Let me begin with an apology. It’s been forever since my last communication, and that’s not because the whole enterprise has slipped my mind. Every night I go to bed telling myself I’ll get to work on a newsletter first thing in the morning, and every morning I roll out of bed, see my shadow, and say the hell with it.

This is especially unfortunate in that I’ve had a large batch of recent subscriptions, probably stemming from sales of Dead Girl Blues. Each new subscriber gets an acknowledgement from David, my faithful assistant—and that’s the end of it. You never hear from me again.

I’m not sure of the cause of this lingering inertia. Age probably plays a role, and neither the state of the world nor its future prospects seem to help. But y’all don’t need to hear all that. I have a few things to report, and I think I’ll go ahead and Get To It.

First, I want to express my gratitude.

To all of you, really, for the reception you’ve given to  Dead Girl Blues, the novel I published some ten weeks ago. I chose self-publication for several reasons, and explained my decision at some length in a piece I wrote for Mystery Fanfare. I anticipated a mixed reception for Dead Girl Blues, knew that some crime fiction fans would find it problematic, but decided I could trust those readers who constitute the book’s natural audience to find their way to it.

I had help. Several writers furnished blurbs, and supported the book mightily in social media. Bloggers and reviewers spread the word. With no spots on bookstore shelves, with little or no attention from traditional media, the book has been finding its way. To date, 64% of 77 Amazon reviews have given DGB 5 stars. Some of you have said, publicly or privately, that it may be my best book—and, while there are those who might call that a low bar, I have to say it’s very nice to hear. The ebook and paperback and hardcover continue to find buyers. There’s an audiobook, and translations in German and Italian.

You can wind up with a small fortune through self-publishing—but that’s only if you start with a large fortune. It’s a slow way to get rich. But, see, getting rich was never the point. Had that been my chief concern, I’d have written another book altogether. I’ve covered expenses, and I’m more than pleased.

So…thank you.

And now some overdue announcements, numbered to provide the illusion of order:

1. Bloody Scotland is that country’s equivalent of Bouchercon, and I’ve long thought of it as something I’d like to get to sooner or later. Well, the good news is I’ll be there this year—and the even better news is that I can do so without having to remember where I put my passport. The festival is virtual this year (as is virtually everything, not least of all virtue itself) and on Saturday, September 19, I’ll be sharing the Zoom stage with my friend Ian Rankin.

We’ll be getting underway at 6pm Scottish time, which looks to be 1pm in New York and 10am on what’s left of the West Coast. (I believe that makes it 1am in Taipei, but I could be wrong about that. I know that all of y’all in Taiwan are resourceful enough to work it out; whether you’ll be awake at whatever hour it is, well, that’s another question, isn’t it?)

You have to register, but the whole thing appears to be free, astonishingly enough. Ian and I first met in Paris decades ago, and would see each other more frequently if there weren’t this great body of turbulent water in the way. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about this time around, but we did a joint interview at a recent Bouchercon and I don’t recall any awkward silences.

2. New Audio.  I’ve mentioned the excellent audio treatment given to Dead Girl Blues by Peter Berkrot for Tantor Audio. Peter has teamed up with Teri Schnaubelt to voice my anthology, The Darkling Halls of Ivy, and I think the result will please you.

Theo Holland, the Voice of Evan Tanner, has many of my titles to his credit; the most recent are Cinderella Sims, a noir vision of counterfeiting and trickery, and Sin Hellcat, an erotic romp I wrote in collaboration with Donald Westlake. Two very different books, and Theo had fun with both of them—and so will you.

Threesome, another erotic romp, is a tour de force with three narrators; in the new audiobook, Bill Weeden is one of those narrators, and the other two are Dolores McDougal. Dolores and Bill have completed 3 is Not a Crowd—do you see a pattern here?—and it should be on sale soon; while we all wait, the two of them are at work on an anthology, Dark City Lights.

A Madwoman’s Diary, like Threesome, appeared originally as the work of Jill Emerson, and it’s now an audiobook brilliantly voiced by PJ Morgan. (Whether or not you’re interested in reading it, with either your ears or eyes, the background story about the novel is worth a look; see it on the book’s Amazon page.) Another recent release of PJ’s is Passport to Peril, an espionage romance set in 1970s Ireland; the heroine’s a folksinger, and ’tis a sweet voice PJ brings to the party.

I have a ton of work available in audio. A search of audible.com turns up 134 titles, with the most recent titles listed first. You might want to see if anything appeals.

Or not. Whatever.

3. Affirmations for Writers. If you’ve read my book Write For Your Life, you may recall I referred to a tape of affirmations I created in connection with the seminar. I sold it for years, then it was unavailable for years, and now you can download it for ten bucks as an MP3 file. The link is to a blog post where I tell you all you need to know about the tape. (Well, make that “more than you need to know.”)

4. This is the paragraph where I tell you what’s in the works, and what might be coming up next….

Well, nothing, really. I haven’t been writing anything. Don’t want to, truth to tell.

Back in January, I did have plans. There was a notion for a piece of fiction that seemed vaguely promising, though I wasn’t all that eager to do anything with it. There were also two projects that seemed easy enough to get in shape, and it was my plan to settle into our new apartment in Newberry, South Carolina, in mid-February and spend six weeks or so doing just that.

One was A Writer Prepares, the working title of a memoir of my auctorial beginnings; I’d written 50,000 words of it at a furious pace a quarter of a century ago, set it aside, and never picked it up again. I looked at it last fall and saw that it was more than good enough, and could see that it wouldn’t be all that hard to finish, so why not?

A second was Afterthoughts, a book of intros and outros and reminiscences about a lot of my early titles that have returned to print. I brought out Afterthoughts as an ebook original in 2011, when I”d arranged for Open Road to publish my backlist titles, and I retrieved it four of five years ago when my arrangement with that firm had run its course. All I had to do now was republish it myself, although it wouldn’t hurt to tweak it a little, and maybe add a piece or two to bring it up to date, but how long would that take? A week? Two at the most?

Well, best-laid plans and all that. I did get to Newberry in mid-February, and after my Frequent Companion and I had spent two weeks rendering the place fit for human occupancy, she flew home and I sat down to work. And I actually made some progress on A Writer Prepares. It was more work than I thought it would be, but it was doable, and even seemed to be getting done, and then I packed up and returned to New York in a hurry because, as you may have heard, there was this virus going around.

I did some more work on A Writer Prepares when I got home, but in a matter of days I simply lost interest. It probably wouldn’t take me long to wrap it up, but the fact is that I haven’t even looked at it since late March, and haven’t given Afterthoughts any thought at all.

Perhaps I’ll get back to one or both of these projects.

Then again, perhaps I won’t. It’s hard to know what I will or won’t get back to, in terms of my work and everything else. We took that place in Newberry anticipating that we’d be using it for occasional getaways during the year, and for the full autumn semester, when I’d be teaching once again at Newberry College. Well, it’s autumn, and I’m nowhere near Newberry, and the likelihood is remote that I’ll ever get around to teaching there or anywhere else. I hope we get back to Newberry sometime, out of fondness for the college and the town, but I’m not counting on that, either.

And that’s one more item on the lengthening list of Things That Don’t Really Matter Very Much. I’d have a hard time arguing that I haven’t written enough books, or visited enough places. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve already lived longer than I ever expected to. And however depressing and uncertain the world unquestionably is, I’m still on balance very glad to be in it.

Most days, anyway.

Cheers,