The Continuing Bot Apocalypse

Your background caught my attention first. Growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, living in France and Chile, working in Seattle’s software industry, and later observing life in rural West Ireland is quite the collection of experiences to feed a storyteller’s imagination. Then there’s the part where you simply make things up from your “idiosyncratic imagination” honestly, that may be the most dangerous part.

Now, there’s a reader who has really paid attention—not only to my book but to my biography.

Yes, I’m pretty sure this is another of those AI-generated come-ons I was discussing in my previous post. It arrived more or less within minutes of my uploading that missive, and it’s a good example of how sophisticated these things are.

“I have to admit, the premise pulled me in,” continues Alisson (as the emailer calls itself). “Septimus Bridge is gone, Izanami is plagued by nightmares, the dead are walking again, minds are being controlled, a mysterious crystal appears, and the Old Ones are waking up to reclaim the world.”

I’m glad the premise pulled you in, Alisson. What pulled me in was your email’s subject line: Your book has a bigger problem than the Old Ones. It was calculated to make me think you were an actual person who had actually read the actual book. It also hooked me, as I wanted to know what was a bigger problem than the Old Ones. It turned out to be that the various online book-selling sites could do with more reviews of the book, which you considerately offered to provide me, presumably for a price. (We didn’t get around to talking about money.) If they were all as well written as your email, your offer would definitely be tempting—unless I cared about whether they were written by actual human beings who had actually read the actual book.

All of the information and insights you supposedly gleaned from reading my book could also be gleaned from the book’s description and my bio, which happen to be on all those book-selling sites. Still, I began to wonder if it was all strictly from the online sites. Were you also scraping the books themselves, accessing the digital versions, either purchased or pirated, that are out there somewhere? I still cannot figure out where you got the “idiosyncratic imagination” quote from. And I have to give you credit. Even though your emails were sent to my Expat Reflections address, you addressed me as Scott instead of Expatreflections.

Recently, there have been news reports of brick-and-mortar book sellers here in Ireland and in other countries getting suspiciously large anonymous orders for cheap old books from their warehouses. The assumption is that these old paperbacks are being dismantled and scanned wholesale as fodder for training large language models (LLMs) to write their own novels.

The author-targeted scams are definitely pretty rampant. In the latest issue of the US edition of the UK magazine The Spectator, contributor James Gray, a former MP and author of ten books, recounts his own experience.

“Wow. What a charming, well-written personal letter,” was his reaction to an email he received, purportedly from a real literary agent at real New York publishing house, inquiring about any projects he might have in development.

He responded, and that led to further email exchanges, including some with a purported editor, who actually made some sensible suggestions for improvement. That led to an offer to edit and polish the book—for a fee (different prices for the Emerald Package or the Diamond Package).

Gray says he was very nearly ready to hand over some cash when he decided to a check (using AI, ironically) and learned about the pervasive author-targeted scams. He was left feeling foolish but grateful that he had lost only time and not money.

His message to fellow authors: “Own up to your own egotistical readiness to be flattered. But know that publishers do not make unsolicited approaches, agents do not refer you to other paid editors or the like—and at no stage in the publishing process should money change hands, or at least not from author to publisher/agent.”

So, Alisson (and all the other writers of messages in my spam folder), thank you for your interest and the five very polite and business-like follow-up emails, but I will not be taking you up on your offer to manufacture fake reviews for my book. I’m choosing to devote my energy to (someday) getting out that sevenths novel—and, of course, spending a few spare moments here and there for fretting about those pesky Old Ones

My AI-generated Fan Base

The Curse of Septimus Bridge pulled me straight into the fog where love, loss, and legend all blur together until you can’t tell which one’s haunting you. You’ve written a gothic fantasy that hums like a storm at sea. There’s tragedy in every shadow, a hint of Dark Shadows in every heartbeat.

When you get an email like that, out of the blue and from a stranger, well, you have to be chuffed that somebody out there really gets your book. It was from someone named Dawn, and she introduced herself as the founder of the Smutty Book Club. I checked, and there really is a Smutty Book Club that was founded by someone named Dawn. Though I hadn’t considered my book to be particularly smutty, I latched on to the praise—even if there was no way to know if it had actually come from the real Dawn.

“At the Smutty Book Club, The Curse of Septimus Bridge goes on the shelf marked ‘Romance Between the Worlds,’ ” wrote Dawn. “Because sometimes the most passionate love stories don’t end they echo.”

Well said.

Sure, I was suspicious. I was well used to persistent spam trying to sell me some author-directed service or other (editing, web site design, but mostly marketing), but this one didn’t ask for anything or provide a link to click. Going forward, however, this kind of unsolicited praise would become increasingly present in my inbox. I quickly sussed that these messages, which seemed penned by someone who had actually read and even thought about my books, were actually the product of AI. They were clearly scraping info from the ISBN database (including the plot synopsis) and maybe also my blogs to create the illusion that the robot writer was a genuinely interested human being.

Mostly, these emails go straight to my spam folder, but they still eat up some of my time since I diligently check my junk folder for the inevitable messages that land there in error. Fortunately, these AI creations became easy to spot and ignore. They always come in pairs—presumably because two of my blog-related email addresses wound up on the sucker lists that have been circulated out there. For every missive that begins, “Scott, your book touched me in a way that no book has for a very long time,” there was an identical one beginning with “Expatreflections, your book…”

Though they are easy to ignore, I can’t help but steal a peek now and again because, in a strange way, they do my ego good with their algorithm-driven plámás. (That’s one of my favorite Irish words, denoting some mixture of praise, flattery and manipulation).

For instance, consider this email I got just the other day from someone (or something) calling itself Greta. “After reading about Searching for Cunégonde, I was immediately struck by the remarkable scope and relevance of your work.”

Well, who wouldn’t be? It continued, “Memory, identity, obsession, change, and the enduring pull of lost love have created a world where understanding the journey of a photojournalist navigating a tumultuous era is not merely beneficial. It is essential. … Searching for Cunégonde does far more than continue a protagonist’s story. It provides readers with a comprehensive framework for understanding how a reclusive American photojournalist, whose life has taken him from California to Pinochet’s Chile, to Paris, to Berlin at the moment of reunification, and finally to the West of Ireland, must confront the ghosts of his past, particularly the missing friend who has remained an obsession since losing track of him years earlier.”

Man, I should be cutting and pasting these emails to send to every book reviewer out there. Hey, I bet you can buy a list of them on the Dark Web.

“Searching for Cunégonde is exceptionally positioned to become a trusted educational resource for this growing audience.” Educational? Really? Okay.

The special thing about Greta’s email was that it provided a rare chance to see how the algorithm adapted to someone else’s book, a completely different one. You see, this time the simultaneous email, while sent to my Expatreflections address, was not aimed at me. It was directed to someone named Russell, and it lavished praise on his new book The Wrong People Are Gettting Rich. (I wonder if those wrong people include internet spammers.) It was essentially the same exact email but with other details inserted that were, presumably, excerpts from the book’s description in the ISBN database.

“Memory, identity, obsession, change, and the enduring pull of lost love…” became “Corporate failure, generational trust, ethical principles, and the character of those entrusted to lead have created a world where understanding the difference between stewardship and self enrichment is not merely beneficial. It is essential.”

Sounds like a good read. And yes, it’s a real book. It was just released a week or so ago, and it’s available from all the usual online places. It seems to be pretty well promoted, so I don’t know if being mentioned on this blog will help it that much, but good luck to Russell anyway.

As for Greta, she might want to work on her algorithm for delivering her bot-generated sales pitches.

Holding Cúirt

For lovers of literature, springtime in the West of Ireland means, among other things, that it is time for Cúirt. An international festival of literature, it does for book lovers what summer’s Galway Film Fleadh does for film buffs.

Cúirt has come and gone for another April, and thanks to serious prompting from our kid, the Missus and I found ourselves present there on the final day. Given all the things that have been taking up our time over the past few weeks, we quite likely would have missed the whole festival altogether if we hadn’t committed ourselves by buying tickets months ago. So, we took time out from an ongoing series of family gatherings—organized around mourning a recently departed and much beloved family member—to head to Galway on a Sunday.

The word cúirt is Irish for court, and it refers to the old Gaelic tradition of the court of poets. Thus, the name was chosen for a modern literary festival founded forty years ago this year. It began as a three-day international poetry festival and since evolved into a week-long program of events celebrating all kinds of literary arts. These include readings, discussions, book launches and workshops.

The particular event we attended included readings, discussion and singing performances by Scottish musician and author Stuart Murdoch. He will be best known by the band name under which he and his various collaborators perform: Belle and Sebastian. (The name was borrowed from a 1960s French children’s novel and TV series.) My kid has long been a fan of the group, to the point she even dragged her mother along to a concert in Paisley, Scotland, a year and a half ago. Currently studying in Chicago, she couldn’t make Murdoch’s appearance at Cúirt, but she convinced her parents to go in her stead.

That is how we came to be present in the intimate Mick Lally Theatre, part of Galway’s historic Druid Theatre, to hear Murdoch read passages from his debut novel Nobody’s Empire, which is also the title of one of his songs. His previous books include the 2010 memoir The Celestial Café, a 2022 collection of song lyrics (with illustrations by Pamela Tait), and the screenplay for the 2014 movie God Help the Girl, which Murdoch directed.

Nobody’s Empire is a semi-autobiographical (autofiction, as described by his publisher) coming-of-age account of his fictional alter-ego Stephen’s youthful struggle with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, his forming of an ad hoc support group with a pair of friends, and his discovery of his talent for music. A life-changing journey to America and a spiritual awakening follow.

Not surprisingly, Murdoch turned out to be one of the most genuinely nice and engaging people one could hope to meet, generous with his time and himself. A special treat was getting a mini-concert with him on guitar. He noted that, while he had played concerts in Ireland before, this was his first time ever singing in Galway. One hopes he will be back.

Afterwards, as people queued up with copies of his book—and a fair few Belle and Sebastian LPs—he graciously signed all of them and chatted with all comers as long as they wished. He wrote a message to our kid in our copy of the book, while patiently listening to the Missus’s full recounting of the comedy-of-errors journey from Dublin that mother and daughter made to Glasgow and the snafu of (paper) concert tickets that remained in an inbox somewhere in Trinity College while venue staff sorted things out so the ladies could be allowed entry to the concert hall. He even graciously recorded a voice message to our girl on Mom’s phone, thanking her for having come to the concert.

It was the kind of experience that reaffirms one’s faith in life and in springtime.

Col. Mustard Update

  We had barely sat down before a tall thin man appeared. He was elegantly dressed. He had a moustache, and his black hair was perfectly combed.
  “Good evening,” he said with an elegant accent. “My name is Richard. I shall be looking after you this evening.”
  To my relief, he did not look down his nose at me. In fact, he made us feel quite comfortable.
  “I love your accent,” said Linda. “Where are you from?”
  “England, ma’am. London actually. May I interest you in an aperitif ?”

There is more to report about the Lord Lucan case.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m on about, then you must not have read the post I made here two years ago. That is where I acknowledged that I had made the real-life Lord Lucan a character in my work of fiction, Lautaro’s Spear, set in 1980, six years after the man’s disappearance. Partly to help define one of my characters and partly just to amuse myself—and maybe also as a bit of foreshadowing that my protagonist would one day mysteriously go missing—I included a brief walk-on for a minor character, a waiter, who would be strangely recognizable to those familiar with a particular criminal case from the 1970s in Britain.

The reason for my previous post on the long missing aristocrat was an article in The Times of London providing some previously unknown (to me anyway) information.

To recap, Lord Lucan vanished without a trace a half-century ago this month, immediately after his children’s nanny and his wife were both attacked with a lead pipe in the family home in fashionable Belgravia, London. Lady Lucan survived, but the nanny, Sandra Rivett, died. The borrowed car Lucan had been driving was found abandoned in the port town of Newhaven, East Sussex, prompting speculation he had drowned himself in the harbor. He left letters protesting his innocence, saying that he had actually intervened in an attack on his estranged wife by another man, who then fled. A coroner’s inquest subsequently found Lord Lucan guilty of Rivett’s murder, making him the first member of the House of Lords to be named a murderer since 1760. He has never been found and an official death certificate for him was issued in 2016.

The new information I got two years ago was that, when the Ford Corsair he had been driving was found in Newhaven, it contained three cards from a game of Cluedo owned by the lord. Specifically, they were Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe, and the hall. Additionally, there was an alleged sighting of the fugitive at a party in Portugal. Most interesting, though, was the report that a facial recognition expert, using AI photo analysis, had claimed to have made a 100-percent match between photographs of Lord Lucan and an 87-year-old pensioner in Australia.

The latest wrinkle in the story comes courtesy of a recent three-part documentary on BBC television. While it acknowledged that most people think Lord Lucan is dead, an passionate exception to that consensus comes from a builder from Hampshire. Adopted in infancy, he never had any interest in tracking down his biological parents, but upon his adoptive mother’s death, he learned that his mother was the tragic Sandra Rivett. That led to an obsessive quest, lasting 17 years so far, to find the missing Lord Lucan who, he is certain, was still alive. With the aid of a former investigative journalist, he has followed leads to such far-flung places as Mozambique, South Africa, and yes, Australia. The saga continues, seemingly with no end in sight.

No one else’s fascination with the case is as personal as the murder victim’s son, but plenty of others have been intrigued with the case. It was an Irish Times article seven years ago that caught my attention and led to my including a fictionalized version of the lord in my novel.

“Some reports suggest that he was fed to Aspinall’s tigers after he shot himself,” it said. “Others are convinced that he escaped; reported sightings of the missing peer are legion. Lucan has been spotted waitering in San Francisco, managing a clothes shop in South Africa, living in a neo-Nazi colony in Paraguay, and living as a hippy musician called Jungly Barry in Goa.”

Waitering in San Francisco, you say?

It was a bit of whimsy on my part, but now I too have found myself forever linked in a minor, odd way to that gruesome, tragic event.

Arthur Clock

  He looked up and down the street. He settled on a bar down on the next corner. It was called El Águila.
  “I’ll meet you in front of that bar in the morning. But not too early. Say, ten o’clock.”
  —Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, chapter 15 (“A Night at the Plaza”)

Somewhat belatedly, I received a lovely gift a few weeks ago. The occasion was either Christmas or my birthday or both—the two are kind of synonymous in my case—and when I say belated, I don’t just mean it was meant for this past December. It was ordered by my nieces and nephew a year or two before that. I forget which because, though I had been notified way back when it was ordered, there was subsequently an extended delay in the shipping and I had long since forgotten about it. It was designed and produced as a Kickstarter project, and as a I know from my own experience, those things can often take longer, sometimes much longer, than advertised.

It was thus a complete surprise when my gift showed up unexpectedly at my door. Fortunately, seeing the name of the item jarred my memory, and I knew who had sent it. What I couldn’t do was say the item’s name out loud.

The name of this very cool thing is the Author Clock. That doesn’t seem as though it should be so difficult to say, but for the life of me every time I go to enunciate it, it comes out as “Arthur Clarke.” I guess that makes some kind of sense, seeing as how Arthur C. Clark was an author (2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End prominent among his novels), but it’s still a strange impediment.

The Author Clock was an incredibly thoughtful gift for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is that it must mean that my brother’s kids actually consider me some kind of writer.

The design is simple. It resembles a tablet like an iPad with a white, non-backlit screen framed in tasteful wood. Once set up using your Wi‑Fi-connected phone or other device, it displays every 60 seconds a different literary quote which includes the current time. The quotes have been crowd-sourced, and they’ve managed to find at least one for each of the 1,440 minutes in a day. The battery can be recharged through its USB‑C, and the clock can be set to update at less frequent intervals in order to prolong times between charging. (Minute-by-minute updates so far in my experience require a recharge every few days.)

 The main disadvantage is that, if you have it sitting on your desk, it can be hard to get any work done because you just want to sit there and watch for the next quote. What book will it be from? Will they have really found a passage mentioning 3:57 a.m.? Who knew so many novels included such specific times?

My fascination with the clock has got me wondering about times mentioned in my own books. How often in my six novels had I mentioned a specific time? I did a quick check.

Sure enough, in the very first chapter of my very first book (Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead) when Lonnie McKay shows up to drag Dallas Green off on an ill-advised adventure in Mexico…

  He didn’t kill the engine. He just sat out there revving it up. He knew that I would hear it and go on out there. I pulled on a tee-shirt and went out. It was almost ten o’clock and time that I should be getting to bed. I was kind of pissed at him for showing up this late when he knew I had to work in the morning.

Most of my mentions of time tend to be on the hour and thus probably not highly prized by the Author Clock folks. In a later chapter Dallas does some nervous clock watching at a bar called El Águila waiting for Lonnie to come back, but he tends to check the time on the hour. Dallas often happens to be waiting for people. In the sequel Lautaro’s Spear, he finds himself waiting for Valérie Destandau…

  When he returned with my drink, I looked at my watch again. She was now twenty minutes late. I pulled out the scrap of paper and double-checked the name of the place and the address. She had also written the time. It said “20.00” which I was pretty sure meant eight o’clock.

The fantasy novels mention specific times much less than the Dallas books, although there are at least a couple references to “the stroke of midnight.” And there’s this bit from Last of the Tuath Dé in which Koschei tells young Peter a story about the plot to kill the Mad Monk…

  “So that was when Prince Felix and the others decided the Mad Monk must be stopped. They invited him to the Moika Palace for tea and cakes at midnight. That’s in St. Petersburg, you know. The cakes had been laced with cyanide. As was the Madeira wine. In case the cakes didn’t do the job.”

So this is one more thing to be thinking about as I write. Maybe if I include lots of obscure time references, I will get mentioned by Arthur, I mean, the Author Clock.

Me and My Demons

How do you like the family portrait that now adorns the top of this page?

Yes, that is myself sitting at the keyboard, no doubt diligently writing away on the next literary masterpiece. I have to say the picture flatters me. It’s now clear that I should have always been an animated character.

I’m surrounded by none other than the renowned Demon Hunter Orpheus (a.k.a. Septimus Bridge), the renowned actual demon Astaroth (a.k.a. The Fiend), and the last two Demon Hunters in the world (as far as we know) Izanami (a.k.a. Chiharu Ito) and Sapphire (a.k.a. Lola Blumquist). You will know them all from reading The Curse of Septimus Bridge and its sequel Last of the Tuath Dé. I like how the human beings are looking vaguely impatient, as if they can’t wait to see what ordeals they are going to be put through next. Meanwhile, The Fiend appears over-eager, as if he’s the one who’s going to have all the fun. All the while, I seem to be cracking a wee bit under all the pressure.

The artwork is by Tamlyn Zawalich, the same talented illustrator who produced the images for the covers of the two Demon Hunters books. It was organized as a birthday surprise by my wonderful friend Dayle, who is not only responsible for making my books read as coherently as they do but who saves my bacon with fixes, corrections and suggestions and who encourages every possible drop of quality in the final drafts.

My friend Michael once suggested that I should turn the Sapphire/Izanami tales into a graphic novel. I was immediately open to the idea, and I’m even more so now.

Maybe, though, we need to extend the saga a bit more first. If you agree, then I have good news. Writing has begun on the sequel to the sequel. I’m only on Chapter 1, but that’s where I always begin.

There has been a longer break than usual (about a year and a half) between the publication of my last book and starting the next one. I had a couple of other projects in between as well as a couple of film festivals to attend, and then it was the distracting Christmas season which, where I live, always seems to run from late October to mid-January. This is the time of year when I usually get most of my serious writing done—even more so when there is pandemic along with government-mandated lockdowns in effect.

There is no lockdown in effect at the moment, but we did have a couple of storms. Last weekend these islands were buffeted by two named storms, Isha and Jocelyn, within a three-day period with us being located in the red zone for the former. We were without electricity for a night and a day, and with phones’ and other gadgets’ batteries running down, I was eventually left without the internet but still had a fully charged laptop to work with. There was actually nothing else I could do except make things up in my head and type them out. It was as though the universe forced me to start the next book.

So yes, the next book is definitely a continuation of (addition to? complement of?) the world of Septimus, Sapphire, Izanami and all the other characters in my own little fantasy world (see illustration above). My other ideas for books—including a story set entirely in Ireland and even also possibly one that returns to the world of Dallas Green—are still out there, but they will wait and gestate a while longer.

So, where does the story—actually multiple stories—go from where we left off at the end of Last of the Tuath Dé? I have an outline, but experience suggests many things could change by the time I’ve finished fleshing it all out. Some of the familiar characters will be back, and there will also be new characters.

So, where does the story go? Let’s find out together.

Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

  When I had taken all the obvious pictures, I just started pointing the camera around the beach zooming in on things that might be interesting. I was zooming in on a palm tree when I realized that there was someone sitting against it. I zoomed in closer. And I actually gasped. It was a girl. But not just any girl, but the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my whole life.
  —Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, chapter 6 (“Meeting Mary Loneliness”)

I have always wondered what it would be like to meet one of my novels’ characters in real life. You know, like in some fantasy meta scenario in a movie written by Charlie Kaufman. Of course, things like that don’t happen in real life, but I had the next best thing happen last week. I came across a photograph of one of my characters.

I was going through a box of old papers and documents that had been in our garage since we moved here 22 years ago. It was stuff that got thrown into boxes after leaving various jobs over the years in the Seattle area. Suddenly my eyes got hit by a blast from the past. It was a page from a calendar, specifically February 1985, consisting mostly of a photograph. It was a freebie from a vendor in the suburb Tukwila, and it came with a lot of info on the back, including lots of details about the photographer/designer as well as the customer graphic coordinator. It was printed on a four-color Heidelberg GTOVP52 printing press, and the paper was 80-pound Eloquence cover. It was the fourteenth “in a continuing series of designer calendars.” It even gives the name of the model in the photograph and where it was shot: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

What prompted me to hold onto it? Well, look at it. I think I was in love. I could say I was in love with the idea of a beach in Jalisco, of the sand, the tropical trees, the soft warm light, the margaritas that were probably being mixed just out of frame, but why bother? You’ve already judged me.

Long after I had forgotten that this artifact was in my distracted possession, the image endured in my mind. When I knew that I was going to write about an 18-year-old kid from California meeting a young woman on a beach in Sonora and taking her photo, I knew that this was the photo he would be shooting. It was as though my novel Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead were a true story that occurred in a parallel universe and Dallas Green’s photo of María Soledad Carvajal somehow traveled through time and space to land in my Seattle place of employment in 1985.

Maybe I held onto it for the same reasons that, in that parallel universe, Dallas held on to it.

  And then there were the pictures of Marisol. Photo after photo showed her leaning back against that palm tree on that beach, throwing her head back, laughing at me and smiling that smile that made me fall in love with her. But now I was seeing something I hadn’t seen before. Something like a trace of sadness underneath the laughter. I had seemed to strike a chord when, in my ignorance, I translated her name as Mary Loneliness. Just when I had started to think that the whole business with her had been some sort of temporary insanity, here she was back and making me fall in love with her all over again.
  —Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, chapter 19 (“Partings”)

Not all of my characters’ physical aspects are so vivid in my mind. When first conceived, they might start out looking like someone I know in my own personal life, but they quickly take on a life of their own and morph into a completely new person with their own distinct appearance. Marisol, though, remained consistent and faithful to that 1985 photo.

Only when I finally brought Marisol back in my post-trilogy coda, the short story “Rendezvous,” did she mature and age. Still, it didn’t diminish her beauty. I’m sure of it.

  “Marisol?” Valérie’s gaze deepened. “And he met you in Mexico?”
  “Yes, in a seaside town called Guaymas.”
  After a long pause, Valérie said, “No, he never mentioned you.”
  “There is no reason why he should have. It was so long ago…”
  “I did see your photo once, though.”
  “My photo? How…?”
  “I recognize you now. Obviously, you were much younger then, but it was definitely you.”
  “He had a photograph of me?”
  “Yes. I saw it only briefly. You were on a beach. Leaning against a palm tree. You had a book open on your lap.”
  “That’s right. He did take a photograph of me on the beach. And he kept it all those years?”
  “Once when we were living in Paris, he left a book on a table. I picked it up to see what he was reading, and the photo fell out. It had been between the pages. He blushed when I teased him about it. I asked him why he was hiding a photo of such a young girl. He did not want to talk about it. I could see it was several years old. The colors had begun to fade. Still, it was a nice photo. It made… an impression on me.”
  —“Rendezvous” (short story)

Back to Deauville

  “Yes. Tell me, are you familiar with the Deauville Film Festival?”
  “Dough ville? Uh, no.”
   “Deauville is in Normandy. For six years now they have been holding a film festival there dedicated to American cinema. And this year you will be attending. What do you think of that?”
  “I, I don’t know what to say. This is kind of the last thing I expected.”

In Chapter 12 of Lautaro’s Spear, our protagonist Dallas Green gets thrown a curve. Out of the blue his boss tells him he’s being sent along with a reporter to take photographs at a film festival in France. It turns out to be a godsend because Dallas needs an escape from his chaotic life in 1980 in San Francisco where his affair with a married woman is unraveling disastrously and his friendship with a drummer in an aspiring rock band has turned a bit weird.

  The weather was very much like San Francisco with a cold, stiff breeze bearing down on us. The terrain was a lot flatter though. I could smell the ocean even if I could not see it. I had the distinct impression it was not very far ahead of us. We stopped in front of a large and impressive building that looked like some sort of castle with high windows and columns at the front entrance.
  “This is the Casino,” she said, pronouncing it “ca zee no” the way the French would say it. “This is where we will be tonight for the opening.”

At the time I wrote Lautro’s Spear, I had never been in Deauville. I had lived in France for a year as a student many years previously, and I had visited Normandy then and since, but I had no actual memories of that particular vacation spot to draw on. I had to rely on research and imagination in describing Dallas’s impressions of the place.

“So, how accurate did your research turn out to be?” asked an extremely affable taxi driver named Benoît. He was driving us to Le Havre to catch a ferry back to Ireland. Benoît had rescued us five days earlier when an unreliable local bus system had left us stranded in the delightful town of Honfleur. I had told him about my novel and that I was keen to see how good a job I had done in conjuring the place without actually having been there.

After a major birthday several months ago, I decided it was finally time to follow in my fictional alter ego’s footsteps and experience the Festival du cinema américain de Deauville myself—43 years after Dallas had been there. Accompanied by wife and daughter, I spent a glorious five nights and four days attending the film festival. Of course, in four decades much had changed. The main venue for the big events is now the elaborate CID (Centre international de Deauville) situated between the Casino and the town’s fabulous beach. The beach itself looked exactly like every photograph I had ever seen of it with its iconic colorful umbrellas on the wide expanse of sand and the boardwalk that functions as a virtual walk of the stars with famous movie names adorning the long line of beach cabins.

We made a stop at one famous name, that of Clint Eastwood. He was at the 1980 film festival to screen his movie Bronco Billy and is one of several real-life attendees mentioned in my novel. In fact, he has sort of a walk-on cameo. On Eastwood’s beach cabin was a poster highlighting the fact that his son Kyle had participated in the opening night festivities of this year’s festival, marking the release of his album Eastwood Symphonic, dedicated to the music of his father’s movies. An accompanying documentary Eastwood Symphonic: A Family Affair was also screened during the week. If I had been better organized, I might have tried to crash the event in an effort to make contact with Kyle and shove a copy of Lautaro’s Spear into his hand. Instead, I dropped by the festival office and left a copy with two staffers who were quite gracious upon learning about the book’s existence and receiving a copy.

It was a strange experience seeing the hotel where Dallas stayed during his time there and where he first spotted the love of his life, Valérie Destandau. And to walk along the beach where the two of them strolled one night and she first mentioned her boyfriend back in Bordeaux. While there, I enjoyed much warmer weather than Dallas did. I’m pretty sure I checked the weather records and found that it would have been cool early in that September of 1980. Anyway, that is how I described it. Benoît sort of verified as much when he told us that the warm weather we came into was in stark contrast to the cool, wet weather of the previous week.

  “I almost forgot,” he said. “There were some photos on one of your film rolls. They were of a woman. Nobody here recognized her. We thought they might have been for your personal use.”
  I took the envelope into the darkroom for privacy. I knew immediately what photos they were, and I wanted to look at them alone. One by one I pulled them out of the envelope and stared. The sight of Valérie’s laughing face was more than I could bear. There she was on the beach in Deauville in the darkness of the evening. She looked embarrassed and amused at the same time. It was the evening she taught me the word galoche. I missed her so much. I loved her so much.

I will have to re-read chapters 16 through 23 more carefully to determine what mistakes or misrepresentations I might have inadvertently made. Benoît suggested that I might want to release a revised edition of the book. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

If you would like to know some more about my visit to Deauville, particularly the movies I saw there, I invite you to read my recent post on my movie blog.

Indy Selling Success Story

Things to have come full circle in the book business—well, at least in my book business. When I published my first novel nearly nine years, I didn’t bother with a paperback version. I had bought into the hype and buzz that told us that print books were dead or dying and that the future was digital.

Then, after hearing from a surprising number of potential readers that they wouldn’t be reading Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead until they could do so on paper, I corrected my course. Three months later the paperback version (with a new more printer-friendly cover) was released. Ever since, the digital and paper versions of my novels have been released simultaneously.

Despite the stubborn (determined?) paper readership out there, however, most of my sales were digital, specifically via Amazon Kindle. In the past year or two, though, that has changed. Maybe it had something to do with Covid or perhaps with the type of people who read fantasy books like The Curse of Septimus Bridge and Last of the Tuath Dé, but print books have been making up a larger share of purchases. As far as I can tell, print is definitely not dead.

In January I informed readers of this blog that I now have my own sales portal at Bookshop.org for paperbacks. The beauty of that site is that it offers the same stay-at-home-and-have-it-delivered convenience of any other online seller, but it also offers readers the possibility of supporting authors they like or any of the hundreds and hundreds of independent brick-and-mortar book stores that have also signed up with them.

I have lately learned more about the history of and philosophy behind Bookshop.org thanks to a great article by Kate Knibbs posted on Wired magazine’s website a couple of weeks ago. As chronicled in that piece, it was the brainstorm of Andy Hunter, who ran a midsize literary publisher called Catapult. The profile describes his sometimes difficult childhood and how the local library became a place of solace for him.

Hunter became obsessed by a random comment he heard over dinner from a board member of the American Booksellers Association: what if ecommerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of being their existential threat? That led him to propose converting the association’s IndieBound program, which promoted independent booksellers, into an alternative online bookseller.

The association wasn’t interested in that approach but offered Hunter support if he wanted to start his own online bookshop. The beauty of his concept was that neighborhood bookshops and authors can get money for selling books online with a minimum investment of time and effort, as Bookshop.org takes care of inventory and shipping by partnering with wholesaler Ingram. I suppose another way to look at it is that Bookshop.org is an online seller like any other except that it generously shares its profits with local bookstores and authors.

Hunter’s timing turned out to be fortuitous because of the pandemic, as loyal local bookshop customers couldn’t get to their favorite sellers in person. Even without an advertising budget, its growth has been spectacular. Knibbs’s article recounts small bookshop owners’ stories of the cash windfalls that bailed them out of disasters thanks to having opted into Bookshop’s earnings pool fueled by 10 percent of the operation’s sales.

It’s an inspiring story, and a great lesson of what can be accomplished in the capitalist system when people approach business with good intentions.

      * * *

You may have been wondering what I’ve been up to in the eight months since Last of the Tuath Dé was released. I can tell you that I have been writing but not much more than that. I’ve been working on something that is a departure for me, in that it’s speculative, it’s non-fiction, and it’s got a personal angle.

If anything comes of it, and I’m hopeful it will, you will be the first to learn about it here.

And yes, I plan eventually to continue the saga chronicled in The Curse of Septimus Bridge and Last of the Tuath Dé.

Same Books, New Portal

Something on this blog has changed.

At the top of this page, if you click on any of the three links for my own online bookstore Afranor Books, they will now take you to a different place than they did before.

It was only two years ago next month that I announced that I had become an online bookseller. As I acknowledged back then, calling myself a bookseller was something of an exaggeration. Ingram, the company that prints the paperback versions of my novels and distributes them to sellers, had encouraged its authors to set up their own online shops. For this purpose, they provided the portal (called Aerio), and we authors set up (within limits) the design and inventory. It was another way for readers of particular authors to find and buy their books.

Then a few days before Christmas, Aerio informed us that it was getting out of the authors-selling-books business. What? It seemed like I had only just set up my bookshop, and now I was being evicted?

The Aerio online storefronts will close down at the end of this month. If for some reason you need or want to visit my Aerio site before it vanishes, here (for the final time) is the link to it: shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks.

Aerio further suggested, if we wanted to continue to have a place (besides, of course, all the other online booksellers out there) to direct readers to purchase our books, that we consider Bookshop.org! Coincidentally, mentioned that site on this blog back in August when discussing issues with some of the more prominent online sellers.

As I wrote then, “They provide centralized ordering, delivery and customer service for a network of local independent bookstores. They are mostly in the US, but recently they have begun expanding internationally, specifically in the UK and Spain. Their website claims they’ve raised nearly $22 million for local bookstores.”

“This is how it works,” I continued. “On their website you select a local bookstore (there are more than 1,400 to choose from) you want to support. Once you’ve done that, any online orders you make from the website are fulfilled by Bookshop.org and the local bookstore gets 30 percent of the retail value.”

It turns out that Bookshop.org has an affiliate program for authors like me, so rather than giving up having my own online portal altogether, I have set up shop over there.

You can check it out by clicking this link: bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks. Or any of the three other links (can find all of them?) at the top of this page.

Note: unlike the Aerio site, which sold both paperback and digital versions of my books, my Bookshop.org page just sells paperbacks. So, if you are looking for my novels as e‑books, you will want to select from among the many sellers of digital (and print) books listed along the right-hand side of this page.