The Shadow Warriors, soon to be on the Kindle

Soon, before the holidays I hope, my novel of technology and desire, The Shadow Warriors will be available for purchase on your Kindle.  I haven't set a price yet, but it will be cheap.  Information Warfare is as ripped from the headlines as it was in the nineties when I began to write the novel.  Amazon has some good reviews if you want to check them out.  Don't get it mixed up with Tom Clancy or Korea or the computer game.  Next time I'll Google the title far and wide. 

Just a heads up.  Sorry for the Blatant Self Promotion.
 

Emma Lee Davis must delve deep into the past to find a weapon to end the Infowar that threatens to de-stabilize a computer-dependent global economy.  Project manager of a  tiny firm of cyber-sleuths, Emma scrambles to make the connections between a body washing up on a beach in Singapore, and the technical derring-do at a German university.

She tracks a desperate hacker planning a unique software auction, a determined entrepreneur who will stop at nothing to acquire  ‘bleeding edge’ software and  tumbles onto a new generation of terrorists with their own agenda. 

Emma and her colleagues are sucked into a vortex of lies, spies, and betrayals and ultimately into the sleaze and paranoia of Berlin in the months before the wall comes down. Not quite glamorous, sometimes nerdy, always nosy, irreverent and intuitive, Emma becomes the reluctant sleuth. She narrates the story as she scrambles to manage a software project and her complicated love life, while puzzling over the paradox, “if our mission is to stop computer crime, why are we abetting it?”

  More holiday recipes anon, including from scratch Green Bean Casserole and Sweet Potatoes Stuff in Orange Shells.  Check out the Pumpkin Bars.  Yowza! 

Cyber Czar

All this news (you do read a newspaper, don't you?) about the Cyber-Czar has me thinking of The Shadow Warriors, the book about Information Warfare that I wrote in the late nineties, published as an e-book in 2001, and by Booksurge in 2003. Jeepers, that's six years ago.

One of the cool things that in the opening pages of the book the protag is reading a paper about the appointment of the new cyber czar.

When we actually have an "info war," perhaps a mainstream publisher will pick up The Shadow Warriors, give it a quick edit and put it out for the world to find and read. Maybe it will even be available on the Kindle.

The "Warriors" are really rather fun, a dark romp, with scenes from Singapore and Hong Kong to a university town in Germany and Boston's Fanieul Hall and Public Garden. The sweep of history, if you will. It was such fun to write and I still had a lot of passion for writing in those days.

Now I carefully craft words, almost bloodlessly, although every now and then I work up a big push of enthusiasm when a scene that interests me needs to be written. Not true, really, but I had MORE enthusiasm in the old days when I thought a mainstream publisher would snap up my novels like carp after a worm.

Didn't happen.

I've been tweaking Festival Madness. When I wrote about Burning Man, the passion came back, because I could return to the Man, actually be there in my writing. I've been tweaking the beginning. Still not quite there. The queries weren't eliciting requests for the full manuscript or even partials. Zero interest. Sometimes I want to set my hair on fire.

Once more into the breach. Thank god the stuffed escarole is history and tonight we had black bean soup with chorizo and chicken and it was tastsy. I'm making composed salads from the garden and the supermarket and using my plane grater and they are good, good good.

Reading Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. She's such a fine writer. Her writing never calls attention to itself, but keeps you on the page.

I loaded three more books and my friends manuscript onto my Kindle. Wheee!

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Grave Yard Stew

I'm always intrigued by our American English language and its colorful idioms. When I was a child, and my mother was sick, she would always prepare something my dad referred to as "graveyard stew." It was a piece of toast with a pat of butter, over which she poured hot milk, and she ate that. I always found it disgusting, as I found most food as a child. The only thing worse was when a poached egg was laid atop the toast.

I found the term Graveyard Stew in a listing of hobo slang, and wondered if my dad had ever consorted with hoboes. This is not as weird as it sounds. During the Great Depression, many men, including two of my uncles rode the rails. "On the bum," my uncle called it. He became a successful businessman and made a lot of money, so the years or months of riding the rails didn't shame him, for he often mentioned it. Apparently graveyard stew was frequently eaten by the toothless.

When was the last time you saw someone with no teeth? My grandpa could eat apples and corn on the cob without any teeth, but at my grandmother's insistence, he always put them the false teeth in his pocket when he went to Minnesota (from Kansas) to fish. Aren't old family stories fun?

We should all take pride in the fortitude, rectitude and endurance of our ancestors. People like that will not come this way again, alas.

I would have had an agent except that she was already repping someone who had a cybersleuth series. Can you believe it? Onward, onward. The first chapter of Festival Madness is with an editor to help with the first paragraph. I want to get it out to all the California agencies before thoughts of the man go away. By the way, the Man Burns, i.e. Burning Man on September 1st and the temple will burn a day later. Alas, again, would that I were there. Maybe next year. Burning Man is one of the festivals, the main one. Now, again, onward.

If you are a new reader of this blog, go to www.burningman.com. You'll have the time of your life, and that's just the website!

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