You know, if there were a special font for Irony I’d be on it like a mongoose on a cobra. My putative retirement’s been drawing raised eyebrows for quite a while now, and it’s starting to look like a joke, and an old one at that.
It’s been a while since the last newsletter, but I seem to remember you talked about behaving like a real trollop and knocking off a little bit every day. Why are you making a face?
That was Anthony Trollope, you ninny. The British novelist, not some lady of easy virtue.
But I got the rest of it right, didn’t I? And I bet you finished that novella you were working on. Am I right?
Not quite. I finished it, but it’s not a novella. Like Topsy, it growed…and wound up tipping the scales at 52,000 words. That makes it a novel. Not a lengthy one, but longer than my early ventures in erotica.
Like Campus Tramp?
Or Trailer Trollop, as far as that goes. It’s even longer by 5000 words than Matthew Scudder’s debut in The Sins of the Fathers. But shorter than, say, A Long Line of Dead Men.
So it’s a real book.
Right now it’s a a mere PDF, being read by my daughters and my agent. But yes, if all goes well, it’ll be a real book soon enough, with the several things it lacks at the moment: Ink, paper, cover art, a publisher’s imprint. And, come to think of it, a title.
How come it doesn’t have a title?
Because, come to think of it, I haven’t come to think of it.
Duh. The thing is, I thought you were done writing novels.
So did I.
I thought you felt you’d aged out of it, and a full-length book would take too much energy for a man your age, and besides you’d already said pretty much everything you had to say.
Ah yes. It seems to me I reported as much, to you and to others. That’s what I’d been led to believe.
So what happened?
The book happened. And my wife, whose eagle eye spots what SpellCheck overlooks, has read it and tells me she loves it, for all its uncompromising darkness. So we’ll see. All I know is I sat down sometime last year to write a short story or a novella, whatever it might turn out to be, and I abandoned it after 15,000 words, never expecting to come back to it. And then I picked it up again, and couldn’t seem to put it down…
Got it.
Do you suppose we could talk about something else? Something I wrote and published a few years ago? It’s called Step By Step, and the subtitle is A Pedestrian Memoir. It had a respectable sale as a HarperCollins hardcover and trade paperback, and picked up a nice following in the community of runners and racewalkers. (Benji Durden, the Olympic marathoner, has championed the book ever since he came across it, and we’ve since become online friends; I’m hoping a face-to-face meeting is in the cards before too long.)
It’s never been done in audio, and I waited because I felt it was the sort of personal book that ought to be author-narrated. But narrating audiobooks is something I’ve truly aged out of; by the end of even a medium-long session at the 
microphone, my voice has fallen apart and my energy level’s just this side of comatose. (I did manage to narrate A Time to Scatter Stones, and am happy I did, but it was no walk in the park. And it’s only a quarter the length of Step By Step.)
So I had the good fortune to team up with accomplished narrator/producer Michael Bonner, and I’ve published the result via Audible’s ACX division, and now that it’s up and running (well, maybe that should be walking) I can but wonder why I waited this long. I think you’ll like what Michael has done; just click the Audible Sample arrow on the Amazon page and see what you think.
I gather you’re pleased with his performance.
He’s already at work on narrating another personal book, this one for writers: The Liar’s Bible, a Good Book for Fiction Writers. So yes, you might say I’m happy with his approach to my work.
I understand you sent links for free downloads to fans who might want to review Step By Step. But they’re all gone now.
True. ACX gave me a generous batch of links, and audio fans snapped up every last one of them. If you got one, and if you liked what you heard, I’ll look forward to your review. And if you missed out, well, all is not lost.
It isn’t?
Not really. I’ve been self-publishing audiobooks via ACX for a few years now, working with a variety of excellent narrator/producers, and I can furnish FREE download reviewers’ links for all of the following titles:
These links are to Amazon, so that you can check out each book description on its Amazon page and determine what may or may not appeal to you. If you’d like any of these free audio downloads, email your request to me at lawbloc@gmail.com. Choose up to three titles and I’ll reply with your personal free codes, along with a direct link to the page where you can access the downloads.
If you’re in the UK, please mention that little fact in your email; there are different codes and a different access link, for UK listeners. In fact, I still have a few UK downloads available for Step By Step…
And now you’re about to tell us that these won’t last long, so hurry. Right?
I don’t really know how long they’ll last. But FREE is as seductive a four-letter word as any I know, so they may go quickly. That’s what happened with the Step By Step codes, and they didn’t have the clout of this mighty newsletter spurring them on.
I should probably emphasize that grabbing a freebie doesn’t obligate anybody to review the book on Amazon or Audible or Goodreads or any other media, social or otherwise. But, ahem, if you should happen to like what you hear…
It’s the right thing to do.
Some would say so. Meanwhile, see those falling leaves coming up on the right? They’re a sure sign that the end of this epistle is in sight, and not a moment too soon. But I still have a batch of things to mention, so I’m just going to rattle them off one after the other. I’ll number them, if only to endow the enterprise with the illusion of organization.
1. Hit Parade has just gone on sale in Italian. Luigi Garlaschelli has been working his way through some of my more popular series, and he’s followed up Il Sicario(Hit Man) and Il Sicario nel Mirino (Hit List) with Il Sicario Ritorna(Hit Parade). His translations have received superb notices, and if you read Italian, well, ti sarà tutto chiaro. The new title’s broadly available in both ebook and paperback form.
2. You can call me professor now.As I believe I’ve mentioned, I’ll be spending the fall semester as Writer-in-Residence at Newberry College in South Carolina, where I’ll be leading a writing workshop and presenting a literature course on crime fiction. A colleague tweeted this photo of my office door, and another pointed out I’m lucky they didn’t put quotation marks around the word Professor.
Gosh, my mother would be so proud…
And no, you can’t enroll in either class, or attend as an auditor. Both are for Newberry undergraduates only. I’ve been asked if I could post the reading list for the crime fiction course, and I’ll do that, probably in the next newsletter. You can read along—and you might want to get in the mood by wearing a Newberry sweatshirt, and shouting Go Wolves! on Saturday afternoons…
3. From book to screen in only 60 years! Well, that may be a trifle optimistic. But the good news is that Grifter’s Game, the first book I ever published under my own name, has been optioned for filming. I’ve signed and returned the contracts, and with a wee bit of luck it’ll wind up on TV or in a theater a year or two from now.
You may recall the book as Mona, which is the title Fawcett Gold Medal slapped on it when they brought it out in 1961. (Ralph Daigh, a guiding genius at Fawcett, had bought a cover painting of some woman’s face on spec. He changed the title so he could cut his losses by using the painting as cover art. But don’t get me started.) Hard Case Crime restored the original title for their edition, and now, if all goes as I hope it will, we may get to see it on a screen.
Fingers crossed! And in the meantime, the book’s abundantly available as ebook and paperback. And all of y’all who read with your ears will want to treat yourself to Alan Sklar’s narration for Blackstone Audio.
And that’s enough for now. I’ve got a manuscript to edit and a trip to pack for. Go Wolves!
Cheers,
Amazon has Trailer Trollop listed with children’s books and school supplies. That ought to get the church ladies attention. They are currently sold out. Imagine that!
Wow!!! What fantastic news!!! Congratulations from a fan down under.
Thanks, Greg!
I hope some of your excellent lines make it into the script for “Grifter’s Game” (“I thought like clocks tick”) and they don’t mess too much with the shockeroo ending. Best of luck with it. Love your work and your ceaseless industry.