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I did a deep dive into my business today. I’m very disappointed in myself. It’s like looking in the mirror and seeing a gut grow. I know how it got there. I stopped running. Stopped eating right. Drank more beer. All the things that got me into the best shape of my life, I quit doing them. Same thing for the business. I can complain that the algorthym changed or that the market shifted or blah blah blah. I can also look in the mirror and see what I did. Or what I didn’t do. Let’s look at last quarter. I did soft releases of four new books. In four separate series.   I preach staying in one series until you master it and are making the money from it you want. I didn’t practice it. I launched at full price in a new genre where I have no presence and no list. This worked for a couple of other writers. I wanted it to work for me. It did not. So it’s back to the basics for me. That means running at least a mil...

CHAPTER FOUR They lay on top of the white duvet on his queen size bed under a skylight he had installed himself. The noon sun drilled through at an angle, casting an oblong rectangle of bright yellow on the white wall. It had tracked along the wall as they finished the shower and started time number two in the bed. Number three finished him for the day for good, he thought as he collapsed into a quivering heap next to her, one hand draped across her flat stomach tracing indentations in the smooth expanse of skin. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back one hand and rubbed the small of his back with the other. “Just like I remembered,” she said. “That could go either way,” Jake said. Gretchen rolled over to one side and cocked her head on her hand. “I think you know which way it went.” “You told me,” he nodded and switched to writing circles on her hip with the tip of his finger. “You were a little different.” “I’m a different man...

CHAPTER THREE Jake almost fell when the door opened and Gretchen stepped around the end of the shower. He was sure his mouth dropped because she wore the gold necklace he got her as a gift and nothing else. “Got room for me?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question because Jake wasn’t stupid, and neither was she. He had installed the shower himself. It was the width of the room, partitioned by a single pane of glass with an entry on either side that led to four shower heads. There was a giant picture window on the exterior wall, double paned for energy and tinted so anyone standing in the shower could see the width of what once was his empire and now belonged to a developer he no longer called friend. “Save me some hot water,” Gretchen scooted around the end of the glass partition and turned on a second spray of steamy water. He still thought of it as her end, he mused as his eyes travelled over the rest of her. Same Gretchen, same lines, sam...

“Will you sign this for me?” My shields went up. “Are you a cop?” I joked. Mostly joked. I added a smile to make sure she knew it was a joke. She took a step back. Sometimes I forget my smile and snarl look almost alike. “I saw you on tv,” she said and held out a book. One of mine. “I got it on Amazon,” she explained. “I wanted your autograph.” My autograph?!? I barely kept from looking around to see if she was talking to someone more famous behind me. I saw this happen before. Not to me, of course. A lifetime ago, when I worked in LA, I hung out with Mark Wahlberg’s crew for a bit, which meant lunch with the artist formerly known as Markie Mark a couple of times. Women would ask for his autograph all the time. That made sense. He was famous. Not as much as he is now, but back then, he had a couple of movies under his belt and a hit or two. Plus they saw his Calvin’s. I didn’t even have Calvin’s.  ...

CHAPTER TWO The smell of bacon was stronger inside the door and his stomach answered the crackle and sizzle with a roar of it’s own. Gretchen took his cup from his hand as he stepped into the kitchen and steered him toward the bistro table in the breakfast nook. She waited until he was seated and topped off his cup. Jake couldn’t help but put ups his guard. People weren’t nice to him unless they wanted something, and Gretchen being nice was twice as bad. She hadn’t been that nice to begin with. Sure, she was nice to look at, an amazing treat for the eyes from her crafted fashionable hair to the tips of her pedicured toes. Grey green eyes that sparkled in laughter or burned with anger, depending on her mood, and topped off with an attitude and intelligence that came off as half sass and all brass. “Thank you,” he sighed as he took the cup from her and cradled it in her hands. She patted him on the back of the head and let her fingers drift down to the...

If you can’t trust the news, who can you trust? No one. Not even yourself. The news lies to you. Every single day. Weathermen forecast. Which means they tell you what they think is going to happen, not what is going to happen. They model. They predict. They make it up. Sometimes they’re right.  So we believe them. Until they’re not, then we joke about them. Newscasters are the same way. Take the recent college admissions scandal. This is not news. It’s something that only affects less than 10,000 kids in North America.  Probably a lot less than that. The news is using Felicity Huffman and Lori Louglin as the faces of this scandal. Two moms who happen to be well known actresses who paid a fee to get their kids into a good college. The news is not showing you the sixty other “normal” people who did the same thing. Because the news has one agenda. To get you to watch.  The more you watch, the more money they m...

SHADOWBOXER - THE FALL The Fall He sat on the edge of the creaky wooden porch, rocking back and forth in the scratched rockers that old lady Walden kept out there for her guests.   He wanted a cigarette, could almost taste it, but he gave up that habit ten years ago.   He wasn't about to start again. "They're late," he said to no one in particular. He was alone out here, except for the crickets, and lightening bugs winking in the thick, humid air.   He had been on the porch for over an hour, forty-five minutes longer than he was scheduled to wait.   He didn't mind. When he was a young man, what felt like a thousand years ago, he had crouched in a hollowed out tree stump barely three feet tall, and half that deep for nine hours.   He was on a mission to shoot a North Vietnamese Army General that intelligence said would pass by with a convoy.   He did, Bog sniped him, and had to be folded out of the stump by a Green Beret patrol.   They c...