The advantage in being the Artist's Mother

You get things like this in the mail...

Next time I go to Sioux Falls, I need to stop at Michaels and lay in a supply of black frames so I can hang these somewhere besides on the fridge (and yes, I do have enough magnets to color-coordinate the photography).

I think the Hotel South Dakota poster is available through CafePress, but the others might be limited editions... neener neener...

The Hotel South Dakota Magnet and Note Card Giveaway!

Enter here to win a fridge magnet and note card featuring the new eBook cover of The Hotel South Dakota, signed by the author and the artist! Three people will win!!!!

The Hotel South Dakota- the Kindle Edition- and the Nook Edition

It's Here!!!!!!!! Or to be more accurate, It's There!!!!!

The Hotel South Dakota. The Kindle version isn't linked to the Kindle versions of Funeral Food or Sex and Salmonella at the moment, but that'll be fixed soon.  And it'll be up for Nook probably by tomorrow.

CafePress items with the covers of all three books are available in the link to the upper right of this page. I have an HSD tee shirt, a beer glass, and fridge magnets coming. Once I get them, I'll do a magnet set giveaway with all three covers.

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Ryan Boettger and his students for the fantastic job they did in formatting the first three Tory Bauer mysteries for Kindle, and Abby Reilly for getting the files ready for the other platforms, and for handling all of the uploading. And I especially want to thank Curtis Taylor for the fantastic new covers!

The final three books in the series won't be available until next spring. They'll be sporting Curtis Taylor covers too. I can't wait!

Added in this afternoon: the Nook Edition is now available! Find it here!

Drum roll please...

I'll be heading out to NCFF soon. It's going to be a weekend full of friends, fun, and wool fumes. I'll post pics and commentary here (and if you're on Facebook, I'll be posting some pics on both my personal page, and my *author* page) (throughout the day, if my phone works inside the big metal building... which is unlikely).

In the meantime, Curtis finished the cover for the eBook release of The Hotel South Dakota.

 Beautiful, is it not? I especially love the little TA + NB in the heart, written on the desk.

The book will likely be ready for Kindle, etc, sometime next week, and I'll be sure to announce when it's available. I'm also sure that Curt will add the cover to his CafePress store, if you're in the mood for tote bags or doggie jackets with the design. I see another tee shirt and beer glass in my future, not to mention fridge magnets (at which time I will have a giveaway for a few sets of all three).

I think this post on the evolution of all three of the covers is fascinating. Art is like writing- a lot of false starts, and then the lightbulb moment.

The last three books in the Tory Bauer series won't be ready for eBook release until next spring, but Curt will be doing the covers for those books too. I can't wait to see what he does with them.

Books

While I get  my breath back after hearing the estimate to replace the pool bladder (bladder... that's what they call the plastic part of an above ground pool... obviously I'm twelve today because the word makes me giggle even as the number makes me wilt),which was irreparably damaged in Sunday's storm, let's talk about books.

I finished Lev Grossman's The Magicians. You might remember that I didn't love this book. I didn't love it even more as I continued on. In fact, the only reason that I finished reading it was to see if #1 the characters ever stopped whining, even for a moment, and #2 the plot ever made a lick of sense. The answer is no on both counts. A lot of people really loved this book. I didn't.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Steve Brewer's The Big Wink. Set in and around California's legal marijuana dispensaries, this caper novel barrels out at the starting gate, and never lets up. The characters

 are extremely well drawn, and the writing is excellent. It's only available via Kindle (and maybe other eReader formats), but my guess is that it'll end up on the big screen eventually. My only quibble is that the ending came rather suddenly, but I just hope that means that a sequel is in progress. Side Note: I listened to much of this book as I worked out on the treadmill, via the Kindle's text-to-speech function. The TTS is not really a substitute for a human reader, though it's not bad. There are quirks though, it cannot distinguish between live (to live) and live (something done live), minute is always 60 seconds, never something very small, and it thinks that maury-who-wanna , a term that came up rather frequently in this novel, is a word.

George R. R. Martin's Dreamsongs Volume II is a companion to Volume I. It's filled with more short stories, novelettes, and autobiographical essays. I really enjoyed the Wild Card story, and now need to read the others (something like 17 books full of them, by assorted writers), and The Hedge Knight, which is a prequel to the Song of Fire and Ice books (A Game of Thrones). The rest were mostly okay, though some of the longer fiction pieces were a slog. I want more more more of The Hedge Knight however. I think those characters are part of a graphic novel series now. (Evidently, there are sequels in print form too, spoilers abound in that link).

Tarzan himself, is not the beast in question in The Beasts of Tarzan, but we're constantly reminded what an primitive hunk of manliness he is. All women want him, and all men want to be him, and Tarzan, the big lunk, is not even dimly aware of either fact. This volume starts off at a run, with Tarzan and Jane's infant son Jack (not Boy- we can thank the movies for that) kidnapped, and Tarzan and Jane on separate quests to find him. It's a rip-roaring adventure, as silly and entertaining as all the rest. There are a couple of continuity errors in the plot, but we won't let them get in between Lord Greystoke and his Lady.

Laura Lippman's The Most Dangerous thing is another in a long line of wonderful books written by a master of the craft. I'm not going to rehash the plot (it's being reviewed everywhere), I'm just going to recommend that you go out and read it.

Oh yeah, and I finished proofing the files of my own book, The Hotel South Dakota. It's the 3rd Tory Bauer Mystery, set during Delphi High School's homecoming celebration. The cover is almost finished, so I suspect it'll be available via Kindle (and other platforms) in a couple of weeks. This is the book where I think I hit my stride as a writer- I didn't want to change any of it as I read, which is a first.  I'm excited that it will be available again. And as with the other Tory Bauer titles, the cover art will be available on any number of items from CafePress.

Funeral Food Swag

The SoCal contingent traveled back from Oregon with us, so Gramma is my main occupation these days. But I'll still have some time to post, and to complain about the weather (we got home to find the AC nonfunctional, though The Hub fixed it in the time honored way: he hit it with a big stick until it started working again). The heat index is supposed to top 100 today, and the weatherpeople are throwing around words like *enhanced tornado risk*, and *severe storms*, so we may spend the afternoon hunkering down.

In the meantime, the Funeral Food swag arrived from CafePress while we were gone. In fact, it arrived double because the first shipment got lost somewhere along the line, so CafePress kindly resent the items. They said if the first package did show up, I could keep it with their compliments. Sometime in the last two weeks, both shipments did, in fact, show up. So I have lots of fridge magnets, note cards, and two identical tees.

You can guess what shirt I'll be wearing today. When the cover for The Hotel South Dakota is finished, I'll have a fridge magnet giveaway.

In the meantime, if you're interested in any of the goodies, the CafePress link is on the upper right of the main blog page (the beer glasses are back in stock). And of course, if the mysteries themselves intrigue you, Funeral Food and Sex and Salmonella are both available in most ebook formats (links to the right). Hotel will be available fairly soon.