time travel | Jennette Marie Powell

by Jennette, October 6, 2011

Okay, not a real award, like the Rita, or even the Wrters Digest 100 most useful blogs, but what the heck, it’s fun. You can play too, as long as you play by the rules (at least somewhat):

1. Thank and link to the person who nominates you.

Thanks to my writer friend, Stacy McKitrick! Stacy keeps a fun blog called Stacy’s Rantings and Whatnot, where she ~~rants~~ writes about TV, writing, sports, travel and whatever else strikes her fancy. Check her out!

2. Share seven random facts about you.

Hmm, this one was kinda tricky. I mean, I’m not that interesting. That’s why I make stuff up! So anyway…

Some stuff I like - and some I don't
I hate, I mean loathe, green peppers and celery. I can deal with the latter if it’s cooked, as that takes out the stringy texture and mostly kills the taste, or I pick them out if they’re not tiny, but peppers tend to leech into the surrounding food upon cooking, which pretty much ruins whatever it is for me.
I bought a car. ~~Turned out to be an alien robot, who knew?~~ I ordered it a month before it even went into production. It came with new friends, who knew?
I can curl my tongue, and make the Vulcan “live long and prosper” gesture. It always surprises me that there are people who can’t do this, including my husband and daughter!
Despite my artistic background, I never was able to get into scrapbooking, quilting, knitting, crocheting, or anything like that. I do like sewing clothing, though – I wish I had more time to do it. I’ve made numerous sweatshirts, dresses, hats, slacks, bridesmaid dresses, and even a wedding dress for one of my college roommates. The dress outlasted the marriage, but she’s been happily married to husband #2 for over 10 years now.
I am a Dale Carnegie graduate, which came in really helpful when…
I met my husband at a bar. If not for DCC, I wouldn’t have kept talking when the mutual friend who introduced us be-bopped off to talk to someone else and left me at a table with him. I started dating him after I paid him $400 to fix my car. I figure I’ve gotten my money’s worth – quite a few times over, as we’ve now been married 17 years!
My Earliest Memory
The earliest thing I can remember is going to get my dad’s new car – a ’69 Camaro – when I was 2-1/2. I mostly remember the weird look on my mom’s face when we went to the dealership, which I later found out was because she’d had no idea my dad bought a car! It’s still in the family, too – my brother spent two years restoring it, and it’s beautiful!

3. Pass this Award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it!

Well, I’m only going to list a few, as most blogs I follow are mostly about writing. Some of these aren’t so new to me, either. If you’ve already received this award (or don’t do memes like this), you can repeat it, or ignore, no problem. Everyone else – these are some fun blogs I follow that aren’t all about writing, so check them out!

The Evil Jim Winter – Edged in Blue

Athena Grayson

Michele Stegman – Thoughts from a Writer’s Block

Catie Rhodes – Full Tilt Backwoods Boogie

Julie Glover

My Town Monday – a group of writers who collect links from the comments – fun facts about places all over! Anyone can participate, so if you’re looking for blog topics, MTM is a good way to get them – and share!

Woman carrying a basket of bread and vegetables photo via Microsoft Office Clipart

by Jennette, October 5, 2011

I usually don’t get a lot of writing done on Mondays or Tuesdays, because Monday is paperwork night, and both nights are big TV nights for DH. Yet, I managed to knock out my first goal of the week: I finally noted the remaining places in my manuscript where plot holes need to be plugged – yay! There were quite a few, so that’s one revision step that took longer than the week I’d originally planned for it.

That leaves timing and sequencing for the rest of the week for me. If anyone else here has done Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel workshop, this is Lesson 14 and 15. This is my third book using this system, so I’ve managed to compress it a bit. Anyone else using HTRYN?

Good luck to my #ROW80 peeps!

by Jennette, October 3, 2011

I am taking part in a new writing challenge – well, new to me at least. It’s called Round of Words in 80 Days, and the idea is to set a measurable goal not only for the challenge as a whole, but each week. We report our progress each Sunday and Wednesday, so I’ll be doing that here. If nothing else, it will keep me accountable on my revisions for Time’s Fugitive.

So here goes:

My goals for the 80 days are:

Finish revisions on Time’s Fugitive by November 7, with the ultimate objective of a release by Christmas (although that depends on my beta readers and editors too). I have specific steps to achieve this, so it’s not just a big eat-the-elephant goal.
While Time’s Fugitive is with the beta readers and editor, my goal is to either outline the second half of the book I started for NaNoWriMo 2009 and never finished, or to outline a new Saturn Society novella – I’ll figure out which when the time comes.

This week’s goals are:

Mark where changes are needed in Time’s Fugitive to fix plot holes
Review scene sequence and timing issues, note fixes where needed. This sounds simple, but it’s time travel – with multiple characters traveling in multiple times – so it’s not. Especially since I want it to make sense to readers. 🙂 After all, that’s all of us writers’ ultimate goal, right?

by Jennette, October 3, 2011

Continuing last week’s homage to our area’s German heritage, let’s take a look at one of the biggest food festivals in southwest Ohio: the Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville. And yes, it’s huge: according to the Sauerkraut Festival website, the event drew around 350,000 visitors last year, who ate seven tons of sauerkraut!

Last year's Sauerkraut Festival

Situated in the very northeast corner of Warren County, about 15 miles or so southeast of Dayton, Waynesville is known for its small town charm, and is considered the “Antiques Capital of the Midwest(sm).” The festival started in 1970 as a feature dinner for a sidewalk sale, which quickly became the main event. Subsequent years brought more and more vendors as well as a steadily-growing attendance, and included unusual items like sauerkraut pizza, sauerkraut donuts, and even sauerkraut ice cream! I can’t help wondering if the ham and sauerkraut pizza is as good as Marion’s. For those who don’t like sauerkraut, there are plenty of other offerings, including perennial festival favorites like funnel cakes, deep fried candy bars, pulled pork, burgers and hot dogs.

image of sauerkraut balls One of my favorite foods, which we typically only have during the holidays, is sauerkraut balls. My grandparents went to the Sauerkraut Festival once in the mid-seventies, just to get the annual festival cookbook. With no Internet and limited bookstore offerings, it was the only place she knew she could get the recipe for sauerkraut balls. Even though I was a kid at the time, and like most kids, didn’t like kraut, those kraut balls were awesome! Grandma’s no longer with us, so if we get them now, it’s up to me. They are a lot of work, but some years I still make them, they’re so good. One of my coworkers makes the festival a must-go every year – his wife goes to shop for crafts, he goes to eat. The kraut balls are one of his favorites. He was disappointed in last year’s; said they must’ve used a different recipe. If this years’ kraut balls aren’t the good ones, I might have to make some to take in to work and share.

The Sauerkraut Festival is held every year on the second weekend in October, which would be the 8th and 9th this year – next week! I will admit I’ve only been to the Sauerkraut Festival a couple of times, and a long time ago at that. I do sometimes pass through on the way to and from another event that’s always held on the second Sunday of October, which we’ll visit next week: the Motorcycle Hill Climbs in nearby Oregonia.

What are some of the fun food festivals in your area? Are there any foods you specifically look for there – and maybe learned to make because of it?

More at the My Town Monday blog

Festival photo via official Sauerkraut Festival website, sauerkraut balls via allrecipes.com

by Jennette, September 29, 2011

As I dig deeper into revisions for Time’s Fugitive, it seems lately that I never get done what I’d planned. Seeing as the release is set for December (thankfully, I haven’t committed to when in December), this is a problem. I really need to be done with these revisions by the first of November at the latest, in order to give my beta readers and editor adequate time to do their thing. So it’s time to reevaluate the schedule again.

If nothing else, it should be clear that the routines (or schedules) we set up for ourselves need to be flexible, and we need to reevaluate periodically to make sure they’re still working for us (and not the other way around). So what was going on with mine?

My Cozi to-do list: It's frightening

I was spending no more than an hour each night dealing with email, checking friends’ blogs, and checking in on my social media presences. I was doing my workout, eating dinner with my family, and spending time with my pets. I was getting my paperwork and chore stuff done. Best of all, I was getting my writing. But not necessarily done. And by the time I got done with that and was ready to do a little business stuff – finding review blogs, designing business cards, stuff like that – it was time to get ready for bed.

Of course, it would be really easy to cut back on sleep. I’m a night person, and it’s almost always a challenge to get to bed on time because, hey, I was a zombie for half the day, but by evening, I’m good to go! That might not matter if I didn’t have a kid to take to school, and a job to go to. But I do, so I need to get up no later than 7 AM. Which is even harder than going to bed on time, even when I do. But going on less sleep has more ramifications than simply a lack of energy the following day. Sleep is our bodies restore themselves, both mentally and physically. Too little of it can make your ability to focus on a task take a real hit. That, too, might not be a problem if you do a mindless job, but I am a computer programmer. My day job deserves better, as does my writing! There are other health disadvantages in inadequate sleep, including more difficulty losing weight. I need all the help I can get there!

So cutting out sleep is not the answer. Better to figure out where the schedule went wrong – and what to do about it. Once I gave it a little thought, it was obvious where my failure was: my writing tasks for the day were taking more than the allotted hour – more like an hour and a half, or even two hours.

The lesson here is that we need to figure out how long does a task really take, and choose a realistic time frame for completion. Maybe you were able to crank out a 50,000-word novel in one month for NaNoWriMo last year, but is working at that rate sustainable long-term? For many of us with day jobs, family and other responsibilities, NaNoWriMo involves putting other tasks to the side for that month, or cramming lots of writing into the weekend. I did NaNoWriMo in 2009 and won, and that’s how I did it. Instead of trying for the 1,667 words/day, every day, I instead shot for 1,000 words on four weekdays out of five, and 3,000 on Saturday and Sunday.

And therein is my other tip for today: Allow yourself some time off. By divvying up our tasks in such a way that allow for an evening/day off, we reduce the pressure on ourselves, and in doing so, increase our chances for success. Miss a day? No worries! It’s built in. No need to stress about having to do x much more tomorrow.

And going back to the issue of tasks that take longer than we expect, the answer there is easy, too: we need to realistically estimate how much time a given task will really take, and allot for it.

The problem is, sometimes it’s hard to know how much time something will actually take, especially when it’s something that’s not always the same, like writing – or computer programming! Yes, I deal with this in my day job on a regular basis, and that’s where I learned the secret of scheduling: However much time you realistically think something will take, double it. And if there are a lot of variables or unknowns, double it again. I can’t tell you how many times these have saved face for me at work, where in programming, Murphy’s Law rules. With this kind of scheduling (and a great project manager who will fight for it with the client), I almost never fail to deliver what my clients expect, when they expect it. The times I have run up against this, have always been cases where the client refused to give us the amount of time we asked for. Conversely, clients are never upset when we deliver a project ahead of time, or are able to include wish-list features now that they were hoping to add later.

Do you find yourself not having enough hours in the day to do all you’d planned? If so, can you figure out why? Is it because things took longer than you thought, you didn’t allow yourself any extra time, or something else? Got any tips to share? If so, please do!

by Jennette, September 26, 2011

Dayton Oktoberfest This past weekend was Oktoberfest in Dayton. Like Cincinnati, Dayton has a large population of people with German ancestry and an even larger population of people who like to drink beer. 🙂 My friend Jim Winter blogged about Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest last week. Ours isn’t as big, but it’s still a significant event, worthy of the name.

I will admit I have never attended. My husband went last night with some friends, and I was invited, but declined as I have nowhere near the drinking stamina any of them have – especially for a binge of five hours!

Wall to wall people, here for the beer!

Our event is held on the grounds of the Dayton Art Institute. Like the original in Munich, beer is served in tents, but here in Dayton, they really are tents, whereas the ones in Munich are actually huge, multi-story buildings. (My husband and several of our friends went there a couple years ago.) A stein of beer (approx. 1 liter) cost $9.00, and the servers weren’t allowed to take tips. My husband got around this by telling the girl to turn around, then stuffing a couple bucks down her top. Then one of our (very drunk) friends tried doing the same thing, and ended up breaking her necklace! My husband sent him a text the following morning: “Wanna buy a necklace?” (Me: facepalm!)

There is also plenty of food. Even Schmidt’s Sausage Haus from Columbus attended. My husband enjoyed the Bahama Mama sausages, but paid for it later. 🙂 Luckily, the group went in on a limo – not a bad deal when split between ten people, especially when there were probably several DUI checkpoints in the area. As for me, not only can I not handle much alcohol, at 5’0″, my time in crowds is mostly spent looking into people’s chests and backs, which is not much fun. So, staying at home to write was probably best for me. But my husband and our friends had a good time – seven of them passed out in the limo on the way home!

Does your hometown have an Oktoberfest, and if so, did you go? Got any funny stories to share?

More My Town Monday at the My Town Monday blog

Thanks to my bigsexyhoney for the photos – you’re the best!

by Jennette, September 22, 2011

It seems ebooks are getting all the press (virtual and otherwise!) lately. Ebooks and e-readers are all the rage – instant gratification! Large type, if you want! More choices! Tons of cheap and even free books! No restrictions on length, whether you’re reading a four-page flash fiction piece, or a tome to rival War and Peace. No e-reader? Read ’em on your phone or even your computer! What’s not to like?

Yet despite all the advantages ebooks offer, plenty of people still prefer to read a good old fashioned paper book. The smell and feel of the paper! Pretty book covers that look cool on your bookshelf or coffee table! Read ’em in the bathtub – and if you drop it, no expensive electronics to replace! Heck, no expensive electronics to buy in the first place! Browse in the bookstore or the library! Used books! No worries about dead batteries! Despite all the gloom-and-doom reports of ever-decreasing sales, paper books are still with us, and aren’t going away any time soon IMO.

Quite a few independent publishers are forgoing print altogether and publishing only in e. After all, print typically involves a setup fee, and print also requires some knowledge of print graphic arts, which is a whole different animal than on-screen graphics. It’s definitely a lot more work to produce a print book, even though the setup fees have gone way down in recent years, and there’s no longer a need to warehouse and ship – Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, and the like are still happy to fulfill that role for a piece of the action.

Time's Enemy in print - available soon!

Out of all the people I’ve talked to who’ve expressed interest in reading Time’s Enemy, about half of them next ask, “Is it available in print?” So as someone with graphic arts experience, I really have no reason not to offer this, and to that end, I uploaded my book to a printer last Saturday. My proof arrived on Wednesday, I approved it on Thursday, and it should be available on the e-retailers in the next week or so. When that time comes, I’ll announce it here!

So where do print books come from? If you’re an independent publisher, they most likely come from one of two printers: CreateSpace (which is owned by Amazon), or Lightning Source (which is owned by Ingram, the largest print book distributor in the U.S.). CreateSpace (henceforth referred to as CS) is definitely the easier of the two as far as setting up the files for printing, and they have a lower setup fee as well. But Lightning Source (LSI) has some major advantages in other areas, and after some major deliberation, I went with LSI.

Most of these differences won’t be apparent to the reader. One of them is how authors are paid – basically, CS requires a larger portion of the book’s price go to the retailer, meaning the author and publisher make less money, while the reader’s cost doesn’t go down (usually – sometimes the retailers will discount). Books produced by LSI are automatically included in Ingram’s catalog, which may make it easier for them to be ordered by bookstores and libraries.

The most apparent difference – at least with my book – is that LSI offers a matte cover, whereas other print-on-demand providers offer only glossy covers. Until LSI offered it earlier this year, only big publishers’ books had matte covers. A lot of readers probably don’t care, but it gives a book a “richer,” higher quality look and feel IMO.

So what about you – do you notice things like glossy or matte covers? Does the “feel” of a book matter to you? Print-on-demand books are typically printed on heavier paper, which obviously makes the book heavier, but also adds to that “richer” feel. Is this something you notice or care about? Inquiring independent authors and publishers want to know!

by Jennette, September 19, 2011

A couple weeks ago, the Dayton Daily News ran an article about the possibility of research, development, and the manufacture of UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – coming to Dayton:

Dayton, home to sensors research, engineering and propulsion expertise and production of small-sized UAVs, wants to become a go-to center for unmanned aircraft technology development and pilot training, creating an environment for new jobs.

Kettering Bugs ready for takeoff

The primary hurdle is FAA regulations that currently block off airspace used by passenger aircraft from being used by UAVs, even though the latter fly at different altitudes. Industry and government people are currently applying for an exception. Hopefully this will happen – not only does the Dayton area desperately need the jobs this effort will bring, but it’s also fitting, for the Dayton area has a long history with UAVs: one of the first (if not the first) was developed here.

Called the Flying Bomb, the Aerial Torpedo, or simply the Kettering Bug, this unmanned aircraft was developed in 1918 by Charles Kettering and Orville Wright. Around fifty were eventually manufactured by the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, which was contracted by the Army Signal Corps. The craft were launched pointing in the direction of the target, which would have been approx. 50 miles away. An elaborate system of internal pneumatic and electrical controls were designed to cut to the engine after a pre-determined number of propeller revolutions, and the Bug would fall apart, dropping its payload of 180 lbs. of explosives on impact. After many failed tests, a successful run took the Bug to a planned drop (without payload, one would assume!) in nearby Xenia.

This replica of the Kettering Bug is on display at the National Museum of the US Air Force

The Bug was never put into actual use, as armistice was declared before it saw combat, and development halted in the mid-1920’s as the U.S. moved back into peacetime and funding was cut. However, the Kettering Bug was an important development, as the precursor to modern cruise missiles.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force hosts a replica that was built in the early 60s, as part of their Early Years Gallery.

Is your hometown home to technological developments most people don’t know about? Please share!

by Jennette, September 15, 2011

Time's Fugitive book cover I design my own book covers (sometimes my graphic design background comes in handy), and was pleased to finish this one last week. Time’s Fugitive is the sequel to Time’s Enemy, and is slated for release as an e-book in December. Depending on how print book sales go for Time’s Enemy, Time’s Fugitive will also be released in print, about a month after the digital release.

Covers matter a lot to me, never mind the old saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” People do. I know I do. Authors published by big publishing houses usually have little to no input in cover art. There are a lot of bad covers. By “bad,” I mean poorly executed, unreadable, or just plain ugly. They happen to independently-published books and to those from small publishers, but they happen to big-time published books, too – the three-armed woman on Christina Dodd’s Castles in the Air is probably the most classic example. Then there were the notorious, ugly “nekkid Poser people” that seemed to appear on every other erotic ebook for a while. I’m glad that trend went away! Designing my own covers means I don’t have to worry about any of that. If a cover misses the mark, I can easily upload a new one, with the only cost being my time and any stock photos I have to license.

I totally grabbed this book because of the cover!

Even if you’re paying someone, there are some great cover artists who provide wonderful covers for very reasonable fees – I’ve seen as little as $100. I’m not looking for cover art work right now, but if you’re an independent author and you’re looking for cover art, I recommend my cousin and fellow author, Sheri McGathy. Sheri also does copy editing (including mine).

The Writers’ Guide to Epublishing did a good article about cover art a couple weeks ago, and the commenters (mostly or all authors) pretty unanimously agreed that good covers sell books, and bad covers can hinder sales. What do you think? Whether you’re an author or a reader, do you care about cover art? Has a cover ever made you pick up a book (and buy), or conversely, has a book cover ever made you not buy a book you otherwise might have?

by Jennette, September 8, 2011

First of all, thanks to Jim for joining us here, and helping to make the mundane magical! I’ve known Jim for a loooooong time – we met my freshman year in college, <cough> years ago, through a mutual friend. I served as an early sounding board for some of Jim’s early Star Trek fanfic (you knew I’d mention that, didn’t you?:)) and later, as a beta reader for his first efforts at publishing crime fiction. Jim returned the favor and gave me some good advice for Time’s Enemy, and assured me that, yes, Tony indeed thought and acted like a guy.

So let’s dig a little deeper, and take a look at what makes Jim – and his characters – tick:

Jim, you’ve been published before by a small press. Your novel, Northcoast Shakedown, was a crime fic piece that I really enjoyed, even though that’s not a genre I read a lot. Please share your publishing experience with us:

Well, when I signed, the publisher was full of energy, and everyone on the roster became everyone else’s cheerleader. There were some hiccups getting Northcoast out, but it was a fun ride. And at the time, I had some money to spend on travel, so I used that to beef up my networking and get to know authors and booksellers. That first year was fun.

The second year was not so fun, but when any business goes under, there’s no clean way to sever ties. It’s too bad, because I really thought they could do something or be a decent launchpad for a lot of the writers. I think that’s true of a lot of small presses when they overreach. I remember UglyTown did not go quietly, despite both the publishers’ and authors’ best efforts, and Point Blank just sort of faded away. But for a short time in the middle of the last decade, it was a wild ride.

There are two more books featuring Nick Kepler, the protagonist of NCS, both of which I also beta-read and really enjoyed. I remember reading Bad Religion at work during a slow period, and having to restrain myself from laughing out loud. IMO, these books deserve to see publication, and NCS deserves another chance. Now that you’ve gone indie, do you have any plans to (re)release them?

Northcoast will definitely be out later this year. Noir master Ken Bruen wrote me a very nice intro, and I found out it was sitting on a shelf he uses for quotes when he writes. So I was very touched by Ken’s intro. He’s been one of my mentors for years, and I have one project under wraps that will bear his name on the dedication page. I’m not saying which one.

The second book, aptly titled Second Hand Goods, is going to get a rewrite and a fresh edit. I’ve evolved as a writer, and since its collected cyberdust for the last five years, I can look at it a bit more objectively.

Bad Religion is just screaming for some fresh material based on my experiences since the early drafts. I’ll likely downplay Nick and Elaine somewhat to focus on some of the other characters.

Which brings me to your new release, Road Rules. This book has a history of its own, including snagging an agent’s interest. Can you share a bit of that with us?

The seeds of Road Rules have been around for some time. Tim Mason was the earliest. A mutual acquaintance of yours and mine introduced me to this weird coworker. I’d toyed with making him a lawyer in a standalone (picturing Seth Green in the part) and a thorn in Kepler’s side, a role eventually taken by the Eric Teasdale character.

A couple years later, my publisher and I kicked around the road trip idea. I wrote a short sketch about two guys in a stolen Cadillac trying to get to Miami. Tim Mason sort of attached himself to the story.

After I got orphaned, a few friends prodded me into doing NaNoWriMo in 2006. So I fleshed out the story, hit on the idea of the decadent, yet spiritual drug lord, Julian Franco as the cause of all this chaos, and boom! The story demanded to be written.

Road trip stories are always fun! I love your tagline, “The road to hell begins with a stolen car.” But what really pulled me in were the characters. Were there any particular events, places, things you saw/heard/read that inspired the overall premise of the book, its events, or any of the characters?

The route they took was once the “long way home” from Hilton Head, SC, over a few years last decade. And having visited Savannah a few times in the process left me longing to write something set in that city. I still wanted to write about Cleveland, where I-77 begins, so the setting fell together easily.

I saw a few shows on History about holy relics and one of those true crime things about the theft of one such relic. Put those together in a city with a large Slavic population and you get St. Jakob.

Mike is based on years of working in the insurance industry. Maybe too many years. And Cinnamon was part of my desire not to have a bunch of macho white guys hosing the freeway down with testosterone. Plus, instead of the angsty tarnished knight, she’s someone just trying to prove herself.

Back in May, you released your first indie title, a short story called “A Walk in the Rain” (also a good read). What made you decide to go indie?

Well, crime doesn’t really pay well. Of course, I’ve got a short story in West Coast Crime Wave coming out this month from Bstsllr.com, which I did get paid for, but the paying markets are few and far between. I decided to get paid for my short work. I also found out that 1.) It’s the cover, stupid (though content still rules), 2.) people don’t really buy a lot of short fiction on Amazon unless it’s a collection, and 3.) it might help if you actually market an ebook.

(Jennette: A Walk in the Rain is available at Amazon for $0.99.)

Now that you’ve tasted the control and flexibility that comes with indie publishing, are you still pursuing a traditional publishing contract, or perhaps another agent?

I think eventually, I’d like to go traditional, but only under certain circumstances. I’m in a position now where I don’t have to make this a career. So the terms have to be right, and I have to be able to keep control of material I’ve already published. But if the right deal can be worked out, sure, I’ll sign.

Are you planning to offer Road Rules in print?

If enough copies sell, I’ll put it on CreateSpace. If a publisher makes a sweet enough offer, I’ll seriously consider it.

Now that Road Rules is out, what’s next for Jim Winter?

Northcoast, as I said, will be coming out. And the other two Keplers will see revisions and fresh edits. Then there’s my “magnum opus,” which I’ve been reworking since the original draft checked in at 105,000 words.

Thanks again for being here, Jim! And to everyone else, Road Rules is a fantastic, fun read that you owe it to yourself to check out, even if you don’t normally read crime fiction. It’s a fast-paced caper that will keep you reading – and laughing – all the way from Ohio to Georgia, along with Mike, Stan, and Cinnamon. Road Rules is available in your choice of e-formats for a knockout price of $ .99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Jim keeps a fun, entertaining blog at http://eviljwinter.wordpress.com where he writes about books, publishing, sports, Cincinnati, technology, and whatever else strikes his fancy.

Anyone have questions for Jim? Feel free to ask, or just comment to say Hi!

Life and Love in Four Dimensions

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