There are just some authors you wait on with bated breath. Not because they write a book you can wrestle with, or one of profound, deep, truth, but because it’s the perfect book fora lazy Sunday.

So, grab your hot chocolate, stoke up the fire (OK, I live in the mountains of Colorado, where it’s getting cold. If you live somewhere warmer, stoke up the AC), kick up your feet and turn the page.

Bonnie Manning Anderson has written her latest book, Down and Out and Ready for a Miracle, joining the ranks of Fannie Flagg and Erma Bombeck as a humorist with a bit of bite.

The truths revealed in this great book are not deep, or profound, they’re personal and if you’re slow, you’ll miss them, because their truths (funny, thank goodness) are about growing old, about hopelessness, and feeling like you can’t do anything right.

Jacko, homeless, hapless, and helpless, feels awfully familiar. So does Oscar. You’ll discover that Bonnie writes about her family, pushing them past the point of absurdity, yet her family feels a lot like mine…

Maybe those truths are a bit more profound that I thought.

It’s available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats. Check it out!

Announcing the launch of another Prevail Press book, that also happens to be mine. 🙂

The final installment of the Hammer Springs series finds Sam dealing with tragedy, confusion, friendship, and love as he comes to grips with his own entry to the Partial People Society.

Let me tell you a story that happened last weekend. A reader of my first book in the series said, “You should market these to adults and especially seniors. I just love it; it took me back to my childhood.”

Pick yours up today!

You may be thinking, “that doesn’t look like the other covers in the series at all!” You’d be right. However, in upgrading my C: drive, I somehow managed to delete more than 800gb on my E: drive, where everything, including photos and book covers, were stored. Whoops! But I like this one better, to be honest, with the partial eclipse of the sun being a subtle pointer to the title.

It’s a bit longer than the other books—I had a choice, spit it into two books with added story, or let it be long. You see my decision. A tad more expensive in the paperback version, same price in the Kindle version.

Sometimes, series just happen. You’re toodling along, writing your novel and realize you’ve got more than 100,000 words. Unless you’re a bestselling author, that’s too long for a book. Now you’ve got a decision to make. Slash your word count or start a series?

I suspect outliners don’t have that problem, but we explorers do (my term for pantsers).

Series are good! Unless you’re that guy that points out the problems with series. The first book doesn’t have to be good, it has to be great for readers to want to pick up the second book and that has to be even greater for the third book to be picked up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, needs must, and all that.

The trick is having enough stories to break it into a series.

My series, Hammer Springs, started as a single book (which became the third book in the four books series, which may now become a five book series.)

The first book was about a tragic love story. The second about racism in a small town, the third about two bored kids who build a hurricane car and use it, the fourth book was a love story, but now it’s too long, so maybe the fourth book is about a mayoral election and grieving, pushing the love story to the fifth book.

Some may say I’m an undisciplined writer, to which I say I’m undisciplined in just about everything… why should this be different? More generous people say I just have too much story in my head. That would be nice, it would explain why I have too little memory retention these days. Any excuse would be nice.

Here’s the thing about a series. You end up loving your characters, more so than in a single novel, because you’re developing them (or they’re developing themselves) for a greater span of their lives. They become real to you.

Funny story. Hammer Springs is a fictional place. I know this. However, when I was trying to figure out where to put GCU and The Colony, after searching about the Gulf coast, I needed to reorient myself to the town, so I map quested Hammer Springs. Oh yeah, it isn’t real.

Another funny story. Hammer Springs was supposed to be Brooksville, FL, which has an ugly racial background. I intended to get over and visit Brooksville, take reference photos and get to know the place. COVID hit, traveling was down, and we moved to the middle of the country. Never got to see Brooksville, so made up Hammer Springs. I highly recommend inventing towns if there are going to be negative casts to your story.

Third funny story. I did research on small town racism in the 40s and 50s. You’d think it would be a homogenous thing, but it wasn’t at all. Some small towns were deadly to Black people, others just segregated, and a few mostly skipped racism altogether. That meant Hammer Springs didn’t have to be a horrible place. Very little physical abuse, mostly segregation and a stick-to-your-place-we’ll-stick-to-ours kinda thing. Doesn’t mean violence doesn’t happen, nor that mental and emotional abuse doesn’t happen, or that racism in any form is intolerable, but I didn’t have to get uglier than I wanted to.

I figure my few dedicated readers will pick them all up. That’s enough. If I did this for money, I’d have died from malnutrition decades ago.

So, what’s too long and what’s too short for a novel? For adult readers, 60 to 80 thousand words are the goal. You can undercut that quite a bit and make it a 20 to 40 thousand word novella. The Stephen King’s of the word can get away with triple digit books, but printing costs get high over 80k, so keep ’em around there. If you go longer, slash or series, your choice.

Living atop a volcano has its advantages; I highly recommend living in a caldera. Ideally of an extinct volcano.

For reference, see the picture below.

Schematic of an idealized active volcano. They’re never this neat.

Loooongggg ago, Colorado was dotted with active volcanos. Now there’s only one, down south, with a bunch of extinct volcanos everywhere else, one of which is where Swan’s Peak is situated. In the graphic, you see some bumps on the top of the volcano. We live on one of those bumps, though it’s 20 acres of bump.

I’m not sure about all calderas, but ours has its own weather system. We can see the ridge of the caldera all around us (it’s very big). The town of Guffey is on the outside slope of the caldera. It can snow there and not here. It will snow all around us and not necessarily here.

Today, a low hanging cloud (fog to less snobby people) was piled up at the ridge. It gives us the feeling of living in a snow globe, because it’s all along the outside of the volcano bones, but hasn’t ventured inside.

This is both good and bad. The weather apps use the overall area of Guffey (our town is four paved streets, but we have four zip codes. Guffey is huge, though the residence density averages one home per square mile), so it’s not very accurate for us volcanoers.

The other nice thing is all those bumps. We live atop one, with no name until I dubbed it Swan’s Peak. Several people have their own bumps, and some of those bumps are perilous. The back side of Pike’s Trail (our… um… unDevelopment) is populated by wealthy people who must be able to afford helicopters, because I’ve been back there and my truck won’t make it through to some of these homes. Still, many of us have our own little mountains, which is kind of cool.

And, I admit, the following benefit is a strange one. The idea of an “extinct” volcano is a misnomer. It won’t blow on its own. We’re safe from lava plumes…BUT… the volcano is connected to all the other volcanoes way down deep.

You’ve heard of the Yellowstone Super Volcano, surely? Geologists like to scare people about it. I even predicted it in my Me and the Maniac series, where the center of the continent falls away. This is the possible event where the lynchpin of all volcanoes blows its stack, melting all of Yellowstone and kick-starting all the extinct volcanoes in its chain.

Like my volcano.

Within a day of Yellowstone throwing a temper tantrum, my beautiful log home (and not so beautiful second home, and outright ugly cabin), will drop into the magma flow no longer deeply beneath us, and then shoot out of it in a blazing bomb, to be charred remains all over greater Guffey, which would soon follow into oblivion.

But it will be quick.

Funny thing, I watched Skyfire last night, a Chinese/American film (meaning the lone white guy spoke English, and everyone else was dubbed). The dumb white guy built an amusement park in the shadow of a volcano that wasn’t suppose to blow for 130 years, but did the next day. Of course. Not a great film or even a very good one. Needed character development, and some visitors we cared about so when they were smoked we’d feel bad. But have lived near Mt. St. Helens, I knew that they would have all been dead from lethal gas immissions–that would rival those inspired by Taco Bell–before the lava and bombs would get them. But that would have been a short movie.

Still, I’m confident I won’t die in a caldera drop, but something much more and far less dramatic in about 25 years or so.

But a guy can dream…