Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: on Alistair MacLean. Louis Shalako.

"Broadsword calling Danny Boy."

Louis Shalako

 

On Alistair MacLean.

I was just watching the 1979 film of Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island.

It has been said that the quality of his work was uneven. You could say that about any writer, if one compares the first thing they ever wrote against the last thing they ever wrote, along with some of the really great stuff when they were at their peak. Of course their work was variable, and so is mine and so is yours.

Author John Creasy wrote something like six hundred books, and there are a few in there, which I have read, where one wonders how it actually got published in the first place. Truth was, he was grinding them out relentlessly, at the dining room table, and trying to feed a family, when the going rate for a novel might have been a measly twenty-five pounds.

(How in the hell do you even do that? - ed.)

There is a big difference between six hundred books and twenty or thirty, that difference is the luxury of time.

I wanted to talk about Alistair MacLean due to the number of films that were adapted from his works.

First, a little background.

“In 1941, at the age of 19, MacLean was called up to fight in the Second World War with the Royal Navy, serving with the ranks of ordinary seaman, able seaman, and leading torpedo operator. He was first assigned to PS Bournemouth Queen, a converted excursion ship fitted for antiaircraft guns, on duty off the coasts of England and Scotland. Beginning in 1943, he served on HMS Royalist, a Dido-class light cruiser. There, he saw action in 1943 in the Atlantic theatre, on two Arctic convoys and escorting aircraft carrier groups in operations against Tirpitz, and other targets off the Norwegian coast. He took part in Convoy PQ 17 on Royalist. In 1944, Royalist and he served in the Mediterranean theatre, as part of the invasion of southern France and in helping to sink blockade runners off Crete and bombard Milos in the Aegean.” (Wiki)

Where Eagles Dare consistently ranks among the top five war adventure films of all times, and that’s pretty good company to be keeping for any writer. The Guns of Navarone is an acknowledged classic, one I have viewed many times. Force 10 from Navarone, another classic film.

Alistair at about twenty.

In terms of comparisons, River of Death is quite terrible, at least in the film version. And I have read the book, in fact I used to check for new titles at our local mall book shop, way back in the days when we had time, money, and plenty of hair on the old noggin…a leather jacket and a seventeen-hair mustache, if you really want to know.

Fear is the Key, this film has one of the best car chase scenes ever. What might have been described in the book is fully brought to life in this one. MacLean loved sending things over cliffs, for example vehicles in Where Eagles Dare and Guns of Navarone, as well as Bear Island. There are probably others, and this is one reason why they’re called action-adventure stories. Oh, yeah. In Breakheart Pass, a train goes over a cliff.

He wasn't exactly messing around, when it came time for things to go off of cliffs.

H.M.S. Ulysses, his first novel, was based on his wartime experience in the Royal Navy.

This accounts for some of the naval themes, arctic themes, for example Night without End. There are lots of ships in his novels, Golden Rendezvous for example.

The list of actors that have appeared in the films is impressive. Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Harrison Ford, Robert Shaw, Rock Hudson, Charles Bronson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan, Carl Weathers, Lloyd Bridges, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, Edward Fox, Franco Nero, the list, ladies and gentlemen, goes on and on and on. Barry Newman, Ben Kingsley, John Vernon. Richard Harris and Anne Turkel, Burgess Meredith and David Janssen, John Carradine.

Robert Vaughn and Donald Pleasance and Michael Dudikoff in River of Death, just to name a few more. And I know I’ve left a few out—I had to, there’s just too many films and too many names.

Gregory Peck, David Niven, Richard Widmark, Ed Lauter, Ben Johnson, Charles Durning, Richard Crenna. Gia Scala and Irene Papas. As I said, this is a very long list.

Throw in a hundred more character actors, whose faces you might recognize, and whose names may be vaguely familiar, and you start to get the idea of just how successful Alistair MacLean actually was. Patrick Wymark and Michael Hordern, in Where Eagles Dare, for example, these actors each have very long lists of credits, starring and supporting roles, in film and theatre. Barbara Bach and Michael Byrne in Force 10 from Navarone is (or are), just one more example, then there were Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt. Jill Ireland.

These are just a few of the ‘vapid females’ (essentially, Bond Girls), in what are called stories ‘of good Englishmen and bad Germans’. Which would appear to be an entire genre in itself, at least when a good writer gets hold of it.

It’s different for everybody of course, but when I read these books and saw the films for the first time, I was a young man, impressionable, an inveterate reader above all else. I soaked it all up like a sponge.

These are the stories that make a young man’s fancy turn towards writing a few stories of his own someday…

The books that kind of stick to your ribs, like soul food for the adventurous home-boy.

When I fantasize about my own humble bookshelves, which I do from time to time, (if only we had money!), this would be one box set I might be willing to pay money for—just for the purposes of study, scholarship, and maybe even stealing a few ideas here and there as a writer myself. Maybe even just learning a little something at the knee of a master. Or maybe it’s just some kind of an escape.

It always was, an escape.

There is nothing wrong with a little escapism, at the time we probably needed it, and there are times when we still do.

In which case, we will always have someplace to go.

I have written a critique of Where Eagles Dare, and you can read it at the link below. I describe it as ‘a series of plot holes flying in close formation’, and yet I still enjoy the film, just as much as I did the book, such a very long time ago.

MacLean figured out how to make it work for him, and perhaps that is the real lesson here. I have no idea of who the reader is, I have no idea if the lesson is relevant to you, although plenty of folks write, and plenty more dream about it just as I did. I can only hope you enjoyed reading this story.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the lesson was for me.

And why not.

I’ve always needed plenty of stimulation.

END

Plenty of stimulation.

Alistair MacLean. (Wiki)

When Eight Bells Toll.

The Golden Rendezvous.

Fear is the Key.

Night Without End.

Breakheart Pass.

Where Eagles Dare: A Series of Plot Holes Flying in Close Formation.

Why I Love Louis L’Amour.

On Agatha Christie.

Louis Shalako has books and stories, ebooks and audiobooks, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading. The blog is acting rather wonky today, and trying to get the text all in the same shade of black has defeated me.

#Louis

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Love Louis L'Amour. Louis Shalako.

He loved the stories.

Louis Shalako

Why I Love Louis L’Amour.

 

I love Louis L’Amour books and stories. I like the highly-romanticized version of the American West, which is only half myth. Some of it might even be real. And a lot of the rest is bullshit—

We’ll talk about that some other time.

I suppose it’s the action, the adventure, the escape into a world where the moral questions are easy enough.

It’s good versus evil, no mistaking that.

One must assume the characters are engaging, the women beautiful, the villains are clearly the villains. The landscapes in the background speak for themselves.

Louis L’Amour is one of the few authors that can regularly bring a tear to my eye. This is when the male character arrives in town, immediately goes for the most beautiful girl in town, and often noting that he’s going to have to buy a cow—for the milk, right, like when they marry, settle down, and have lots and lots of children. That’s pure romance, and even men like a little romance once in a while.

This is the character with a bag of peach pits and cherry pits and apple seeds to plant when he gets his own spread…a hard worker, someone with a dream, a story to tell, and not afraid of a fight.

Coming from an interesting background, not without its hardships, L’Amour had one hell of a resume.

From Wikipedia:

“Louis Dearborn LaMoore was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, on March 22, 1908, the seventh child of Emily Dearborn and veterinarian, local politician, and farm equipment broker Louis Charles LaMoore (who had changed the French spelling of the name L'Amour). His mother had Irish ancestry, while his father was of French-Canadian descent. His father had arrived in Dakota Territory in 1882. Although the area around Jamestown was mostly farm land, cowboys and livestock often traveled through Jamestown on their way to or from ranches in Montana and the markets to the east. Louis played Cowboys and Indians in the family barn, which served as his father's veterinary hospital, and spent much of his free time at the local library, the Alfred E. Dickey Free Library, particularly reading the works of 19th-century British historical boys' author G. A. Henty. L'Amour once said, (Henty's works) enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics.

After a series of bank failures devastated the economy of the upper Midwest, Dr. LaMoore and Emily took to the road. Removing Louis and his adopted brother John from school, they headed south in the winter of 1923. Over the next seven or eight years, they skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, worked in the mines of Arizona, California and Nevada, and in the sawmills and lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. It was in colorful places like these that Louis met a wide variety of people, upon whom he later modeled the characters in his novels, many of them actual Old West personalities who had survived into the 1920s and 1930s.

Making his way as a mine assessment worker, professional boxer, and merchant seaman, Louis traveled the country and the world, sometimes with his family, sometimes not. He visited all of the western states plus England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama, finally moving with his parents to Choctaw, Oklahoma in the early 1930s. There, he changed his name to the original French spelling L'Amour and settled down to try to make something of himself as a writer.”

Something has been said about the Social Darwinism of some of his later books. It’s not unlikely he would be a conservative, a Republican. It went with the terrain. These were hardy, independent, self-reliant people who had overcome all odds, (those who didn’t die young), which is a recurrent theme of his stories after all. The fact that they’re not preachy or beat the reader over the head with it, is what helps to make them readable in the first place. I doubt if he had much sympathy for the truly criminal or the irresponsible or the just plain no-accounts.

Louis was not a lazy man and neither am I.

One of his more popular titles is the book and film entitled Shalako.

In a kind of tribute to a writer of what was, essentially, pulp, my name is Louis Shalako. If a name has any power, and I believe that it does, this is a great name and a wonderful homage to Louis L’Amour. Louis is of course French, and the Zuni Shalako is a celebration of the winter solstice, a time of rebirth, renewal, and consequently, great magic.

It is also a tribute to myself.

It’s very symbolic, but in a sense, I have remade myself. I wanted to make a few changes and so I did. All I ever really wanted to do, was to write pulp—genre fiction, ladies and gentlemen. I doubt if L’Amour set out to sell 200 million copies, that’s a ludicrous proposition. What he said, was that he would ‘try to make something of himself as a writer’. You have to admit, the gentleman was very successful. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It’s interesting that his father Anglicized the name but Louis changed it back.

L’Amour means love in French. This is pure deduction, but this is why the man changed it back. Louis loved the world he saw around him, the people, the places, and the times he lived in. He love the land and its history. It was his own form of tribute, far more so than LaMoore, if we think about it.

In that sense, he is a kind of inspiration to us all.

As a very wise man once said, love your customer.

And if you don't love something, you're going to hate everything, and that is no way to be, which is just plain miserable.

***

A bizarre anecdote. My uncle Ed ordered a sign to go out in front of the family business. When the sign arrived, it read E.S. Ambrose, Monuments. Authorized dealer for Rock of Ages. (A brand-name of the time, from a big quarry up in Quebec. He sold tombstones.) The correct spelling was Ambroise. About as French as you can get, right. But Sarnia was an English speaking town in Ontario. Ed being Ed, instead of boxing it up and sending it back, (at his own expense no doubt), he decided to live with it, although he’d probably still have the correct name on his driver’s license and stuff like that.

I'll need three tombstones...

END

 

Louis L'Amour. (Wiki)

A Lesson For Us All. Zach Neal.

The Zuni Shalako.

John Wayne as Reactionary.

Shalako. The film.

Louis Shalako has books and stories on Amazon.

Thank you for reading.

Dead Reckoning, Chapter One. Scene Two. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery. Louis Shalako.

Roger Langeron: separating the wheat from the chaff.

Louis Shalako

Chapter One

Scene Two

After one hell of a weekend, Monday morning was predictable enough. Roger Langeron, head of the Sûreté here in Paris, sat across from Gilles, pausing for a moment as another of the crew shuffled in. He’d heard the news.

“As police, we can separate the wheat from the chaff, and ignore the irrelevant. It’s a good thing the average juror doesn’t get to read all of our case notes, otherwise we’d never get a conviction.” He uttered a long, drawn-out sigh. “And the housekeeper got the knock at the door and accepted all of this at face value.”

“Yes. Their timing was perfect. They might have been aware of her routine. If they knew anything about the lady at all, it was a dead certainty. To sit there and wait for them to finish would have been beyond her. Fridays, she heads out, early afternoon, does an hour or so of shopping, comes back. She puts it all away, probably looking at the clock every two minutes, knowing her.” She would have been put out if she’d had to stay one minute over her allotted time, or worse, been forced to deviate from what was clearly a pretty strict routine. In an emergency, Gilles would have been happy to pay overtime, but with that one, it simply wasn’t in the cards, at least not before Hell froze over.

Fridays, she went home early, as agreed between them on day one…she would have been caught between a rock and a hard place, and didn’t seem to have much flexibility of mind.

“Fuck. I had no idea of what to do.”

The crazy woman had let them in, accepting their story at face value and trusting them alone in the home of what was, after all, a pretty senior police official. She’d taken her purse and her shopping bags and simply walked away—

Unbelievable, and he was still trying to decide whether to let her go or just give her a stiff little lecture…any kind of help, let alone good help, was surprisingly hard to find these days. It would be the perfect chance to get rid of her, the trouble lay in finding another one.

Madame wasn’t even much of a cook, and he’d taken to making excuses for her, mostly, and eating out or having his meals delivered. What might have been acceptable on weekends had now become seven days a week. That, could only go on for so long.

“And?”

“Finally, it occurred to me that I really ought to call the police. Ha. She says she signed a delivery form, and yet one would think a legitimate operation would leave an invoice or something, perhaps a thin, badly-translated manual, or a warranty card or something. But, no, nothing.” They’d taken away the crate, or any other materials that might have gone along with it.

Heavy and difficult to handle, the machine had been scrupulously wiped down for prints.

It was one hell of a load to drag up three flights, even in the empty state…how in the hell had they even gotten it in the door, and that was another good question.

Of course, she hadn’t taken any notice of the name on the side of their delivery van, parked right out in front, nor much notice of the men involved, at least three or four of them or so she said. All average working men, of indeterminate age, nothing that really stood out about any of them. All of them wearing coveralls, again, with the name of the company written all over them. She had said that they were very polite, very sincere, and that was about all it had taken to convince her.

“Bah.” Gilles practically spat the word in his disgust.

There were hundreds of places where one might purchase such a freezer, and all of that would take time to look into.

“Here’s the thing. A private citizen could pay cash, and drag the thing home on their own. A moving company, a nephew or a son-in-law with a lorry or van of their own. It’s a cash sale, they don’t even need a story.” While the machine had a serial number, that only led back to the manufacturer and up to the point of sale. “If the sales person was a little too persistent, they could simply give a fake name and address, load her up and take it on home, or wherever.”

It might have been cash-and-carry all the way along.

It was up to the customer to fill in and mail in the warranty card…the seller couldn’t care less if they did or if they didn’t. There would be those customers who wouldn’t bother, or simply forgot.

Gilles. One pissed-off dude.

After that, it was pretty much untraceable. It was brand-new, insofar as anyone could determine so far, and yet it had to be looked into, in the hopes of some future outcome which would require documentation—the chain of evidence and custody.

“Are we supposed to go around to every recent customer’s house and make sure their deep freezer isn’t missing?” Maintenon gave another little snort. “There’s nothing like that in the recent theft and burglary reports…”

“Ah.”

Roger wasn’t the most intuitive of people, but he was bright enough to be head of the department. The more professional thieves were known to take a load of meat, sometimes the whole freezer, better yet, a refrigerated van or lorry, full of product and easy enough to dispose of. If you knew all the right, or all the wrong, sort of people. These were mostly crimes of opportunity, possibly a little planning, given a little bit of inside knowledge and the right time and place.

“Yes. Anyhow, the idea of a bomb or something struck me, and of course there are the times we live in…”

Roger nodded. Recent events came to mind—

It was a like a virus going around, and the political climate had not been good for some years in this country.

Gilles had made the call.

Officers had attended to his residence, and thinking furiously, they’d found a dustpan and some large bowls. It had taken quite some time, just scooping out ice cubes, which had tended to fuse together in large lumps, once the lid had been open for any length of time. Once the kitchen sink was full, they’d started in on the bath tub and the little sink in there. Once they’d gotten a ways down, running hot water through the taps to sort of help the melting process along, a dark colour had shown through the ice cubes and it was clear they had something else on their hands—

Gilles growled.

“One dead body, well, that’s a tragedy. Three, dead bodies—that, is damned interesting.”

Cause of death as yet unknown. It would take time to make any kind of identifications, or perhaps there would be no identification. At this point, once they’d figured out there was at least one corpse in there, the thing to do was to call in the crime-scene photographers. Then to drag it down the stairs again, all very carefully, so as not to spill it, and take it all down to the lab. Gilles had spent Friday night with the thing in his kitchen and an officer on the door for crime-scene security. On some level, Gilles might even be a suspect. It was laughable. Yet appearances of propriety had to be kept, even so, he’d been allowed to remain in his own home. It was the privilege of rank or something, and there would probably still be questions.

They had literally discussed the fate of the cat. Perhaps that had been the clincher—that and his own glares and grunts.

What were they going to do, arrest him? Were they going to arrest Sylvestre?

He had laughed in their faces.

He’d been pretty pissed-off by that point. He outranked the whole damned bunch of them, all at once sort of thing. For a senior officer to lose it like that wasn’t good and yet he still had the stubborn feeling…that was it. He really didn’t have much of an excuse.

A bad compromise all around.

And there still might have been a bomb, down in the bottom somewhere, as he put it.

It was one hell of a mess, and the news-hounds, the average tabloïd de journalisme jaune would be all over it, and for good reason: it was downright sensational, there was no other word for it.

"Looks like you're screwed, Boss."

“It gets worse from here, Gilles. I’m going to have to suggest that you are excused from this investigation. Mostly for the sake of appearances—”

Gilles nodded glumly.

“I agree.”

“There’s more, Gilles.”

“There is?” As if it wasn’t bad enough already.

“I hope you understand, as your boss, but also as a friend, that I am also under a bit of pressure here…” He trailed off. “Well. It’s a question of your vacation time.”

Maintenon groaned.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist this time, Gilles.”

“Argh.”

“Gilles. Take three weeks—please. Or the Minister will be having my head.” He rose, glancing at the others in the room, all desperately trying to look busy and not like they weren’t eavesdropping on every word. “It’s been years, Gilles. Years. It’s fucking summertime, Gilles. The weather has been beautiful, and you really, really do need to get out of this town once in a while. Just for the sake of your own sanity.”

And mine too, although he didn’t say it.

“…look, you can hand off your files to the other detectives. Cold cases won’t get any more hopeless with a few weeks off. Your people are very competent when it comes to the live ones and you know I have full confidence in their abilities. But you’re off, as of Friday at quitting time…” That would give Gilles a little time to get used to it.

He could tidy up the desk and his files…

It might even give him a little perspective on things.

He didn’t say that either. Halfway out the door—

Gilles growled again.

Spinning on one heel, Roger turned back, half-choking on a laugh which would be real bad politics just then. He waggled a finger in Maintenon’s darkening face.

“That’s an order, Gilles. I’ll put that in writing, if I must—” And then he was gone.

Faces turned to him and Margot, for one, caught his eye.

Levain: about time, too.

“Looks like you’re kind of screwed, eh, Boss.” Her eyes dropped and she went back to her notes.

And there was Levain, grinning in the background over his own typewriter.

“And it’s about effing time, too.” Levain snorted, pleased with his joke.

His eyes came up and stabbed Maintenon right in the gizzard.

“…sooner or later, it had to happen. Right?”

Fuck.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on Fine Art America.

***

Chapter One, Scene One.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

Dead Reckoning. Be Happy In Your Work. Louis Shalako.

Maintenon as a very young man.

Louis Shalako

Be happy in your work.

Dead Reckoning, (provisional title), the tenth in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, is well on the way.

I’ve gotten the story up to well over 10,000 words, since I started it on October 26/24. Interestingly, I had three lines, and a few notations at the bottom of the brand-new document, a grand total of 57 words, when I shut it down for the day and basically, just sat there and thought about the story. It was a form of commitment and I knew I was prepared to work at it.

How does it begin? (A dead body. – ed.)

How does it end? (A variation on a theme. – ed.)

And what do I do to fill up the middle. Almost any idea is good, and I’ve even written one of my own dreams into a chapter, in a book, which if nothing else adds something to the inner narrative of one of our characters.

I think about the stories at work, I think about them driving down the road, I suppose I think about them in the shower.

What really sucks is when you think of something in the middle of the night, and you have to fight the urge to clamber out of bed, fire up the machine, and tack that in somewhere before you forget…which you almost surely will.

My last mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, took three winters to write, with bouts of about 20,000 words each, resulting in a novel of over 60,000 words. It’s also something of a masterpiece, but then, I did have plenty of time to think about it.

It’s genre fiction, pulp essentially, the only real advantage is that I’ve read hundreds of them and seen hundreds of them on film and on television. We get to see their strengths and their weaknesses, and if we think we can do better, then we should—and good for us if we do.

To steal from one may be plagiarism, to steal from many is pure genius. That’s a cliché, but I will go it one better.

I might steal, but only from the very best. This is how I end up with an idea, a gag, one that came from Conan Doyle, or Agatha Christie, and perhaps others, all mixed up like a dog’s breakfast in a story that is new, it’s fresh, and it is nothing if not original. But if you think about it, Sherlock Holmes was a master of disguise. Agatha Christie was known for gentle gender-benders, for example the accomplished actress who dressed as a man, in order to commit the perfect crime. (Ah, but as an accomplished actress, she was also the only one that could have pulled it off, which might have been her undoing in the end.) I promise you this much—if I live long enough, I will do the parody, where at the end of the book, every single damned character reaches up under the chin, grabs a hold of a little loose bit, and then peels off the rubber mask in order to become somebody else. (Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.) This is the one where every single character in the book all end up in the same place, and every single one of them is pointing a gun at the next one’s head. Okay, I am exaggerating, but not really…sort of.

(There is such a thing as bad television. – ed.)

Yeah, but seriously. Everyone in the whole damned book is pulling off a rubber mask with one hand, and pointing a gun at the next guy's head with the other...the poor #basterd at the front of the line says, "...hey, wait a minute..." (it's not fair), and then he sort of shuffles along sideways, very, very carefully, until they all form a circle and then he can point his gun at the head of the last guy at the other end of the line. And then, the one you least suspect will pull the fucking trigger...

Probably me, but you never know.

(No one would ever suspect. – ed.)

And if you don’t believe me, you really should read A Stranger In Paris. As formulaic as the genre is and can be, the ending will still surprise.

And then you will know—

You can always throw in another hot babe.

So, if I peck away at this on some small, daily basis, it really doesn’t take much more than five or six hundred words a day to get a pretty good manuscript in two or three months. The key thing is to get to the end of the plot—we can go back and dress our figures, decorate our sets, explain the floor plans, talk about the town, describe the personalities, and add in essential details. We can plant clues to account for little events later in the book, we can take clues out, we can change the name of a character, we can copy and paste paragraphs so that they make a better kind of linear sense.

We cut words out here and add words in there…

I would like to equal or better my last work, and it may even be possible but you just never know.

I enjoy the work. You know, last week I recovered five email accounts. I still can’t get into one Amazon account. I need to get in there and update the tax page…I need to get in there just to change the recovery email and phone number. It took two and a half hours to change my telephone service provider, and the thing is still eating the battery at an alarming rate, and truth is, I’m still messing around with it.

I do not enjoy that work.

Writing is like sex, ladies and gentlemen. When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

This is not a contradiction.

Trust me, I know.

I’ve done a little bit of both in my life. Which brings me to the last point. If I get bored, I throw in another hot babe, and that helps to keep me interested.

And if some nice young guy falls in love with her, well, it all goes toward filling up that big long middle part.

 

END

Check out Louis Shalako’s A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play. The audiobook is free, the ebook a reasonable $3.99.

Our good friend and colleague Harold C. Jones has just released Shipwrecked on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

2023 In Review. It Was a Very Good Year. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

A couple of weeks ago, I began my new audiobook on Google Play. It’s been a long year.

My attention was wandering, and I basically saved it as a draft. I’d probably had enough, at that point. I went off and did other things for a couple of weeks. I was grabbing free, public domain short stories from the internet, finding images, publishing them, putting in links and posting them all over. At some point my eyes were rolling back into my head. I couldn’t focus for the life of me…I’d probably had enough, by that point.

I'm back at it now, no rush, no hurry, no worries. My Criminal Memoir will be available as an audiobook within a day or two.

So, 2023 was fairly productive, after a hiatus of some years. It took me three winters, to write a mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, the ninth of the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. That was three winters where I wrote about 20,000 words, and long periods in between when I didn’t write a damned thing except the very occasional blog post. Publishing that on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, and finally, Google Play, I saw the notice. Click here to publish your book as an audiobook narrated by AI.

People are scared shitless by AI, and no one can blame them. They know themselves best. They are at a distinct disadvantage, one has to presume.

I thought, why not, why not learn how to use the fucking thing. I have all these books and all these stories. A series of assets, and it’s all about tending that little garden. I spent the next five months, producing what turned out to be around one hundred and thirty audiobooks in terms of full-length books and short stories. I have five different pen names, writing in any number of genres. I now have 285 titles up on Google Play. This does not account for paperbacks in two different sizes, or a number of different ebook formats available from Smashwords, just to clarify. Where I failed, was in getting that up as an approximately 4x7 paperback on Lulu (dot) com, where I have sold exactly three books since 2011, and I will never see a penny from that website…so far, I haven’t even attempted to produce a paperback of that book on Amazon. I was completely used to making paperbacks through Createspace, which was purchased by Amazon and is now a dead portal. I suppose it’s time to learn a new trick—

Having done all of that, all within a few months, I started looking around, and I had this story, The Black Orb, which had originally been published by New Myths. It had been hanging around in a folder on my desktop, the big hurdle there was the question of a cover image and a half-decent book cover.

I bit down hard on the bullet, and found a free, black and white, public domain image and produced a book cover, got an ISBN number, wrote some kind of half-assed blurb and published that as an ebook on various platforms, and as an audiobook on Google Play. I found the material and published One Million Words of Crap. I didn't even have to write it, only collect it, format it, and publish it in the usual fashion.

All of this is free to do, incidentally.

When I went to publish my new ebook on Lulu (dot) com, they wanted $4.99 to publish an ebook. They claim two million authors, (all of whom are happy and successful), that part is credible enough. It is also a drop in the bucket compared to some other platforms, and the truth is, I have sold exactly three books there since I joined the platform fifteen or more years ago. Why in the hell would I ever want to do that.

By this time, it was October, I was looking at a long, boring winter square in the eye. I had been thinking of writing my memoirs, I had some other ideas, but I just started writing. I wrote down a heading, and then just said what I thought. Whatever I could recall, from a certain period of my life. I didn’t even have to lie, to write fiction…that one’s about 54,000 words. A bit short for a novel, but this one is non-fiction. 

Publishing that, chapter by chapter, on my blog, was a motivating factor. People expect you to follow through and to finish that thing.

So did I.

That is exactly what I did.

At the present time, I need to go back, publish two paperbacks through Amazon’s KDP portal, assuming I can trim and fine-tune the book covers for A Stranger In Paris, and My Criminal Memoir.

I have three ebooks hung up due to formatting issues at Smashwords, in terms of wider distribution through iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, etc. Basically, I just got tired and parked it for a while. If I could trouble-shoot all of that, I would be just about caught up for 2023, and that would be that.

In that sense, it was a very good year.

I have no idea of what I might do next.

No promises, okay.

#Louis

 

END

 

A Stranger In Paris. Amazon.

One Million Words of Crap.

My Criminal Memoir. Google Play, (Audiobook).

The Black Orb.

Louis Shalako on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading or listening, whichever the case may be.

 

#Louis