The Writer's Life 2/17 - Reversals

I was just listening to the Sean Hannity radio show. His guests were lawyers Joseph diGenova and Jay Sekulow. The topic was the leaks that brought down NSA director Mike Flynn. They claim there is a conspiracy, through damaging leaks, among members of the CIA to bring down President Trump. They say the list of suspects has been narrowed to 20. Also, they cited a measure President Obama enacted, through Attorney General Loretta Lynch, made 17 days before the end of his term. I didn't quite understand that part of it, but the implication was clear, its purpose to undermine Trump. Several members of the press have touted the Flynn controversy as the biggest scandal since Iran-Contra. Is a complete reversal underway? If the accusations those two men made are true, even the mainstream media would have to cover the story. I'm skeptical and believe there has to be more to Obama's ploy, something far less sinister. I was in almost complete disagreement with the prior administration's policies, but I never thought Obama stupid. Would he have done something egregious hoping he wouldn't be caught? It seems far-fetched.

With business at the floating book shop as slow as it gets, I got a much needed shot in the arm yesterday at Facebook. Edward P. Ciesielski, author of In Sheep's Clothing, a crime thriller, responded to a post I made advertising my novel Killing, saying he bought it. Ed is a retired Maryland police officer, who rose to the rank of Sergeant. He investigated the deaths of 400 citizens. He was one of the officers who arrested Arthur H. Bremer immediately after he shot Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and three others at a shopping center on May 15, 1972. We share a publisher, All Things That Matter Press, which published my short story collection A Hitch in Twilight. To return the favor, I downloaded the Kindle version of his book. Thank you, sir. I frequently wonder if posting book info (I do one ad a day at FB & Twitter) is an exercise in futility. It's nice to get positive reinforcement.

 Another plus on the literary front: I received the proof copy of Close to the Edge yesterday. To recap, there was a glitch in it, the print on page 48 one-third the size of the rest of the book, a sentence underlined, an arrow pointing to it. Since the entire text was there, and given all the work I'd put into the process, I let it slide. Of course, it's haunted me periodically ever since. That error has been corrected. With a sense of trepidation, I went through the entire novel looking for the line breaks and lack of paragraph indentation I'd spotted after I transferred the file from its safe haven at Google Docs into the Create Space template. I was sure I would find several. Fortunately, there is only one, on page 105. Here it is:  
She locked the door behind him. The apartment hadn’t changed. It remained antiseptically clean and fragrant, white its dominant color. He wondered if the scheme had been designed expressly to relax the whites who visited. It was as if he were gazing at a snowy landscape through a large picture window.
The air-conditioner was set high, enhancing the effect...
It's a paragraph break. I'm letting it slide rather than going through the entire process again. Because the margins are narrower in the latest update, the novel shrunk from 310 to 233 pages, which reduced the cost of printing it and allowed me to the lower the price at Amazon to ten bucks, the same I charge for all of my books on the street. It's the only one that matches up exactly. And now it's on to next year's book, which I'm reluctant to begin work on because I'm scheduled for jury duty on the 28th. Who knows how much time that will eat up?

My thanks to the middle aged woman who donated about 40 books in Russian, and to the gentleman who bought 14 of them. I used to dread his appearance, as he always asks for half-price. I sense he runs a book shop of his own and wants to earn a profit. The way business has been lately, I was glad to see him. If not for him, it would have been a second straight session of zero sales.

Vic's Short Works: http://tinyurl.com/jy55pzc

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