Serendipendy - Brilliant Plan

A Barnes & Noble reader gave me a one-star review because he/she felt I ripped off my first book Calendar Moonstone's "A Brilliant Plan" from the works of an author called Marne Davis Kellogg.  I honestly had never heard of her and looked her up and read up on one of her story snippets published on her author-webpage.

 And indeed, the first installment of Mrs. Kellog's series is called "Brilliant" and the heroine is a part-time jewelry burglar with a regular job in the art world  (auctioneer?). 

Yes, so small the literary world is. But I can assure you guys, it is definitely not a rip-off! "The Brilliant Plan" Calendar Moonstone setup had evolved from three major influences:

• The Hitchcock movie "To Catch A Thief" - I loved watching this movie as a child, hot summer evenings and a great movie on the tube...
• Sydney Sheldon's "Tomorrow Never Comes" - Banker turned jewelry thief, hunted by insurance agent (wait! another rip-off) in a sort of Monte Christo revenge story (wait! Sheldon ripped-off Dumas!)
• Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels - this is probably the weakest link and the weakest developed but from a speed, humor and tone this is what I aspire with this series. Well, maybe one gear longer on screwball situations and one gear faster on story-twists.

Cover Preview "Trouble at Christmas - A Troubleshooter Novella"

And here the exclusive preview of my "Trouble at Christmas" cover. I will still fine-tune it as I am not happy with the alpha-channels of the Christmas tree branch; my evaluation copy of Photoshop ran out and Powerpoint's functionality is unusable for such fragile graphic with all the needles and their backdrop. Intention was to have a design compatible cover to the first "Troubleshooter" novel, the next one will then probably be black or dark blue.

"Trouble at Christmas" will continue Paul Trouble's adventures right from the point where "Troubleshooter" left off, with Paul visiting his Dad in the USA for Christmas holidays. It is not a full novel (if I remember correctly "Troubleshooter had about 70.000 words where "Christmas" has about 13.000) and it will be published under the "Novella" label that Amazon has used in the past for a lot of premium writer's short stories.  (My favorite one: The Second Son by Lee Child).

Right after the break - Updates

Been silent on the blog for a month, writing on more important things. I am still on my first pass for my German pirate story (mainly I write that one for my kids, and I want to be done with it while they are still in the right readers age). My train commute to and from work allows me to write on the less difficult scenes for 20 minutes each way. Those 20 minutes result in about 400 words of progress, twice a day.

The evenings had belonged the last month for the Troubleshooter backstory novella "Trouble at Christmas". Finished third review last Tuesday and shipped it off to the editor. If all goes well, I can put it up on Amazon KDP Select at the end of the month (main competitor for time is my tight travel schedule that will bring me into the three global centers of London, Paris and New York).

What We Are Reading: Robert B. Parker's Spenser

I consider myself a big reader with close to 60 books per year. I had started out with Robert B. Parker's "Goodwulf Manuscript" very early on my reading career, after I had read somewhere that Parker was an epigone of Raymond Chandler, one of my heroes in the early Eighties. But it wasn't my style at that time, too philosophical, too imposing. So I stopped for twenty five years until I started to notice the Jesse Stone TV specials with Tom Selleck by accident. I watched the shows, read the books and got drawn into Parker's Boston, Mass. universe of characters.
One fine day I started out on Spenser and similar to buying a complete DVD series in a box, I bought all Spenser books from 1 to 40. After half a year, I am now almost current ("School Days" being the last one).
I like the long term development of the characters life without a perceptible change in characters. Spenser will always be in love with Susan, Hawk will always be Hawk, Vinnie Morris is always reliably available and Susan will never learn to cook.

The hardest thing to do when writing is finding the voice for the characters so that they act and talk consequently after their character. Spenser's code and type makes him behave one way and not another.

About ten books to go, plus a handful of Sunny Randall's. Too bad it has to end!

What we are writing: Trouble At Christmas

I am about halfway through writing a Paul Trouble novella that had appeared in my little creative head over the Christmas period. What if... Paul Trouble comes home for the Christmas holidays and helps his father solving a mystery. A straightforward storyline that mostly will help understanding Paul's roots.

I'll try and publish it on one of those new platforms that offer piece-by-piece publishing of stories. About ten chapters, means ten weeks of attention of anyone interested in the story. I am undecided whether I will time it with the Christmas season or simply start publishing when I have the story final.

Unfortunately it means my boys will have to wait for the second installment of my YA Pirate novel a little longer.

Update: "A Brilliant Plan" - Free book promotion

A Brilliant Plan will be available on Amazon for free for a brief period of time between Jan 26 and Jan 29.

Strangely enough sales of A Brilliant Plan had been best at Barnes & Noble, so it is time to push the Amazon channel a bit.

UPDATE 3. Feb.: Despite a forced interruption of the promotion period due to my parallel published eBook through Smashwords (violation of the KDP Select promotion program that asks for electronic exclusivity), I managed to get at least exposure in the three days of "free:  2058 Downloads!!!  Let's see how the cross-pollination works out.
An additional benefit: I received the first five star review on amazon.com.