Tips for laundering money.

(Morguefile.)

The best way to launder money is very, very slowly. It can be likened to the old ‘hot water/cold water debate.’

You don’t want to find yourself in hot water, right?

Buying a bunch of shitty little things every day is better than buying one nice big thing and blowing your cover. It’s a question of quality of life, right? That’s all that really matters here.

What you need to do is to get it all into small bills. Using a hundred at a roadside lemonade stand will just draw attention to yourself and you don’t want to do that. Hundreds are what you pay the rent with, right? No one knows if you can actually afford the place, right?

So, once you got her all in fives, tens and twenties, you need to buy a lot of little stuff. No one thing is a big-ticket item. It’s not like you drove up in a brand-new Winnebago, right? Someone will ask how you got it, right? Like a neighbour or something. Or even your crazy brother-in-law. Whatever.

Sign up for a lot of magazines. Sign up for every news rag in town. In a similar vein, you can buy a lot of used books. Your town probably has a used bookstore or two. They might have thrift stores, like the Salvation Army, or the International Daughters of the Revolution Thrift Shoppe, or whatever. Right?

Buy everything at Ikea, I really can't stress that enough. You want to be a loner. It's a kind of high-security lifestyle, and not everyone is cut out for it. Bear that in mind.

Go in once a month and put some major cash on your credit card, that’s always good. Slide a couple of hundred-dollar bills in there. The bank don’t care where you got it.

Never go to the same liquor store twice. Think about it. You show up the same place every day, get a twenty-sixer or whatever size of the liquor of your choice. Sooner or later, they think they’re getting to know you. You’re an old and trusted friend, right? And then, they ask what you do for a living, and you ain’t got no job, right? So never go to the same liquor store twice in a row. It only makes sense. (Don’t tell them you’re a writer either, it’s the most suspicious claim you can make. Writers can’t afford to buy anything at all.)

Another thing you can do is to buy a shitty old car. A big old gas-guzzler will take care of a few of them hundreds every month. You can take it to every garage in town. There’s always something wrong with it, right? Them guys are such crooks, they’ll never suspect. They will laugh at you behind your back, but you know something they don’t, right? Just let it slide, my brother. They’re just jealous anyway, ‘cause you go out to bingo every night. Anyhow, it’s like the Purloined Letter, it’s hiding in plain sight. You don’t want to disturb the pattern of living in your immediate vicinity, right? (All them fuckin’ drones.)

What I like is them Royal Dalton figurines, and them Norman Rockwell plates, but there’s a hundred other things you can collect. Anything with Elvis, pigs, or frogs painted on it is good for that. Anything with Princess Di is good, even now. Trade or sell on Ebay. It’s a visible means of support. You can talk a lot about your ‘online business.’ Try to sign them up for water-filtration affiliate schemes. Trust me on that one. Bore the fuckers to death, it’s legal and everything. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. The real problem arises if you are actually any good at it, and begin to make money on your own. This happened to a friend of mine, quite by accident I assure you. He has the right to privacy, right?

I like having a lot of cold and sinus medicine in the cupboard. That’s always good. You could do comic books or baseball cards, whatever you can turn into cash real quick. Say it’s an investment, people will understand that.

Oh, another good one, buy all of your clothes at Wal-Mart. Have a lot of shoes, and I don’t know, maybe a chair that you can ride around in. You can be like Seinfeld, and have every brand and flavour of cereal in your cupboard.

Just remember, everything you bought was on sale. That’s your story. All you have to do is stick to it.

Then plastic cards are good. Same as cash, right? Leave a couple of bucks on them and then just throw them away on the sidewalk in front of the candy store. Little kids live for found money. They’ll pick it up, try and see if there’s any money left on it, and then your ass is covered. Right? ‘Chain of custody,’ bro. Look it up online somewhere. It works two ways, brother. It works two ways.

Vending machines are another good one. If you follow my advice, you’ll end up with a lot of loose change anyways, and that’s good because there are no serial numbers. How are they going to prove it? Just tell ‘em you looked under the cushions of your couch, and you should be okay on that one as long as you’re not going overboard with the egg salad sandwiches and the candy bars and stuff. You can never have enough cans of Coke in the fridge, right? Follow my advice, and you’ll never have to cook again.

If anyone gives you a rough time, break down and tell them you’ve had a problem with hoarding for years, hug them a lot and then ask if they wouldn’t mind coming over and helping you with a garage sale some weekend.

If that don’t put them off, I don’t know what will.

Take lots of empties back to the beer store. That accounts for a major part of your income, what can you say? You were hurtin’. Right?

The only other thing I can think of is e-books. You can have hundreds of them, some of them are quite expensive, and you can always say you pirated them off the internet.

Think about it: you can always plead guilty to the lesser charge, right, but your main concern right now is the IRS, right? And them guys are inexorable. They never quit. They’ll fuckin’ follow you to your grave, bro. You have to admit I’m a fuckin’ genius. Go ahead: say it.

“Louis is a fuckin’ genius.”

That wasn’t so hard now, was it? Right.

Whereas if it’s just some criminal thing, the judge gives you a slap on the wrist, you get your name in the paper, and off you go, no one the wiser. Lawyers accept cash, trust me on that one.

“Hey everybody, look at me! I’m an online shoplifter. Now fuck off.”

It don’t mean nothing. Anyways, that’s just a few ideas, I thought I’d throw them out there 'cause I just like helping people.

You know how it is. We got the love, bro.

Independent Publishing: Utopia or dystopia?

(Hieronymus Bosch.)


As a science fiction writer, I have to ask the question, is the rise of independent digital publishing dystopian? Or is it Utopian to have the freedom to publish a book?

It depends who you ask, doesn’t it? There are those who see the democratization of publishing in dystopian terms. It is the end of the world, and a cloud descends over humanity. Others, including myself, see it as a vast and wonderful opportunity to transcend hierarchical structures and establish our own meritocracy of abilities.

Not everyone has the ability to write, so there is inequity here as well, although this is true for traditional as well as self-publishing.

What makes dystopia or Utopia is interest. It depends which side you are on. One man’s Utopia might be authoritarian. He would finally have the power and control to rectify the world’s wrongs, and confine or reform those who did not meet social standards. Sounds good, eh? Unless you don’t live up to expectations. His personal Utopia includes tyranny over you.

And yet the opposite, a state where there was no authority, and the needs of all (or the greatest number,) were still somehow met, might seem very dystopian to those who believe that there is nothing good which does not stem from some higher power or authority somewhere—they might be Utopian in that they seek a benevolent world government. They might have all kinds of logical justification. They would be up on a pulpit and no one would listen. That might be very frustrating.

What if all they want to do is to organize things constructively? You can’t get anything done, in an anarchic dystopia. That’s for sure.

What if they want to tell you what you can and cannot read? Surely there is some of this behind all the angst from authority figures in this industry. They're just not giong to come out and say it on record; what you can and cannot read. That would reveal them in all of their splendour, wouldn't it?

A woman’s Utopia, or dystopia, often looks far different than that of males.

So many issues of social control or progress, or reform, revolve around our bodies, from what we can eat, or what we can do on a given day of the week, fish on Friday or whatever, and of course all the reproductive and moral guidelines. Then there is the battle for our loyalties, our hearts and our minds. It’s all over the place. Surely someone has an interest there. Society has an interest—if an ‘inanimate idea’ can be said to have an interest. Society is a necessary fiction. Society is a generally agreed-upon thing. It is the thin veneer that covers barbarism.

To throw all that away could be seen as dystopian or Utopian. It depends on your point of view.

People’s arguments don’t always make sense. Yet they can be very sincere.

Here is the Utopian disconnect: one man’s Utopia involves getting rid of every law. Every law. He drives as fast as he wants on the highway, drinking beer, setting fire to the homes of people he doesn’t like and having sex with farm animals. He’s in paradise. The rest of the world is endangered or even just offended. So many social sanctions depend on public opinion. What else is there to judge by?

Another person’s Utopia is one where everyone behaves rationally and with perfect decorum. How could it be achieved, without massive social intervention, or even a eugenics program?

Another person’s Utopia would involve perfect social control through the use of legal sanctions. There would be a law for every eventuality, and laws for scenarios as yet unimaginable. They would cover all the bases. Who pays for the court system? Who wants to be taxed to support the masses of humanity serving time and paying their debt to society in a jailhouse?

One person’s Utopia might be to impose a belief on another. Not to be able to impose social control, or morality, could be considered dystopian. Perfect personal freedom might lead to dystopia. Surely efforts to band together to avoid anarchy, to provide social services, would tend to promote one group of interests ahead of others. How does that play out over the long run? Wouldn’t that lead to another elite? We admire elites. We look up to them for all kinds of reasons. Or would we all sit around doing nothing? Where none may rule, who is to say otherwise? What right do they have to enforce it?

Public opinion has never stopped evil from doing what it will or good from doing what it must.

What sounds like Utopia, a world where everyone just accepted everyone else, and then went ahead and did what they had to do, what was right for them, probably isn’t an achievable dream anytime soon. That’s because it looks too much like dystopia to the average bear in the street. And you can’t legislate or impose enlightenment on those who will not have it.

I’ve got that much figured out.

Is the new world of digital publishing Utopian or dystopian?

It is both. It represents change. One person’s disaster is another person’s opportunity. There are two schools of thought on the industry today, divided along almost partisan lines. It is that tension that prevents either Utopia or dystopia from actually happening.

***

So what qualifies me to be a writer?

Nothing, really. And everything.

I say that because after some thought, I realized that I’ve had nineteen cars in my lifetime. I’ve lived in five different places, including big cities and remote locations. I’ve had at least thirteen addresses that I can remember. This includes houses, apartments, boarding houses, and even a motel room with a kitchenette.

I’ve had easily fifty jobs, some of which were service or construction jobs, where we went to all the different plants and businesses in the tri-county area. I’ve worked in a hundred cities, towns and villages, and on farms as well.

I attended five different schools, took something on the order of forty different classes, (including bluegrass guitar,) and I’ve had five decades to sort of figure things out. I’ve been around the block once or twice.

I’ve read a lot of books, seen a lot of films, and listened to a lot of music. I’ve looked at a lot of art, listened to a lot of people and lived my life. I’ve had a few girlfriends, drank a lot of beer and had a lot of fun.

I’ve known a lot of people, and heard quite a bit about people I don’t really know all that well. Some of them, I don’t care to meet.

I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been to two other countries and a couple of different states, although as far as Canada goes, I’ve never been anywhere else but Ontario. Mind you, Ontario is a pretty big place.

I’m fairly intelligent, a good worker, and exhibit some imagination. I’m logical, and reasonable, and just a joy to watch in operation. I also have the ability to write. I have plenty of free time, a good dose of patience and rarely lose my sense of proportion. I’m a pretty good guy, all things considered.

I take things day by day and I like to laugh a lot.

If we’re not having fun, then it’s just not worth doing anymore.

Rational writing goals for 2013.

                                                                                                             (Morguefile.)



It’s time to set some rational goals for 2013.


For 2013, I hope to write three novels, one a mystery in the Maintenon series, one science fiction, and one in another genre. The third book could be a thriller, a high fantasy or whatever—I don’t care, all I need is the gag. Otherwise, I don’t know what it’s about, which makes it difficult to write.

Assuming I live ten years, this would result in thirty books at the rate of three a year. If I live twenty years, and if I’m still capable of writing, then I would theoretically be able to write sixty more books, looking forward from this day. I could squeeze out a few short stories and maybe a few poems by then as well.

I would very much like to see some really professional marketing images, not just for new books but all the titles so far. This requires money, and one of my goals is that the money to invest in the business is generated by the business. Another goal is not to pay 30 % tax withholding to the IRS. I’ve applied for my passport, in order to properly identify myself to them and get an ITIN, which Smashwords requires, etc, etc.

I will continue to write short stories, and submit them to pro markets, and for 2013, I will be creating some new pen names. Nothing has been decided yet, but we would need pen names for mystery, science fiction, horror, fantasy, but the WW I memoir could remain as ‘Louis Shalako.’

Right? Gee, I don’t know either! But another question is whether I would open fresh accounts and publish all of them under separate accounts, or simply use Shalako Publishing as an umbrella organization.

With all the recent talk of sock puppets and fake reviews and stuff, it’s easy to see that some negative connotations might be associated with one guy writing under half a dozen names, and at the same time pretending to be ‘a small press,’ or ‘an emerging press.’

It’s all me, right? I could be anybody. You have no idea of who I am, right?

People will think I’m just in it for the money. They’ll say all sorts of nasty things about me. I get quite a bit of that now…

What has stopped me so far is that I really don’t have a procedure all mapped out in advance. At some point, someone will have to make a decision, and I ought to know, because I used to work in construction.

In order for all of this to happen, there are a few things to tidy up before the end of 2012. This includes making new marketing images for the five or six paperbacks I have out now, as well as making danged sure the new ones I create meet some kind of minimal artistic standards.

I have a couple of novels coming out, one October 1 and one November 1, so there is a bit of what I like to call ‘a time-suck’ there. I have those well in hand, but the images still need some work. Before the end of the year I’ll produce a couple or three more short stories.

November is Nano-Write month, in which millions of people all try to write a novel in about a month. Normally what I do is to write short stories exclusively for the month of November, as it suits my purposes well enough, and it represents some kind of participation. It’s also motivating to try and hit the word count, right? And why not? What have I got to lose?

Not much, in strictly objective terms. I mean, take a look at me: I’m just some guy.

Right? But the whole objective with the short stories is to have something new to submit around to professional magazines. It represents more than just a cash sale. It’s something to put in a bio or a blurb, and it helps to build a readership.

Before winter is over, I should have every full-length novel on the list published as a print on demand paperback. That’s another goal.

When I published my first couple of e-books it was exciting. My hand shook when I did it. It was fun, too, because of that sort of rebellious spirit that I exhibit occasionally. No one really knows what’s going to happen.

But.

There was no great stir of controversy over my first couple of books, and while that was disappointing, now I know better what to expect.

But a major goal for 2013 is to bring back some of the fun, some of the excitement of self-publishing.

One way to do that would be to apply for a cultural grant and use it to publish a couple of other people’s books. The problem that I see with that, is the question, ‘What is my goal?’

What purpose would it serve? If my goal is to break new authors, with all the pen-names and fake entities out there, finding someone who is not an established pro is problematical, and if the goal is simply to learn how to publish someone else’s book, then I guess it wouldn’t matter whose book it is!

Some clear and logical thinking on my part would appear to be in order, however the deadline for application is November, so either I hurry up and do it, or postpone it for another year.

As for excitement, opening up the e-mails to discover a hundred submissions might be kind of exciting, or it might just be a pain in the wazoo. Also, with all the talk of sock puppets going around, someone will inevitably suspect that I own those books, and might be fraudulently giving myself an advance from monies intended to assist an emerging press…red faces all around, in that scenario. The problem is to identify just exactly who we are dealing with when entering into any contracts with putative or prospective authors.

As for submitting novels to major publishers, the whole thing is such a crashing bore that I might do it, and I might not. But once a book is submitted, there’s nothing for it but to wait to hear back, (it’s only polite,) and some folks aren’t that good about sending rejection slips. I see it as a sense of entitlement. On their part, not mine. (I’m entitled to my friggin’ rejection slips, I’ll grant you that much.)

Are you entitled to first crack at anything that I write?

That depends on your world-view and your philosophical outlook. I kind of doubt it, although I would be interested in your reasoning.

I’m just saying. If you would prefer not to discuss it, that’s fine too.


Note: I don't have a donate button on this site. The best thing you could do to help an independent author is to buy one of their books.

Dooley wakes up.





Chapter one

Dooley wakes up…







One by one the crew was awakened from stasis, head-space, as their duties were required aboard ship. In some cases, decades had been spent in cold storage, with only their dreams for company. As the starship got closer and closer to the home world, the video, radio and laser-casts became ever more recent in date of origin, and ever more current.

Presumably, the data was ever more relevant to the actual situation as it existed on Earth. Down there, the present day was circa 14,059 anno domini. Their faster-than-light journey lasted three generations. Twelve thousand years of history had passed. Avid study of the signal spectrum was crucial to the survival of the passengers and crew of Ark One. They had the dubious honour of sitting in review, objective observers in accelerated time, as the future unfolded in reverse out of the past.

At the time of departure, radio had been in existence for a century and a half. The outer edge of Earth’s bubble of electromagnetic radiation dated back to a time when signals were faint, sparse, and sporadic. Under deceleration there was plenty of time to listen in and catch up on the news. Analysts were fascinated by the evolution of the languages over the centuries. The officers in charge of the ship determined that society had crashed shortly after departure, from chaotic environmental degradation and a worldwide economic collapse. This led to revolution, war, famine, disease, with a sudden consequent die-off of humanity and many higher animals. The closer to home they got, the more worrying and darker in tone the news feeds became. And then they slowly began to wink out and fade from the airwaves, and one day there just wasn’t anyone out there anymore. The world had re-entered a darker age of human experience. Or perhaps human life had gone extinct.

***

“Jesus Christ, I’m only twelve thousand years old. Why do I feel so tired all the time?” Dooley Peeters had a kind of never-ending internal monologue.

His top-priority briefing ended. Nothing he hadn’t already guessed. Now it was all out in the open. The corridor was as cold as a witch’s tit as soon as he opened up the door of the compartment. He scuttled along on wooden-stiff legs, shivering and cursing aloud. The room wouldn’t let you out until you were briefed. You never got used to it. Thankfully his quarters were only fifty metres along. As soon as he got in, the room lit up and the heaters kicked on. Feeling the quivery belly tension that comes from near-hypothermia, he bolted for the shower stall, grateful to strip out of the rubber suit, with its itchy and sometimes painful plug-ins, inserted into veins in wrists, ankles, groin and neck. You wanted to be careful not to accidentally yank one of the little stoppers out, and leak to death. It was quite difficult, and his patience was tried by the urgent need to get warm, but he had to be careful pulling the tubes out of the suit’s reinforced circular openings.

The rush of negative emotions was pretty intense, and some training in bio-feedback and mood control was essential. You had to become objective about yourself, and learn to control your passions. Everybody felt the same way when they came out of the suit.

“The one common element in all of human experience is suffering.” The briefings always ended the same way.

We suffer for the common good.

Complete with feet and mitts and a hood, like a baby’s sleeper, the suit protected against ice-up. His skin was pink, wrinkled and moist as he clambered out of it and disposed of it in the chute. The first lukewarm drops of the shower spray stung like a sandblaster on a sunburn. He gritted his teeth and thought about what came next. An unwelcome glimpse in the steam-fogged mirror revealed the deep-set lines from where the face-rig clipped on with elastic straps. The sphincter-like ring in the hood left a solid blue line, crinkled around his forehead, under the chin, and along both cheeks. He looked like death warmed over, but then they all did after wake-up. There was never any provision made for psychological or physical recovery. You were expected to be on the job a half hour later. Why the machine couldn’t wake you up the day before had always remained a mystery to him. The drain on life support wasn’t all that great. In a ship of this size, there had to be so much air in the system just to fill the vessel up to the proper pressure. Whether or not anyone was there to breathe it was quite secondary.

He wanted a shave and a hot meal. Men complained about the way they felt, oddly enough, when talking about the experience later. Women complained about the way they looked. Or was that just bullshit, from the secret little book that women passed around, amongst themselves, and never letting a mere man get a look at it? He wondered what the operating manual for a woman’s mind looked like.

Based on past experience, it would be two or three days before he could take a dump.

He needed some clean pants, a shirt, a cup of coffee and a smoke. Dooley Peeters had his priorities in the proper perspective. The damned plug-ins still itched, especially with the sting of hot water and soap on the red-rimmed Fluid Entry Points. The fluid was based on the paw-pad antifreeze of the Siberian husky breed of dogs, distilled from tissues grown in an industrial-scale in-vitro process. This was mixed with a blood-plasma replacement rich in oxygen, due to the low temperatures and therefore the slow pace of chemical reactions under hibernation.

He wasnted to remove the Fluid Entry Points as soon as humanly possible. He had lived for that day, when he was feeling a little down. For a moment he reveled in being grumpy, as he began lathering up his hair.

The scary part was when you had to put the mask on, knowing full well that a few seconds later a sickly-sweet, pungent smell would come through, and you would be knocked out. Certain thoughts never left, they even showed up in semi-conscious dreams. Dooley noted his heart begin to race at the thought, and carefully cleared his mind of animal fear. Good posture and long, slow breaths were the key.

It took real guts to suit up, after a while. The first few times were all right. But that was before he had all that time to think, and to calculate on the odds.

Statistically-speaking, sooner or later you wouldn’t wake up.

You could only tempt the odds so many times, and he accepted that part. What scared him was the possibility that your number would come up on the very first roll of the dice. It might not be an entirely rational fear, but it was his, and his alone, and he just had to live with it. It felt very reassuring to button up a clean white cotton shirt, and feel the rug under the soles of his bare feet. With luck, he would never have to put the mask on again.

The key thing was to make no mistakes. All he could do was to pray for luck, and prepare for the worst. Dooley liked living, and the notion that the universe could just as well do without him was a distinctly unwelcome one. At last he could have a smoke and a half-decent cup of coffee.

Dooley feared that random hit of bad luck.

END   This is the first part of 'Horse Catcher,' coming on October 1/2012 or thereabouts.   Comments are always welcome. Photo credit: NASA, artist impression, public domain.

Become a better writer. Learn how to edit.

Presently I’m editing two books at a time. This involves my new mystery, ‘The Art of Murder,’ which is the second in a series, and ‘Horse Catcher,’ a science fiction novel originally written in the spring of 2008.

It’s good to be able to go back and forth between two different projects. I just finished the mystery, and I can only look at it so many times before the page starts to swim in front of my eyes. After leaving it for two or three weeks, I opened it up and started work, and within the first thirty pages I made numerous minor changes to the text. Because I didn’t know it off by heart any more, I was forced to read it with fresh eyes rather than just skim through with my attention wandering.

When I published my first two e-books in 2010, I spent ten months editing them side by side. I started writing sometime before September 1983, when I went back to school at about age 25. For most of those years I just puttered around, but I submitted my first few books about a hundred and twenty-five times. A couple of vanity publishers were interested, and a couple of the books got some interest from a respectable Canadian publisher. I guess I just wasn’t ready for it.

I had plenty of insecurity about the work. By this time, I had surrounded myself with all kinds of writers on Facebook, some of them pretty famous, and I suppose some diffidence is understandable.

The fact is, the books needed a lot of work. Now I can edit a book in about a month, but at some point the attention begins to wander, and so I go off and do other things. In terms of man-hours, at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty hours of editing go into one of my books. It doesn’t all have to be in the same month.

There are times when I read an opinion, and the person is talking about all the ‘unedited’ independently-published works out there, and while most of the time I can take it in proper spirit, there are times when it really does bug me.

If you want a well-edited book, you either pay someone else to do it, or you do it yourself. If you can’t afford to pay, or if you simply don’t have the skill or the aptitude, then you really are up a creek. Your only choice then is to either learn how or live with the results. Incidentally, paying money for professional editing is no guarantee of big sales. You can write badly, pay a ton of cash for editing, do the work, and someone will read your books and tell you that you’re ‘a great writer.’ Maybe that’s true. It’s also true that you might succeed. It might go ballistic.

In my case, I wanted to learn anyway. I don’t hang up a shingle as an editor, because I really don’t have a long list of qualifications or publishing credits to establish my credentials. There are plenty of editors out there. It’s very competitive, and I would still have to charge $35.00 an hour. $70.00 an hour would be better, and the fact is I don’t want to do it anyway. Think of what I would be letting myself in for. I would edit someone’s book, and then maybe they get a few bad reviews, and I’m not interested in all the angst that might go along with all of that.

We learn by listening. We learn by reading, and we learn by doing. We learn by any number of means. However, I am far better off to be able to edit my own work, even though I really don’t claim to be an editor.

What happens, is that I am becoming a better writer—a much better writer. That’s all I really want out of the editing skills.

It is a way to become a better writer.

And if you want to learn how to write, then by all means, write. If you want to learn how to edit, you either go to school, get a job as a junior editor, or edit your own stuff. If you want to learn how to write well, set very high standards for yourself.

If you want to learn how to edit, grab a manuscript, any manuscript, and start editing. The first thing that you will find is that you don’t automatically know the answer to every question that an observant person can come up with. And so you look it up, ask a question, Google a few key words and phrases. Then you go back and look at that danged book again.

You submit a few short stories around, enter a few contests, and take every bit of criticism and rejection as a positive thing. It can really hurt sometimes. It is the path to learning.

Anything can be criticized. And anything can be improved. While some may quibble that I could have done a little more of this, and taken out some of that, I am pleased with the results in terms of subsequent writings. My ninth novel was better-written than my first two, right out of the box, and this was before I ever started ‘editing.’

Will everybody love ‘The Art of Murder?’ Probably not, and I can still think of one or two valid criticisms myself. It’s fairly short at around 62,000 words, and any book could be made longer and more complex. By the standards of the genre, it holds up well enough when compared to famous and long-dead writers of genre fiction.

There will be valid criticisms of ‘Horse Catcher.’ It goes with the territory.

When I write a book, it is a unique artistic achievement. No one else could have written that book.

There are no acknowledgements in the front of my books.

Here is an example of 'Dense Prose.'

http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.ca/2012/02/have-you-ever-heard-someone-absolutely.html

Here is a before and after edit of one scene from 'Horse Catcher.' < (Note: Louis re-read this later and added the final apostrophe. -ed.)

http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.ca/2012/09/excerpt-horse-catcher.html

Comments are always welcome. I don't have a donate button on this site. The best thing anyone could do to help an independent author is to buy one of their books.

Incidentally, if you need help with editing, or have a question, the best people to ask are the ones making all the blanket statements and disparaging reviews on Amazon and other sites. They know what they're talking about, assuming you can penetrate their identity or locate them or whatever. I'm sure they'd be glad to help.