It’s Been a Long Time Coming!!

Once again I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you…

Like the last time I’ll give you the bad news first;

There will be no FREE book this week.

After a month of giveaways, and well over 500 FREE books downloaded – I’m pulling the plug on it (at least for the foreseeable future).

That’s the bad news.

 

 

Now for the good news;

If you remember when I started giving books away back on Valentine’s Day, I said I was going to do it until my next novel, 24 Minutes, was released.

Well, strike up the band and let loose the doves!

 

It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of my tenth novel – 24 Minutes!!

It has been about 15 months since the release of my last book, Blood in the Water and I had every intention of releasing 24 Minutes in 2017…but that didn’t exactly go according to plan (as discussed here).

I guess this is a good time to polish off the old standard better late then never!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who were instrumental in the writing of 24 Minutes, beginning with Sr. Commander Mark Carmen of the Flagler Beach Sheriff’s Office for teaching the “active shooter” class which provided the inspiration. My good friend Bill Eldredge for always being there to help with computer related issues and also for offering some great feedback about the story.

And my crew of outstanding beta readers;

Tracey Yankee

Susan Toy

Dennis Ference

Becky Heishman

Susan Nicholls

Darlene Pardiny

Mary Kronenberg

Carolann Padgett MS, PhD

Joe Baker

and

Ted Baker

These folks probably don’t realize how critical their input is, but without them none of my books would be the same.

Speaking of being the same – it’s worth mentioning again that 24 Minutes is very unlike all of my other books. As discussed before, it deals with an active shooter situation.

The fact that the phrase active shooter has become such an accepted part of our lexicon is very sad, and I have given a great deal of thought in the past year about how I felt writing a story about it.

Part of me felt guilty – as if I were capitalizing on such tragedies…part of me felt as though the situation was not proper subject matter for a fiction story, and the rest of me felt the story needed to be written.

Obviously, I got over my trepidation.

Naturally, I hope you enjoy it, but my bigger hope is that 24 Minutes will have a positive effect on the current epidemic of gun violence in this country.

The book is not political, it doesn’t take a side and it offers no solution…it’s just a story, but maybe it will get people talking, which is the first step in finding a solution.

Anyway – enough of that – it’s time for some more good news!

When I release a new book, the kindle price is always $2.99, but what I also do is drop the price of one of my other books to $0.99.

So in keeping with that tradition, the price of Pump It Up has been dropped.

All in all I would have to say I’m pretty excited…and I hope you enjoy 24 Minutes!

 

As Always – thank you for reading

 

 

 

Banning Books is NEVER the Answer

It has been reported that Colorado school shooter Karl Pierson (Friday Dec 13, 2013) had been infatuated with the Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell.

Naturally, this has renewed the fervor of those who wish to do away with the 42-year-old book containing recipes for making homemade bombs and illicit drugs.

Powell has gone on the record saying that his Cookbook should not be printed or sold anymore. He claims that it was the “misguided product of my adolescent anger”, but the current owner of the book’s copyright refuses to stop printing it. (Powell never owned the rights to the book)

I understand his reaction, although I don’t agree with it – I cannot imagine a book as the sole cause of people carrying out horrific acts any more than I blame art, movies video games or music.

Mark David Chapman (the man who assassinated John Lennon) and John Hinckley Jr. (the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan) were both said to have been big fans of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

It’s no surprise that many people called for that book to be banned as well. In fact, many high schools refuse to teach it and it has become one of the most censored books in high school libraries.

Once again, I understand the emotional response, but I refuse to believe that taking a book out of circulation will eliminate, or even reduce violent acts.

I admit, ashamedly, that I’ve never read Catcher, so I can’t say, from personal experience, that it is capable of inciting a person to violence, but I can say this… it sells around 250,000 copies per year, and has sold more than 65 million copies since it was first published.

That’s a lot of books…and only a handful of them have been directly associated with violent crimes.

The math doesn’t work for me.

Similarly, The Anarchist Cookbook has sold over 2 million copies. How many bombers and assassins have been linked to it?

Again, we seem to have a mathematical anomaly.

Out of curiosity, I purchased a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. I wanted to see what all the hoo-ha was about.

I was rather disappointed.

The first half of the book is a bunch of self-righteous, adolescent rambling which basically amounts to don’t let the man keep you down and the second half is a bunch of crude, (at best) free-hand drawings of how to make drugs, bombs & boobie-traps along with some more horrible sketches and brief background information about guns. There is also a little bit about hand-to-hand combat – again, accompanied by the worst sketches imaginable.

To be honest…there is not one single thing in the book that a curious 12-year-old can’t find on the internet.

For that matter, there is so much more information available at a child’s fingertips today that the Anarchist Cookbook wouldn’t even make up a tiny fraction of it all.

Why aren’t people calling for the banning of the internet?

 

As always – thank you for reading