People ask me why I don't write more short stories. I'm not talented enough, I tell them. There is a true art to writing a competent short story. You have to be able to relay the heart of the matter in as few words as possible, but yet still make it engrossing and readable. That's why I'm a novelist. It takes me 80,000 words to do what a good short story writer can do in less than five-thousand. THE EFFECTS OF URBAN RENEWAL ON MID-CENTURY AMERICA AND OTHER CRIME STORIES is a lengthy title. It sounds more like the heading of a master's thesis than a collection of short fiction, but don't let the title throw you. Jeff Esterholm knows what he's doing. In this book, Esterholm delivers a watertight collection of short crime stories deftly written with prose cut to the bone but never lacking a poet's sensibilities. Esterholm doesn't shy away from the grittier side of things. He handles the idea of human evil with a delicate touch, allowing bad people to do bad things, as they are wont to do in real life. The prose is striking. It is polished to the point that it glides on the page. The images and moods he evokes in his stories fit the writing, and all in all, he hands you a delightful tome of satisfying crime stories. This is a collection well worth your time. When I was in college, I got hooked on the USA television network. I didn't grow up with cable living out in the sticks as I did, but once I had cable in college, it was like a whole new world of offerings. At the time, USA was the home of the WWF (not the WWE--they didn't change until 2002). USA had Duckman, one of the most criminally underrated shows ever. They offered weird movies on the weekends. It was the sort of channel I turned on and just watched because it was good background, if nothing else. One of my favorite things USA offered was all the odd, strange light action/mystery fare they showed all the time. Shows like Silk Stalkings, Pacific Blue, and La Femme Nikita. After I was out of college, they kept the hits coming with shows like Suits, Burn Notice, and White Collar. USA was also the home of two of my favorite shows of all-time, Monk and Psych. Both of those shows were core inspiration for the Abe & Duff series. The other day, Peacock launched the final ride for Tony Shaloub's great detective, Adrian Monk. I got a chance to watch it last night, and it was everything I hoped it would be. I'll try to keep the spoilers on low here, but if you're worried about it being spoiled at all, stop reading. I expected another fun, but not overly taxing Adrian Monk mystery. I expected some germophobia, some social awkwardness, and some OCD (You'll thank me later...). I was not disappointed. Adrian's desperate need to have the world be orderly and clean was well represented, as well as his personal self-hatred because of his quirks. We were gifted with an appearance by the lovely Traylor Howard, and a flashback of Bitty Schramm as Sharona. We find out that Disher (Jason Gray-Standford) has moved to New Jersey and is working as a county sheriff. He's also married to Sharona. Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) is retired and working private security for a Jeff Bezoz-like character named Rick Eden (James Purefoy). Monk's stepdaughter, Molly, has taken over as his caretaker since Natalie left Monk's employ after 12 years to move to Atlanta to get married (which Monk still hasn't forgiven her for doing). Molly is getting married to a real go-get-'em journalist named Griffin, and this is the event that brings everyone back together. Griffin is on the verge of breaking a story that Rick Eden's former business partner may not have died in a diving accident, as was listed on the death certificate. Rick Eden offers Griffin a job to keep him from pursuing the story further. Griffin refuses, and then a few days later, Griffin dies in a bungee-jumping accident that Molly immediately suspects was no accident. This puts Monk back on the case, his first case since the pandemic turned him into a shut-in. Cue standard Monk mystery-solving and good-hearted fun. What I wasn't prepared for was the dark undercurrent of the story. Monk is a man at the end of his rope. The pandemic did some serious mental damage to Mr. Monk. Now, add in Molly's impending marriage and the fact that he isn't solving cases, and Monk has no reason to live. Monk spends several scenes talking with the ghost of his wife, Trudy (Melora Hardin), and he has firmly decided that his time on Earth is just about up. He's had enough of everything and just wants to join his wife. Without mysteries to solve and someone to care for him, Adrian Monk is making firm plans to check out of planet Earth and journey to the next realm. With this twist, we get a whole new subtext of how people need to be needed and need to feel valued. I was not expecting the dark edge of this topic for the finale, but it worked extremely well, and made the finale for one of TV's great detectives to be that much more meaningful. Tony Shaloub is a Wisconsin native (Green Bay), and one of my favorite actors. He was great in Monk, his performance in Big Night is amazing, and I think the Academy owes him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for what he did in Galaxy Quest. As always, he delivers. It was a joy to see the rest of the cast back together again, as well. I watched every episode of Monk when it aired. It was appointment viewing for me. The final episode of the TV series was very rewarding, but this final case was a denouement done right. I highly recommend watching if you were a fan of the series. If you never watched the series, I higly recommend you do that, too. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Monk. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/opinion/audiobooks-spotify-streaming-algorithm.html
I make almost nothing from book sales. I actually end up giving away more copies of my books for free than I sell. (Under that "It takes money to make money" guise...) I barely sell any hard copies; more than 99% of my writing income comes from eBooks. Believe me, I'd like to sell more hard copies, but people don't have disposable income like they used to, and books are a luxury item. Kindle books take up less space. A $15/month subscription to Kindle Unlimited gets people a massive library of books including every page of every book I've written. It pays me microfractions of a penny per page read. If someone reads a whole book of mine through KU, I make a bit less than I'd make if someone bought it outright, and I only make like $.31 per copy on a $5 Kindle book. It's pretty brutal. But hey--I'm just glad Uncle Jeff can buy himself another mega-yacht. (Please note the dripping sarcasm of the previous sentence.) Now with Spotify jumping into the mix and giving away 15 hours of free audiobooks for their new Audible-like subscription service, this is getting worse and worse for content creators, and it's getting massively worse for the smallest content creators like myself. People have long been accustomed to getting things like music and books for free, or for nearly free with a monthly subscription. Movie ticket sales are slumping massively because people would rather wait for streaming. (Myself among them...don't think I'm not complicit in this, too...) Fewer than 2% of all TRADITIONALLY published authors actually make a living off their writing. Almost no indie writers can live off their writing. Almost every writer out there has to have a "real" job for insurance, to pay rent, etc... Writing income is a bad second job. And real jobs are paying less and less. Right now, the average earner in America actually has 40% less buying power than the average earner did in 1990. Everything is coming to a breaking point, and Spotify isn't going to help with this. Already, it's a travesty what they pay artists per play. I believe that an artist gets less than $.005 per play. That means an artist has to earn more than 10,000,000 plays to make a decent living off of Spotify. It's possible...but unlikely. Now, if that artist is an indie band with four people, then you have to get 40,000,000 streams to make a living for the band. Point is, selling books and music is hard. I make sure I try to support local authors when I can. I buy physical media of my favorite bands to encourage them to continue to make music. (I try to use Spotify as little as possible.) I always try to review the books, movies, TV shows, and albums that I like to make sure other people might get turned on to them. Hell, I even review restaurants to try to make other people go to them. The corporations are making life tougher for artists, but the demand for books, music, TV, and movies has never been higher. People want to be entertained...they just don't want to pay to be entertained anymore. And big companies giving away hours of free content isn't helping the little guy. Things like this are bad for creators. It rewards the Taylor Swifts and Drakes of the world, the James Pattersons and the Stephen Kings, and filters less money to grassroots and emerging artists, which means less diversity and less creativity in new media. It's the same reason that "best-selling" writers are not always the best writers with the best stories. They're the ones the corporations told people to like, and people who aren't actively seeking the smaller, less well-known stuff will never know they've been led down that path by advertising and marketing. I imagine there will be a breaking point someday, and it won't be pretty. And I know that artists like myself will come out on the losing end. We always do. There's really no such thing as a casual Rush fan. If you're a Rush fan, you know that Tom Sawyer and Spirit of Radio aren't their best songs. If you're a Rush fan, you know all about how those three guys are consummate musicians and songwriters. You know they have a wicked, strange sense of humor, but at heart, they remain polite Canadian boys from a small Toronto suburb. The one thing you don't know as a Rush fan is much of their personal lives. Those three guys (especially drummer Neil Peart) always knew how to draw a line in the sand between "work" and "home." Their private lives remained largely private. Neil wrote a few books about traveling the world by bicycle and motorcycle before his untimely passing, but they were really travelogues, insights about his experiences on the road and not so much backstage stories or tales of the three Stooges traipsing the countryside in their ongoing musical cavalcade. So, for Geddy to sit down and pen a monumental 500+ page journey that starts with his parents surviving concentration camps in WWII and arriving at where he is now, a semi-retired 70-year-old musician, father, and grandfather, is an applause-worthy feat. In MY EFFIN' LIFE, the esteemed master of the bass shows that he ain't just a musician by penning a funny, thoughtful, sometimes irreverent, and wonderfully heartfelt journey through his life and the music Rush brought to the world. I have long been a rabid Rush fan, amassing all the records, watching the live concerts, buying bootlegs of concerts, etc...--you name it, I'm that guy. I have always said that my life could be largely encompassed by two bands: Rush and Marillion. To get his insights into the band's history, particularly the writing and recording processes of all their records has been something special. In my mind, this is the equivalent of Beatles fans getting that extended film from Peter Jackson last year. Because Rush has always been a fairly low-drama band that was more concerned with the music than with rockstar lifestyles, there aren't a lot of explosive reveals in this book, but ol' Ged doesn't shy away from the difficult topics. Firing their original drummer, John Rutsey (and Rutsey's eventual passing when he was only 55) is one of those tough parts. The drug use and alcohol issues in the band, while they never really got in the way of the music, were a prevalent part of the book. And the most interesting and telling parts are when Ged details how his marriage struggled because the life of a touring musician is just not the most conducive career for marriage or raising a family. Still, the overriding theme that comes out of this book is the loyalty and friendship of the main triumvirate, but also their long-time road crew, many of whom began the same journey with them in the beginning and remained in their traveling circus until the final show. That speaks to the brotherhood of the music that they all believed in and were willing to sacrifice for. It's a big reason that Rush endured, and why people gravitate to their music. They did not compromise artistically. They remained true to their vision and each other. MY EFFIN' LIFE is easily the best book I've read this year. It's easily one of the better music autobiographies I've read. It's not going to change anyone's life. It does serve as a beautiful companion piece to a fifty-year career in the music industry. Thanks for the music, boys. It was a helluva ride. When it comes to writing, I know my role. I'm a genre hack, a storyteller who wants to make people have a little fun while reading, but not someone who's putting out literature that people would use big words like "important" or "poignant" to describe. I basically write mysteries with gratuitous one-liners and a decent payoff at the end. In my college writing classes, my professors always pushed me toward literary fiction. That was the gold prize. That was where your true worth as a writer would be measured. They told us that genre fiction was beneath "good writers," and that we should concentrate on telling human stories in human settings. I doubled down on my dragon-fighter and private eye stories because those were what interested me. And besides, I knew my role, and I knew I was not, and probably would never be, a good enough writer to engage readers on the level of literary fiction. I needed my gimmicks, my structures, and a handful of known tropes to lean on. I couldn't just tell a human story. (Maybe that's because I've always felt like I'm missing some of the components that make us truly human, but that's an issue for a different therapist.) Maggie Ginsberg is a writer who can engage the human condition and make important and poignant commentary on the deepest issues that affect us all. In STILL TRUE, Ginsberg does battle with big issues like loss, isolation, grief, strength, and weakness. She digs at the uncomfortable lies we tell ourselves and the deepest secrets that we don't tell others. She examines distance in relationships, and how even married couples can have miles between them no matter how close they think they feel. She also finds an undercurrent of being needed. Of feeling valued. And of finding a place in this world when our original plans fall apart and our original places reject us. I have never been a fan of literary fiction because I find so much of it so deeply pretentious. It always feels like authors are digging too deeply in their toolboxes for the tricks that will make people think they are some sort of genius wordsmith. Ginsberg is able to craft art with simple phrases, but there is no shortage of poetry in her construction. With a few paragraphs, she can bring life to vibrant, living color in your mind and keep you questioning the characters' intentions and personal shortcomings. STILL TRUE is the kind of book you read in a single day, a simple story on the surface, but one whose true depth is hidden behind layers of nuance and humanity. It's also the kind of story that you will dwell on while you look around at your friends and family with new eyes wondering what sort of secrets are they hiding that are currently keeping them from experiencing life to its fullest. A desperately intriguing tale of real people despite its label as being "fiction." LEGENDS AND LATTES was the best book I read last year. It was original and cute. I had high hopes for this prequel story, but it fell a little short of the greatness of the first book. However, BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST is still fun and kind and tells a compelling story with compelling characters. This tale finds the orc warrior, Viv, recovering from a battle injury in Murk, a seaside town with not much going for it. Viv, out of boredom, stumbles into a bookstore and befriends the proprietor, Fern. Fern runs a cluttered and unsuccessful bookstore, but she turns Viv into a reader by giving her saucy tales of swords and romance that she figures Viv will enjoy. In turn, Viv helps Fern run her shop better. Add in the conflict a necromancer poses to the area, and you have an enjoyable low-stakes fantasy adventure. Baldree continues to root this series in a Ted Lasso-like kindness that makes it an enjoyable change of pace from so many books out there. It's anachronistic and silly at times, but that's what makes it endearing. Writing the second book in any series is difficult, even more so when you write a prequel instead of a sequel. In the acknowledgments, Baldree even notes that he wasn't able to write the sequel he initially wanted to write, but he put forth another fun story and a worthy installment for this clever fantasy world he's creating, but it just doesn't land quite as well as the first book, probably because I'm not terribly interested in prequels. Tell me what comes next. I'll look forward to whatever comes next for this series. Like all good authors trying desperately to sell books, sometimes books go better with merchandise. Everyone likes to wear a nice t-shirt repping their favorite Chicago detectives, or maybe you'd like a Write. Publish. Repeat. shirt with the Spilled Inc. Press logo on the back. We have you covered. I'm proud to announce the Spilled Inc. Press merchandise store. You can click the in-text link or there is a button on the right side of the home screen that says you can Click For Merch. There's also a link in the Links list up at the top of the screen. The prices are set as low as possible so I'm not making any real money on this stuff because I'd rather have people rep the product than profit from it. (Besides, I'm a writer--I'm used to not profiting.) If you'd like to be a proper Abe & Duff homer, the merch store has you covered. Wear the shirt, have a burrito, and read the book in the tacqueria. It'll be like you're hanging out with Duff. Last year I had the good fortune to read a book by Travis Baldree called LEGENDS & LATTE. It's a brilliantly done low-stakes piece of fantasy writing about an orc named Viv who tires of the sword-for-hire game, so she takes her savings and opens a coffee shop in a town where coffee shops are not a known quanitity. Over time, she learns how to add things that make a coffee shop a coffee shop, such as hiring a strange little baker to make muffins and other goodies, and hiring a guy to play music. It's about as delightful a book as I have ever read. It was easily the best book I read in 2022. I tell people that it's basically the Ted Lasso of fantasy novels: it's clever, it's fun, and it's kind. You don't find that in many fantasy novels anymore. I was raised on fantasy novels. One of my earliest memories is getting the brilliant Dragonlance Chronicles collection for Christmas when I was in first grade. I had always been a good reader, so my mother thought I could handle it. At the time, those books were all over 300 pages, and I was at an age where 100 pages was still a daunting task even with my advanced reading skills, but I managed to get through the first book, and that led to the second, and then the third. It hooked me instantly, transporting me to Krynn and allowing me to battle dragons and weild magical weapons in my mind's eye. I was a fantasy book nerd from day one. Travis Baldree has just put out a prequel to LEGENDS & LATTE called BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST. I grabbed it the week it was released, and I'm halfway through it now. I'm pleased to report that it carries that same low-stakes, kind, and clever writing. Travis doesn't labor over his prose. It's written at a middle school level, at best. But it works. I'm not near the end of this one, but I can already tell I will like it. Bring on more low-stakes fantasy, Travis. I'm waiting. New post-apocalyptic product coming at you in the near future.
If you played the video games at all (I did; big fan!), this looks pretty true to form, and it has Walton Goggins in it, and he's outstanding in everything he does. It's a more standard take on the end-of-the-world scenario, but if you're unfamiliar with the games, I'd still encourage you to take a look if you like the post-apoc genre at all. |
About the AuthorSean Patrick Little is a writer, speaker, editor, educator, and general literary dude from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Click the pictures below to purchase books!
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