March
It’s March already! How come the older I get, the faster time
flies? No need to answer that question. Anyone who’s old knows the feeling, and
if you aren’t yet old, you will know it—with luck and survival skills.
Winners of February’s contest, which is whatever book you want as
long as I have a copy, are: Alicia Carol, Linda Rorex, Rita Wray and ALICE
DUNCAN! Yes! There’s another one! And she lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She
also claims to wear a kilt, but I haven’t seen proof of same yet. I’ll send you
an e-book of your choice, Alice, since I can’t afford to send a real book.
Alicia, Linda and Rita, please let me know which book you’d like, and I’ll send
it to you. It may take me a while to do so (unless you want an e-book) I regret
to say, because I’ve been a bit dilatory of late.
So. Here’s the fabulous cover of next month’s release,
SPIRITS UNEARTHED, Daisy Gumm Majesty’s 12th (actually, it’s
her 13th, but let’s not go into that again) adventure. Right below
the cover is a link to purchase it for your Amazon Kindle or your B&N Nook:
B&N Link: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spirits-unearthed-alice-duncan/1127914274?ean=9781947833395
February was kind of a dopey month. I got edits for SPIRITS
UNEARTHED while I was sick, and I fear for the book’s reception and overall
worth. I think it stinks, although I do hope I’m wrong. The cover is
spectacular. Yes, Spike is a black-and-tan dachshund; red dachshunds show up
better on book covers. Therefore, he’s red on the cover (by the way, red is
dachshund-speak for brown). But his attitude on the cover is pure Spike, and
he’s doing precisely what he does in the book to get the action started. Hope
the rest of the book lives up to its cover. If you ever want to understand
insecurity, go in for a writing career. Insecurity guaranteed, curse it.
Oh, and everyone else I know was sick in February, too. Basically,
February was a sickly, sucky month. Fortunately, the hounds seem to be all
right, even Giblett, my problem child, which doesn’t seem quite fair to me but
what do I know?
Also, I got an invitation to attend my – this just makes me gasp
with appalled-ness – 55th high-school reunion. I swear, I don’t know how
I got so old so fast. I wouldn’t mind the aging thing if it didn’t hurt so
much, but oh, well. However, I’m going to attend. This is mainly because I’ll
get to see Phyllis McKown and Janet Levine Goldberg, with whom I used to play
flute in the Eliot Junior High School band in Altadena, California. I don’t
think the three of us have been together since Eliot days! Egad. I only
recently found out that neither Phyllis nor Janet considered herself a
musician, but both merely sort of faked it. And here I thought we were all
ardent flautists who practiced all the time (even though by doing so we made
our dogs howl). Show’s how much anyone knows about anyone else when s/he’s a
kid, huh? Also, it cleared up any doubt I might have had about why I was
selected to be first-chair flute. Evidently, I was the only one who could play
the instrument!
Anyway, now I’m in the process of writing Daisy’s 13th (or 14th) adventure,
SHAKEN SPIRITS, in which Daisy has already been hit by a car and had her left
shoulder dislocated. She’s recovering nicely, although she’s in a good deal of
pain. The car that hit her was a 1923 Cole Sportster Sedan, quite a classy car.
In fact, here it is! It’s not the real culprit. It’s the agent the real culprit
used to whack poor Daisy. After he stole it from a grand estate in the
San Rafael hills. Then he abandoned it on the Angeles Crest, the bounder:
Daisy’s going to miss choir practice for a couple of weeks, and
she won’t be able to use the Ouija board or shuffle tarot cards for a while,
but she’ll recover. I’m also relatively certain she and Sam will figure out who
did the evil deed, why, and make certain whoever dunnit will never be able to
do it again. If that made any sense.
Well, whatever. Let’s see now. What should I give away at the end
of March? SPIRITS UNEARTHED comes out in April, so what I think I’ll do is give
away one copy each of SPIRITS ONSTAGE (in which Daisy has a marvelous
time playing Katisha, the mean old nastypants in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The
Mikado), UNSETTLED SPIRITS (in which people keep dropping dead during
communion service at Daisy’s church), BRUISED SPIRITS (in which Daisy and her
friends save the life of a battered woman – this is based on a true story, by
the way. The woman lives in Australia), and SPIRITS UNITED, in which a
dastardly plot at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech as it’s
affectionately known) is foiled by Daisy and her gang. I think Sam’s Voodoo
juju goes a bit wacky in this one, too.
A word about my monthly contests. I love giving my work to people;
however, I found out quite by accident a few months ago that sending books to
Great Britain, Australia, and other countries outside the United States is
beyond my monetary capability. If a resident of a nation other than the United
States has an e-reader, I’ll happily supply that person with an e-book. If a person
doesn’t have an e-reader and still likes to read book-books, he or she is on
his or her own. I’m sorry, but what I laughingly call my writing career hasn’t
made me wealthy yet. And it probably won’t, but let’s not get in to that
because it always depresses me. So. That’s that.
If you’d like to enter the contest, just send me an email (alice@aliceduncan.net)
and give me your name and home address. If you’d like to be added to my mailing
list, you may do so on my web site (http://aliceduncan.net/)
or email me (you won’t be smothered in e-mails, because I only write one blog a
month, and that’s an effort). If you’d like to be friends on Facebook, visit my
page at https://www.facebook.com/alice.duncan.925.
Thank you!
Alice Duncan
(alice@aliceduncan.net)
www.aliceduncan.net
SPIRITS UNITED (July 2017)
(alice@aliceduncan.net)
www.aliceduncan.net
SPIRITS UNITED (July 2017)
SPIRITS UNEARTHED (April
2018)
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