Blog-Mountain Musings - P.J. MacLayne

The Samurai’s Inro Cover Reveal

By P.J. MacLayne May 16, 2020 May 16, 2020 Uncategorized

Here it is! The Cover for “The Samurai’s Inro,” the fifth book in the Harmony Duprie Mysteries. Coming June 1, 2020

Trouble has a long memory and is stalking Harmony Duprie.

Harmony Duprie has it made. Or so she thinks.

New job.

New routine.

A quiet life in the quiet little town of Oak Grove.

Oh, and Eli.

But trouble has a long memory and it’s playing a deadly game.

Friends’ cars stolen.

Her apartment ransacked.

The duplicate of a stolen Japanese antique carved box left behind.

Trouble follows wherever she goes, including the parking lot of the police station. Not even the want-to-be bodyguard brought in by Police Chief Sorenson can end the harassment. All her research leads to dead ends.

Can Harmony identify the face of trouble before she loses and the winner takes her life as the final prize?

Let the games begin.

Thanks to K.M Guth for another great cover design.

Scroll down for a bonus.

Watch this space for buy links, coming soon.

Bonus! Just for you, a quick excerpt.

“Not unless Marly comes with me. You coming, Marly?” Kody asked. His angry eyes locked on mine.

“No. I’ve told you no before and I’m telling you again. No.”

I read his intentions and was prepared when he reached for her shoulder. With a quick thrust, I knocked his hand away. “She said no.”

If he had known what was good for him, he would have backed down. He wasn’t that smart. He swung at me. In a classic move, I grabbed his arm and used his own power to toss him to the floor. “Not cool,” I said.

He should’ve stayed down but wasn’t that smart. He wobbled as he half-rose and lunged at me. I moved aside and kicked him in the rear as he sailed by. The alcohol didn’t do him any favors.

“Enough is enough. Give it up. Go home.” I wondered how everyone else was reacting and if I’d need to defend myself from any of his friends, but didn’t dare take my eyes off him. I backed up until I bumped into the bar.

It took him longer to get up the second time. For a minute, I thought he’d finally gotten smart and was giving up. I was wrong.

How Soon is Too Soon? #OpenBook Blog Hop

By P.J. MacLayne May 10, 2020 May 10, 2020 Open Book

May 11, 2020

How soon is too soon to include a real-life event in a fictional story?

Let’s start with the most current event. You know the one I mean. I subscribe to a lot of book newsletters, and I cringed the first time I saw an ad for a self-help book with a quarantine related title. I think it was two or three weeks after most people in the US were asked to shelter at home. My first thought was – how does anyone pull together a meaningful book in that amount of time? And my second thought was – nothing like taking advantage of people in a time of crisis. Yes, I thought that was far too soon.

In the past week, I’ve started to see fiction books with titles like “Quarantine” and “Pandemic.” First, I despise the titles as being unoriginal. They certainly wouldn’t attract me to buy the book. Second, I wonder how well the book has been edited. Yes, I am aware that there are people out there that can write a book in less than thirty days, but I’m not among them.

What do I consider a reasonable time lapse to include a real-life event in a fiction book? It’s going to depend upon the event. For the tragedy of 9-11, it would have been at least a year if not more. For the space shuttle explosion, six months would have been a long enough of a wait. For the current virus? I can’t imagine turning it into fiction for entertainment while up to 2500 people a day are dying from Covid in the US, let alone the figures world-wide.

Now the first moon landing? Shoot, go ahead and use that before the dust had even settled. A presidential election? Have at it. The capture of a criminal? I’ll give you a soft maybe, depending upon the crime. The murder hornet? Better get that book written before they become a real problem.

It comes down to how many people have been hurt by the event and how deeply. I can’t imagine trying to profit from an event when people are still suffering. (Unless every cent of that money goes to organizations working to help the affected.)

My caveat to this discussion is that the author has to be mindful of their use of the event. Either disguise it appropriately, or make your use historically accurate. I don’t want to read about the first landing on the moon with fictional names.

So, that’s how I feel about it. Me, I avoid real world events with a passion. I don’t want to get them wrong.

I’d love to hear about how you feel. Share your thoughts in the comments. In the meantime, I’m going to head over and see what the other authors in this hop have to say.

May 11, 2020

How soon is too soon to include a real-life event in a fictional story?

Rules:
1. Link your blog to this hop.
2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.

Rituals for Writing #IWSG

By P.J. MacLayne May 5, 2020 May 5, 2020 IWSG

May 6 question – Do you have any rituals that you use when you need help getting into the ZONE? Care to share?

Just give me that rock and roll music… (and a good headset)

Although lately, I’ve been branching out into other types of music to help me get in the zone, depending upon my mood. Tradition Celtic melodies. Modern Native American songs. I keep thinking I should look for Gregorian chants but haven’t yet. I’ve got a nice collection of CDs and LPs, but I like finding new musicians and singers.

Basically, I look for music I don’t really listen to, but serves to shut out the distractions around me. It allows my mind to concentrate on writing.

But back to rock and roll…classic rock, of course. The era of singer-songwriters. Lots of female singers. Buffy St. Marie. Joni Mitchell. Janis Joplin. Linda Ronstadt

And here’s a nod to my favorite. He doesn’t fit any of the categories above, but he’s always my fallback. John Denver.

And that’s as much of a ritual as I’ll own up to!

Be safe out there, please.

Holidays We Need

By P.J. MacLayne May 3, 2020 May 3, 2020 Open Book

May 4, 2020

May 4th is the unofficial Star Wars Day. (May the Fourth be with you.) What other days should be recognized as holidays but aren’t?

Sadly, there are a number of holidays in the U.S.A. that have been basically forgotten or turned into nothing but a big commercial. President’s Day is a good example. Does anybody beyond banks and government agencies celebrate it? Without looking, I couldn’t even tell you the date it was originally celebrated.

People have lost track of the difference between Labor Day in May and Memorial Day in September. All they know is one marks the unofficial beginning of summer and the other the end.

Growing up, the first day of deer hunting season was practically a holiday. Unofficial, but lots of people took the day off and even the schools let kids out for the day. I don’t think as many people hunt anymore, so I suspect that has changed.

Another area I lived in had an excellent high school basketball team. Somehow, Spring Break normally was scheduled for when the state level basketball tournaments were held. Then one year the schedule was changed and people got really upset. When the team had a bad year, the furor died down.

(Political Rant ON) If I was going to create a holiday, it would be Election Day in November. Too many people find it difficult to go vote because of their work schedules. Either that, or make voting by mail the standard. It’s ridiculous that people have to stand in line for three or four hours to vote in some places. (Political Rant OFF)

I’d like to see Earth Day turned into an official holiday. I participated in the first Earth Day back in 1970 and it helped to make me aware of the challenges the environment faces. Combine it with May Day and let’s have some fun while doing good things.

And I really want a play day holiday. Did your school do that, just have a day to play games and have fun? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that worldwide? We’d all get to ride bikes with bells and toss inflatable balls or whatever else makes us happy. Heck, we could call it Fun Day!

Is there a holiday you think we should add to our calendars? Tell us about it in the comments. And don’t forget to check what the other authors on this hop think we should add.

In the meantime, stay safe and hope to see you next week.

May 4, 2020

May 4th is the unofficial Star Wars Day. (May the Fourth be with you.) What other days should be recognized as holidays but aren’t?

Pet Peeves #OpenBook Blog Hop

By P.J. MacLayne April 26, 2020 April 26, 2020 Open Book

April 27, 2020

What are your pet peeves when it comes to grammar and spelling?

I’m sure the list will be ones you’ve all heard over and over before, but I’ll give this a shot.

Too! Many! Exclamation! Points! Now, I’m not against the use of
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
exclamation points in general, but I think they need to be used sparingly. It’s like sending an email in all caps—it’s yelling. Look at me! I’m important! If you, as an author, have to use an exclamation point to show how important the sentence you wrote is, you need to rewrite the sentence. There are exceptions, of course, because they help to show what a character is feeling. But, please, please, don’t overuse the exclamation point!
Apostrophes. Apostrophes can be hard. Is it it’s or its? And how about the possessive of a noun that ends in s? If you have more than one dog, and they each have a bone, is it the dogs’ bones or the dogs’s bones? Now throw in someone whose name end in ‘s’. Let’s say someone’s last names is Cookes. Is the car belonging to Mr. Cookes, Cookes’ car or Cookes’s car?
Here’s a fun one. One or two spaces after a sentence? Old style sheets will tell you two, newer versions will say one. The truth is, back in the days when documents were typewritten, two spaces made for a cleaner look. Nowadays, that’s not true. Microsoft, in all its wisdom, has decided to flag two spaces as errors. (But it’s an option that can be turned off.)
There, they’re, and their. It strikes me as silly that the English language has three words that sound the same but have different meanings. Especially when all the words are used frequently. Homonyms are bad enough with two words that sound alike, but three word homonyms are totally unnecessary. It’s a wonder that auto-correct ever gets them right.
How about the word I am most likely to misspell. Awkward, isn’t it? No, that’s the word. Awkward. I always want to put a c in the first syllable. I know it doesn’t belong there, but darn, if my fingers don’t reach for that key every time I type the word awkward.

There’s my five. What did I miss? Tell me your pet peeves in the comments.

And stay safe, y’all.

April 27, 2020

What are your pet peeves when it comes to grammar and spelling?

Making Fiction Out of Real Life #OpenBook Blog Hop

By P.J. MacLayne April 19, 2020 April 19, 2020 Open Book

April 20, 2020

Talk about the setting of your book. Is it entirely imaginary or is it based on a real-life place?

As I say in my bio, I grew up among the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania. I know that people refer to them as mountains, but after spending years in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, what you find on the East Coast are just big hills to me.

But I love the landscape. Growing up, I spent many hours exploring the woods and meadows, and dreaming up stories. I knew where the huckleberries grew and when they were ripe for picking. I knew where large patches of endangered ground pine hid in the shadow of the nearby hardwood forest. I stared down a whitetail buck from across the patch of grass where an old farmhouse used to stand. I watched pheasants flash by when I flushed them from their nests in the meadows and listed to wild turkeys call their mates. I tracked a field mouse searching for seed among the dry winter grass. From my third-floor room on hot summer nights, I fell asleep to the song of the whippoorwill.

Naturally, when I started writing, I drew upon what I knew best for my settings. Both my Free Wolves series and my Harmony Duprie stories lean heavily on that area. But I fictionalize the details.

For my wolves, I work on the theory that they don’t want people to know exactly where they are. Between the two main packs in the stories, their territories cover parts of two states and may occasionally bleed over into a third. (New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio) I try to not be accurate when creating their pack lands to honor their need for secrecy.

When I write my mystery stories, I deliberately don’t reveal which state Harmony lives in. It gives me the ability to play with laws and police duties, which can vary from state to state. What the sheriff’s department in a Pennsylvania county does differs from their counterparts in Ohio. And laws dealing with things like gun ownership and speed limits may not be the same. By not saying exactly where Oak Grove is, I can use whichever legal system makes the most sense for the plot.

That doesn’t mean I make everything up. I spent several hours studying road maps for one chase scene that took place north of Pittsburgh. I wanted the road numbers, intersections, and exists to reflect reality. I often search out average drive times between cities to create an accurate timeline.

It’s been a lot of fun ‘building’ Oak Grove, naming its streets and populating it with a variety of people. Some of those eccentric characters may or may not be based on people I’ve known in real life. And some may be tributes to people I’ve loved. It’s been a challenge to give the town the happiness it deserves, and still include the challenges that small towns all over America face.

Anyway, I hope the love I have for that part of the country comes through in my books. But before I take off to see what the other authors are sharing, I’m going to say it again.

Be safe, everyone.

April 20, 2020

Talk about the setting of your book. Is it entirely imaginary or is it based on a real-life place?

99¢ Book Sale Event

By P.J. MacLayne April 17, 2020 April 17, 2020 Uncategorized

Check out the N.N. Light 99¢ Book Sale and giveaway. One lucky person will win an e-nook bundle of all 41 books featured. The Marquesa’s Necklace, the first book in the Harmony Duprie Mysteries, is one of the featured books. HERE

Enter the giveaway here: HERE

Open Internationally

Runs April 16 – 19, 2020

Winner will be drawn on April 27, 2020

Best Blogging Tools #OpenBook Blog Hop

By P.J. MacLayne April 12, 2020 April 13, 2020 Open Book

April 13, 2020

What are the best tools you use on your blog? (widgets, templates, etc.)

I’m no expert when it comes to the subject of blogs. I’ve been running this version of my blog for a little over a year now, and I’m still figuring out how to do things. But I’ll share what little I know.

First, the basics. I left the Blogger platform when they dropped the google component that had gained me most of my followers. I debated what to use as my base platform and decided to go with WordPress. I looked at several others, but my choice was made by the sheer amount of free support out there from other WordPress users. I’m not doing anything fancy, and every time I’ve run into a problem, I’ve found a YouTube video to help me out.

Image by William Iven from Pixabay

Next up was choosing a theme. I’m using Parabola, but that certainly isn’t the first one I played with. I don’t remember how many I tried before another author suggested this one. It gives me the flexibility level that’s just right for my basic skill set.

Let’s dig deeper into widgets and plugins. I use the built-in Gallery widget in many places. It has its limitations, but my graphic artist and I have been able to work around them.

I use MailChimp for my newsletter, so the MailChimp widget was a no-brainer. Except for setting it up. I had help with that.

I also use the basic Add to Any for sharing. That’s the widget that gives you the pretty buttons to tweet my posts or share on other websites. I hope you’ll make liberal use of them.

My best non-standard widget is Code Embed. It’s the one that allows me to turn Java Code into clickable fields. That’s what I use to take the code for our blog hop and make it user friendly. (That’s why you can click on the pictures from everyone else’s blog and get taken directly to their post.) It took me a few weeks to learn to use it correctly, but there are helpful videos on YouTube on how to make it work.

I want to find a plugin that allows for basic slideshows. (I had one bookmarked to check out, but it’s no longer being supported.) Does anyone use one and is willing to share the information? Share in the comments, please!

Before I go check out what tools the other authors are using, I’m going to say it. Be safe. I want you to be able to come back next week. Thanks for taking the time to drop by!

April 13, 2020

What are the best tools you use on your blog? (widgets, templates, etc.)

Welcome to The Samurai’s Inro

By P.J. MacLayne April 11, 2020 April 11, 2020 Uncategorized

I’ve been working hard on the next Harmony story and it’s getting close! I haven’t set an official release date, but it likely will be the early part of May. No cover to share just yet, but I’ve got the tagline and description. And of course the title! It’s called The Samurai’s Inro.

Tagline:

Trouble has a long memory and is stalking Harmony Duprie.

Doesn’t that sound like fun? Here’s the description:

Harmony Duprie has it made. Or so she thinks.

New job.

New routine.

A quiet life in the quiet little town of Oak Grove.

Oh, and Eli.

But trouble has a long memory and it’s playing a deadly game.

Friends’ cars stolen.

Her apartment ransacked.

The duplicate of a stolen Japanese antique carved box left behind.

Can Harmony identify the face of trouble before she loses and the winner takes her life as the final prize?

Let the games begin.

Growing Up #OpenBook Blog Hop

By P.J. MacLayne April 5, 2020 April 5, 2020 Open Book

April 6, 2020

What did you want to be when you grew up vs. what you are today?

Once upon a time, I posed that question to Harmony, the main character in my mystery series. Well, Jake, the anti-hero, asked.

“You know, when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a cop when I grew up.” He glared at me. “Don’t laugh.”

I swallowed my chuckle with a sip of coffee. “What happened?”

He grimaced. “Life, I guess. I still think I would have been a good one.”

It was surreal, having a conversation with a renowned jewel thief about being a police officer. “Sometimes dreams just don’t work out,” I said, thinking about Janine and the library job.

“What dream hasn’t worked out for you?”

I picked up a section of the newspaper so he couldn’t see my eyes. “It’s not important. I’ve got a good life and good friends and that’s what matters.”

“Let me guess, you wanted to be an astronaut but your eyesight’s not good enough.”

“Worse. I wanted to be a cowboy. Not a cowgirl, mind you, but a cowboy.”

Jake snorted into his cup, spraying coffee everywhere. He snatched a handful of napkins from the holder and blotted the liquid from the newspaper. “Yeah, I can see where that might be a little hard to accomplish.” He eyed me. “You don’t have the right parts. But I must say, I like the parts you have.”

I crumpled up an insert from the paper and hurled it at him. I needed to find a way to keep him busy and out of my hair, and soon.

Now, I never wanted to be a cowboy. Daniel Boone, maybe. Or a hermit. There was a time I wanted to be a singer-songwriter, but only knew the basics about music. Or maybe a writer. Then I decided to be a librarian.

Those of you who have followed this blog for awhile may remember I actually got to be one. Part-time, in a small library in a small town. But it was everything I wanted. I got to be surrounded by books, I got to do story hour for kids, I got to help pick out new books to the collection. Best of all, I got to read when there was nothing else to do!

Life happened, and I had to leave that small town and small library. Eventually, I was introduced to computers and fell in love. (I won’t talk about the many jobs in between.) Yes, I’m old. No one had a personal computer when I was a kid.. And now I’m a Windows server administrator. A job that didn’t exist when I was growing up. (And one that certainly wouldn’t have been suggested to a teenage girl.)

The best part is, I’m a writer too! Which may seem like an odd combination. One is mathematical and the other creative. In the whole right side of the vs the left side of the brain theory, I’m using both equally, but not at the same time. And loving it.

I tell people I didn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was over 40, and it’s the truth. Better late than never!

To find out what the other folks on this hop wanted to be when they grew up, follow the links below.

Be safe, everyone!

April 6, 2020

What did you want to be when you grew up vs. what you are today?

P.J. MacLayne