Slightly Off the Mark

This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in California who's holding down a job to support her blind mother and her brother, an inventor who's working on his own flying machine. To say airplanes were still new at the time puts it mildly; in fact, the author gives credit for help on the book from Glenn C Curtis, a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry and winner of the first international air meet, and Wilbur Wright, who with his brother did something even more spectacular just eight years before publication.

Orissa's brother Steve is a genius in mechanical design, but the Kane family finds itself in the middle of a dispute with two former business partners, who want to invest in the Kane airplane for different reasons. Here Van Dyne cleverly describes one partner in heroic terms and the other like one might describe a silent movie villain--then flips the script.

Oh, no, surely not a girl. How indecent!

To say the book's approach to a female protagonist was advanced for the time is putting it mildly. Orissa Kane jumps into the role of airplane pilot fearlessly, and meets all the many challenges that come along with it. Yes, there's a boy, and Orissa never loses her "maidenly virtues", but she's also competent and way braver than I would have been.

But what would you expect, from the same author who invented Dorothy Gale and Ozma of Oz?

Because Edith Van Dyne was really L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. That shouldn't come as a surprise for those who read the Oz books, which were full of strong, smart, competent female characters. (And it's how The Flying Girl came into my reading orbit. I've been reading up on Baum as I prepared to tackle writing my own Oz book.)

By today's standards The Flying Girl would be considered a young adult book, and it also works pretty well, a century later, as an historical novel. In context it's surprisingly advanced not only in its treatment of women, but in its technical aspects--it turns out Baum, who wrote science fiction and invented an early robot and miniature submarines, had an interest in the mechanical.

There's a sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and I liked this one enough to look forward to trying the second one.

 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53386/53386-h/53386-h.htm

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929527241

 More Slightly Off the Mark: Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies, was featured May 7 (today as I write this) on Bargain Booksy. It's a newsletter where you can find bargain books, see? (Oh, now I get it.) Their website is here:

https://www.bargainbooksy.com

You may not get their newsletter, but the price is still a buck ninety-nine for the e-book, and only $7.50 for the print version. That's less than most fast food meals--and without the cholesterol.

Just to clarify, if you read the subtitle carefully you'll realize it states that I do NOT hate cats. Got it? I don't want another repeat of that time when PETA burned a scratching post on my front yard.

See? We're having a great time.

Many people say humor doesn't sell, but I disagree. All you really need to sell a humor book is an author who's famous, infamous, or in prison. I'm working on it.

Anyway, More Slightly Off the Mark is the sequel to Slightly Off the Mark, and a modern day examination of humor columns I originally wrote twenty years ago. It is, in my considerable opinion, one of the two best books of humor columns ever written in my house ... I'll give you that I haven't looked into who owned the place since the Powells lived here in the fifties. I suppose it's theoretically possible that Fred Markey, who carved his name on my garage wall in 1879, also published a book of humor columns. Maybe I shouldn't be so full of myself.

I'm not even the only writer in my own house.

More Slightly Off the Mark: Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies is just $1.99 on Kindle—free on Kindle Unlimited—and is also available in print for $7.50. Find it on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/More-Slightly-off-Mark-Other/dp/1709741287

Or on the author's website:

http://www.markrhunter.com/

Remember to support authors—because most have pets to feed, even if they're not cats.

"Whoa, wait--what about paying for pet food?"

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

I like to know what readers are thinking, especially when it comes to my writing. For instance, while reviews are vital for an author's success these days, they're not just for social media's algorithms: They can also let the author know what may or may not work for his audience.

And they can drive the author to drink, but never mind.

That's why I ran that poll earlier this month, in which I asked readers which of our book or books they thought I should run promotions for next. I got a lot of hits on that blog, probably not because of my sparkling wit. The surprise: 100% of those who voted in the poll thought I should promote one of my romantic comedies next.

Or maybe not such a surprise. considering that at this writing only three people actually voted.

Ah, well. One of my friends said they couldn't access the poll from where they were, cyber-speaking, so I'm just going to pretend that slowed down the results by, say, 500%. Oh, if you want to hit me with a contradictory vote, it's still up:

Promotion isn't the most exciting thing to vote on, after all. Besides, if I wanted to make it easy on myself, I'd have stuck to just one genre to begin with.

Still, when 100% of people motivated enough to give their opinion give the same one, maybe that should tell me something. I think, in between submissions and working on my new novel, I'm going to put a little more time and money into promoting Coming Attractions.

Guess I picked the wrong decade to give up drinking.

It's my newest novel, and I really think it deserves more of an audience. Besides, since getting the rights back to two of the others we haven't had time to reissue them, so their presence on the internet is limited right now. The last one, Radio Red, also deserve more readers (in my opinion), but it's not as recent, so Coming Attractions it is.

Now I have another question for you, especially for my readers who are writers themselves: What is your preferred/most effective method of promoting books? I've had some success here and there, but not enough to really make back the money I spent. I'm considering doing an Amazon promotion, which some authors swear by. Me, I just swear.

Opinions? I promise not to put it in a poll.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 Time for a poll!

I mean, a survey--get your dancing mind out of the gutter.

I just realized, it's been over four months since I did any kind of promotion or advertising at all for our books. This is not how one should run a business, but it's easy to do, since I have a hard time thinking of writing as a business.

Last year, I spent ... well, more money than I took in, advertising. Yes, it produced an increase in sales, but it's hard to tell how much, and what worked best. To paraphrase the old joke, there are three good ways to promote books, but nobody knows what they are.

The other question is, which books to promote? We won't be able to get a new book out as soon as I'd hoped this year, but I have a dozen or so previously published ones to keep on everyone's reading radar. (Didn't LeVar Burton host Reading Radar?)

Should it be the most recent one, More Slightly Off the Mark?

Or my first published novel, which sees its tenth anniversary later this year?
 

(It's the one on the left.)

Or maybe I should go by genre, since I've written in more genres than Congress has pay raises. Humor doesn't sell worth crap unless you're already famous, so maybe I should give up on it or get an HBO special, or maybe a prison term, which always ups sales.

Maybe I should do a poll. Anyone know how to do a poll? Me, either. Let me check around.

💁✌💤

Okay, well, now I know how to do that. Let's try again:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bV_IvSwiWKchvD8TaEQ1z0Nw5GbdHdXhKQpXerhxJdM/prefill

They should both go to the same place. If one of them works, you should be able to tell me what to spend my money on to get you to spend your money! I mean, if we're not getting rich we might as well have fun, right?

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 The final draft of The Source Emerald is done!

Wait, let me start over:

The "final draft" of The Source Emerald is done! (Assuming that will continue to be the title.)

There, more accurate. The Source Emerald is about a young FBI agent who is assigned to track down possible gem smugglers, only to discover two of her suspects claim to be foreigners--specifically, from the Land of Oz, which they insist is a real place. And if they don't find the mysterious gems everyone seems to be after, it might be the end of both their worlds.

I suppose it can be considered urban fantasy--I wasn't thinking in terms of genre when I wrote it. You might remember that my word count changed from draft to draft, starting at 67,515, peaking at 70,294 with the second draft, then dropping to 69,028. Now, after polishing and going through the whole thing line by line to check for voice and errors, I'm left with 69,370 words. I added some here and there for clarity, but also cut a lot out of one of the later chapters.

So, from the first word typed on November 1st to the "final" version, it took me just under three months to finish an almost 70,000 word novel. Yay, me! (I did do some outlining and research in October.)

Now Emily gets it.

Emily was holding my granddaughter hostage until I finished my draft!! Hey, I don't make stuff up.

My wife/editor/IT department/cover artist doesn't take any crap from me. The manuscript will come back full of red words, with numerous notes in the margins. She'll tell me what does and doesn't make sense, what word choice is wrong, where I'm being long winded, and what food is best for me. Well, that last one isn't directly connected.

Then I'll go through the whole thing all over again, because writing is editing. When it's finally, completely, for sure done, I'll put it in a file and go over to reread We Love Trouble, the book I went through all this with last year. When The Source Emerald has sufficiently cooled, I'll try to read it for entertainment, like a regular reader, and we'll see.

This is the writing process. The process is boring to everyone but the writer, and sometimes even to them. But it's the best way I know to get a good product.

Also, I can't write without the dog keeping a close eye on me. I think he's spying for Emily.

 Second draft of the new novel-in-progress: done. New working title: The Source Emerald.

The rough draft weighed in at 67,515 words. Even after cutting some of the final chapter, the second draft finished at 70,294 words. A lot of those extra 2,779 words consisted of me saying, "Huh? What did I mean by that?" and then going in to make it clearer. The whole thing is better now.

I think.

And how does one celebrate the completion of a second draft?

Why, by starting the third draft, of course.

I leave you with a photo of a giant emerald.

This, the Bahia Emerald from Brazil, is believed to be the largest single shard ever found. It weighed about 752 pounds, and has been valued at about $400,000,000.

It was necessary to shrink the emerald in my book down to thirty-two pounds, but it was once much larger, and still resembles this one. And that, Mr. NSA guy, is why I've been researching gems so much lately.

 I know all of you have thought to yourself, "What makes for a good advertisement? How do those people get me to buy their stuff?"

I dunno.

But I did write my own ad for our most recent published book, and sent it out into the cold, cruel world, where for all I know it's being read by someone in a secret bunker in North Korea even as we speak. It was an interesting challenge, because I put it up on a book site that wanted me to write something about a third of the length this originally was.

 I'm putting it here to show people an example of selling the soap, to ask what others think about it, and to ask if the expression is still "selling the soap". I've never sold soap. Despite that, I occasionally get up on my soapbox.

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Is the turn of the last century already ancient history?

In More Slightly Off the Mark: Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies, Mark R. Hunter collects his 2000-2001 humor pieces—the earliest he put on a computer. In DOS … on a floppy disk.

The change in just twenty years resulted in a complete rewrite, so Hunter inserts his present self into the work—mostly to make fun of his older stuff. Along the way he riffs on everything from history to health, vacations, holidays, and, of course, technology. Weather also, naturally—because everyone talks about that.

It's just $1.99 on Kindle—free on Kindle Unlimited—and is also available in print for $7.50. Find it on Amazon:

Or on the author's website:

http://www.markrhunter.com/

Remember to support authors—the original self-isolation workers.

NaNoWriMo update: 35,000 words into the new novel!

Just an update on our newest book, More Slightly Off the Mark: We had to make some changes, and that screwed up formatting, and things happened, pandemic, yadayada ... anyway, it's back up for sale in print and e-book. If you ordered a copy direct from us, there will be a slight delay in delivery, for which I'm deeply sorry. I blame 2020.

 It's that time of year again ... that time when we think about Christmas and completely forget the fact that there's still another major holiday before then.

While I'm firmly of the "too much Christmas lessons the holiday" opinion, I'm also well aware that many of you are already searching for Christmas presents. Honestly, it's a good idea, and I should do it myself someday. But until then, here's another idea for Christmas presents:

Yes, books. If you already knew, why did you let me go on for so long?

In addition to previously dropping prices on some of our other books, we recently dropped the e-book price of Coming Attractions from $2.99 to $1.99, which according to my admittedly weak math is close to a dollar off, and in the area of half the cost of a four dollar book. 

As usual, you can go direct and get it and our other books on the website:

http://www.markrhunter.com/books.html

In that case you can get it signed ... which is kind of like your own personal graffiti, already in the book when you get it. No extra price for my defacing! Heck, it should drop the price.

Needless to say, of course, you can also get it and the other books on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Attractions-Mark-R-Hunter-ebook-dp-B07KM6JWQC

I'm hearing some people aren't leaving Amazon this year. At all. I'm more of a brick and mortar guy, but I suppose reading in general is more important to me than where you get your reading. If you're contrary, you can do a search for "Coming Attractions Mark R. Hunter" and get hits from several different book sellers, because some of us just march to the beat of our own book drums.