I don’t often read women authors. Except when I do and according to my Goodreads’ history, my last five books have been authored by women. Some of my preferred genres lend themselves to men and perhaps my current trend is coincidence. I suspect I read Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to satisfy my confirmation bias after having weaved Putin’s oil oligarchy into my last novel, Full Spectrum Cyberwar. Her story did in fact support my fictional account. I was surprised when she dedicated part of a chapter to the president of Shell, for whom I served as an usher in his wedding.

I read Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider as part of a writing assignment for my writers critique club. It’s a collection of classic stories from 1939. We take turns in my small group of five male writers to assign exercises to each other on a monthly basis. Sometimes, the exercise requires research, which for me is what makes it fun. Research has always been necessary for my novels and I enjoy that. It’s also essential in my day job as a product manager, and one of the roles I most enjoy.

Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game reminded me somewhat of Where The Crawdads Sing. I think because of the setting; even though it was in the U.K. rather than America, as it was on the coast. There are other similarities in the mystery format. The main characters were all women and it caused me to consider if, on average, women are better at creating female antagonists and men are better at creating male characters. Seems safe to agree to that, but of course some writers are so good they aren’t challenged by gender.

Lucy Foly’s The Guest List is the very first audio book I’ve listened to. Karen and I listened on our long drive to Ouray. It was a great whodunnit for a drive. Each character was voiced by a different actor. That might have been jarring as a read as I suspect Lucy changed the point of view per scene in the text as well as the audio.

Jen Louden is a friend and I’d been wanting to read one of her best-selling books, but I’ve never been interested in the motivational self-help genre. Her latest book Why Bother? was perfect because it’s as much memoir as self-help. I thought once she steamed up the narrative with real-life stories in section two, the book became fascinating. It reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing, which was as much memoir as instructional. I find the sharing of personal vignettes a successful approach to storytelling. It helps to have lived an interesting life but I don’t think one necessarily has to be Hemingway.

After writing this, it has occurred to me my interest in reading women authors stemmed from making the antagonist in my current novel a woman. Call it research. My first novel was strongly male dominated. My wife gave me grief, and that’s putting it mildly, over the sexist undertones in my story. I was trying to convey a sense of men who travel extensively for their careers. She wasn’t a fan. I corrected that somewhat with my second novel by having the wife of the antagonist tag along during his adventures. I’m comfortable writing from a woman’s point of view. Doesn’t mean I’m good at it. If I pull it off, I credit having grown up with five sisters.

I’m using the three-day weekend to submit my taxes.  I expect to get a return and will need it to buy Ellie Rose a laptop before she heads off to college.  I think back in the day, parents used to buy their kids a car for graduating high school.  Now we buy them a three thousand dollar MacBook Pro.  I really hope I get a nice return this year.

I find joy in doing my taxes when I sum up all my book royalties from Amazon.com.   I’ve made royalties almost every month of the year.  The coolest part is seeing book sales from other countries.  Mostly the UK, but also Germany, Australia, Japan, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and 26.77 rupees from India.  That’s 39¢ I wouldn’t have if I weren’t an international author.

Other writers might find this interesting.  I published a second book in 2019, but almost all my sales were from my first book.  I suspect this is because I handed out a hundred copies of my book at a tech conference in Austin and those techies followed up by purchasing my first book.  That’s exactly what they tell you will happen, and it did.  This is why you will make more money the more books you publish; readers who like your latest book will buy from your entire collection.  There’s a multiplier effect.

Knowing that, I really should work towards completing my third novel.  I’m twenty-five thousand words into it, but paused it to rewrite a second edition of my first book instead.  I believe I had multiple reasons for changing directions.  One was that, with the surge in sales of the first book, I wanted it to be better.  I didn’t have a copy editor for it, not that there were many typos, but I’m a better writer now and wanted to make some improvements.

The major edit, the reason I believe the rewrite qualifies as a second edition, is I changed it from present tense to past tense.  Most novels are written in past tense.  Present tense is rare enough that it can be a bit jarring sometimes to read it.  The book I’m currently reading, The Lying Game by Ruth Ware, is in present tense.  She does an okay job of it but it’s been my experience that past tense allows for more latitude in sentence structure.  It’s easier to write past tense.

That exercise took me a couple of months.  I spent the previous two weekends publishing it on Amazon.  I find formatting text and designing a book cover extremely tedious and I don’t enjoy it, but I’m too cheap to outsource it.  There are always problems.  It took me a week to fix my cover and another to get the formatting to show paragraph indents correctly on the InsideLook feature.

It’s good to go now though, so go out and download a copy.  As part of this second edition, the hardcover is no longer available.  Amazon might try to sell you one anyway.  They like to play this trick where they say it’s out-of-stock.  Trust me, it’s out-of-print.  If you already own a first edition hardcover, consider it a collector’s item.