New Video

I've been playing with videos to promote my books. Okay this post is kinda self serving, but making little videos is fun and there are some cool shots of strange places.

Lasagne and Publishers

Sometimes there are things in life that elude you. The two things I notice that I am never able to nail down are lasagne and publishers. I wonder if there is a connection?

I love lasagne. With meat. (Note to chefs, lasagne has meat. Meatless lasagne should be condemned to the same hell as light beer) Throughout my life I have had great difficulty getting lasagne in restaurants. I have walked into restaurants that specialize in lasagne and not been able to get it. They are out. I have ordered it ahead of time, going into the restaurant and saying, "I am coming in on Wednesday. The only thing I am coming for is lasagne. With meat. I don't care if you have running water, but promise you will have lasagne." They write down my name and my order.

When I arrive they don't have it.Or they made a mistake and saved some meatless thing that vaguely resembles what I ordered. Even if the waiter says yes they have it and takes my order, I won't get it (once a group of 24 people came into a restaurant and ordered all the lasagne about three minutes before they took my order.)

This has nothing to do with where I live. It has happened:
In the United States. (Boston, Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland OR...)

In Italy (for crying out loud!).

And now in Cambodia.

A neighbor, out of pity for my plight, went to the same damn place that I struck out the last time and called to ask if I wanted her to bring me some as she was there and they had lasagne coming out of their ears. So sometimes I actually get some, but not when I go out to eat.

It has been this way all my life and isn't likely to change now. My wife laughed when I told her about. Now, lo these many years later she has seen this in operation too many times and always hints nicely that I might consider the lovely ravioli.


I've been writing for many years now. Magazine articles, nonfiction books, poetry, short stories and novels.
My luck with publishers, at least with fiction, follows a path reminiscent of my search for lasagne. I write a book, and after a great deal of effort, find a publisher who loves it. Hurrah, I cry.

But just because the waiter took the order, it doesn't mean you get the lasagne.

So the publisher loves the book. Contract is signed. Celebrate! The publisher gets to work (we are not talking cons here) and spends eons working on the book. Me too. Back in the old days I wrote a lot of science fiction and Ermine Publishing was excited about bringing out a double novella of mine. That was in the days of physical galleys. They hired someone to do the cover art. They edited the text. They typeset it. Lots of work.

Then they went out of business.

A few years later I sold a book to a publisher I won't name, but the editor got fired a week later and it turned out he didn't have the authority to sign the contract and anyway, they were changing their focus to cook books.

Then I sold a humorous novel (THE LEGEND OF RON ANEJO) to NovelBooks. They actually published it. A lot of angst and chaos later, they were out of business and, fortunately, the rights returned to me. (Lucky you can get it through the link on the right.)

A little bit ago, I announced that Glass Page Books was going to publish my murder mystery novel, based in Venezuela, called UNDER LOW SKIES. They did a nice cover. And then... went out of business.

So I will publish the book myself, along with the sequel, BANDIDO, that is almost done.

Fortunately, I've worked in publishing a lot of my adult life as a magazine editor, book editor (freelance) and sometimes publisher. I can see why the publishers I worked with failed. Float Street Press, my imprint, is a more cautious toe in those waters. I publish myself and a few others. We will try to develop the process and have fun with it.

Meantime, I have to remember not to expect to get lasagne or a publisher. And interestingly enough, I can actually do fine without either. It turns out that neither is particularly healthy.

UNDER LOW SKIES

Recently my agent, Rebecca Pratt, contacted me with the news that a publisher in the US was interested in my mystery novel UNDER LOW SKIES. We negotiated and I am happy to say that Glass Page Books will be publishing the book later this year.


This is the story of Martin Billings, an exSeal who is captain of an inter-island freighter. It is a tough life and requires an independent spirit. In this story, his younger brother is accused of murdering a Venezuelan fisherman. Martin goes to Cumana, Venezuela to try and sort things out and finds that the mess his brother has stepped into is a lot bigger than he could have imagined.

The publisher did this cover, which I think is great, and my good friend Derek Marabolí corrected both my Spanish and a few errors I made in place names in Venezuela. 

Needless to say I am looking forward to its release.

Colds and construction

The terrible onslaught of colds and flu hit here in Asia just as it has in so many places. It seemed odd at first, that we were sitting in weather that was 90F and snorting away with winter colds, but there it was. I thought it a poor choice of ways to begin the new year, but on the other hand maybe it gets all the being sick out of the way for a good long time. There ought to be some sort of karmic value to it -- short term, I mean. I suppose everything factors in karmically if you look at a long enough span of time.

It doesn't help that Dr. Philippe, our landlord, started putting up a new old house next door. He bought it standing out the jungle or someplace, had it taken down and brought here. It looks like a nice house, but with the crew working it was hard to sit around and take it easy and get over being sick. Below are photos of the ritual blessing on site, and two photos of the first wall going up. Reconstruction, Cambodian style.

Now the house is mostly done, at least that is what we are told. It seems to us like there is a lot left to do.

Cambodian Christmas

Christmas is not a big deal in a Buddhist country like Cambodia, but the merchants know that the tourists enjoy it. As a result, the restaurants tend to have Christmas meals of far too much food and the locals make an attempt to wave the flag, as it were. I took this shot in Kampot at the old/new/somewhat refurbished market just before Christmas.

New Speculations

Float Street Press has been taking on a bit of a life of its own lately. I started publishing my own work, then stumbled across Kurt Dysan and published his (with more to come). Then my old friend Javaid Qazi got the rights to his out of print short story collection (UNLIKELY STORIES) returned from Penguin and we published that. Then, while Jim Beckett and I were finishing up THE INVENTION OF CLAY McKENZIE, Tilly Jupiter turned up with funny speculative fiction (you are free to speculate whether or not the science is science or fantasy) and that went into the mix.

And now Jim has produced a couple of fine and funny science fiction stories. He comes from a hard science background, but with his funny bone intact. The first story is:

Proton, protector of the innocent and oppressed, roams the world of Chem fighting evil and injustice. But if she can't escape the ambush she has wandered into, all life on Chem will be in peril.

An adult story for those who appreciate chemistry.

And of course he writes about space travel as well:

When Amanda Murphy accepted the command of the spaceship that would test a revolutionary new propulsion system she didn’t bother to ask why she was selected over dozens of veteran Captains with more rank and seniority. Until, that is, she learned that the computer would actually have total control of her ship. A human couldn’t think fast enough to make course corrections at the speeds the Dark Drive was capable of reaching. But what if something went wrong?

Both books are available as ebooks from Amazon and Smashwords

(and soon through B&N and iTunes and Sony and Kobo) and in paperback from Amazon or CreateSpace.

You can find both right at Jim's sites on Amazon and Smashwords.

I'd put previews or teasers up, but they are in a nicer format at the bookseller sites anyway.

French Chicken

As the United States is celebrating annual slaughter a turkey day, I thought it appropriate to write a column about the fool things.

Here in Cambodia there isn't a word for turkey, not exactly. The word for chicken is (badly romanized) Moan. A turkey is Barang Moan, or French chicken. However, nowadays any foreigner is call a barang and if you want to say that someone is French you have to say barang barang. So I suppose French chickens are now actually foreign chickens, if anyone wants to get that technical. There is no word for fowl, either. You just say Chicken-duck. I guess turkeys and geese don't count for much.

At any rate, here is one of our landlord's foreign chickens parading around this morning. Although they look like US turkeys (although not like butterball or other factory models), these will still be around next week. They have a longer lifespan here. Must be the weather or something in the water. At any rate, this one does not look stressed out.