The reason promoting a book is so hard is that what one can do is might-nigh infinite, and time is maddeningly finite. Crazy of Natural Causes, my third novel and first published (at least for now) strictly for Kindle, is available for advance purchase on Monday (July 6). It becomes immediately available for download on …
Tag: Monte Dutton
An Open and Shut Case
As husbands went, Layla could have done worse than Preston Cranstern. The sex was good. He was, by most accounts, competent at his job. He had some annoying facets to his personality. For instance, Preston had an absurd habit of insisting he was right when he obviously wasn't. Once he had asked her to proofread …
Submitted Once More for Your Consideration
Ahhhh. Next week my third novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, is scheduled to go on sale for advance orders. It will be available, uh, "on demand," about two weeks later. The release of a book is exciting. It's the culmination of lots of work: drafts, outlines, rewriting, tinkering with the order, et al. Now I …
Only the Best I Can Do
I'm waiting for the race to start -- I write a column on NASCAR every week for Bleacher Report -- and pondering the promotion of my upcoming novel. I'm also watching the Boston Red Sox play the Tampa Bay Rays. I've been reading the reviews. Not the reviews of my books. The responses to …
What’s Done Is Just Getting Started
Home is a refuge. I'm holed up, contemplating the day ahead, and trying to be creative. This is the way most days begin. Precisely this. I get myself ready to write by trying to cultivate coherence, cohesion, and, quite possibly, several other words that begin with "C." Soon, and tentatively, July 14, my third …
Personalized Treatment
Most Mondays were the same. Olin Hampden was accustomed to it. Minor crises took up as much time as major ones. The wife of the president of Hortense National Bank had a fender bender; she had backed her Escalade into the back of a Nissan that was backing out of a space behind her at …
Why My Novel Is Running
One of the recurring signature events of any political campaign occurs when a candidate is asked why he's running and can't answer it. If a person can't say why he (or she) wants to occupy the office he seeks, invariably he will claim this fundamental question is of the "gotcha" variety. Then he tells his …
Observations of My Humdrum Day
I had a productive day. The majority was busy and business, though I finished a short story I'm not going to post on my web site because it's unconventional and catered to the requirements of a contest. I haven't entered it yet because I have to shave about 150 words in order to make it …
Nothing Left to Lose
On Saturday morning, I was riding around and around my front yard on a mower, listening to Charlie Robison’s “Desperate Times.” That’s where this dark tale started. Joe Scharmann had applied for dozens of jobs. Three had deigned to invite him for interviews. Those whose job it was to conduct the interviews knew better than …
A Selfie Portrait
This morning I started fooling around with this laptop -- okay, this is a tablet linked to a keyboard -- and I started tinkering with the Fresh Paint app that came with it. As you may know, sometime in 2014, I started drawing simple sketches to illustrated my short stories here and the blogs at …
Nightrider's Lament 