What Are We All Reading?

Hi Everyone! Happy Solstice!

I hope you are all having a good and low-stress holiday season. I am pleased to say that I got all my final grades submitted a good 36 hours before the registrar’s deadline, *despite* having finals scheduled the Friday and Saturday of exam week. Yes, Saturday finals are a big thing now, in case you haven’t been keeping pace with the innovations in higher education.

I’ve also managed to read some pretty interesting stuff, which I’ll share in a bit. But first I wanted to remind everyone that the audiobook of Permanent Position is currently free on Apple and Nook.

The Apple link is here and the Nook link is here.

I’ve also just uploaded the audiobook for Campus Confidential, book 1 in the series, and I’m working on revisions of Trigger Warning, book 4 in the series. So keep an eye open for excerpts from that, coming soon!

Meanwhile, though, I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve been reading and enjoying recently. And of course I’d love to hear what you’re reading!

First of all, I was riveted by The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, their in-depth report on the current war in Afghanistan. I highly recommend it to, well, everyone. Afghanistan is the longest-running conflict in US history, and soon we will have soldiers serving over there who weren’t born when it started. So it behooves us to pay attention to it.

I also have a personal/artistic stake in this, since John, my heroine’s brother, is deployed in Afghanistan in Campus Confidential, and comes home at the beginning of Permanent Position. This was a way to work my “day job” research on contemporary war literature into my fiction. As I like to stress, while the Doctor Rowena Halley series shouldn’t be taken as pure autobiography, it is based on the experiences of myself, my friends, my students, my colleagues, and people I’ve encountered for my research. It’s meant to reflect the current zeitgeist, and as such includes a lot of current events.

I also recently finished reading the English translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog.

It’s another must-read of the year, in my opinion. The story of Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, a Ukrainian Jewish woman born in 1930, it follows her Becky Sharp-like career from husband to husband and lover to lover. WWII, the Holocaust, and the post-war repression of Soviet Jews all form a backdrop to Maya Abramovna’s picaresque strivings to achieve upward mobility. That might not sound attractive, but it’s actually a riveting picture of Soviet life.

I was finishing up the edits on the audiobook of Campus Confidential at the time, so it was particularly apropos. Each of my books depicts a different social group, and Campus Confidential focuses on the experiences of Soviet Jewish emigres. The stories of my characters were inspired, again, by the stories of my friends, students, and colleagues, as well as those of Soviet Jewish authors such as Vasily Grossman and immigrant writes such as Gary Shteyngart. (Believe me, you also want to rush out and snap up their books ASAP if you haven’t already done so).

And for something maybe a little more mainstream, although still delightfully off-the-beaten-path, I’m currently reading Palm Beach Finland, by Antti Tuomainen.

Not sure if I’ve shared this yet, but I’ve been to Finland and speak a bit of Finnish. Although not enough to read the book easily in the original, alas.

It’s a kind Nordic-Noir-meets-Carl Hiaasen, if you can imagine such a thing. I’m only about halfway through right now, but I’m riveted in expectation of the inevitable showdown between the sleazy hitman, the undercover police officer, and the various people who have decided to investigate the mysterious murder on their own.

So that’s what I’ve been reading! What about you?

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways!

It’s cold out there! Warm up with a little vengeance in the Ice Cold Vengeance giveaway.

Celebrate the season with the Crime Filled Christmas giveaway.

Enjoy the wintry weather with the Snowed In giveaway.

Ring in the New Year with the New Year’s Noir giveaway.

Yet More Artistic Adventures in Audio–And Free Audiobooks!

Hello everyone!

Yes indeed, you may have noticed that I’m a bit obsessed with audio right now. Of course, anyone who knows me will not be surprised. I have a bit of an, um, obsessive personality. One of those greatest strengths/greatest weaknesses things.

Now seems like a good time to mention that the audiobook of Permanent Position is currently free on AppleBooks and Nook Audiobooks.

Oh, and if you’d like to get into reviewing audiobooks, StoryOrigin is currently running a review code giveaway for suspense and thriller audiobooks.

So what’s so great about audiobooks? I have to admit that I have always had a love/hate relationship with being read to. When I was a small child, I enjoyed it tremendously (thanks, Mom & Dad!). Then I learned how to read myself, and immediately realized all the advantages of that. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to read to myself rather than to be read to. Reading text is faster and you, the reader, have more control over how you interact with it. Plus it allows things like side-by-side or back-and-forth comparison in a way that other media forms do not.

However, listening to someone else read, whether it’s an audiobook or they’re reading out loud to you “live,” is a great way to get a story or information while driving, doing chores, or working on handicrafts. It frees up your eyes and your hands, and also connects you back to the primal human experience of telling stories while sitting around working together.

Want to experience more audiobooks? Check out the Dead of Winter Thriller Audio Shorts giveaway.

And there’s also the fact that you can gain new insight into a work by experiencing someone else’s interpretation of it. My doctoral advisor always used to tell us that the best way to understand a work was to see someone else’s interpretation of it, like in a stage or film adaptation. If you liked it, great; if not, you still gained new insight into the work. At the time I think I said something narky about that, and I definitely said something narky about the some of the adaptations of Checkhov plays he made us watch. Needless to say, I don’t appreciate having other people’s artistic visions imposed on me.

But, as is so often the case, I now, ten years later, see the wisdom in my advisor’s advice. I hate it when that happens! Actually, no. It’s a comforting reminder that we can grow and change and learn to appreciate more and more things as we do so.

And, to return to audiobooks and my insatiable need for artistic control, my own interpretation of my own work is of course of considerable interest, at least to me. We treasure crackling 30-second recordings of poets from the 1920s reciting their poems, and wish we could have anything like that of poets from the 1820s. But now that it’s (almost) the 2020s, anyone with a mic and a makeshift recording studio, or even just a smartphone, can record themselves reading their own work. Or anyone with a spare $3,000 lying around can get an actual professional to do it all for them. Which often seems like the more attractive option when you’re knee-deep in the recording and editing process.

Yeah, because it turns out that recording an audiobook is SUPER exhausting. Even perfectly healthy, fit people describe it as physically debilitating. For me, since I struggle to speak, or even remain upright for long periods (for those of you just joining us, I have been seriously ill for a number of years from a combination of Lyme disease, toxic mold exposure, and who knows what else), it’s, like, a crazy-difficult thing that I can only do in short bursts. And let’s not even get into the editing…other than to say I’m doing good if I can do a ten-minute section of finished audio in an hour of editing work.

On the other hand, it’s an absolutely fascinating experience from the artistic standpoint, and I do like the thought that, if you’re listening to one of my audiobooks, you’re getting that immediate experience of me telling my story. It may not be as polished as if professionals are doing it, although I certainly did my best to polish it up–in the future I’ll have to share some of the cat-snoring clips I had to cut out–but it is in keeping with the overall aesthetic I’m attempting to cultivate in the series of authenticity and immediacy.

I could, and no doubt will, say a lot more about the experience of actually reading the words and my thoughts on spoken vs. written media, but this is already going on pretty long and, frankly, I’m exhausted, so I’ll save it for next time. In the meantime, happy listening!

Those links to get a free audio copy of Permanent Position again:

Apple Books

Nook Audiobooks

Oh, and if you’re in the US, Canada, or Australia and you’d like a review code for the audiobook of Summer Session, book 3 in the series, reply to this post or email me at sidstarkauthor@gmail.com and let me know!

And now for this week’s giveaways:

The holiday season got you feeling vengeful? Check out the Ice Cold Vengeance promo! Mysteries, thrillers, and suspense with a revenge plot or subplot.

On the other hand, if you’re starting to get into the season, check out the Snowed In giveaway.

And you’ll absolutely want to visit the Crime Filled Christmas giveaway.

If you haven’t read Foreign Exchange, the prequel to the Doctor Rowena Halley series, you can get it and many other suspense stories for free in the Domestic Suspense giveaway.

Awesome Audio! Get a Free Review Copy of “Permanent Position”

Well, it’s finally autumn here. Of course, because of my mold/chemical sensitivity issues, being able to actually heat my house is turning into a bit of a challenge. Hopefully by the next time you hear from me, my house will be toasty warm, but at the moment I’m reminding myself that a bit of chill builds character.

But enough about that! I’ve got plenty of other, more exciting news.

First of all, a HUGE thanks to everyone to downloaded, shared, reviewed, or otherwise participated in the launch of the ebook of Permanent Position. It was a massive success, peaking at something like #32 in the overall free store on Amazon.com (not that I was obsessively checking or anything). So thanks once again! And, of course, if you feel moved to leave a review, it would be massively appreciated. The book’s universal Amazon link is here.

The next bit of exciting news is that the audiobook of Permanent Position is now available on all sellers EXCEPT, apparently, Amazon, which they say takes a month or more to happen. And in celebration of this foray into audio, I’m currently giving away links to free review copies. If you’d like one, reply to this post or send me an email at sidstarkauthor@gmail.com, and I’ll send you your very own personalized code to get a free copy of the book.

I had to do a crash course on Arabic and Persian accents as part of the recording of Permanent Position.

Oh, and speaking of audio, I’ve started posting podcast episodes of Summer Session. They’ll be up for a few weeks and then I’ll take them down when I release the audiobook version. In the meantime, you can start listening to it on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

I had to learn a tiny bit of Arabic to do the audio for Summer Session. Apparently my Arabic has a heavy Russian accent.

The official release for Summer Session will be coming soon, so stay tuned!

And here’s this week’s selection of giveaways

Want to spice up your fall? Check out the Spicy Fall Suspense Giveaway!

Want just a little bit of romance, but not too much? Check out the Love in the Strangest Places Giveaway!

Have a Kindle that’s feeling empty and bereft? Go hit up the International Women of Mystery book event on Amazon!

Looking to put your KU membership to good use? Come visit the Mystery & Suspense on KU book event!

It’s here! Get “Permanent Position” for free on Kindle!

Hi All!

Well, as you might guess from the superfluity of exclamation marks, Permanent Position has finally launched and is now live on Kindle.

Booklinker is playing up and refusing to give me my universal link, so here’s the UK link, here’s the Canadian link, and here’s the Australian link.

Audio version to be following soon. So far I haven’t committed to doing a paperback, because A) I don’t sell a lot of paperbacks, and B) I want to reduce the overall pollution/carbon load of my bookselling. Because of A, B is really just empty posturing, and if I get a wave of requests for the paperback, I will probably do a print-on-demand run (cheaper for the publisher and better for the environment–we hope).

Anyway, I’m thrilled that Permanent Position is finally out in the world. And already climbing the charts! A heartfelt thanks to those of you who have already left reviews on Goodreads and/or Amazon. And of course, I would LOVE it if you left a review on Amazon if you haven’t already done so (Amazon.com link here). I can’t tell you how much reviews, especially Amazon reviews, mean to authors on both a personal and commercial level, so I’ll just go with saying that each and every one is appreciated.

I could go on about the real-life inspirations for Permanent Position and how meaningful it is for me to finally see it out in the real world, but I’ve already covered that in previous blog posts, so I’ll just thank everyone for your help and support, wish you all a wonderful weekend, and sign off.

Those links for Permanent Position again:

And, of course, this week’s selection of promos and giveaways!

There’s still one more week left of the Edge of Your Seat Thrillers Giveaway!

If you haven’t picked up a free ARC of “Summer Session,” the novella that follows immediately after Permanent Position, you can grab one in the Feel-Good Crime and Thrillers Giveaway.

Check out the International Women of Mystery Amazon sales book event, for mystery/suspense novels featuring female protagonists! Dozens of titles, most free on Kindle Unlimited.

#AdjunctLife: The Real-Life Inspirations Behind “Permanent Position”

Hi All!

I am almost, almost ready to launch Permanent Position. Hurray! Doing the audiobook slowed me down considerably, but I’m hoping to have the launch for both the ebook and audiobook versions by the end of the month. Expect heartfelt requests for reviews to come rolling your way soon :).

The artwork for the audiobook

Like the other books in the Doctor Rowena Halley Series, Permanent Position is fiction, but fiction drawn heavily from real-world experiences. The germ for the plot came from a request for help I got, back when I was still adjuncting, from an American man who had married a Belarusian woman and gotten involved in a nasty custody battle with her over their son. She had taken the boy back to Belarus and was refusing to give the father access to him.

I sent him some information about people and organizations who specialized in Belarus, and never heard from him again. But I always wondered what happened, and what the true story was. The man who contacted me represented himself as the victim, but I always had my doubts. He had probably married a mail-order bride, right? At least that’s what it seemed like to me. So that’s the story I went with in Permanent Position.

Many of the side plots, secondary characters, and recurring motifs throughout the book are also taken from life. The $3,200/course that Rowena earns while teaching at UNC-Matthews is the average pay per course for adjuncts in North Carolina. UNC-Matthews is fictional, but many of the experiences Rowena has there are based on my own experiences at various North Carolina institutions. The half-finished campus, the confusing or missing signage and students showing up for the wrong class, the lack of administrative support, and the precarious position of instructors and students waiting to see if a course will fill up enough to be held, are all things I’ve witnessed from both sides of the lectern, and not just in North Carolina.

Similarly, Rowena’s harrowing experiences with applications, interviews, and job offers are loosely based on things that happened to me too. The only thing that’s completely fictional is the presence of a sort-of-good, sort-of-sleazy Provost who may or may not be willing and able to help Rowena out.

The sexual harassment that follows Rowena wherever she goes is taken directly from my own experiences, some of it verbatim, so to speak. The proposition and all the intense “appreciation” Rowena receives while walking around in her “cold-weather burka,” and the construction crew who set up their scaffolding to be able to look directly into the women’s restroom are both taken straight from life, alas. As she says, the more she wears, the more attention she gets.

On a related note, the lecture Fatima gives Rowena about how Islam is a very liberal religion, a very good religion for women, and allows a career as long as you have your husband’s permission, was something an acquaintance once told me, and seemed too good not to share. The same acquaintance kept assuring me that she wasn’t gathering money for al Qaeda as I drove her around town to meet with potential donors to the Muslim charity she was representing. That also seems too good to waste, so I’m sure I’ll work it into a later book in the series. (For the record, this acquaintance was a lovely person and, as far as I know, not affiliated with al Qaeda in any way).

I’ve already written about how Rowena’s ex-fiance Dima is based heavily on real life. The Battle for the Donetsk Airport that he covers in Permanent Position was a real battle, and Givi and Dmytro Yarosh, the people he interviews, are also both real. Dima’s experience of being caught and tortured by Ukrainian forces who believe him to be a Russian spy is based on something similar that may have happened to Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who, in one of those amusing little ironies, is ardently anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine.

I could keep going, but you get the general drift. Like all fiction, Permanent Position is all about reality, but a reality that’s been carefully curated to create a coherent and satisfying narrative. It’s not a memoir, but I was heavily influenced by the genres of memoir and “documentary novel” as I composed it. And so, like those genres, it’s supposed to be a little slice of real life, one that has been framed in order to create art, but still open-ended, the way reality always is.

And now it’s time for this week’s selection of giveaways!

Haven’t read Campus Confidential, book #1 in the series, yet? You can pick up it and many other books in the Crime, Mystery & Thriller KU book promo. All books are free to read on Kindle Unlimited!

And if you haven’t gotten Foreign Exchange, the prequel novella, you can grab it and lots of other books completely FREE in the International Espionage and Spy Thrillers book giveaway!

And finally, check out the Edge of Your Seat Thrillers & Suspense giveaway!

Publish AND Perish: The Academic’s Dilemma. Plus musings on Ukraine, and this week’s selection of giveaways

Hello everyone! I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend. If you’re in Florida: Stay safe! If you’re in my part of the world, I hope you can enjoy the beautiful weather we’re currently having.

I spent a while wondering what to write about today. Should I talk about the start of the new semester? (For those of you just joining us, I was on medical leave last semester due to a crippling case of late-stage Lyme disease, toxic mold poisoning, and other fun things). I just finished my first week of being back teaching, which has made it clear that, surprise surprise, I am in no way recovered. Sorry everyone who keeps asking in saccharine tones if I’m “All better.” Recovery is going to be very slow, inasmuch as it happens at all.

I am walking better than I was this time last year, so that’s encouraging, but I’ve been having a lot of problems with losing my voice. This is a bit of an issue for a teacher. The good news is that I have finished re-recording (long story) the audiobook for Permanent Position, Book #2 in the Doctor Rowena Halley series, and am almost done editing it. Deciding to do an audiobook version has put a big delay on the release, but soon, soon it will be ready. Maybe even in September! Stay tuned for more updates.

Going back to my quandary of what to write today, I then thought of talking about the recent elections in Ukraine. If you haven’t been following along with that story, Volodymyr/Vladimir Zelensky, an actor who played the president of Ukraine in a popular sitcom was, in fact, elected president of the country in a landslide victory this May. You cannot make this stuff up. His party, “Servant of the People” (named after the tv show) just won a resounding majority in the parliamentary elections, taking control of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. Major reforms are promised. Of course, major reforms are always being promised in Ukraine. As with my health, improvement, if it happens at all, has been a slow and painful process. Everyone wants the miracle, the quick path to heaven. Unfortunately, that’s not normally how things work.

But at the moment everyone’s all full of rosy hopes for Ukraine. Will it finally manage to crack down on corruption? Will there be peace in the Donbass?

I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation in Ukraine for a few years now (full disclosure: as I write this I’m live-streaming Казачье Радио/Cossack Radio, a separatist radio station in Luhansk/Lugansk), and have woven a number of elements of the current conflict there into my novels. Dima, my heroine’s ex-fiance, is a journalist covering the war in Eastern Ukraine. In Permanent Position (click to get your free ARC if you haven’t already) I place him in the 2014/2015 battle for the Donetsk Airport, while in the follow-up novella Summer Session (click to get your free ARC if you haven’t already) he observes one of the many battles around Avdiivka/Avdeyevka during 2015 (names are in both Ukrainian and Russian, if you’re wondering about the doubling).

This is part of my general strategy in the series of hewing as close to real life as possible. My heroine Rowena and her friends aren’t real people, but their experiences are closely based on reality.

A major part of that reality is Rowena’s precarious financial situation, along with the tremendous pressure academics are under to publish. Like a lot of contingent faculty members, Rowena hopes that publishing a few articles, or better yet, a book, will help vault her into the ranks of the financially secure. This means that she is in no position to publish intellectually meaningful scholarship, since intellectually meaningful scholarship tends to have a hard time getting through peer review, something she meditates on in Book 1 of the series, Campus Confidential (click to get it on Amazon, where it’s free on KU).

Rowena’s financial and professional struggles are taken from real life, including the amounts she’s paid for teaching; the $3,200/course she’s paid in Permanent Position is the average rate per course for adjuncts in North Carolina. All her jokes about taking up bagging groceries, stripping, or streetwalking are taken from contingent academics’ real-life attempts to fund their teaching hobby with real work.

On the other hand, publishing and getting a “good” job is no guarantee of wealth and riches, as shown in Kathryn Rudy’s breakdown of what it costs her to publish her research, and why she, a full professor at a reasonably elite Western institution of higher education, is broke. In brief: she has to pay for all the travel costs, all the licensing of images and so on, and foot the bill for the actual publishing. As she points out, this isn’t “vanity” publishing. These are respectable academic presses that put out peer-reviewed scholarly works. If you want to get tenure and keep tenure, or even a halfway decent temporary position, you will probably need to publish a book, maybe several books, in this way. So even if you jump off the adjunct treadmill that Rowena finds herself in, you might not find yourself living the comfortable upper-class lifestyle of the senior academics in Lucky Jim.

The two things–post-Soviet politics and publishing–came together for me this week, when I was invited by an academic press to submit a proposal for my scholarly monograph about Chechen war literature. This entailed a fair amount of agonizing and hand-wringing on my part. Did I want to put in all that time, money, and effort, especially when my health is still so poor, into publishing a book that probably won’t make any money or even get read very much (scholarly works tend to sell a few dozen or hundred copies at best)?

On the other hand, I feel a moral obligation to spread the word about the topic of Chechnya and Chechen war literature, especially after the authors I profile have so graciously granted me interviews and expressed a strong desire to share their stories with the West. One of the reasons I include so much about Chechnya and Ukraine in the Doctor Rowena Halley series is because it’s the topic of my “day job” scholarly research. Not only am I interested in it, but I want other people to be interested in it as well.

And then there’s the fact that going through the process of attempting to publish a scholarly monograph with an academic press will no doubt provide much fodder for my fiction! When you look at it from that angle, it’s a win-win.

So if I do through with this other publishing endeavor, I’ll be sure to keep you posted, and let you know how it will inform my next novel! Expect hearty laughs–I hope.

Meanwhile, here’s this week’s selection of giveaways:

Back to School Special

Celebrate the start of the school year with the Back to School Special Giveaway! All the books are school-themed.

Summer Shorts

Enjoy the last few days of summer and pick up some mystery short stories in the Summer Shorts Giveaway!

Damsels who cause distress

Check out these butt-kicking heroines in the Damsels Who Cause Distress Giveaway on StoryOrigin!

What Are You Reading? Plus Meditations on Cliffhangers, and This Week’s Selection of Giveaways

“But Krymov was now in the grip of new impressions; he was walking on the earth of Stalingrad.”

Stalingrad

So ends Vasily Grossman’s magnificent Stalingrad, the “prequel,” as it were, to his even more magnificent Life and Fate. He originally intended them as a two-part work that would tell a complete story; due to the vagaries of publication, Stalingrad was published in the Soviet Union (under the title For a Just Cause) in the 1950s, while Life and Fate was published in the West in the 1980s. Stalingrad finally appeared in English translation for the first time this summer, in what was the Russian translation event of the year. So naturally I had to read it.

I could go on and on about how good it is, but I recommend reading it for yourself instead of taking my word for it. It’s a war novel, and a production novel, and a family drama, and a picture of Soviet life during the first part of WWII, when things were looking truly bleak for the USSR. Stalingrad ends, as you can see from the quote above, just as one of the main characters, finally sets foot in the city after retreating all the way from Kiev and receiving the “Not One Step Back” order to stop the Soviet retreat and hold the line at Stalingrad.

I’ve always loved this kind of ending, especially as, in this case, it concludes an early installment in a series. It’s very Romantic-with-a-Capital-R, as we see in the delightfully fragmented works of Pushkin, Lermontov, or “Odysseus’s Fate,” my favorite poem by Konstantin Batyushkov. I love the sudden opening of the narrative, the feeling that, just as you think the journey is over, a hidden vista has suddenly appeared on the horizon. They give so much space for the reader to create their own meaning, just when it seems that the author is about to collapse the storyline into one interpretation.

In other words, I’m an unashamed fan of what are commonly called cliffhangers. I adore encountering them in the novels that I read, and I love to incorporate them in my own books.

That being said, they have to be used with care. In the above example, it works so well in Stalingrad because 1) Krymov has been striving the entire book to get to Stalingrad, so his arrival is the resolution of that storyline as well as the beginning of a new storyline, about the actual Battle of Stalingrad, and 2) there’s a sequel.

Since I write stories that combine elements of mystery/thriller/suspense and romance, cliffhangers have to be approached with especial care. Both of those genres require a very specific kind of plot resolution. Mysteries have to end with the protagonist solving the main mystery, otherwise they’re not mystery stories, and romance novels have to end with the two main protagonists ending up together. No exceptions! Romance readers are very strict about this, as they should be. I mean, you can write a story about a failed romance, but it’s not a romance novel.

Of course, if you’re writing a series, the rules can be a bit looser, in that the resolution can happen at the end of the series rather than the end of each book. So in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike books, each book ends with a specific mystery being solved, but the ongoing romantic tension between the two characters only grows from book to book, without (yet) being resolved. In fact, the third book, Career of Evil, ends on a devilishly suspenseful moment.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a huge fan of the series. Have you read it? How do you think it compares with Harry Potter? I may actually prefer it to HP, although Harry will always hold a special place in my heart…

So in my own writing, I specifically sought to borrow techniques that I particularly enjoy from authors I particularly admire. Which means I resolve the main suspense/thriller/mystery conflict at the end of each of my Doctor Rowena Halley books, but then leave a little transitional moment at the very end that provides both resolution of the romantic subplot, and a cliffhanger-ish moment leading into the next book.

So in Campus Confidential,

(you see what I did there?)

Campus Confidential Front Cover Small

Speaking of Campus Confidential, KU subscribers should check out the Mysteries & Thrillers on Kindle Unlimited book event. Dozens of mysteries & thrillers, all free on KU, have been gathered together in one place for your perusing pleasure!

the main mystery and action scene are resolved, but I end with the hint that my protagonist Rowena *may* be starting a new romance.

In Permanent Position, the second book in the series, I up the cliffhanger stakes, ending with the following words (SPOILER ALERT!):

Permanent Position Front Cover

And if you haven’t yet picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Permanent Position, you can find it and dozens of other mysteries and thrillers in the Page Turning Mystery/Thriller Giveaway.

“But there, in amongst all the junk mail, was an email from Dima. Both the subject line and the body had the same, two-word message:

Forgive me.”

Like Krymov’s arrival in Stalingrad I quoted at the beginning of this post, this ending serves both as an end point and a beginning. A theme that runs through the entire novel is forgiveness and redemption. Dima’s request for forgiveness thus acts as the culmination of that thread of the story, while simultaneously opening up possibilities that until that moment had seemed closed. It’s literally a pivotal moment, causing the overall storyline of the series to pivot in a new direction at the “hinge” between two books.

Summer Session, the novella that comes right after Permanent Position, has a slightly less cliffhanger-y ending, but also has a kind of “hinge” moment in its final scene.

Summer Session Cover Small

If you haven’t yet gotten a free Advance Review Copy of Summer Session, you can get it and loads of other mystery shorts in the Summer Shorts! Giveaway.

Summer Session ends with the following conversation:

“Is that a promise?” I asked.

He grinned. “You bet.”

Again, it’s a resolution, but it’s a resolution that leaves a lot open. The juxtaposition of the words “promise” and “bet” suggest both certainty and uncertainty. The future, as Tom Petty would tell us, is actually wide open, even as the characters appear to be closing it down.

Wow! What a lot of writing! It’s fun to apply my carefully honed skills in close reading to my own works–until this moment I had never even thought about the “promise” and “bet” thing 🙂

But enough about that–what do you like to read? What are some books/series you’ve read recently that have really knocked your socks off?

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways:

Summer Thrills and Chills

The Summer Thrills & Chills Giveaway is still going strong!

Damsels who cause distress

Want to find a whole host of kickass heroines? Check out the Damsels Who Cause Distress Giveaway on StoryOrigin!

Back to School Special

School doesn’t have to be boring! Swing by the Back to School Special Giveaway to stock up on all your school-related reading.

On Accidents and Accents: Narrating My Books

I hope everyone is enjoying the hot weather! Unless you’re Down Under, in which case I hope you’re enjoying the cold weather. I’ve always wanted to go Down Under and spend a while visiting Australia and New Zealand. Maybe someday I’ll get that chance. Maybe as part of the round-the-world trip by boat I keep fantasizing about. Crossing the oceans by boat would be a way of circumnavigating the globe while significantly reducing the carbon footprint of doing so, plus I’ve developed a significant aversion to flying in the past decade or so. It recently occurred to me that maybe it has something to do with the fact that planes are full of chemicals (I have multiple chemical sensitivity) and probably also mold (because they’re carpeted). Not sure if boats would be much better, but…

Wait, what does this have to do with writing? Nothing, so let’s move on.

As you know if you’ve been following along with these posts (and if you’re new here, then welcome!), I’v been podcasting my stories from the Doctor Rowena Halley series.

Listen to the latest episode on iTunes here.

The plan is eventually to make audiobooks out of them. The podcast has been a good, if occasionally frustrating, way to figure out the technical aspects and try out different narration techniques.

One iteration of my home recording studio, shortly before it collapsed, terrifying my Chihuahua and nearly taking out my computer–hence the “accidents” in the post title.

At the moment, I’m trying to rest up my voice after accidentally messing up my throat yesterday by trying to do voices for the male characters. I always found it annoying when narrators did silly (in my opinion) voices for the different characters, with their parodic accents and (shudder!) that horrid high-pitched, breathy sound when male narrators affect a female voice. As I say in Campus Confidential, that sound pretty much always marks the person being imitated as an idiot.

But, I discovered, it is very helpful to do something to mark the different characters as different while narrating dialogue. Doing the Russian characters was no problem: one thing I certainly do know how to do is a Russian accent, although it’s rather better in Russian than in English.

Things got more complicated when I started narrating other characters. The one that’s given me the most trouble so far is Rowena’s brother John. Obviously he should have some kind of a markedly masculine voice. And a bit of a Southern accent.

Well, I thought, I should be able to do a Southern accent. After all, I am from the South. Once upon a time I even had an accent, before I, like Rowena, suppressed it ruthlessly. Now it’s firmly repressed, and my regular accent is standard educated American, with a side of English (I used to live in England). My regular speaking voice has become quite posh, as I discovered with surprise when I started listening to recordings of myself.

But, lurking under all that, there is, it turns out, a Southern accent, one that was more than ready to come out once I had coaxed it to the surface. Now I’m finding it bursting forth at unexpected moments. Once I’m done narrating Permanent Position

If you haven’t yet picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Permanent Position, you can snag one in the Fierce Feminist Fiction book giveaway on Bookfunnel.

I’m going to have to go back to suppressing it ruthlessly.

Unfortunately, my native Southern accent is from Western Kentucky. So while John should have a Georgia drawl, what keeps coming out is more of a Midsouth twang. But whatever. At least it is a more or less authentic Southern accent, which is more than I can say about a lot of the “Southern” accents you hear on TV. But don’t get me started on that…

Next stop: Arabic and Persian accents! Now that will be a challenge!

You can listen to the podcast (with some but not all of the glorious accents I plan to deploy for the actual audiobooks) on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

And here’s this week’s selection of book giveaways!

Make an escapist getaway with the Women’s Fiction and Chick Lit Beach Reads giveaway!

Get your rebel on and tickle your funny bone with the Politically Incorrect Satire giveaway!

Celebrate the heat with the Sizzling Summer Suspense Stories giveaway!

See a Sneak Peek of My Current Work in Progress!

Hi everyone! Hope you’re having a fabulous Fourth of July holiday. Alas, since my household contains a particularly nervous Chihuahua with Addison’s disease, the Fourth is the most awfulest of all awful holidays around here, but I’m glad to say that all of us made it through with no obvious long-term damage.

I’ve been hard at work on Trigger Warning, book 3 in the Doctor Rowena Halley series, and am now about 47,000 words in (that’s about halfway through your standard novel, if you’re curious). So I thought I’d share a sneak peek (did I spell that right? I have a block about the peek vs peak difference. At least I normally know when it should be pique) of it. Be advised that it is from the first draft of an uncompleted manuscript, so it’s in pretty rough shape and will probably change between now and when ARCs go out, let alone the actual release, but I thought it might be a fun thing anyway.

But first! If you haven’t gotten an ARC of Book 2, Permanent Position, you can snap one up in the “Fierce Feminist Fiction” giveaway on StoryOrigin right now.

And if you want to get an ARC of “Summer Session,” a novella that’s book 2.5 in the series, you can grab one in the “It’s a Family Affair” giveaway on BookFunnel.

Family Affair Header

And now, without further ado, the first chapter of Trigger Warning:

It’s really depressing how even small pieces of good fortune are followed so often by their reverse.

I had plenty of opportunities to contemplate this universal truth as I sat, stood, and walked through the intermidable orientation process for my new job at Crimson College. I had spent all of the spring semester trying to get this job, and all summer making plans for what I would do when I started it. But now that I was finally here, I was hoping that this portion of the job, at least, would be over. And the future wasn’t looking too good either.

In marked contrast to my previous faculty jobs, which had been notable largely for their professional neglect, my current position as a VAP (Visiting Assistant Professor) of Russian involved a multiday onboarding process. Over the previous two days I, along with the largest and most contingent-heavy group of new faculty in Crimson College’s history, had toured the campus and the dorms, done several exquisitely humiliating team-building exercises, and attended lectures and orientation sessions on the library, IT facilities, campus security, and the zeitgeist of the current crop of undergrads. Which was apparently stressed out. We were given several training sessions on how to recognize drug abuse, binge drinking, suicidal ideation, and potential warnings that a student was about to flip out and commit a mass shooting. As part of that, campus police did a short session on what to do during an active shooter event, from which I gathered that if anyone did come strolling into your classroom with their finger pressed down on the trigger of an AR-15, you were well and truly fucked.

“Nothing,” we were assured by several different deans, “like that is going to happen at Crimson, of course, but it’s always better to be prepared. Everyone is very happy here. The worst we have to deal with is the Gang of Six.”

The first dean who brought up the Gang of Six then skipped on merrily to talking about town and gown outreach without seeming to notice the excited murmer that went through everyone at the sound of this intriguing name. The second dean who mentioned it hastily corrected himself and refused to answer any questions about it. By the time it came up again, during the session with campus police, everyone was burning with curiosity, and when the particularly mousy-looking dean who had dropped the name tried to pretend that she hadn’t said anything about it, several of the new faculty members insisted, actually almost raising their voices, that we be informed what was going on.

“It’s an anonymous group with an anonymous website,” said the chief of the campus police force, when the mousy dean gulped and refused to say anything more. “We’re keeping an eye on them.”

“Are they making death threats? Planning mass shootings?” demanded several voices at once.

The mousy dean gulped again.

“No,” said the chief of police. I had the impression that he was having a hard time not snorting or rolling his eyes. “They,’re, uh, how shall I put this, writing blog posts about social justice issues. We have no reason to believe that they pose any threat of violence at all. But they’ve expressed some, uh, discontent with certain aspects of campus life, so the college administration has decided to keep an eye on them. We always get a few unhappy customers—the Men’s Protection Alliance has been blathering on for months now—but they never actually cause trouble.”

This led to a fierce debate amongst the incoming faculty about the ethics of monitoring student groups and student social media activity, and for a moment it looked like a shouting match might break out between someone from the B School (business) and someone from English, until the police chief broke it up and told everyone we needed to finish the training session on active shooters, because we’d be really sorry if we didn’t and something happened in one of our classes.

That had been followed up yesterday evening with an outdoor picnic where we had hobnobbed with two fresh new deans, the Provost, and the President. That had been so much fun I had seriously considered bursting into tears afterwards, and wondered why I had ever agreed to take this job. Oh right, because I needed the money.

Now, at quarter past eight in the morning, I was pushing my way through the Georgia August heat in search of Lee 032, where the mandatory diversity and inclusion training was scheduled to be held.

I had parked in the designated new faculty parking area on the far side of the athletics center and hoofed it past the tennis courts, around the outdoor track and the football practice field, over the beach volleyball area, filling my shoes with sand in the process, past several dorms, and across the back quad to Lee, the main administrative building. Which may or may not have been named after Robert E. Lee. The college was cagey on that subject.

Sweat was trickling down my sides, soaking my bra and panties, by the time I found an open entrance to Lee. The chill of the air conditioning hitting my wet clothes was welcome at first. By the time I had circled the first floor twice and found the stairs to the basement, where Lee 032 was housed, I was feeling distinctly chilled. And I still had four more hours in here to go.

Lee 032 was a windowless basement space that looked kind of like a church rec room. Round tables, laid with tableclothes in Crimson College colors (crimson and cream, a combo that looked sort of but not exactly like Harvard’s), had been set out around the room.

“There are name tags and place cards.” A woman in a uniform-y non-uniform of a crimson blouse and cream pencil skirt stopped me at the door. Her name tag said Tanika Scott, Assistant Dean of Faculty Development. She looked at a table diagram in her hand. “What’s your last name?”

“Halley,” I told her. “Rowena Halley. Russian.”

“Goodness! That’s not something you hear every day. Welcome to Crimson, Rowena. Here’s your name tag. You’re at table four. Over there.”

I took the name tag and followed her pointing finger to a table in the back corner of the room. The back corner was fine with me. Maybe I could catch a brief nap or at least check my email while I was there.

Another woman was already sitting there, scrolling through her phone. She was tall and fit and looked about my age, so mid-thirties, and had weathered skin and dark blonde hair that had been cut in a very short pixie that flirted with the boundary between attractively gamine and aggressively mannish.

Lesbian, ex-military, I guessed.

“Oh hey,” she said, looking up from her phone as I approached. “Take a seat.” She pulled out a chair for me. “Mel,” she said as I sat down. “Well, Melissa Wilson, but everyone calls me Mel. Arabic.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Rowena Halley. Russian.”

“Nice. Oh hey, are you at our table too?”

A short, slightly plump woman was hovering uncertainly behind me, like she wanted to join us but didn’t quite have the nerve. She was wearing big glasses, an oversized blouse and maxi-skirt, and was the only black person in the room other than Tanika Scott and the woman standing in the background wearing a caterer’s uniform.

“I think so,” she said diffidently. “I’m, uh, Chloe. Chloe Taylor. Chinese.”

“Well don’t just stand there, take a seat,” Mel told her. “And welcome to the torturers’ and terrorists’ table.”

I laughed. Mel winked at me. Chloe swallowed and sat down without looking at either me or Mel. Up close, I could see that her big glasses hid beautifully clear smooth skin, marred only by scars on her temples, presumably from a lifetime of aggressive hair straightening.

I had just opened my mouth to say something comforting to her when my phone pinged at me. I glanced at the screen, and my heart skipped a beat. It was a WhatsApp message from Dima.

“Everyone turn off your phones, please!” a heavyset woman called out in a singsong voice. “And welcome to Crimson!”

***

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways:

Literary Fiction

There’s just a couple days left in the “Literary Fiction” Giveaway on BookFunnel, so check it out before it’s gone!

Fabulous, Feisty & Female

It’s the last week of the “Fabulous, Feisty & Female” all-genres giveaway on StoryOrigin!

It’s hot out there! Celebrate the heat with the “Sizzling Summer Suspense Stories” giveaway on BookFunnel!

Happy Midsummer! Plus Podcasting and Other Fun

Hi All! Hope you’re having a fabulous Midsummer.

I’m hoping I’m having a fabulous Midsummer too, especially since it’s my birthday, but I’m now starting to worry that I might have picked up a cold during my visit to the doctor yesterday. That could be either really bad news (because it could plunge me into a major crash), or really good news (there’s a school of thought that says that getting a cold is a sign of your immune system returning to normal after the ravages of Lyme disease). Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ve been pressing on with the podcast. In fact, I’ve finished podcasting Campus Confidential, and started Permanent Position. So if you want to listen to me narrating my own books (with accompanying bird tweets–they make a tremendous racket around my house, and I’m not always successful at editing them out), you can do so on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

Permanent Position Front Cover

And if you haven’t downloaded an ARC of Permanent Position yet, you can do so in the Fabulous, Feisty & Female Book Giveaway, going on now on StoryOrigin.

More Giveaways!

Mystery Shorts

It’s the last weekend to check out the Mystery Shorts Giveaway!

Psychological Thrillers

The Psychological Thriller Summer Book Bonanza is still going strong.

Summer Session Cover Small

And last but not least, you can pick up an ARC of my novella “Summer Session,” plus lots of other family-themed stories, in the It’s a Family Affair Giveaway.

The Apple link is here and the Nook link is here.

Not sure if I’ve shared this yet, but I’ve been to Finland and speak a bit of Finnish. Although not enough to read the book easily in the original, alas.

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways!

It’s cold out there! Warm up with a little vengeance in the Ice Cold Vengeance giveaway.

Celebrate the season with the Crime Filled Christmas giveaway.

Enjoy the wintry weather with the Snowed In giveaway.

Ring in the New Year with the New Year’s Noir giveaway.

Now seems like a good time to mention that the audiobook of Permanent Position is currently free on AppleBooks and Nook Audiobooks.

Oh, and if you’d like to get into reviewing audiobooks, StoryOrigin is currently running a review code giveaway for suspense and thriller audiobooks.

Want to experience more audiobooks? Check out the Dead of Winter Thriller Audio Shorts giveaway.

Oh, and if you’re in the US, Canada, or Australia and you’d like a review code for the audiobook of Summer Session, book 3 in the series, reply to this post or email me at sidstarkauthor@gmail.com and let me know!

And now for this week’s giveaways:

The holiday season got you feeling vengeful? Check out the Ice Cold Vengeance promo! Mysteries, thrillers, and suspense with a revenge plot or subplot.

On the other hand, if you’re starting to get into the season, check out the Snowed In giveaway.

And you’ll absolutely want to visit the Crime Filled Christmas giveaway.

If you haven’t read Foreign Exchange, the prequel to the Doctor Rowena Halley series, you can get it and many other suspense stories for free in the Domestic Suspense giveaway.

I had to do a crash course on Arabic and Persian accents as part of the recording of Permanent Position.

I had to learn a tiny bit of Arabic to do the audio for Summer Session. Apparently my Arabic has a heavy Russian accent.

And here’s this week’s selection of giveaways

Want to spice up your fall? Check out the Spicy Fall Suspense Giveaway!

Want just a little bit of romance, but not too much? Check out the Love in the Strangest Places Giveaway!

Booklinker is playing up and refusing to give me my universal link, so here’s the UK link, here’s the Canadian link, and here’s the Australian link.

And, of course, this week’s selection of promos and giveaways!

There’s still one more week left of the Edge of Your Seat Thrillers Giveaway!

If you haven’t picked up a free ARC of “Summer Session,” the novella that follows immediately after Permanent Position, you can grab one in the Feel-Good Crime and Thrillers Giveaway.

Check out the International Women of Mystery Amazon sales book event, for mystery/suspense novels featuring female protagonists! Dozens of titles, most free on Kindle Unlimited.

The artwork for the audiobook

And now it’s time for this week’s selection of giveaways!

Haven’t read Campus Confidential, book #1 in the series, yet? You can pick up it and many other books in the Crime, Mystery & Thriller KU book promo. All books are free to read on Kindle Unlimited!

And if you haven’t gotten Foreign Exchange, the prequel novella, you can grab it and lots of other books completely FREE in the International Espionage and Spy Thrillers book giveaway!

And finally, check out the Edge of Your Seat Thrillers & Suspense giveaway!

Meanwhile, here’s this week’s selection of giveaways:

Celebrate the start of the school year with the Back to School Special Giveaway! All the books are school-themed.

Enjoy the last few days of summer and pick up some mystery short stories in the Summer Shorts Giveaway!

Check out these butt-kicking heroines in the Damsels Who Cause Distress Giveaway on StoryOrigin!

In other words, I’m an unashamed fan of what are commonly called cliffhangers. I adore encountering them in the novels that I read, and I love to incorporate them in my own books.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a huge fan of the series. Have you read it? How do you think it compares with Harry Potter? I may actually prefer it to HP, although Harry will always hold a special place in my heart…

Speaking of Campus Confidential, KU subscribers should check out the Mysteries & Thrillers on Kindle Unlimited book event. Dozens of mysteries & thrillers, all free on KU, have been gathered together in one place for your perusing pleasure!

And if you haven’t yet picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Permanent Position, you can find it and dozens of other mysteries and thrillers in the Page Turning Mystery/Thriller Giveaway.

If you haven’t yet gotten a free Advance Review Copy of Summer Session, you can get it and loads of other mystery shorts in the Summer Shorts! Giveaway.

Wow! What a lot of writing! It’s fun to apply my carefully honed skills in close reading to my own works–until this moment I had never even *thought* about the “promise” and “bet” thing 🙂

But enough about that–what do you like to read? What are some books/series you’ve read recently that have really knocked your socks off?

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways:

The Summer Thrills & Chills Giveaway is still going strong!

Want to find a whole host of kickass heroines? Check out the Damsels Who Cause Distress Giveaway on StoryOrigin!

School doesn’t have to be boring! Swing by the Back to School Special Giveaway to stock up on all your school-related reading.

Listen to the latest episode on iTunes here.

One iteration of my home recording studio, shortly before it collapsed, terrifying my Chihuahua and nearly taking out my computer–hence the “accidents” in the post title.

If you haven’t yet picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Permanent Position, you can snag one in the Fierce Feminist Fiction book giveaway on Bookfunnel.

You can listen to the podcast (with some but not all of the glorious accents I plan to deploy for the actual audiobooks) on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

And here’s this week’s selection of book giveaways!

Make an escapist getaway with the Women’s Fiction and Chick Lit Beach Reads giveaway!

Get your rebel on and tickle your funny bone with the Politically Incorrect Satire giveaway!

Celebrate the heat with the Sizzling Summer Suspense Stories giveaway!

But first! If you haven’t gotten an ARC of Book 2, Permanent Position, you can snap one up in the “Fierce Feminist Fiction” giveaway on StoryOrigin right now.

And if you want to get an ARC of “Summer Session,” a novella that’s book 2.5 in the series, you can grab one in the “It’s a Family Affair” giveaway on BookFunnel.

And now, without further ado, the first chapter of Trigger Warning:

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways:

There’s just a couple days left in the “Literary Fiction” Giveaway on BookFunnel, so check it out before it’s gone!

It’s the last week of the “Fabulous, Feisty & Female” all-genres giveaway on StoryOrigin!

It’s hot out there! Celebrate the heat with the “Sizzling Summer Suspense Stories” giveaway on BookFunnel!

And if you haven’t downloaded an ARC of Permanent Position yet, you can do so in the Fabulous, Feisty & Female Book Giveaway, going on now on StoryOrigin.

More Giveaways!

It’s the last weekend to check out the Mystery Shorts Giveaway!

The Psychological Thriller Summer Book Bonanza is still going strong.

And last but not least, you can pick up an ARC of my novella “Summer Session,” plus lots of other family-themed stories, in the It’s a Family Affair Giveaway.

Wow! What a lot of writing! It’s fun to apply my carefully honed skills in close reading to my own works–until this moment I had never even thought about the “promise” and “bet” thing 🙂