Slater’s life (and stomach) disintegrate.

After eight years, the story still holds up well. There’s even an appearance by DS Donkin, the nemesis of Banks’s other creation, Cal Innes. Banks knows his stuff. And while the influence of Ken Bruen is evident in the storyline and the tone, Banks’s prose replaces Bruen’s Irish lyrical poetry with the harsh buzz saw of Manchester, England. Dark, unrelenting, and brutal, what Banks excels at.

Congress has, time and again, proven its inability to handle matters of technology. Witness the hearings into Microsoft’s practices in the late 1990′s, wherein Sun’s Scott McNealy told an ignorant subcommittee, “Why does it take thirty-two lines of code in Windows to sign your name?” Given how network authentication is done in most operating systems, including Sun’s, that’s actually pretty lean code. The Senator questioning McNealy did not know that, and even Bill Gates smirked when the Senator didn’t quite realize his leg had been seriously pulled.

Now these geniuses want to regulate the Internet.

No. The only possible outcome of PIPA/SOPA is the muffling of American citizens by corporate interests who will be given far too much power to quash whomever offends them in the name of “copyright infringement.” Copyright infringement is bad; suppression of free speech is treason. Do the math.

Tell your senators and representative to vote no on these ill-thought-out, poorly written bills. If they vote yes, let them know they need to update their resumes. Do not tolerate this attack on our rights.

Presumptive nominee – Yes, I know. Mitt’s the only GOP candidate not in dire need of some sort of anti-psychotic medication, which pretty much makes him the safest bet to get the Republican nod this year. But until it’s glaringly obvious that the others have dropped out or have been mathematically eliminated from consideration, could we please stop using the term “presumptive nominee”? Four years ago, they had already been calling Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee since 2004. How’d that work out for you? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Presumptive nominee means all the delegates are pledged, and all that remains is the dog-and-pony show we call the convention.

1% – If you make over $34,000 a year, you are the 1%. You have more money than 99% of the rest of the world. Oh, but you say, we’re speaking relatively. OK, let’s look at the 1% in America. Quite a few of you protesting are in that 1%. It’s not the 1% causing all the trouble. It’s a specific subset of them. Who are they? Bankers. Wall Street traders. Congressional lobbyists. The 1%? It’s less than the 1%. That’s the real crime.

Lies of the liberal media – Look, wingnuts, when your guy gets called out, it’s not a lie. It’s the truth. Sometimes, the truth hurts. Deal with it.

Obamacare – Let’s look at this one in the cold light of day, shall we? Last I checked, we don’t have a Canadian style healthcare system (and I’ve yet to meet a Canadian who thinks it’s horrible. I asked. Think of that next time you want to give me a lecture.) We have a law that says the insurance companies have to spend more time insuring you and less time denying you your insulin because the CEO needs to buy a new fur-lined sink.

Socialist/Fascist – I’ve yet to meet an American who actually knows the definition of “socialist.” Certainly no one in the Tea Party. Likewise, the term “fascist” to describe political opponents of either stripe needs to go into cold storage. Let us be honest in our descriptions of those whose political opinions juxtapose with their lack of any sort of social grace. Let us use the politically correct term “asshole.”

Politically challenged – If you have to refer to people who disagree with you as “politically challenged,” you’re an idiot. No exceptions. Knock it off.

Rethuglican – OK, seriously? To criticize a wingnut, you sound like a wingnut? It doesn’t make your point. It makes you sound like a moron. It’s like when wingnuts refer to CNN as the “Communist News Network.” All that tells me is you don’t have a leg to stand on, even if you do.

Basically, what I’m asking is to quit sounding like a dumbass when you talk politics. We generously spend our tax dollars to pay other people to do that.

It’s no secret that Nick Kepler’s former employer and biggest client, TTG Insurance, is loosely based on the former employer I discreetly call BigHugeCo. But just how closely is it based? One former coworker told me there was no way someone could make up all those characters without basing them on real people.

I had to explain that basing a character on a real person becomes limiting because you start trying to force fit the real person into the imaginary character. Counterintuitively, the character becomes less believable. But the company?

TTG is a property/casualty insurance company, the people who insure your car, your house, your business. Like BigHugeCo, they have a life insurance division. Because BigHugeCo was large enough at the time to have the most common lines of business in insurance, it allowed me to pattern TTG’s structure after theirs. They had a personal lines (Home and auto), competing commercial and specialty insurance (Trust me. I worked there 11 years and that one still confuses me.), and, of course, life insurance, which is a whole ‘nother animal.

But what was the working environment like? Physically, very similar. BigHugeCo’s campus, before a major move last year, was scattered over several buildings in downtown Cincinnati. Likewise, I picked several buildings to house TTG’s various and sundry division and corporate units. The building where Nick works really does house the regional office of another insurance company. I altered the street address slightly to avoid implying that Nick worked for Chicago Title & Insurance, but still imply that TTG actually occupied the building.

As for the people there…

Well… No. My coworkers at BigHugeCo were pretty normal folks. The closest we ever came to a Ken Giamatti (the Commercial Lines exec who gives Nick a hard time in Northcoast Shakedown) was a middle manager who had some… um… interesting photos on his hard drive. Stupid, but not earth-shattering or even enough to put him on unemployment. Some of the more unpleasant characters in the book would not have lasted very long at BigHugeCo. Screaming was not considered a viable management technique. When it is, even in this economy, one generally updates their resume when it is.

But the resemblance also ends when you go back to what I said about basing characters on real people. I really dislike roman a clefs since inevitably, the story gets stilted trying to make fictional characters bend to the author’s perception of their real world counterparts. It’s one thing to write historical fiction and speculate on how real people behaved and acted. It’s entirely different when you write a novel that is, by definition, supposed to be fiction. I used BigHugeCo’s structure to design a fictional company, but every company has its own personality. I had to let TTG’s corporate personality evolve on its own.

Amazon | Nook