RRBC Back-To-School Blog & Blog Party!

Welcome to my stop on the party lineup! I'm Joe Stephens. I write soft-boiled detective fiction and that's what you'll receive if you're selected to win the prize for my page. One perseon will receive copies of all three of my Shalan Adventures novels: Harsh Prey, Kisses and Lies, and In the Shadow. I'm sorry to make you wait, but the last book doesn't actually hit the public until October 1, so you'll receive your prize about then. Hope that's not too long a wait. But mostly I hope you enjoy my writing. 

I'm no expert in creating videos, but I've seen a few book and author trailers and felt like the ones that people were paying for were pretty limited and pretty similar, so I thought I'd give it a try for myself. The biggest challenge was finding royalty-free music that I liked (still didn't, but it's the best I found in the time I could give to searching), but I found once again that Windows Live Movie Maker is pretty user friendly. Give it a look and see what you think.  As always, comments are welcome. 

If you want to learn more about my books or me, check out the tabs at the top of the page. You'll find links to my books, my full author website, and my Amazon author page, as well as RRBC and a writers' blog group I'm a member of entitled Writing Wranglers and Warriors. 

But in case that's just too many clicks, here's a little background on me and my books. My disguise is mild-mannered teacher, but my secret identity is intrepid spinner of tales starring Harry and Dee Shalan. Harry is the narrator and he's not Superman, but he's just a little better than the average guy. He's tougher, smarter, a better shot, and (at least he thinks) funnier than the man on the street. And he sees himself as a modern-day knight in shining armor whose job is to defend the defenseless and right wrongs. All while maintaining a sarcastic running dialogue with his best friend, police detective Otis Campbell. Yes, he's named after the drunk on The Andy Griffith Show--his parents' favorite show. 

Harry's partner, in both the professional and marital sense, is Deanna Shalan, known to the world as Dee. She's the whole package--beautiful with flaming red hair, smart, mentally and physically tough, talented (Harry fell in love with her the first time he heard her sing), and a scary good shot with a handgun. 

They are terrific partners in the detective business, but they are better partners romantically. They are madly in love with each other and their love story is part of what I think makes my books a little different from the standard first-person detective story. Harry and Dee have been compared by some readers to Nick and Nora Charles. If you're too young to know who they are, Google them. They are the protagonists in The Thin Man and subsequent movie from the thirties. The movies are based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, probably best known for a much grittier detective story, The Maltese Falcon. 

You can read the books in any order since they are stand-alone stories, but it's probably most logical to read them in the order I've listed them, as they are in chronological order and you'll understand the overarching development of the main characters and their relationships. 

Please note before you go: if you join my mailing list (look on the right side of the screen), you'll receive an electronic version of Harsh Prey, the first book, as well as the first four chapters of In The Shadow, the soon-to-be-released third book. 

Questions? Comments? Snide remarks? Feel free to get in touch. 

The Countdown Begins

I added it up. I had to pull up a calendar to do it--I'm not so much on the math--but it's 26 days until the launch of Shalan Adventure #3, In The Shadow. That's assuming you read this on the day it was published. Just in case, I've included a calendar with the big date highlighted for your counting pleasure.

Note: If you would like, we could make this interactive. You can mark off the days
until the book comes out on this calendar. But please print it out first, or you'll have
a heck of a time getting the Sharpie marks off your monitor.

For me, this part of the process is, in many ways, the fun part. The heavy lifting (aka actually writing the book) is finished. Now it's down to the little last-minute things before it's completely ready for publication. Like publicity. The first thing I've been doing is peppering my social media with questions that I hope will generate interest. Questions like, "Where is Jenn Bezaleel?", "What is Cleo Heflin hiding?", and "Why does Antonio Bezaleel have his garage windows blacked out?". I also created a faux newspaper with a story about how the whole city of Parkersburg is wondering what happened to Parkersburg High School student, Jennifer Bezaleel and it's started appearing on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest. Piece of trivia for you: I used an old picture of the same young woman who will be on the cover. 

Not to insult anyone's intelligence, but THIS IS PURELY FICTIONAL! Please don't start
a panic. Please do start talking about how clever it is and how it must mean the author is
a literary genius and we must all buy this book, along with the first two. 

Speaking of which, it's also time to create the cover art. The first step in that (not including the literally months of rolling it around in my head) took place last week when I met with my friend, fellow teacher, and photographer extraordinaire, Charlie Gesell to talk over my, admittedly still somewhat fuzzy, vision for it. Charlie, as you may recall, took my portrait for the back cover of Kisses and Lies. If he can manage to make even me look presentable, he's sure to make the cover look great. The photo session for it took place in a dark little corner of our school that, after eighteen years, I still had never been before yesterday evening. When Charlie took me down into that basement room and showed me the decrepit wooden door, it was like the heavens opened. It was exactly how I'd pictured the door in the end of the book! He got our model, a lovely trooper of a young woman named Courtney Stackpole, to pose against that cobweb-covered, filthy, ancient door to capture our shared image of just what we wanted the cover photo to look like, and, even before he did his editing magic, I was blown away. I can't wait to see the finished product. For those of you who liked the cover of KAL, be prepared--it's a completely different direction, but I think you'll be blown away too. 

Not actually Charlie or his camera. His was somewhat
kind of similar to this, but only in that it takes pictures.

And then there are the launch preparations. I know it's late in the game, but I'm still not completely decided on how I want to handle it. Frankly, the launch for KAL was a tremendous letdown after Harsh Prey. I spent way more money than I made in book sales and, though I was excited to see the handful of people who came, it made me question whether I should go in a different direction. So I'm strongly and e-launch party on Facebook and Twitter. But I'm also going to put in a call this week to CJs Italian Kitchen, a local restaurant that appears multiple times in the book, and ask about the feasibility of doing something connected with them. A signing later might be appropriate if they are interested. 

It's a launch. Get it? It was a pun. Wait, not a pun.
What's that thing that's spelled the same backwards and forwards?
A palindrome? Yes. It's not a palindrome. The palindrome
of launch would hcnual. It's a play on words, then. So, a pun?
Yeah, I guess it's a pun. 

So be prepared to hear more than you want to in the next few weeks about In the Shadow. Not that I don't feel good about the first two Shalan books, but I really feel like I hit my stride with this book. It strikes the balance between light and dark, soft and hard. It still maintains the snarky voice of Harry, but definitely strikes a deeper, more noirish note. I hope you'll agree.

I'm the author of two novels, both Shalan Adventures. Harsh Prey and Kisses and Lies are both available in paperback and ebook format (Kindle only at the moment). In the Shadow will be available around October 1. A prequel novella, "Harry and the Redheaded Angel", will be free to mailing list members at the beginning of November and for sale in Kindle format the week of Thanksgiving for everyone else. 

Buy on Amazon!

Buy on Amazon!

I Love September!

Goldilocks found Papa Bear's porridge too hot and Mama Bear's too cold, but she found that Baby Bear's was just right. We probably all heard that story as we drifted off to sleep accompanied by the voice of our mom or dad or grandparent or whoever it was who told us bedtime stories. At least I hope you had someone who loved you enough to do that for you. But this post isn't about bedtime stories or happy childhoods. It's about September. Partly it's about September in general, but it's also about this September and why I'm particularly excited for it. 

Ironically enough, I wasn't a fan of school as a child, especially at the end of summer. But I always still loved September for several reasons, chief of which being that it's the month of my birthday. Yes, at 51 (going on 52), you might think birthdays would stop being special, but not for me. This is probably because in my mind I'm perpetually eight years old. I still love having a day where everybody greets me with a happy birthday and I get cards and gifts and emails and lots of Facebook well-wishes. It's just fun. I've never understood people who don't like birthdays. Not celebrating it doesn't make you stay younger, so why not have a hoopla?

Another reason I like September, to borrow from my opening paragraph, is that it's the beginning of that Goldilocks time of year when it's not too hot and not too cold, but just right. I can sleep with my window open and we don't have to run the air conditioner as much. Best of all, it's the beginning of the time when I start putting Ellie's top down regularly. Lots of convertible drivers think that summer is when you do that, but I prefer it when it's just a touch cooler so I don't feel like I'm baking in the sun like an earthworm on a sidewalk. And that first night when the temperatures drop into the forties, it feels almost like a requirement to build a campfire and sit by it with a hot chocolate in one hand and a S'more in the other.

NOT the official cover art!

Though I see every September as worthy of celebration, this one is doubly exciting because this In The Shadow. That's momentous for a number of reasons. First, I feel like it's my best book yet. It's a bit of a departure from the previous two in that it goes in a much darker direction than the previous pair. The book itself is finished, so this month I'll be writing the acknowledgements and formatting all the pages that go before and after the story. I'll also be working with some wonderful folks (thanks Charlie, Michele, and Courtney) on the cover photography and design. This is stuff I hadn't even thought about when I opted to self-publish, but I find I actually enjoy it. I even like maintaining my webpage and going to events to sell my books. The social media end of it is, in my mind, a necessary evil, but I don't hate it like I used to.
month is when I ramp up publicity and do all the other activities in preparation for launching Shalan Adventure #3,

Why the launch of this book is distinctly meaningful for me is that it's my third one. I have this (possibly crazy) idea in my mind that I wasn't going to be a real author until I had three books out. Maybe it's that three is a good round number. Or maybe it speaks to having stuck to the task for the long haul. But I think it's mainly that now I can say I've written a trilogy. Nobody says, "Yeah, I read that author's duology." Nor does two make a series. Three is a trilogy and after that your books become a full-blown series. So, on October 1, I'll be Joe Stephens, author of the Shalan trilogy. That just has a ring to it. And even if I don't get that fourth book written (barring an act of God, I will--I'm already almost 5500 words into the rough draft and I like it so far), I'll have made it to that just-right level.

So here's to a month in the Goldilocks zone.

Writers are Jugglers

I knew going in that writing would be a hard job to do, but I sometimes wonder if I had known all that was involved in trying to be a successful independent author whether I would have published that first book. I like to think I would have, but I think it's probably the ignorance of just how monumental a task sometimes is, is the only thing that makes people start out trying to do it.

First, there's the writing part, but that's not as simple as just sitting down to write. At this moment, I have three different works in progress in various stages of completeness. I'm polishing Shalan book three, which comes out on October 1. I'm about to start the second draft of the prequel novella. And this week I started the initial draft of book four, which is so preliminary that I have no idea even what the title is. And then there's this blog, which I write once a week, as well as contributing to Writing Wranglers and Warriors anywhere from one to three times a month. I also write a book review every month for ClutchMOV, an online lifestyle magazine for my area.

Then there are the various other things that go into the creation of a book. There's cover art and design to think about. Do I do it myself or do I have someone else do it? If so, do I go to my friend the art teacher whose life is probably ten times as busy as mine and hope she has time to work me in? And then there are blurbs and calls to action and the back cover's layout and acknowledgements to think about.

But that's not all there is to being an indie author either. You're also your own publicist. Most of what I do is electronic, though I do make occasional appearances in the meat world and, in actuality, most of my sales are face-to-face. But every day I do the rounds electronically speaking. I check my Facebook page, adding items regularly to remind people that I'm here and I have books for sale and a mailing list to join and a blog (sometimes two) to read. Then I head to Twitter to follow and promote other indie authors so they'll follow and promote me. And when I can, I also post there. And then I check Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing, and CreateSpace to see if there are any new reviews to tout or any new sales. I also check my mailing list distribution program to see how many people have or haven't opened my weekly email blasts or if anyone has joined or quit the list. And finally, there's my website to maintain. As a little-known indie, I can hardly afford to pay someone to do that for me. And there are even publicity flyers to be designed and printed and distributed. When I have time to do more than that, I try to contact librarians and booksellers and organizations about scheduling a signing or reading or getting my book placed with them. And that's not everything. There are dozens of other little things that go into creating an audience and getting reviews and getting my book in front of people, but I won't bore you with the list.

And then there are the personal appearances. I have launch parties every time I come out with a new

book and readings and signings whenever I can. But, after the first launch, I've found them to be, at best, break-even propositions financially. Because of a recent financial setback, I've had to start really watching every penny I spend, so I have to seriously consider whether something is financially viable before I do it now. So I'm also a bean counter. Yes, ultimately, there's a return on that investment, but you have to have it to spend it and my pool of spendable cash is now much smaller than it was just a month ago, so I have to decide between projects sometimes.

In looking back on this, I realize it probably sounds negative. I don't mean it to. I really do love writing. And I love the idea of someone reading and loving my book. And I'm also aware that I would probably be doing a lot of these same things if I had an agent and a publisher. I just thought it might be interesting to take a look behind the curtain, so to speak, at all that's involved in the indie author life.

Buy on Amazon!

Buy on Amazon!

I'm the author of two novels, both Shalan Adventures. Harsh Prey and Kisses and Lies are both available in paperback and ebook format (Kindle only at the moment). In the Shadow will be available around October 1. A prequel novella, "Harry and the Redheaded Angel", will be free to mailing list members at the beginning of November and for sale in Kindle format the week of Thanksgiving for everyone else. 

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas?

I know, I know--it's July and the high is predicted to be in the eighties here today. But I'm already getting that Christmas feeling. Why? Because I started a new Shalan story yesterday. It's a prequel set around the first Christmas that Harry and Dee had together, the one where he proposed. Spoiler alert--she says yes.

Plans are for this to be a short story at the moment. Who knows? It may grow into a novella. It will involve a case, though it will not have Harry's buddy Otis because, as you probably know if you've read my books, Harry and Dee fell in love in Louisville, Kentucky. He had gone there for seminary but dropped out when he found what he loved doing--detective work. She was there working on her master's degree. Harry's partner in crime will be his boss, the owner of the McCain detective agency, Lucas McCain. Lucas, older than Harry but still not completely darkened by his work, is Harry's mentor in the gumshoe business. In this story we'll see the origins of many of the ideals that Harry holds dear--and even some of his rules.

Karen Gillan, best known to
nerds as Amy Pond in
DOCTOR WHO, is the
woman I picture playing Dee
in a movie. I love her humor and
also how fierce she can be.  Plus,
she's just stunning. (beyouthful.net)

It's tentatively entitled "Harry and the Redheaded Angel" and plans are for it to come out in mid-november for free exclusively to members of my mailing list. It will go on sale to the public around Thanksgiving. This is going to be ebook only, though it may appear on paper in a collection someday. Unlike Marvel Studios, I don't have this stuff planned out through 2020 and beyond.

If you don't want to wait until Thanksgiving to get more Harry and Dee, never fear. In The Shadow, Shalan Adventure #3, will be available in paperback and for ebook in the fall. My target is to have it out by October 1, though it may be a little earlier than that. This book takes a darker turn than the first two. Harry and Dee, at the request of Harry's best friend Otis, a Parkersburg Police detective, go in search for a teen that may have run away. Her name is Jenn Bezaleel and Harry learns pretty quickly that running away from her seriously perverted family may be the smartest thing she could have ever done. Dee can't help much because she's quite pregnant with their first baby, Emma Grace, who was (sort of) introduced in the epilogue of Kisses and Lies. I won't say more for fear of too many spoilers. I don't say this often about my own writing, but I think it's really good. I believe people will either love it or hate it, though, because it's pretty heavy stuff.

I'm looking for a couple more beta readers for this book. If you have time to sit down and read it in the next week or two and are willing to be honest with me, please get in touch. Let me emphasize that I need this to be done in a timely manner. I'm on the, albeit self-imposed, clock. I need to get final edits done by the end of summer. So please only contact me if you honestly have the time to read for me soon.

Summer Memories

The 4th of July, Independence Day to us in the States and a day commemorating to the British when those ungrateful colonials started getting all uppity. If you read my blog post on Writing Wranglers and Warriors, you know I see this day as the end of the first half of summer. From a citizenship standpoint, it's of great significance. But it is also a day on which I think of summers past.

One of my many favorite childhood memories is not of one particular event but something that happened many, many times. Over the years of my childhood, we had a couple of different boats that we took out on the Little Kanawha and Ohio Rivers quite often. We used them as fishing boats and also to pull skiers, but mainly we used them just to enjoy being out on the river. We also used go to something that is probably little known now. We, along with several people we knew (and many, many we didn't know), took the boat to the closest thing the Mid-Ohio Valley has to a beach.

Can't see it through the brush, but
this is the confluence of the Ohio
and Little Kanawha Rivers

On the far end of Blennerhassett Island, away from what would eventually be the state park, were little narrow strips of sand. On any given summer day, dozens of boats would tie up to downed trees and disgorge families who would spread blankets and beach towels, set out coolers and sometimes even grills, and spend the day just enjoying ourselves. Sometimes we would ski, though the ugly truth is I was a really sucky skier. I kind of became my dad's co-pilot, letting him know when the skier went down so he could circle back to him. But often, we would just splash around in the water, read, take naps, and pretty much do nothing all day. This was in the days before cell phones, so we had no contact with the outside world. We just enjoyed each other's company, along with sandwiches, chips, and cookies accompanied by the main condiment--sand.

The tip of Blennerhassett Island
as seen from Fort Boreman Hill

Eventually, often over the protests of the kids, we would pack up everything and head back to the boat ramp. After we got the boat back on the trailer, we would often stop somewhere to pick up dinner for the evening because Mom, the designated watcher and feeder of us all, often including all the cousins too, was too exhausted to cook. Sometimes, and this was always my favorite, we would stop and A & W Root Beer to pick up whole boxes of hot dogs and gallons of sweet, frost-topped root beer. I also recall stopping at Kentucky Fried Chicken or Roy Rogers (with their mythically epic sandwiches--but that's another story), but my preference was for the dogs slathered in sauce and onions and root beer so sweet it made my throat hurt.


The closest thing to a negative was that I always had this tendency to get water in my ear. Usually, I could just pound on the side of my head for a bit and it would work its way out, but occasionally it would still be there driving me crazy when we got home. When that happened, Mom would lay out a towel and pillow on the couch and have my lie down with the offending ear facing the pillow. I would often fall asleep, only to be awakened by that odd but satisfying feeling of the water, warmed by being inside my ear, trickling out onto the towel-covered pillow.

Then it was into the bathtub for me. I guess that was another sort-of negative. No matter how many baths we'd had that week, we had to have a bath after we got back from the river. If you've never swum in the Ohio River, especially back then when the chemical plants basically just flushed their waste directly into the rivers, you can't fully appreciate the level of stench that comes with you when you get out. Looking back, it's a wonder we didn't grow extra eyes or limbs or develop superpowers.

It's funny. I don't remember many specific details about any particular trip. What I mainly remember is always feeling loved and safe. We laughed constantly and there was never any question, though we didn't really talk about it, that we meant the world to each other. I've joked on here before that I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting, but it's really not that far off.

It's that childhood that inspired Harry Shalan, a man who loves his family and believes in doing right and helping the less fortunate. Yes, he's stronger and more handsome than I am. He knows martial arts and can shoot straighter than I could ever hope to. He can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but small ones for sure. But his values are my values. His happy childhood memories are inspired by my happy childhood memories. And his loving, dedicated family is mirrored by mine. The one way in which I'm better than Harry, though, is that you can't make a fictional family that could ever live up to my real one.

Harry Shalan's first adventure...

and his second.

Stuff I Learned While Editing My Third Book

I'm getting set to head to Tamarack in the morning, so, though you can't tell it, I'm writing this on Friday. One of the joys of summer is time to get writing work done. This week, I've made some changes to both Harsh Prey and Kisses and Lies. No changes to the storylines or anything. For Harsh Prey, I updated the cover and back cover as well as fixing an alarming number of errors, proofreading and otherwise. It now has crazy stuff, like headers and page numbers and all the words are (I hope) spelled correctly. Kisses and Lies had but one typo that I could find and the cover was already amazing, so that didn't change, though I did change the back cover to include the blurb and a short bio. Both books now take up a lot less room, too. I changed both to single spaced, which did a couple things. First, it made the footprint of each book a lot smaller, which is pretty environmentally friendly. Second, it saved pretty heavily on print costs and I'll be able to pass the savings along to buyers.

But while I wasn't working on that stuff, I finally started this week with editing and revising Shalan #3, In the Shadow (Available around beginning of October). This process has taught me a few things. Here they are, in no particular order:

I like editing on paper instead of the computer. I've never done that since the olden days when I had no choice but to write and edit on paper. Since I got a word processor program for my sexy new Commodore 64, which came complete with a dot matrix printer and no hard drive, I've done all my editing right on the computer screen. This time, however, I accidentally started doing it on paper. I say accidentally because I never would have done it if I hadn't printed out a copy so my medical consultant, the real Dr. Mathur (that will make sense when you read the book) could make corrections when I butchered the medical scenes. I went through her comments and made corrections and then, before I knew it, I was editing the whole thing on paper. I found myself moving around in the text checking continuity and tweaking the storyline in ways that would be downright difficult to do on the computer. So I think it's paper editing for me from now on.

I've come a long way as a writer. Since I did an edit of HP immediately before ITS, I realize that, while I think the first book was good, I feel like the newest book is exponentially more engaging. Part of that is because I've had three books now to flesh out Harry, Dee, and Otis, making them more three-dimensional as time has gone by, but I think it's also about just honing my voice as a writer. I hope you'll agree.

I tend to be my worst critic. That's not really news, especially to my Pepper Potts, aka Maria Delgado. She and I were texting about the new book and I said something positive about it and, even through text, I could tell she was pleasantly shocked that it wasn't another critical statement about myself.

Speaking of Pepper and Dr. Mathur, this book, more than any other, reminds me that I can't do this alone. Poonam came all the way from Hershey, Pennsylvania to work with me on the medical scenes in this story. Without her, those scenes simply wouldn't have rung true. Maria reads every version of every book and, though she doesn't do a lot of editorial work, she is my own personal cheerleader. Her support is unwavering and it means the world to me.

I can make myself cry. When I wrote the first draft of this book, it was a dark time for me. The story goes into some really tragic and scary places within human nature, But I never cried. This time, though, as I reread after having put the story away for a couple months, one scene in particular brought a tear to my eye. Harry and Dee are just as real to me as if they were flesh and bone real and when a heartbreaking thing happens to them, it breaks my heart too. Yes, I made them up and I could have written them any way I wanted. But most writers will tell you that, no, I really couldn't have. It really doesn't work that way.

And finally, I discovered--okay, I really just confirmed something I already suspected--that I would love to do this stuff full time. It's summer. I could be outside. I could be traveling. I could be making money teaching summer school. What am I doing? I'm going to bed early and getting up every day and either writing, editing, or marketing. And I'm happy as a clam. I really, really hope I don't have to wait another 8 or 9 years to get to do this all the time. But I guess that's up to the book buying public.

So there they are. Six things I learned this week. That's a lot of stuff considering I only started Monday. So what did you learn this week?