And Just Like That....

I started this blog shortly after I got married in 2005, so if you go way back to the beginning, you'll find posts about my pregnancy and the birth of our son Alex. Well, yesterday, he turned sixteen. Here's his first appearance on my blog....

To yesterday.

 

 

Many happy returns, son!

Mid-Month Mysteries: Birthday Parties

 Since my birthday falls in April, I thought it would be fun this month to look at cozy mysteries set at birthday parties. Here are a few that I found with a quick search. I haven't read any of these yet, so it looks like my TBR pile is going to grow again.

Birthdays Can Be Deadly is the first book in Cindy Bell's Sage Gardens Cozy Mystery series. It's set in a retirement village, where the guest of honor at a birthday party falls dead. Three members of the community join forces to figure out who did it.

Another birthday party ends in tragedy in Berries and Birthdays: A Cozy Murder Mystery. This is part of Leena Clover's Pelican Cove Cozy Mystery series. (The series actually starts with Strawberries and Strangers.) The victim just turned 100, and the mystery in this book is apparently generations old.

In Birthday Party Murder: A Lucy Stone Mystery by Leslie Meier, there are actually two parties being planned: one for a ninety-year-old former librarian, and one for a fourteen-year-old girl. The death happens during the planning stage, but Lucy must solve the murder before the librarian is targeted. This book is the ninth in the series, which starts with Mistletoe Murder.

Finally, Isis Crawford offers up recipes and a mystery in A Catered Birthday Party (A Mystery with Recipes), Book 6 in the A Mystery with Recipes series. (The series starter is A Catered Murder.) In this book, the birthday party is for a dog, but it's the owner who pays the ultimate price and the caterers who have to sniff out the criminal.

Here's hoping the next birthday party you attend doesn't end with someone facedown in the cake!

I Didn't Start the Fire (Song Parody)

Yesterday was my 50th birthday. To mark the occasion, I decided to rewrite the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to cover events of the last fifty years. There are five verses, so each one is dedicated to a different decade. (I used Wikipedia to look up key events, people, and things from each decade.) Although I like to rewrite lyrics to songs, this was one of my more challenging projects. Billy Joel manages to make his lyrics work by incorporating internal rhymes into every line. Not all of my lines rhyme that well. The syllable counts for each line don't sound consistent to me, though I could be mishearing them. Perhaps I'll come back to this at some point to tweak a few lines. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this musical trip down Memory Lane.

Earth Day, Watergate, Richard Nixon ain’t so great,

Oil crisis, Gerald Ford, Hawking finds black holes,

Voyager, Pinochet, Bell-Bottoms and World Trade,

Elvis Presley, Happy Days, Alda and Travolta

Saigon falls, Jonestown, Biko, and stagflation

Star Wars, Space Invaders, Dark Side of the Moon

Disco, edit genes, Test tube babies hit the scene

Margaret Thatcher, Mao Zedong, hostages, and Brady Bunch!

(Chorus) We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Lennon shot, Regan lives, Cold War and Gorbachev

Marcos had to go, Pinochet and Truedeau

Rubik’s cube, Madonna, Mario and Pacman

New pope in Rome, ET’s gotta phone home,

Dallas was a dream, Valley Girls reigned supreme,

Michael Jackson, Challenger, Halley’s Comet, Chernobyl,

Apple, MTV, Sarajevo, Tom Hanks

INXS, greed is good, Germans tore a wall down

Chorus

World Wide Web, NAFTA, Bill Clinton, Mandela,

Hubble, GPS, Windows is a big success,

Rodney King, Eurostar, Kuwait and the Gulf War

Dolly Sheep, Warsaw Pack, Rabin and Arafat

Climate change, slacker, Hale-Bopp, Pathfinder

Amazon, Hong Kong, Spice Girls sang their songs

Toy Story, Pokemon, Gen X has flannel on

OJ got away, end it all with Y2K!

Chorus

9-11 don’t forget, Facebook on the Internet

Climate change, anthrax, we all wear cargo pants

Harry Potter, civil wars, Pluto now is a dwarf

Bush, Obama, Merkel too, Come on back, Doctor Who

Housing bubble had to burst, earthquakes did their worst

Sequence genomes mice to men, Avatar and Eminem!

Chorus

2010, Arab Spring, African uprising

Castro, smartphones, hybrid cars and flying drones

Human rights, Endgame, California needs some rain

Chicago Cubs break a curse, White House goes from great to worse

Women march in pussy hats, teenagers on SnapChat

3D printing, iPads, Brexit, The Walking Dead

Fire sweeps a continent, fake news from the government

COVID-19 at my door, I’ll be here for fifty more!

(This last line is meant to be an expression of an indomitable spirit, not hubris.)

Chorus

Indie Publishing: The Reckoning

When I started indie publishing back in 2011, I promised myself I would keep at it until my next landmark birthday and then re-evaluate if I wanted to continue. That day arrives next week.

Like many people at the start of a new venture, I thought self-publishing success would be assured, and it wouldn't take me long to find fame and fortune. That didn't happen. I'm not a fast or prolific writer, and the stories I want to tell don't have the tropes many readers seem to want. I seldom sell books unless I pay for ads on the free/bargain book sites, and even the ads end up costing more than I earn. I earn more from selling short stories to anthologies than I do from my indie-published novels. Perhaps I should focus on short stories--if I still feel that writing is worth the effort.

Despite all the struggled, I'm determined to keep writing and self-publishing my novels. I improve my craft with every project, and it's possible future novels will hit the sweet spot between what I want to write and what readers want to read. I don't necessarily need to be a bestseller; if I can find a few thousand people who are in my tribe and get what I write, I'll do well enough. There are still so many stories I want to tell with my current and future characters. I can't let them--or myself--down by giving up. I already fulfilled one dream by finishing the Season Avatars series. There are still more dreams out there. Thanks to indie publishing, I can control what happens to my dreams.

Here's to another fifty years of reading and writing books. May the Muse be with me!

Happy 12th Birthday, Alex!

 My son's 12th birthday is tomorrow. He already had his party a little early (see the bottom picture), and since it's a weeknight, we won't be doing much more than going out to dinner and enjoying a decorated cookie. Still, I wish him all the best for the upcoming year!

Birthday Sale!

My birthday is on Sunday, so I'm giving out a treat. All of my novels are sale-priced at $0.99 through Saturday, May 4th. Lyon's Legacy is a novella and still permafree. Here are the universal store links to the rest of my books:


Twinned Universes (sequel to Lyon's Legacy)


The Season Avatars series:

Seasons' Beginnings
Scattered Seasons
Chaos Season
Fifth Season
Summon the Seasons

Enjoy!

Hope Never Dies and Real Person Fan Fiction

First of all, I'd like to wish my husband, Eugene, a very happy birthday today! You'll always be my knight in shining armor.

If you loved all the Obama-Biden memes (particularly the ones after the 2016 election such as this one), then you might like Hope Never Dies: An Obama-Biden Mystery, by Andrew Shaffer. I read about this book a few weeks ago and immediately put it on hold at my library. I finally had a chance to read it last week. Basically, after an Amtrak conductor dies in what everyone else assumes to be a suicide or accident, Obama and Biden team up to discover the truth. Biden is the first-person narrator. I've never gotten closer to either man than through the voting machines, so I don't know how accurately they're portrayed. Certainly some of their escapades seem a bit unreal, and other reviews I've read say Obama comes across as more remote than he actually is. Still, the pair do make a fun Holmes-Watson couple.

Since I used to write Beatles fan fiction, I was interested in the real-person fan fiction aspect of this book. In the New York Times article I read about Hope Never Dies, the author relates how he met Biden but didn't tell him about this project. The standard disclaimer at the beginning of the book says that "All characters--including those based on real people, living or dead...are used fictitiously." Celebrities do give up some of their rights to privacy, and we live in an age where YouTube can make someone a celebrity (notorious or not) overnight. I still don't think I'd be too comfortable using a living person as a character. Even if I was inspired by a certain aspect of their personality, I'd rather remix with other traits and disguise them. While I may have been able to get away with using John Lennon as a character in Lyon's Legacy and Twinned Universes, he might have drawn attention from the main characters. If I ever get past the block I have with the next installments of the Catalyst Chronicles, then the story will go in a different direction anyway.

How do you feel about using real people in fiction? Does it matter if they're contemporary or historical? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.