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Cover photo by BogdanV.

In the next couple of months, I hope to put out my 10th novel. I guess you could also call this my eighth novel, except that I broke up one of my fatter books a few years ago into three pieces, hoping readers might be more amenable to it if it came in pieces.

The new book is called The Silly Dreams of Shallow Sleep, and it’s a follow-up to my novel Zip Monkey, which I released some years ago. The series follows the adventures of Angel Bimini, a former pornographic actress who has become a New Jersey private detective.

In the new book, she is asked to follow the business dealings of a dead cancer researcher. His ex-colleague thinks his death might have something to do with the Chinese government and its attempts to infiltrate the U.S. scientific research community. Angel is also dealing with a dependency on prescription painkillers, something she started taking after sustaining injuries in the previous book.

I haven’t written a novel in a few years. I’ve been too busy doing music, which is a lot easier for me to write, produce, and release (as you can tell from my prolific output as Salon de La Guerre). But I started tapping out a new work on Angel Bimini a couple of years ago when I remembered her story really wasn’t finished. I’ve even got sketchy ideas for a third book in the series.

I don’t write long form fiction with the same quick facility that I write music. While it’s easy for me to write dialogue and characters, it’s harder for me to keep a long plot sustained, especially a mystery story. The main thing I usually wanna do with my writing is make people laugh, but keeping the audience interested over the course of a book takes a little bit more effort.

I’m having some friends look over the latest draft before I release it. When I do, it should be available as an ebook on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I know I promised to have paperback-on-demand versions of my books at some point, but these take a little bit more money investment and are a bit more of a design challenge, so I ask for a little more patience on that front.

Watch here for more news. And if you’re interested in any of my other nine books, you can find them here.

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Trust

I had to sell her a book

I had to sell it to her or I wouldn’t eat

The books were forty-six dollars and I got a 15 percent commission

That was my only food

I wrote out my successes in a blue sales ledger

And the ledger boxes were so empty they yawned

I knocked on the door and showed her my profile

So she could size me up,

That’s the sales posture

And then I turned to her and asked her questions

She couldn’t say yes or no to:

Questions begat questions

What is your favorite this? Who is your favorite that?

What do you care about?

And of course she cared about things

You can’t say you don’t care

You sound like a child

And when she had given bits of herself away

She fed me. Salespeople get fed a lot

We established trust for the wrong reasons.

And I ate a chicken sandwich.

 

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