Slightly Off the Mark

 Well, here I am, making my annual appeal for shoppers to buy our books for Christmas. Once a year isn't so bad, is it? I have yet to make a promotional post in honor of Arbor Day.

But wait--there's more!

That's something sellers have to say, I'm not sure why. Our books should speak for themselves, but they aren't available as audiobooks yet. I thought this year I'd let the books figuratively speak for themselves, so here's a brief description:

 Storm Chaser, The Notorious Ian Grant:

The second is the sequel to the first, and both follow the basic romantic comedy outline: One of the couple is a homebody who loves their little town; the other comes from the big outside world and proceeds to spread trouble. One is a cop, the other kinda/sorta works in the entertainment industry. In the first, a woman chases storms, in the second, her brother is the storm. The other thing they have in common: We're preparing to reissue them after getting the rights back from the publisher, so at the moment you'd have to contact us direct for a print copy.

Storm Squalls: 

Short stories set in that Storm Chaser universe, formerly known as Storm Chaser Shorts--but improved with more content and a better title. I haven't been talking about it much, pending the reissue of its parent novels, but it includes a new short story I'm particularly proud of.

Coming Attractions:

 Like the Storm Chaser books, this romantic comedy is set in northeast Indiana and also involves an outsider, this one trying to get the local drive-in theater shut down. Here's a secret cameo: One of the characters from Storm Chaser makes a very brief appearance, although he's never named. Well, I guess I gave away that he's a he.

The No-Campfire Girls:

Also related to Storm Chaser, but more of a spin-off. This YA adventure stars Beth Hamlin, the irrepressible teen from the other books, who plots to defeat a burn ban at her summer camp with the help of a Native America rain dance. It doesn't end well.

Radio Red is the first romantic comedy I wrote, and it's a little heavier on both the humor and the sex (!) I mean, the publisher is Torrid Books, so what does that tell you? It's about an irreverent Michigan radio station owner who hires a down on her luck air personality just before someone starts sabotaging the station.

What's that, you say? You want some non-fiction? Maybe even some humor? Okay:

People should be full of good humor: Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving At All, proves my co-author (and wife) Emily and I are full of it. We traveled all over the state I love to find out all sorts of cool details about it, and then ... made fun of them all. But it's good natured fun, so ... there.

Slightly Off the Mark and More Slightly Off the Mark are collections of my newspaper columns: The first are columns that never published because the paper got bought out, and the second are edited, updated columns from around the early 90s. Interestingly, while the humor/history/trivia book Hoosier Hysterical has been my best seller this year, these two books have been my worst sellers. Guess I should have added more history and trivia.

Images of America: Albion and Noble County:

This one is part of Arcadia Publishing's Images of America book, photo-heavy volumes about local history. Despite being something you wouldn't expect anyone outside of Noble County to be interested in, it sold very well--which is good, because Emily and I worked hard to produce it. It's also the only one that made it onto the shelves of a Barnes and Noble (and a local CVS pharmacy!)

On an even narrower area of local history, Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With the Albion Fire Department covers the first century of the fire department I served on for forty years. It's got a bit more humor, but of course it's still a local history book--and it took me 25 years to research and write! (I wasn't writing daily, of course.)

Where do you find all these, you ask? 

Thank you for asking, much appreciated. They can all be found on our website and on Amazon:

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

And also on my daughter's website, White Birch Lane Boutique:

https://www.whitebirchlaneboutique.com/search?q=books

Most, but not all, can be found at other places:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

 https://books.apple.com/us/author/mark-r-hunter/id1025271801

You can't get all the books at all those sites for various reasons, but all in all it ain't too shabby.

Remember, every time you gift a book, an angel gets his swim trunks. It gets warm up there.

 I sent the newsletter out last week, and just now realized it was about ... pumpkins and puppies. That wasn't intentional, but what the heck! Not much new to report in the writing world, so I opted for cuteness. Can you really blame me?

 https://mailchi.mp/8aadc24d2fd8/what-i-didnt-do-on-my-summer-vacation?e=2b1e842057

 Here's one of the pumpkins, but you'll have to go to the newsletter to see the puppies.

 Remember, every time you don't buy a book, Jack goes looking for a new body. Don't lose your head over that.

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

I got another great book review, this one for Radio Red:

https://www.amazon.com/review/RHZ7LR0C7RZZP/?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B01MRZ52DM

That's four reviews in less than two weeks! The only thing better would be if the doctor told me I was registering minus on the cholesterol scale, and needed to eat more chocolate. I know that won't happen, because the doc refused to change my test results, even after I offered him half the candy--stupid Hippocratic oath.

He doesn't even own a hippo.

It's fun to create new worlds for your characters to inhabit, even if those worlds are just new communities. For my Storm Chaser series, I created a brand new place called Hurricane, a town of only a few hundred or so where some of my main characters live. In my unpublished Fire On Mist Creek I developed a town of a few thousand called--try to guess--Mist Creek, in northern Kentucky. Also unpublished is Red Is For Ick, and for that I spent some time developing a southern Indiana community of several thousand that features a theme park and a large lake.

(In Radio Red I set the story near the real-life town of Bellaire, Michigan, but never mind.)

In theory a great way to cheat and cut down on research is to set your story in a real place, but the problem with that is that you'd better get your details right. If your characters are running around New York City, you'd better know where Queens is in relation to the Bronx, and the best way to get from Long Island to Manhattan (I don't). If the tale is in your home town, you'll never hear the end from it if you have North Street on the south side. In The Notorious Ian Grant, I have some characters visit a real flower shop in my home town, Albion. The problem is, by the time the novel was published the shop had moved to a different location.

So I often split the difference. My little town of Hurricane is totally made up, but it's in a real location: the intersection of county roads 150E and 600N in Noble County, a few miles from my home. When I've achieved Stephen King status, fans will flock to that location to see … four farm fields and a woods. And a hog farm in the distance.

I did the same thing with Coming Attractions. The story was inspired by a real-life drive-in movie theater, but I didn't want to use the real one. So I moved the location a few miles west, from Dekalb County into Noble County in northeast Indiana, so it would be closer to the story's home town, Hopewell.

Which was silly, because Hopewell doesn't exist. I could have just as easily put it all in Dekalb County.

The town was named after a Noble County road, which you might be surprised to learn is Hopewell Road--but I didn't end up putting it there, either. Instead I put it around halfway between two existing towns, Avilla and Kendallville, when I could have just used either of them, instead. Why did I not? Laziness. I didn't want to have to remember where everything was. The irony of that is that, in very general layout, Hopewell is just a copy of Kendallville, anyway, picked up and moved a few miles south. It's just smaller, and has a cool coffee shop on Main Street.

But see, that's the kind of adjustments you can make when you create your own community. You can move New York City a few miles down the coast and call it Gotham, or Metropolis, and suddenly it has Daily Planet buildings and stately Wayne Manors … and the Batmobile never seems to have trouble with crosstown traffic. You won't hear a thing about it in the story--it's all in the author's world building.

Speaking of world building: Coming Attractions is in the Storm Chaser universe, with Hopewell and Hurricane about ten miles from each other. I did that just for the heck of it--you wouldn't know it by reading either book. One Storm Chaser character does appear, very briefly, in Coming Attractions, but doesn't get named. (In the same way, characters from Storm Chaser and the unpublished Red Is For Ick appear together in my young adult novel, The No-Campfire Girls.)

Are crossovers necessary? Nope … just fun.

Find all of our books at:

http://markrhunter.com/

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

And wherever fine books with my name on them are sold.  

I’m featured again on 50 Authors From 50 States, a blog about ... well, that's pretty self explanatory, isn't it? Commenters on the blog get a chance to win a copy of my newest novel, “Radio Red”.

 Okay, I know ... "Radio Red" is my first book that's not set in or about Indiana. But I still wrote it here (even though I researched and outlined it in Michigan, but never mind), so ... there. Don't miss out, before it's no longer my latest novel!

Indiana, specifically Chain O' Lakes State Park

I normally try hard not to complain too much. Complaining is like trying to talk about politics: It's pointless and just annoys everyone else. Although I often fail, in recent years I've tried to be either positive, funny, or quiet. I used to have a reputation for turning the things that go wrong in my life into humor columns, but I can't anymore because ... well, I'd getting ahead of myself.

But please indulge me, just this once.

Because it's been a really, really bad month.

Actually, the really bad month started last month, as my fourteen regular readers already know. Just before we left for Missouri to see the total solar eclipse, my wife and I learned that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. We did indeed get to see the eclipse, but that was, pardon me for saying, eclipsed by our worry over Jean Stroud's medical condition. We spent most of that week taking her to various medical places, and were there when she started chemo.

Then we came back to Indiana so that Emily and I could do our jobs, only to rush back over Labor Day weekend when things took a very rapid, very unexpected turn for the worse. It turns out her cancer had progressed much further than any of us realized, and she passed away while we were driving somewhere through west central Indiana.

Honestly, that's not something I'm ready to talk about yet.

Now, I could probably turn everything else that happened in September into a humor column, because it was all small stuff of the type we're not supposed to sweat. But when you're already in a state of shock, and the stuff just keeps on happening, one after another, it just can't be made funny.

I should consider us lucky we didn't get into an accident, like we did last September. That ended in splints, X-rays, and car shopping. I'd thought it as bad as a vacation could get, until this September. This one turned into the vacation they schedule in Hell, and what follows is just a sample.

But no accident, although we had a close encounter with a coyote. We drove some five thousand miles over the course of four weeks, most of it in the last couple of weeks. And we drove most of it while sick.

Emily got it first. Nothing accompanies settling your mother's affairs like a bad head cold. We made two trips to and from to arrange and hold a memorial, and to take care of a thousand details, most of which had to be done by Emily as the only child. Those trips were done with frequent Kleenex breaks. I did my best to be a supportive spouse, until I was also felled by little warrior germs that set up shop in my sinuses, then invaded my lungs.

All that driving. After it was over, the chiropractor could identify the model and make of our car by the bends in my spine. By the way, I've made that 500 mile trip for a decade, and have seriously never seen as much road construction along the route.

In the middle of it, we had to come back to Indiana because we'd previously signed up for an author appearance and didn't want to be no-shows. That was on a Friday, and Emily took advantage to work her saddle barn job on Saturday and Sunday before we headed back south. Believe me, she made more money there than we did as authors.

In fact, my author aspirations took quite a hit during September. We sold only a few books that Friday (although we handed out some business cards and bookmarks, which often lead to sales). A few days later I got my publisher's first sales report on my newest novel, Radio Red. Between its release in April and the end of June, the sales made me ... cry. It's the worse opening of my nine books.

Oh, and the newspaper that ran my column stopped publishing, so I no longer have a home for "Slightly Off the Mark".

At least that gave us a little time to watch TV. With a planned vacation, we'd set the DVR to record the shows starting up in September, and had hours of unwatched shows already recorded. Emily was at work when that last straw went dark and permanently dead, falling on my last nerve. She missed the horror-movie screaming noises that came from ... someone ... after the good people at Mediacom said they'd speed a technician our way in only a week or so.

All minor stuff, really. TV shows? You can catch up with them online. Poor book sales? My next novel is just around the corner. Illnesses pass, spines recover, and our car gets really good gas mileage. The dog slept for about twelve hours straight after we returned the last time, but now he's good as new.

It's just that stuff builds up, sometimes.

I don't know. Maybe the hardest thing after the memorial was cleaning out Jean's storage unit. Not because of the 90+ degree heat, dust, and spiders, but because you're suddenly going through memories at a time when it's most painful. We had to start three times, and in the end brought some boxes home into the air conditioning to be looked after later.

They say you have to go through bad times to appreciate the good times, and if that's so I'm feeling pretty darned appreciative. So, okay ... rough month. But if you've been watching the news at all, you know that everyone's been having a pretty rough month. Now and then we all need to vent a little.