Friday, June 3, 2011
FIRST 3 CHAPTERS OF SAME MOON, SAME SKY
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Friday, May 20, 2011
THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE,A Nick & Dagger Mystery is available now at Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble NOOK
Read Chapter One here:
THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE, A Nick & Dagger Mystery
Dedicated to Cerberus of the Red Zone:
“Park at your own peril, dude”
Chapter One
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
"Have you ever had a female partner?"
"Fuck yeah." He made an obscene gyration with his hips and hands which was internationally recognized as the body language for the bump uglies.
"How many?" Coolly interested, but not arctic.
"About twenty-five if you omit my ex-wife. She chewed raw bacon rinds and spit. A lot. She was a virgin when I married her and a virgin when we divorced. I never knew for sure if she was female. The stuffed moose head she hung over the kitchen sink should of alerted me that something was wrong with this picture."
"I meant a female partner. Like me."
"Oh. That kind. No. You're my first," he said.
"I hope I'm all you've fantasized."
"If you're not, we'll get an annulment. I know all the judges."
"You're a smart-ass."
"Absolutely."
"I'm driving."
Detective Nicholas Parti handed Detective Dagmar Erskine the car keys and maneuvered her to the unmarked police car. Unmarked was a misnomer. The vehicle was beat to shit. Enormous holes had been chewed in the steel doors by rampant rust rats. Dagmar slid behind the wheel and found the crap was only skin deep. Zero to sixty in six seconds.
"Knock yourself out," Nick said. "How old are you anyway, Dagger?"
"Twenty-eight. What's it to you?"
"Dagger. How the fuck you get a name like Dagger?"
"My Daddy was a knife-thrower in the circus. One of his gin-soaked knife tosses wavered off course and impaled his assistant, who happened to be my Mother. They did in-utero surgery to save me."
"Bullshit. You're Dagmar."
"If you knew, why did you ask?"
"Why did you get yourself transferred, Detective Dagmar Irksome?"
"Erskine. Because your reputation under the covers was impossible to resist. I had to see for myself."
"Is that all?"
"No. I heard no one wanted to work with you because you were losing your edge."
"So this constitutes a charitable gesture toward a fellow officer?"
"Yes and no. I had an ulterior motive."
"Aha. A double-edged-dagger. Why did you become a cop?"
"All my life I tried to look like a waif. Then I had an epiphany. I joined the police academy so I could justify eating the occasional doughnut. By the time I graduated from the academy, I knew I'd made a mistake."
"Oh, fuckin' wonderful! Breakfast at Epiphany's."
"I love police work! It was the uniform that got me down. When I put on the baton, the weapon, the dropcases, the portable, the handcuffs, the flashlight, the beeper, and the gas, I waddled. I had to find a niche that allowed me some fashion freedom. Paste-ies, maybe, or a riding habit and custom boots."
"And a crop. Don't forget the crop."
"Calm down. You're thinking S & M. I don't carry a crop when I'm walking around. A crop is used to tactfully remind the horse who's on top."
Really? He hadn't experienced that. Nick's mind locked onto the boots/crop fantasy. Then he whipped himself into the moment and critiqued Dagger's fashion choices: faded jeans, beat-up jogging shoes, and a shabby Hawaiian shirt. He'd read her file when he heard she was going undercover with him. She'd attended some upper-crust academic institution like Ms. Wizened's Country Day School for Rich Girls. Her Dad probably owned vineyards, and Dagmar and Mom doubtless 'hunted to hounds'. Nick wondered how her parents reacted when their precious child left Stanford for the Police Academy.
"Welsh ponies," Dagger said out of the blue. (Perhaps it was stream of consciousness produced by the boot/crop stuff.) "Now there's a breed to be reckoned with," said Dagger. "My Dad wouldn't let me ride through his avocado orchards. It can transfer root rot from infected trees and annihilate the healthy ones," she continued knowledgeably, expecting Nick to care. (Which he should have, if he liked guacamole.) "By the time you notice the trees are bummed, it's all over."
"Okay, so I was wrong about the vineyard," he said.
"What?"
"Never mind."
"For this investigation, are we supposed to be lovers?" Dagger fastened her ice-blue irises on Nick's yellowing eyeballs sizing up his off-hours alcohol consumption. "If you clean up, it won't look too far-fetched for us to be getting it on."
What the hell was happening? He was the one who was in charge of sexual harassment. Didn't she know nothing? Oh well, he didn't really give a rat's ass. He'd carried the macho-predator ball way too long. He was tired. It was somebody else's turn.
THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE, A Nick & Dagger Mystery
Dedicated to Cerberus of the Red Zone:
“Park at your own peril, dude”
Chapter One
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
"Have you ever had a female partner?"
"Fuck yeah." He made an obscene gyration with his hips and hands which was internationally recognized as the body language for the bump uglies.
"How many?" Coolly interested, but not arctic.
"About twenty-five if you omit my ex-wife. She chewed raw bacon rinds and spit. A lot. She was a virgin when I married her and a virgin when we divorced. I never knew for sure if she was female. The stuffed moose head she hung over the kitchen sink should of alerted me that something was wrong with this picture."
"I meant a female partner. Like me."
"Oh. That kind. No. You're my first," he said.
"I hope I'm all you've fantasized."
"If you're not, we'll get an annulment. I know all the judges."
"You're a smart-ass."
"Absolutely."
"I'm driving."
Detective Nicholas Parti handed Detective Dagmar Erskine the car keys and maneuvered her to the unmarked police car. Unmarked was a misnomer. The vehicle was beat to shit. Enormous holes had been chewed in the steel doors by rampant rust rats. Dagmar slid behind the wheel and found the crap was only skin deep. Zero to sixty in six seconds.
"Knock yourself out," Nick said. "How old are you anyway, Dagger?"
"Twenty-eight. What's it to you?"
"Dagger. How the fuck you get a name like Dagger?"
"My Daddy was a knife-thrower in the circus. One of his gin-soaked knife tosses wavered off course and impaled his assistant, who happened to be my Mother. They did in-utero surgery to save me."
"Bullshit. You're Dagmar."
"If you knew, why did you ask?"
"Why did you get yourself transferred, Detective Dagmar Irksome?"
"Erskine. Because your reputation under the covers was impossible to resist. I had to see for myself."
"Is that all?"
"No. I heard no one wanted to work with you because you were losing your edge."
"So this constitutes a charitable gesture toward a fellow officer?"
"Yes and no. I had an ulterior motive."
"Aha. A double-edged-dagger. Why did you become a cop?"
"All my life I tried to look like a waif. Then I had an epiphany. I joined the police academy so I could justify eating the occasional doughnut. By the time I graduated from the academy, I knew I'd made a mistake."
"Oh, fuckin' wonderful! Breakfast at Epiphany's."
"I love police work! It was the uniform that got me down. When I put on the baton, the weapon, the dropcases, the portable, the handcuffs, the flashlight, the beeper, and the gas, I waddled. I had to find a niche that allowed me some fashion freedom. Paste-ies, maybe, or a riding habit and custom boots."
"And a crop. Don't forget the crop."
"Calm down. You're thinking S & M. I don't carry a crop when I'm walking around. A crop is used to tactfully remind the horse who's on top."
Really? He hadn't experienced that. Nick's mind locked onto the boots/crop fantasy. Then he whipped himself into the moment and critiqued Dagger's fashion choices: faded jeans, beat-up jogging shoes, and a shabby Hawaiian shirt. He'd read her file when he heard she was going undercover with him. She'd attended some upper-crust academic institution like Ms. Wizened's Country Day School for Rich Girls. Her Dad probably owned vineyards, and Dagmar and Mom doubtless 'hunted to hounds'. Nick wondered how her parents reacted when their precious child left Stanford for the Police Academy.
"Welsh ponies," Dagger said out of the blue. (Perhaps it was stream of consciousness produced by the boot/crop stuff.) "Now there's a breed to be reckoned with," said Dagger. "My Dad wouldn't let me ride through his avocado orchards. It can transfer root rot from infected trees and annihilate the healthy ones," she continued knowledgeably, expecting Nick to care. (Which he should have, if he liked guacamole.) "By the time you notice the trees are bummed, it's all over."
"Okay, so I was wrong about the vineyard," he said.
"What?"
"Never mind."
"For this investigation, are we supposed to be lovers?" Dagger fastened her ice-blue irises on Nick's yellowing eyeballs sizing up his off-hours alcohol consumption. "If you clean up, it won't look too far-fetched for us to be getting it on."
What the hell was happening? He was the one who was in charge of sexual harassment. Didn't she know nothing? Oh well, he didn't really give a rat's ass. He'd carried the macho-predator ball way too long. He was tired. It was somebody else's turn.
Monday, May 16, 2011
THE ANTICS OF ERIK...OR ??????
I'm getting up at 4 A.M. again with a compulsion to write the sequel to SAME MOON, SAME SKY. I don't know where these bizarre ideas are coming from, so I'll just blame Erik. I'm at Chapter 18 and all kinds of twists and turns or spins. If you read it...eventually...you'll understand. But I won't ruin Same Moon, Same Sky by giving you any hints about what happens after that novel ends.
Meanwhile, I have 4 eBooks at Barnes and Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle. All are $2.99 and both B & N and Amazon offer FREE APPS to download to a MAC or PC. You don't have to have a reading device like Kindle,a Nook, an iPad, iPod etc.
BOOKS ON AMAZON & B &N
SAME MOON, SAME SKY (Elisa Medhus and E.J.Daniel)
NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
HAND IN GLOVE, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
BLOOD MEMORY, A Tale of the Supernatural (E.J.Daniel)
Coming soon to eBooks: THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE (E.J.Daniel) and THE GREAT GOTCHA (GHOSTLY TALES) (E.J.Daniel)
It's only 10 A.M. here in the Colorado Rockies and I'm already tired. I'm cheating here, the columbines haven't bloomed yet, but the Aspen trees turned green almost over night.
Meanwhile, I have 4 eBooks at Barnes and Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle. All are $2.99 and both B & N and Amazon offer FREE APPS to download to a MAC or PC. You don't have to have a reading device like Kindle,a Nook, an iPad, iPod etc.
BOOKS ON AMAZON & B &N
SAME MOON, SAME SKY (Elisa Medhus and E.J.Daniel)
NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
HAND IN GLOVE, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
BLOOD MEMORY, A Tale of the Supernatural (E.J.Daniel)
Coming soon to eBooks: THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE (E.J.Daniel) and THE GREAT GOTCHA (GHOSTLY TALES) (E.J.Daniel)
It's only 10 A.M. here in the Colorado Rockies and I'm already tired. I'm cheating here, the columbines haven't bloomed yet, but the Aspen trees turned green almost over night.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
HOW TO GET A FREE APP TO READ e-BOOKS
Here's a link to the FREE NOOK APPs.
Available for MAC, PC, ANDROID, iPHONE, iPAD, Blackberry
Click on the blue highlighted "this" to take you there:
this
Amazon Kindle also has FREE APPS. Go to one of my book pages and you'll see the FREE APPS on the right side of the page.
Available for MAC, PC, ANDROID, iPHONE, iPAD, Blackberry
Click on the blue highlighted "this" to take you there:
this
Amazon Kindle also has FREE APPS. Go to one of my book pages and you'll see the FREE APPS on the right side of the page.
READ CHAPTER ONE OF MY DETECTIVE NOVEL: HAND IN GLOVE
Now available on Amazon as a Kindle eBook. To download and read there are FREE APPS at Kindle for MAC, PC, IPAD,IPOD, etc.
Also available at Barnes and Noble: NOOK. FREE APP available for reading.
HAND IN GLOVE
Sequel to : Nice Ain’t Enough And Cute Don’t Count
Chapter One Detached
I was heading North on Highway 101 at La Conchita (where the hill slid down on a lot of houses years ago and nobody in the government seemed to give a shit). Further on at Rincon, the surf would be awesome with surfers vying for waves. Those were the days.
Anyway, I couldn't complain, all was cool with my life. I groped for my cellphone and commanded Karma, my secretary-factotum, (who actually doesn't take well to commands from man, beast, or God) to lock up the office and go home and get into trouble with Dave, a police detective a couple decades younger who helps Karma not to act her age.
I was clipping along at ninety, testing whether I could lose control like the assholes on the road in cellphone never-never-land talking to 900 numbers with the inevitable ensuing distractions. (I actually leave the 900 numbers to others.)
Flawless weather. I wasn't gonna play private investigator for the balance of the day. I was going home to Santa Barbara after a trip to L.A. to a spy shop loaded to the hilt, credit card and otherwise, with all the latest in surveillance devices.
Karma says I'm psychic, but a little high-tech help never hurts, especially if I've kept Dracula hours and am feeling a little less than indefectible.
The damned ancient pickup truck ahead of me didn't have his load covered and tied down. Where's the CHP when you need them?
I weaved between lanes trying to avoid any airborne detritus, perhaps coconuts (not really coconuts, but being an over-age-in-grade-surfer I like the Hawaiian image). Couldn't get close enough to pass without getting rejectamenta thrown into my wind-shield. A replaced windshield is never the same. It leaks. It sucks.
Baskerville, my half-wolf-half-malamute, was riding shotgun. She liked the bucket seats in my new Toyota Tundra truck. Ditto the CD and all the rest of its expensive options which will take me about four hundred years to pay for. But I had to do it. My old pickup groaned to a halt when two hundred and twenty-eight thousand rolled up on the odometer. It's a bummer when old friends die. But, life is short. That's basically it, and I don't want to live on a basic level anymore. Hence my extreme paranoia and caution about damage to my new vehicle. I'll have plenty of time for regrets when some moron bounces a shopping cart off the pristine finish. I stayed back. Way back. Maybe, I thought, I'll get lucky and some idiot will pull a L.A. trick and fill in the gap between me and the brain-dead-half-baked-driver and get his share of the shit.
No such luck. Whoa! A glove went airborne out the passenger side window. It bounced? Something wasn't right. I was at a section of the freeway that wasn't freeway. I made a U-ie and cruised back to where I was before.
I pulled over on the shoulder and stopped when I caught sight of the glove which had also pulled over on the shoulder and stopped. I got out of my truck. ("No Baskie. You gotta stay. Roadkill is for rodents.") I assumed my best investigative stance: I kicked the glove. Nudged it, actually. It was heavy for a glove. I rolled it over on its back: palm up, fingers curled skyward. I prodded it again, gently, with the toe of my cowboy boot. It was solid. I maneuvered it with my other boot so I could see inside. Then I stooped down and had a look. HAND IN GLOVE. Grotesque beyond imagining! I can’t stand the sight of blood, and there's something about amputated limbs that really gets me down.
Could the driver possibly have known he'd lost a vital part? Was he driving with one hand? This one was the right. Guess he couldn't turn on the radio as well as he used to. I hoped his vehicle was an automatic. He'd better have leather upholstery (highly unlikely in that old tincan). Blood's a bitch to clean off fabric unless he or she knew to use OxiClean. If the driver were a she, I'd expect she'd know this. I'll have to be excused for this sexist assumption.
I returned to my car and dog. Cellphone. Time to raise a reaction from my cop-buddy: the conversation was more or less: "Hi Dave. How's it goin'? Not much. A bloody hand in a glove. Blah. Blah. Sure, I'll guard it. No, I won't let Baskie eat it.”
Also available at Barnes and Noble: NOOK. FREE APP available for reading.
HAND IN GLOVE
Sequel to : Nice Ain’t Enough And Cute Don’t Count
Chapter One Detached
I was heading North on Highway 101 at La Conchita (where the hill slid down on a lot of houses years ago and nobody in the government seemed to give a shit). Further on at Rincon, the surf would be awesome with surfers vying for waves. Those were the days.
Anyway, I couldn't complain, all was cool with my life. I groped for my cellphone and commanded Karma, my secretary-factotum, (who actually doesn't take well to commands from man, beast, or God) to lock up the office and go home and get into trouble with Dave, a police detective a couple decades younger who helps Karma not to act her age.
I was clipping along at ninety, testing whether I could lose control like the assholes on the road in cellphone never-never-land talking to 900 numbers with the inevitable ensuing distractions. (I actually leave the 900 numbers to others.)
Flawless weather. I wasn't gonna play private investigator for the balance of the day. I was going home to Santa Barbara after a trip to L.A. to a spy shop loaded to the hilt, credit card and otherwise, with all the latest in surveillance devices.
Karma says I'm psychic, but a little high-tech help never hurts, especially if I've kept Dracula hours and am feeling a little less than indefectible.
The damned ancient pickup truck ahead of me didn't have his load covered and tied down. Where's the CHP when you need them?
I weaved between lanes trying to avoid any airborne detritus, perhaps coconuts (not really coconuts, but being an over-age-in-grade-surfer I like the Hawaiian image). Couldn't get close enough to pass without getting rejectamenta thrown into my wind-shield. A replaced windshield is never the same. It leaks. It sucks.
Baskerville, my half-wolf-half-malamute, was riding shotgun. She liked the bucket seats in my new Toyota Tundra truck. Ditto the CD and all the rest of its expensive options which will take me about four hundred years to pay for. But I had to do it. My old pickup groaned to a halt when two hundred and twenty-eight thousand rolled up on the odometer. It's a bummer when old friends die. But, life is short. That's basically it, and I don't want to live on a basic level anymore. Hence my extreme paranoia and caution about damage to my new vehicle. I'll have plenty of time for regrets when some moron bounces a shopping cart off the pristine finish. I stayed back. Way back. Maybe, I thought, I'll get lucky and some idiot will pull a L.A. trick and fill in the gap between me and the brain-dead-half-baked-driver and get his share of the shit.
No such luck. Whoa! A glove went airborne out the passenger side window. It bounced? Something wasn't right. I was at a section of the freeway that wasn't freeway. I made a U-ie and cruised back to where I was before.
I pulled over on the shoulder and stopped when I caught sight of the glove which had also pulled over on the shoulder and stopped. I got out of my truck. ("No Baskie. You gotta stay. Roadkill is for rodents.") I assumed my best investigative stance: I kicked the glove. Nudged it, actually. It was heavy for a glove. I rolled it over on its back: palm up, fingers curled skyward. I prodded it again, gently, with the toe of my cowboy boot. It was solid. I maneuvered it with my other boot so I could see inside. Then I stooped down and had a look. HAND IN GLOVE. Grotesque beyond imagining! I can’t stand the sight of blood, and there's something about amputated limbs that really gets me down.
Could the driver possibly have known he'd lost a vital part? Was he driving with one hand? This one was the right. Guess he couldn't turn on the radio as well as he used to. I hoped his vehicle was an automatic. He'd better have leather upholstery (highly unlikely in that old tincan). Blood's a bitch to clean off fabric unless he or she knew to use OxiClean. If the driver were a she, I'd expect she'd know this. I'll have to be excused for this sexist assumption.
I returned to my car and dog. Cellphone. Time to raise a reaction from my cop-buddy: the conversation was more or less: "Hi Dave. How's it goin'? Not much. A bloody hand in a glove. Blah. Blah. Sure, I'll guard it. No, I won't let Baskie eat it.”
Friday, May 13, 2011
SHOULD I SEND ROYALTIES TO A GHOST?
Elisa Medhus, M.D. and I started communicating via email in late November 2010 after I found her blog about her son, Erik.
We started writing Same Moon, Same Sky on January 8, 2011. Then we decided to do a sequel, but instead that became PART TWO .This decision to write a PART TWO created all sorts of TIME problems which we had to go back and fix in PART ONE to make them consistent with PART TWO.
Writing a novel with someone I'd never met and putting her deceased son, Erik, (whom I'd never met) as the main (fictional) character was pretty strange. I got up every morning at 4 A.M. and sat in front of my computer without a clue what that chapter would be about. Then suddenly I'd start writing. I'd email that chapter to Elisa and she would comment and edit as necessary. The parts she wrote flowed seamlessly into my writing.
SAME MOON, SAME SKY is for sale at AMAZON KINDLE and BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK as a downloadable eBook. Elisa has added a thumbnail of the cover on her blog. The novel takes place in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The cover is a photo I took of the Colorado sky.
YESTERDAY, as I was reading Elisa's May 12, 2011 blog, ( click on the highlighted 'this' to get to channelingerik.com) this I read this comment from ERIK.
Elisa transcribed it from a channeling session she had on February 8, 2011...when we were ripping along with Part One. The "me" in the transcript is Elisa. The "Betty" is Erik's reference to me since he doesn't know I write as E.J. Daniel. (He hasn't been paying attention!) Now I can blame my typos on Erik. But honestly, I'm a lousy two finger typist...which is a good thing because I compose as I type and that allows my brain to keep up with my typing.
TRANSCRIPT FROM FEBRUARY 8, 2011:
Me: So, Erik, you’ve really been channeling tons of information to Betty for the book (Same Moon, Same Sky). She’s been cranking it out like a machine! She sent me some bound copies, and I want to help her out, so how do you think I can best do that. The novel is awesome. Very funny, lots of bad words, just as you’d expect—
Erik: It’s so easy to download information to Betty. We have to wait until we’re a little closer to 2012 before it really takes off, because then, people are gonna want to take comfort and find humor in spirituality. There’s so much fear based on death and the idea of the world ending, disasters and stuff like that.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
SO THAT'S WHERE ALL 'MY' IDEAS WERE COMING FROM. WELL, NOT ALL. YOU THINK I SHOULD SEND ERIK ROYALTIES? WHAT IS HIS ZIP CODE "OVER THERE"? I HOPE HE CONTINUES TO HELP ME WITH THE SEQUEL WE'RE WRITING. IT'S TENTATIVELY CALLED "T".
We started writing Same Moon, Same Sky on January 8, 2011. Then we decided to do a sequel, but instead that became PART TWO .This decision to write a PART TWO created all sorts of TIME problems which we had to go back and fix in PART ONE to make them consistent with PART TWO.
Writing a novel with someone I'd never met and putting her deceased son, Erik, (whom I'd never met) as the main (fictional) character was pretty strange. I got up every morning at 4 A.M. and sat in front of my computer without a clue what that chapter would be about. Then suddenly I'd start writing. I'd email that chapter to Elisa and she would comment and edit as necessary. The parts she wrote flowed seamlessly into my writing.
SAME MOON, SAME SKY is for sale at AMAZON KINDLE and BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK as a downloadable eBook. Elisa has added a thumbnail of the cover on her blog. The novel takes place in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The cover is a photo I took of the Colorado sky.
YESTERDAY, as I was reading Elisa's May 12, 2011 blog, ( click on the highlighted 'this' to get to channelingerik.com) this I read this comment from ERIK.
Elisa transcribed it from a channeling session she had on February 8, 2011...when we were ripping along with Part One. The "me" in the transcript is Elisa. The "Betty" is Erik's reference to me since he doesn't know I write as E.J. Daniel. (He hasn't been paying attention!) Now I can blame my typos on Erik. But honestly, I'm a lousy two finger typist...which is a good thing because I compose as I type and that allows my brain to keep up with my typing.
TRANSCRIPT FROM FEBRUARY 8, 2011:
Me: So, Erik, you’ve really been channeling tons of information to Betty for the book (Same Moon, Same Sky). She’s been cranking it out like a machine! She sent me some bound copies, and I want to help her out, so how do you think I can best do that. The novel is awesome. Very funny, lots of bad words, just as you’d expect—
Erik: It’s so easy to download information to Betty. We have to wait until we’re a little closer to 2012 before it really takes off, because then, people are gonna want to take comfort and find humor in spirituality. There’s so much fear based on death and the idea of the world ending, disasters and stuff like that.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
SO THAT'S WHERE ALL 'MY' IDEAS WERE COMING FROM. WELL, NOT ALL. YOU THINK I SHOULD SEND ERIK ROYALTIES? WHAT IS HIS ZIP CODE "OVER THERE"? I HOPE HE CONTINUES TO HELP ME WITH THE SEQUEL WE'RE WRITING. IT'S TENTATIVELY CALLED "T".
Thursday, May 12, 2011
HOW "SAME MOON, SAME SKY" WAS WRITTEN
Scroll down until you see the list of my blog posts. Click on APRIL and that will take you to the story of how I met ELISA MEDHUS,M.D. and how we collaborated on the novel.It's a little spooky.
Tomorrow I'll post the first chapter of HAND IN GLOVE and give you the link to Amazon Kindle. If it is posted at NOOK, I'll send that link also.
Tomorrow I'll post the first chapter of HAND IN GLOVE and give you the link to Amazon Kindle. If it is posted at NOOK, I'll send that link also.
THE PSYCHIC EYE DETECTIVE NOVELS ON AMAZON
NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Novel by E.J. Daniel
Now available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99. It should be available on Barnes and Noble: Nook in a couple days. Here's the first chapter. The novel on Kindle and Nook is properly formatted. You can download the FREE Kindle APP for your PC, MAc, iPOD, iPAD, Blackberry etc. You'll see the APPS on the right side of my book page. Nook also has FREE APPs for e-reader devices.
CLICK ON THE WORD 'this' and that will take you to the book page on Amazon Kindle
this
Chapter One
A GRAVE ERROR?
In my business there aren't many occasions when the adjective 'nice' gets much usage. There aren't nice murderers or nice wife-beaters or nice child-molesters . I'm forty-five years old, and I'm tired. Tired of looking at the maggoty underbelly of humanity. Tired. Beat to shit. I'm a private investigator with no private life. I'd like to meet one nice person, if anyone still exists who meets that description.
I exposed the innards of my Subway sandwich and attacked it with my fighting knife. They never listen when I tell them, 'light on the mustard and mayo'. In life-threatening situations (which the mayo was not), it takes special courage, personal strength and commitment to deploy a knife because it doesn't have the distance and impersonality of projectiles. As a knife user, I needed to know a great deal about strike points, human anatomy, and human physiology in order to achieve the desired result in defending myself. It takes enormous skill and a strong stomach to proceed with a blade. I've never liked the sight of blood, but I've had to put that aversion away on more than a few occasions.
I heard someone enter my outer office. Shit. I shoulda locked the door. Even my lunch is plagued with intruders infringing on my digestion, trespassing on my feast, muscling into my moments of solitude. She ambled in without even bothering to knock. Nice. Very nice. Very, very nice.
Before I could intercept it, my tongue cobra'd out and sucked off a vagrant
glob of mustard which was lodged in my mustache. She squinted at me. I guess she didn't find my snake a turn-on. She sat down and allowed me to size her up. About five eleven (before sitting), blond hair (probably L'Oreal), and blue eyes turning greyish with age, which I judged to be about thirty. Anyway, less than thirty-five. Expensively underdressed. Make that understated. Nice, as I said. Evidence of money.
I still had the Subway between my jaws, so she introduced the topic. "I want you to find my husband," she said. Way cool for someone who'd misplaced her spouse.
"When did you lose him?" Another squint.
"Last night he didn't come home," she said. "He was due home at six. When it got to be five after six, I knew something was wrong."
Curious. Not much time had elapsed. A bit soon for her to think of her husband as 'missing'. That set off a silent alarm from my most distant trip wire."What time does he usually come home?" I took out a pad of paper and began to take notes.
"Six or six-o-one. He never varies. When it got to be ten after six, I called his office, the hospitals, the CHP, the Police, and the Sheriff."
"Did you file a Missing Person Report?"
"They won't do anything for at least forty-eight hours. I've already told you I
knew something was wrong by five after six."
What's wrong with this picture?" Can you think of any reason your husband might have not to come home yesterday at his usual time?"
"If I knew that, would I bother with a private dick?" She squinted at me with
unconcealed hostility. I let that sluice off like water off the proverbial duck. I've gotten waterproof, if not bulletproof after years in this game.
"Does your husband have any ailments?" I asked, pen poised.
"Unfortunately not. He's a very healthy fifty-two."
She squinted at me, and I could sense she was making a comparison. Okay, so I look a little rough. I'm trying to grow a beard and it's a little stubbly at the moment, but when it gets a little longer, it's gonna be 'killer'. That's what my secretary, Karma, says. She, also, left a package of For Men Only beard dye on my desk yesterday, wordlessly letting me know what I already could see: my beard was growing in white. (Karma's name is actually Carmen. From the wisdom of her sixty-seven-I-don't-take-shit-from-nobody-years, she told me that she changed it in the belief that my secretary should have a name like Karma to express compatibility with what she had observed were my demonstrated metaphysical talents.) "For an old fart, she said, "I am very 'new age'."
Back to business, I asked the nameless woman who had interrupted my
Subway, "Does your husband have any enemies?"
"Not that I know of. Except for me. I hate the sucking son-of-a-bitch."
Huh? Mixed messages. "Isn't divorce an option under those circumstances?" I asked, sounding like a wimped-out marriage counselor.
"Not if you can't find him. But anyway, it's not even a remote possibility. He'd make sure I was penniless, and he'd take the kids away from me."
"He can't do that. Divorce courts look at the situation very carefully these days and try to be fair."
She looked at me with disbelief, "Where have you been? Them what has the dough, calls the tune."
Now that got my attention. I don't work for nothing. "How are you planning to pay my fee?" I asked, moving in a straight line to the bottom line.
"I do have a small checking account. Stanley always makes sure I have
about four thousand. Not enough to run away. But enough to make sure I look
nice."
Four thousand. I rapidly calculated how long and how intensive a search I
could make for Stanley on four grand. Not overly long or intense. Then there
was the guilt of taking all her money and leaving her and the kids (who knows
how many) destitute in a homeless shelter, if Stanley wasn't found. Moral
compunction demanded that I fill her in.
"In the P.I. biz," I said, "the money pays for the investigator's best efforts, which may or may not be the client's desired result. That is to say, there are no
guarantees I will find your husband. There are some people who disappear and
are never found." (I didn't mention Jimmy Hoffa.)
She seemed to nod in understanding. Good. I got over that hurdle.
"Does Stanley have insurance?" I probed.
"Of course. For the Jag, the Range Rover, the boat, the house, the business, but he didn't believe in life insurance. The bastard knew I'd be too tempted to slit his throat if I were his beneficiary."
"Yes, I see." Why did she want him back? I asked her that.
"Have I made a grave error? Don't you get it? At least if Stanley's alive, the
kids and I have a roof over our heads and food."
Blanche elaborated. As it turned out, the roof was a house, if it's still called
that when it's thirty thousand square feet in the toniest neighborhood. I guessed
their menu was take-out from some gourmet grocery. Make that delivery. I
couldn't see Blanche grocery shopping. That was her name: Blanche Vorace.
(Did I tell you she had pale skin?) Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Vorace. I'd heard that
somewhere. Blanche gave me a two thousand dollar retainer (half her assets, if I believed her sad story) and a kind of curriculum vitae of her husband. Blanche must be a Virgo, I thought. My Mother made lists like that. Well, not exactly like that. My Father never went missing, but you get the point.
I scanned Blanche's list. In my experience, such compilations are more often than not, incomplete. After a careful perusal, what ain't there, what's
conspicuously absent is often a clue. "I'm going to need a recent picture of your husband," I said.
"Oh. Of course." Blanche seemed to be thrown off-center by her failure to
have included the obvious.
"In the interest of being thorough, I'll have to ask some questions you might find offensive."
Blanche blanched a little. Good. She had something to hide. Secrets. As we all do.
"This isn't a judgment-call on your life, Mrs. Vorace. Be patient here. I have tough questions to ask you. If you want me to do a good job, and you want your money’s worth, you've gotta trust me." She relaxed a little and looked slightly less grim. Like AFTER the dentist gives you the novocaine."What exactly is your husband's business?"
"Imports and exports." (That was succinct.)
I tapped my pen, waiting for an elaboration which was sure to follow. It didn't. "Of?" (I could be equally breviloquent.)
Blanche shrugged. "I really don't know. It was his business. My business
was taking care of the house and kids."
"Are there any personal relationships that you or your husband have which
might have caused a problem in your marriage?" (How was that for tact?)
"I can only speak for myself. No." (I expected her to recoil at my query, but,
in fact, she was matter-of-fact.)
"Was Stanley having any financial problems?"
"I don't know."
"Would it be possible for me to review his income tax returns and business
files?"
Blanche seemed hesitant. "Is that really necessary? I mean, he might have
just taken the Range Rover for a drive up the coast. He'd be pissed off if I
allowed someone to paw through his business records. Can't you work with
what I've given you?" Blanche gestured to the list in front of me.
We'd reached a road-block. I wasn't just someone. I was the someone she'd hired to find her missing husband. The client giveth. The client taketh away.
"Tell you what, I'll go over what I have so far. If I need anything else, I'll call
you."
Blanche stood up indicating she, for one, was finished. I stood as well, to
escort her to the door in a gentlemanly fashion. My parting shot was, "Are there any people who know you or your husband or your kids who have inappropriately insinuated themselves in your life?"
"No." (Just no.)
One more shot, "Does your husband have any lawsuits pending?"
"No." (If she's so out of touch with his business, how could she be so sure?)
And another quick one as we reached the outside door, "Does Mr. Vorace
have a criminal record or are there any charges or investigations pending?" (I
was ready to duck.)
Blanche gave me that squint again and threw me a verbal punch, "My
husband is an upstanding member of the community."
I thought for a moment she was going to rip the case out of my hands,
but she simply left with her own parting shot, "Call me when you find the
bastard," as if I had everything I needed to know about Stanley Vorace. Not by
a long-shot. But then, I'm the P.I. I know what I need to know.
As I was studying the facts of Stanley's life as seen through his wife's filter
and her somewhat guarded replies to my questions, Karma returned from lunch.
She brought me a piece of hot-apple-crumb pie. As she unwrapped it, she said
she pre-cognited (her word, not mine) that I'd kill for this dessert. When I told
her about the woman who had slipped through the front office which she
(Karma) had left unlocked, she told me I was a dumb fuck. Everybody knew
who Stanley Vorace was. Last on Blanche's list, I saw that Stan was on the
board of the local art museum. I could've seen his name or his picture in the
society column if I didn't usually turn directly to the sports page. Furthermore,
his import-export business, Thalassic Marine, meant dick to me. (The closest I
come to imported goods is Pier 1.) On second thought, "Thalassic Marine" was
redundant. Stanley didn't strike me as a person who would be illiterate. Then
again, maybe he just liked the sound of it.
"Blanche and Stanley," Karma said and passed me a fork. She smirked,
"Streetcar Named Desire."
"Go burn some incense," I told her, "And check your shocks."
"Chakras," she corrected me and demonstrated the locations of same on her(fully-clothed) body. "So was there a Stella?"
I examined the list Blanche left and the answers I had extracted, "Not that I
can see." I had to assume, at this point, that the information was correct and
that Blanche actually did want her husband to be found even if he was a son-of-a-bitch. "Stanley's first wife was named Claire."
"Oh shit," Karma sighed. "I was visualizing Stanley standing at the foot of
the staircase like Brando yelling: 'Stella!'. What happened to Claire?"
"Old monkey." I said.
Karma wrinkled her six-decade-old forehead. "Old monkey?"
"Yep. Claire got to the dreaded forty and old Stanley told her to fuck off and
got himself a new monkey, as it were."
Connecting the dots, Karma said, "A monkey called Blanche...as it were."
"And Claire: A Streetcar Named Retired. So Stan married Blanche, had two
kids, and lived happily ever after until he evaporated yesterday evening."
Karma removed the plate and fork and posed in that inimitable way she has
when she's about to delve into her philosophy of life and share it with me. "I
wanna puke," she said. "Guy marries and has his first family which he totally
ignores and lets his wife raise while he pursues the important stuff like wealth
and power. Then one day he looks over at his wife and sees her buns have
sagged. Here he is, a lion of industry, with a spouse whose skin is losing it's
snap. He realizes this is a disaster, and if he could only get a younger
woman, he'd get his snap back (which he's surreptitiously checked in the
shower.) Then he finds the replacement before he dumps wife-number-one and
leaves her to raise the kids which he knows she's good at. Guilt-free, he marries
number two, has a second lot of kids and fawns all over them. Coochie-coo."
"Like you said, 'Puke'. However, be that as it may, we don't know what kind
of relationship Stanley had with Claire, if they had kids, or if anyone close
decided to send him to another level of unconsciousness."
"You think he's dead?" Karma gasped.
"My intuition hasn't kicked in yet. Give me a little time, here. Hold my calls." I stood up. "I'm getting a distinct message right at this moment. An urgent message. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the crapper."
Now available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99. It should be available on Barnes and Noble: Nook in a couple days. Here's the first chapter. The novel on Kindle and Nook is properly formatted. You can download the FREE Kindle APP for your PC, MAc, iPOD, iPAD, Blackberry etc. You'll see the APPS on the right side of my book page. Nook also has FREE APPs for e-reader devices.
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this
Chapter One
A GRAVE ERROR?
In my business there aren't many occasions when the adjective 'nice' gets much usage. There aren't nice murderers or nice wife-beaters or nice child-molesters . I'm forty-five years old, and I'm tired. Tired of looking at the maggoty underbelly of humanity. Tired. Beat to shit. I'm a private investigator with no private life. I'd like to meet one nice person, if anyone still exists who meets that description.
I exposed the innards of my Subway sandwich and attacked it with my fighting knife. They never listen when I tell them, 'light on the mustard and mayo'. In life-threatening situations (which the mayo was not), it takes special courage, personal strength and commitment to deploy a knife because it doesn't have the distance and impersonality of projectiles. As a knife user, I needed to know a great deal about strike points, human anatomy, and human physiology in order to achieve the desired result in defending myself. It takes enormous skill and a strong stomach to proceed with a blade. I've never liked the sight of blood, but I've had to put that aversion away on more than a few occasions.
I heard someone enter my outer office. Shit. I shoulda locked the door. Even my lunch is plagued with intruders infringing on my digestion, trespassing on my feast, muscling into my moments of solitude. She ambled in without even bothering to knock. Nice. Very nice. Very, very nice.
Before I could intercept it, my tongue cobra'd out and sucked off a vagrant
glob of mustard which was lodged in my mustache. She squinted at me. I guess she didn't find my snake a turn-on. She sat down and allowed me to size her up. About five eleven (before sitting), blond hair (probably L'Oreal), and blue eyes turning greyish with age, which I judged to be about thirty. Anyway, less than thirty-five. Expensively underdressed. Make that understated. Nice, as I said. Evidence of money.
I still had the Subway between my jaws, so she introduced the topic. "I want you to find my husband," she said. Way cool for someone who'd misplaced her spouse.
"When did you lose him?" Another squint.
"Last night he didn't come home," she said. "He was due home at six. When it got to be five after six, I knew something was wrong."
Curious. Not much time had elapsed. A bit soon for her to think of her husband as 'missing'. That set off a silent alarm from my most distant trip wire."What time does he usually come home?" I took out a pad of paper and began to take notes.
"Six or six-o-one. He never varies. When it got to be ten after six, I called his office, the hospitals, the CHP, the Police, and the Sheriff."
"Did you file a Missing Person Report?"
"They won't do anything for at least forty-eight hours. I've already told you I
knew something was wrong by five after six."
What's wrong with this picture?" Can you think of any reason your husband might have not to come home yesterday at his usual time?"
"If I knew that, would I bother with a private dick?" She squinted at me with
unconcealed hostility. I let that sluice off like water off the proverbial duck. I've gotten waterproof, if not bulletproof after years in this game.
"Does your husband have any ailments?" I asked, pen poised.
"Unfortunately not. He's a very healthy fifty-two."
She squinted at me, and I could sense she was making a comparison. Okay, so I look a little rough. I'm trying to grow a beard and it's a little stubbly at the moment, but when it gets a little longer, it's gonna be 'killer'. That's what my secretary, Karma, says. She, also, left a package of For Men Only beard dye on my desk yesterday, wordlessly letting me know what I already could see: my beard was growing in white. (Karma's name is actually Carmen. From the wisdom of her sixty-seven-I-don't-take-shit-from-nobody-years, she told me that she changed it in the belief that my secretary should have a name like Karma to express compatibility with what she had observed were my demonstrated metaphysical talents.) "For an old fart, she said, "I am very 'new age'."
Back to business, I asked the nameless woman who had interrupted my
Subway, "Does your husband have any enemies?"
"Not that I know of. Except for me. I hate the sucking son-of-a-bitch."
Huh? Mixed messages. "Isn't divorce an option under those circumstances?" I asked, sounding like a wimped-out marriage counselor.
"Not if you can't find him. But anyway, it's not even a remote possibility. He'd make sure I was penniless, and he'd take the kids away from me."
"He can't do that. Divorce courts look at the situation very carefully these days and try to be fair."
She looked at me with disbelief, "Where have you been? Them what has the dough, calls the tune."
Now that got my attention. I don't work for nothing. "How are you planning to pay my fee?" I asked, moving in a straight line to the bottom line.
"I do have a small checking account. Stanley always makes sure I have
about four thousand. Not enough to run away. But enough to make sure I look
nice."
Four thousand. I rapidly calculated how long and how intensive a search I
could make for Stanley on four grand. Not overly long or intense. Then there
was the guilt of taking all her money and leaving her and the kids (who knows
how many) destitute in a homeless shelter, if Stanley wasn't found. Moral
compunction demanded that I fill her in.
"In the P.I. biz," I said, "the money pays for the investigator's best efforts, which may or may not be the client's desired result. That is to say, there are no
guarantees I will find your husband. There are some people who disappear and
are never found." (I didn't mention Jimmy Hoffa.)
She seemed to nod in understanding. Good. I got over that hurdle.
"Does Stanley have insurance?" I probed.
"Of course. For the Jag, the Range Rover, the boat, the house, the business, but he didn't believe in life insurance. The bastard knew I'd be too tempted to slit his throat if I were his beneficiary."
"Yes, I see." Why did she want him back? I asked her that.
"Have I made a grave error? Don't you get it? At least if Stanley's alive, the
kids and I have a roof over our heads and food."
Blanche elaborated. As it turned out, the roof was a house, if it's still called
that when it's thirty thousand square feet in the toniest neighborhood. I guessed
their menu was take-out from some gourmet grocery. Make that delivery. I
couldn't see Blanche grocery shopping. That was her name: Blanche Vorace.
(Did I tell you she had pale skin?) Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Vorace. I'd heard that
somewhere. Blanche gave me a two thousand dollar retainer (half her assets, if I believed her sad story) and a kind of curriculum vitae of her husband. Blanche must be a Virgo, I thought. My Mother made lists like that. Well, not exactly like that. My Father never went missing, but you get the point.
I scanned Blanche's list. In my experience, such compilations are more often than not, incomplete. After a careful perusal, what ain't there, what's
conspicuously absent is often a clue. "I'm going to need a recent picture of your husband," I said.
"Oh. Of course." Blanche seemed to be thrown off-center by her failure to
have included the obvious.
"In the interest of being thorough, I'll have to ask some questions you might find offensive."
Blanche blanched a little. Good. She had something to hide. Secrets. As we all do.
"This isn't a judgment-call on your life, Mrs. Vorace. Be patient here. I have tough questions to ask you. If you want me to do a good job, and you want your money’s worth, you've gotta trust me." She relaxed a little and looked slightly less grim. Like AFTER the dentist gives you the novocaine."What exactly is your husband's business?"
"Imports and exports." (That was succinct.)
I tapped my pen, waiting for an elaboration which was sure to follow. It didn't. "Of?" (I could be equally breviloquent.)
Blanche shrugged. "I really don't know. It was his business. My business
was taking care of the house and kids."
"Are there any personal relationships that you or your husband have which
might have caused a problem in your marriage?" (How was that for tact?)
"I can only speak for myself. No." (I expected her to recoil at my query, but,
in fact, she was matter-of-fact.)
"Was Stanley having any financial problems?"
"I don't know."
"Would it be possible for me to review his income tax returns and business
files?"
Blanche seemed hesitant. "Is that really necessary? I mean, he might have
just taken the Range Rover for a drive up the coast. He'd be pissed off if I
allowed someone to paw through his business records. Can't you work with
what I've given you?" Blanche gestured to the list in front of me.
We'd reached a road-block. I wasn't just someone. I was the someone she'd hired to find her missing husband. The client giveth. The client taketh away.
"Tell you what, I'll go over what I have so far. If I need anything else, I'll call
you."
Blanche stood up indicating she, for one, was finished. I stood as well, to
escort her to the door in a gentlemanly fashion. My parting shot was, "Are there any people who know you or your husband or your kids who have inappropriately insinuated themselves in your life?"
"No." (Just no.)
One more shot, "Does your husband have any lawsuits pending?"
"No." (If she's so out of touch with his business, how could she be so sure?)
And another quick one as we reached the outside door, "Does Mr. Vorace
have a criminal record or are there any charges or investigations pending?" (I
was ready to duck.)
Blanche gave me that squint again and threw me a verbal punch, "My
husband is an upstanding member of the community."
I thought for a moment she was going to rip the case out of my hands,
but she simply left with her own parting shot, "Call me when you find the
bastard," as if I had everything I needed to know about Stanley Vorace. Not by
a long-shot. But then, I'm the P.I. I know what I need to know.
As I was studying the facts of Stanley's life as seen through his wife's filter
and her somewhat guarded replies to my questions, Karma returned from lunch.
She brought me a piece of hot-apple-crumb pie. As she unwrapped it, she said
she pre-cognited (her word, not mine) that I'd kill for this dessert. When I told
her about the woman who had slipped through the front office which she
(Karma) had left unlocked, she told me I was a dumb fuck. Everybody knew
who Stanley Vorace was. Last on Blanche's list, I saw that Stan was on the
board of the local art museum. I could've seen his name or his picture in the
society column if I didn't usually turn directly to the sports page. Furthermore,
his import-export business, Thalassic Marine, meant dick to me. (The closest I
come to imported goods is Pier 1.) On second thought, "Thalassic Marine" was
redundant. Stanley didn't strike me as a person who would be illiterate. Then
again, maybe he just liked the sound of it.
"Blanche and Stanley," Karma said and passed me a fork. She smirked,
"Streetcar Named Desire."
"Go burn some incense," I told her, "And check your shocks."
"Chakras," she corrected me and demonstrated the locations of same on her(fully-clothed) body. "So was there a Stella?"
I examined the list Blanche left and the answers I had extracted, "Not that I
can see." I had to assume, at this point, that the information was correct and
that Blanche actually did want her husband to be found even if he was a son-of-a-bitch. "Stanley's first wife was named Claire."
"Oh shit," Karma sighed. "I was visualizing Stanley standing at the foot of
the staircase like Brando yelling: 'Stella!'. What happened to Claire?"
"Old monkey." I said.
Karma wrinkled her six-decade-old forehead. "Old monkey?"
"Yep. Claire got to the dreaded forty and old Stanley told her to fuck off and
got himself a new monkey, as it were."
Connecting the dots, Karma said, "A monkey called Blanche...as it were."
"And Claire: A Streetcar Named Retired. So Stan married Blanche, had two
kids, and lived happily ever after until he evaporated yesterday evening."
Karma removed the plate and fork and posed in that inimitable way she has
when she's about to delve into her philosophy of life and share it with me. "I
wanna puke," she said. "Guy marries and has his first family which he totally
ignores and lets his wife raise while he pursues the important stuff like wealth
and power. Then one day he looks over at his wife and sees her buns have
sagged. Here he is, a lion of industry, with a spouse whose skin is losing it's
snap. He realizes this is a disaster, and if he could only get a younger
woman, he'd get his snap back (which he's surreptitiously checked in the
shower.) Then he finds the replacement before he dumps wife-number-one and
leaves her to raise the kids which he knows she's good at. Guilt-free, he marries
number two, has a second lot of kids and fawns all over them. Coochie-coo."
"Like you said, 'Puke'. However, be that as it may, we don't know what kind
of relationship Stanley had with Claire, if they had kids, or if anyone close
decided to send him to another level of unconsciousness."
"You think he's dead?" Karma gasped.
"My intuition hasn't kicked in yet. Give me a little time, here. Hold my calls." I stood up. "I'm getting a distinct message right at this moment. An urgent message. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the crapper."
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
FORMATTING A MANUSCRIPT FOR AN E-BOOK
Well, you can see on the previous blogs, the paragraph indentations DISAPPEARED when I copied the chapters to this blog from my computer.
That is why, if you are a writer and want to make your manuscripts look exactly like a book....
you should think about hiring Kimberley Hitchens at Booknook.biz You can contact her at hitch@booknook.biz
If you purchase my books online at $2.99 each, you'll see what a fantastic job "Hitch" did with my manuscripts. There are FREE APPS you can download for Mac, PC, iPad, etc. which will allow you to purchase the eBook and read it on several e-reader devices. Amazon Kindle will tell you what will work. A FREE APP is available for NOOK to use on an iPAD, but I'm not sure what they provide for other e-reading devices.
Shortly, I'll be uploading 3 more novels to NOOK and KINDLE: NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Mystery (Set mostly in Santa Barbara, California) and the sequel:
HAND IN GLOVE, A Psychic Eye Mystery (Set in Santa Barbara and Oahu.)
Not too grim or grisly, both stories are told with humor. After all, isn't there enough bad news on the TV! Look for humor in all my writing and a few ghosts and spirits may make themselves known.
My third novel to be uploaded as an eBook is THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE, A Nick and Dagger Mystery. This one may take a while before I upload it as it is just now being formatted by Hitch.
All 5 of these eBooks will be $2.99 each (That includes SAME MOON,SAME SKY and BLOOD MEMORY)
E. J. Daniel from THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS OF COLORADO
That is why, if you are a writer and want to make your manuscripts look exactly like a book....
you should think about hiring Kimberley Hitchens at Booknook.biz You can contact her at hitch@booknook.biz
If you purchase my books online at $2.99 each, you'll see what a fantastic job "Hitch" did with my manuscripts. There are FREE APPS you can download for Mac, PC, iPad, etc. which will allow you to purchase the eBook and read it on several e-reader devices. Amazon Kindle will tell you what will work. A FREE APP is available for NOOK to use on an iPAD, but I'm not sure what they provide for other e-reading devices.
Shortly, I'll be uploading 3 more novels to NOOK and KINDLE: NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Mystery (Set mostly in Santa Barbara, California) and the sequel:
HAND IN GLOVE, A Psychic Eye Mystery (Set in Santa Barbara and Oahu.)
Not too grim or grisly, both stories are told with humor. After all, isn't there enough bad news on the TV! Look for humor in all my writing and a few ghosts and spirits may make themselves known.
My third novel to be uploaded as an eBook is THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE, A Nick and Dagger Mystery. This one may take a while before I upload it as it is just now being formatted by Hitch.
All 5 of these eBooks will be $2.99 each (That includes SAME MOON,SAME SKY and BLOOD MEMORY)
E. J. Daniel from THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS OF COLORADO
BLOOD MEMORY: First Four Chapters
BLOOD MEMORY by E. J. Daniel
Available as an eBook at Barnes and Noble NOOK and Amazon KINDLE. The formatting on the eBooks looks great. Unfortunately, those formats can’t be copied and pasted here, so the following four chapters are from my manuscript. I hope you laugh.
First Four Chapters:
Part One: Blood Memory
Chapter One
MINDLESS TRICKS
Her Father's blood still ran in her veins. Not the actual blood. That was long gone. It was the Memory of the Blood. Carey would've been the first to be skeptical. She was trained in the medical arts.
She looked in the courtesy mirror of her Jeep and examined the zit on the end of her nose. No amount of concealer was concealing. SHIT. "I'm thirty-two. Give it up!" She snarled to her skin. If she didn't have to get so close to her clients, she wouldn't have worried about it. She'd have to glob on some of the Derma-Marvel she had in her desk at work. That's when she heard her Father's words, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
In actuality, her Daddy would've never applied that slogan to Carey. He always supported her in whatever her endeavor, and her college training was an expensive endeavor. Starting right after he died, Carey found herself using expressions only her father would've used. Maybe that, she theorized, was his way of continuing to assert himself and show he still had an interest in her life. (BUT THIS SAME SHIT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO HER WIDOWED MOTHER!)
A beater-car lurched out in front of her from a service station nearly grazing the right front fender of her new Cherokee. The old duffer driving was oblivious. His head barely poked above the steering wheel. In fact, if Carey had been behind him, her only evidence that the car wasn't on autopilot would've been a wisp of hair.
"GET DEATH OFF THE ROADS! YOU UNDERSHOT, UNDERSLUNG BASTARD!" Carey yelled. (Fortunately, the windows were up. You could get killed in Southern California for a lot less.) But there it was again: Daddy making himself known.
By the time Carey rolled into the blood bank, her blood pressure had returned to normal, and she was ready for work. She was the Big Cheese. The Top Banana. Well almost. In any event, she ran the joint. Carey was no longer a phlebotomist. Other employees did the blood-letting. She welcomed the donors and made everything run smoothly. She was their first impression of the place. "Gotta cover up Mount
St. Helens," she said to her nose, ignoring the fact that she was a very pretty lady.
Chapter Two
CRUNCH, SPLAT
The role of Trophy Wife of a Real Estate Tycoon was a heavy responsibility. Denise Treasure had suggested broadly to her husband, Wiff, that a Range Rover might be a safer vehicle than the Mercedes to cart around their tiny daughter. She actually had no data to support her theory and was, therefore, overruled. Even though all the other Trophy Wives were getting Range Rovers, Wiff's reasoning was that Denise would be more likely to be car-jacked if she was driving a SUV.
"That kind of vehicle is in great demand in Belize," he explained with not a small amount of condescension.
As soon as Wifford Quincy Treasure, III, left for work, Denise looked up Belize in the atlas. "Huh? A country in Central America. I guess the roads suck. Wiff was right once again."
At noon that same day, Denise took her car keys and loaded her toddler's stroller into the trunk. It was time to collect Tiffany from Montessori. Tiffany was only two and a half, and she was always exhausted from her stint at school.
Denise usually met the other Mothers on the beach bikepath, and they all went running with their snoozing toddlers tucked safely into their pricey three-wheeled-jogger-strollers.
Wiff expected his wife to maintain her hard body. Sometimes she yearned for a piece of the key-lime pie she recalled from her childhood in Fort Lauderdale when she never gained any weight.
Denise talked on her cell-phone to the caterers. (Wiff was throwing a bash to reel in new limited partners to his "Cliff's Edge Condominiums" which were perched precariously on the bluffs above PCH enjoying a fabulous view of the Pacific Ocean for as long as the unstable soil put up with them).
Denise was in charge of making the event as glitzy as possible. When the light changed to green, she was so absorbed in her telecom-menu-planning that she proceeded across the intersection without noticing a huge, very crappy truck that decided to do likewise (having matter-of-factly run the red light). Unfortunately, the truck broad sided her and whipped Denise's car into a 180 which then allowed another crappy truck to plow into her head on.
She lost consciousness when the airbag deployed and pushed the cell-phone into her head. Blood was everywhere. (Wiff had a great insurance policy, and the car, now totaled, could be replaced.)
The firemen extricated Denise with the 'jaws of life' and rushed her to the nearest ER. The need for Denise to make a decision between mushroom tartletts vs. deep-fried baby artichokes no longer existed. Wiff would be extremely disappointed.
Chapter Three
PATIENTS ARE A VIRTUE
Dr. Jack Douglas heard the ambulance before he saw it. The emergency vehicle reached the intersection and cruised through against the light with sirens full on and beacon flashing. Some cars actually pulled over and stopped. Most of the other drivers plowed along oblivious to the ambulance dodging and weaving around them.
Jack wondered how it felt to be in an ambulance with cars coming at you full tilt. "Inside that vehicle lies one of my guests," Jack thought not differentiating between the paramedics, the patient, and the occupants of the cars that nearly hit them.
Another guest. Another customer. Another patient. He would never run out of patients. "I'm running out of patience," he groaned. Two more blocks to the hospital.
He thought about the house he'd just rented at the beach. The waves slopped up to the base of the steps dulling the din on PCH. His living quarters were on the second floor with an unobstructed view of the Pacific. What the hell was he doing in L.A. traffic when he could be fishing? Not that he knew how to fish. He'd never learned as a boy, and he certainly didn't have time for it when he was in med school.
"I could fish. How complicated could it be?"
He pulled past the entrance to the ER and saw the paramedics unloading a gurney from the ambulance at the Emergency Room. He wondered if the gurney-person would eventually arrive at his doorstep at ICU. He'd know soon enough. The important thing was he still had time to chat up the nurses before the shit hit the fan.
Chapter Four
A STICKY SITUATION
The bridal boutique oozed the soft, cloying scent of gardenias while the surround sound system seeped Vivaldi's Four Seasons into the sub-consciousness of the brides-to-be: be happy, get married, buy, buy, buy.
Constance Taylor stepped into her ivory satin wedding gown with the assistance of Maria, a young Hispanic seamstress. Maria lifted the train and helped Constance onto the elevated dais. Constance did a little twirl and observed herself in the bank of mirrors.
"I've been planning this since I was a little kid. Mark and I shared the same playpen."
"Oh, that so nice. You marry best friend," Maria said.
Constance turned slowly to allow Maria, who knelt below the dais, to pin the hem to the correct length. The seamstress completed her task and stood up, a few pins protruded from her mouth.
"This most beautiful dress," Maria mumbled through the pin barrier.
"I think so, too. It's perfect."
"You like me take in waist a little?" the tiny woman suggested.
Constance grimaced and looked distracted. Her face turned ashen.
"Okay?" the seamstress fished for an answer.
"Yes, okay."
As the seamstress cinched the waist with a row of straight pins, Constance swayed and groaned. She grasped her side.
"I so sorry! I stick you?"
"Ohhhh! Ohhh God." Constance's response was to crumple on the platform without any regard for the disposition of the most expensive dress in the shop. "Help me! Help me!" Her weak pleas for assistance were smothered by the strains of Albinoni wafting through the shop.
Fear washed over Maria's face. Had she injured a very important customer? She didn't know whether to call 9-1-1 or just flee before the Migras shipped her ass back to El Salvador. She couldn't let that happen. What would become of her kids? She looked at the pathetic rich girl writhing on the dais. One little pin prick couldn't have done that. Could it? Maria rushed to unbutton the gown and ease it off the tortured creature. Then she called for help.
By the time the paramedics arrived, Maria had wrapped Constance in a terry robe and made her decent for her trip to the hospital. The emergency medics were totally uninterested in Maria's immigration status. A possible burst appendix and impending peritonitis took front and center. Maria picked up the wrinkled wedding gown and watched as Constance was loaded into the ambulance.
"Poor little thing. She plan this for all her life."
Available as an eBook at Barnes and Noble NOOK and Amazon KINDLE. The formatting on the eBooks looks great. Unfortunately, those formats can’t be copied and pasted here, so the following four chapters are from my manuscript. I hope you laugh.
First Four Chapters:
Part One: Blood Memory
Chapter One
MINDLESS TRICKS
Her Father's blood still ran in her veins. Not the actual blood. That was long gone. It was the Memory of the Blood. Carey would've been the first to be skeptical. She was trained in the medical arts.
She looked in the courtesy mirror of her Jeep and examined the zit on the end of her nose. No amount of concealer was concealing. SHIT. "I'm thirty-two. Give it up!" She snarled to her skin. If she didn't have to get so close to her clients, she wouldn't have worried about it. She'd have to glob on some of the Derma-Marvel she had in her desk at work. That's when she heard her Father's words, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
In actuality, her Daddy would've never applied that slogan to Carey. He always supported her in whatever her endeavor, and her college training was an expensive endeavor. Starting right after he died, Carey found herself using expressions only her father would've used. Maybe that, she theorized, was his way of continuing to assert himself and show he still had an interest in her life. (BUT THIS SAME SHIT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO HER WIDOWED MOTHER!)
A beater-car lurched out in front of her from a service station nearly grazing the right front fender of her new Cherokee. The old duffer driving was oblivious. His head barely poked above the steering wheel. In fact, if Carey had been behind him, her only evidence that the car wasn't on autopilot would've been a wisp of hair.
"GET DEATH OFF THE ROADS! YOU UNDERSHOT, UNDERSLUNG BASTARD!" Carey yelled. (Fortunately, the windows were up. You could get killed in Southern California for a lot less.) But there it was again: Daddy making himself known.
By the time Carey rolled into the blood bank, her blood pressure had returned to normal, and she was ready for work. She was the Big Cheese. The Top Banana. Well almost. In any event, she ran the joint. Carey was no longer a phlebotomist. Other employees did the blood-letting. She welcomed the donors and made everything run smoothly. She was their first impression of the place. "Gotta cover up Mount
St. Helens," she said to her nose, ignoring the fact that she was a very pretty lady.
Chapter Two
CRUNCH, SPLAT
The role of Trophy Wife of a Real Estate Tycoon was a heavy responsibility. Denise Treasure had suggested broadly to her husband, Wiff, that a Range Rover might be a safer vehicle than the Mercedes to cart around their tiny daughter. She actually had no data to support her theory and was, therefore, overruled. Even though all the other Trophy Wives were getting Range Rovers, Wiff's reasoning was that Denise would be more likely to be car-jacked if she was driving a SUV.
"That kind of vehicle is in great demand in Belize," he explained with not a small amount of condescension.
As soon as Wifford Quincy Treasure, III, left for work, Denise looked up Belize in the atlas. "Huh? A country in Central America. I guess the roads suck. Wiff was right once again."
At noon that same day, Denise took her car keys and loaded her toddler's stroller into the trunk. It was time to collect Tiffany from Montessori. Tiffany was only two and a half, and she was always exhausted from her stint at school.
Denise usually met the other Mothers on the beach bikepath, and they all went running with their snoozing toddlers tucked safely into their pricey three-wheeled-jogger-strollers.
Wiff expected his wife to maintain her hard body. Sometimes she yearned for a piece of the key-lime pie she recalled from her childhood in Fort Lauderdale when she never gained any weight.
Denise talked on her cell-phone to the caterers. (Wiff was throwing a bash to reel in new limited partners to his "Cliff's Edge Condominiums" which were perched precariously on the bluffs above PCH enjoying a fabulous view of the Pacific Ocean for as long as the unstable soil put up with them).
Denise was in charge of making the event as glitzy as possible. When the light changed to green, she was so absorbed in her telecom-menu-planning that she proceeded across the intersection without noticing a huge, very crappy truck that decided to do likewise (having matter-of-factly run the red light). Unfortunately, the truck broad sided her and whipped Denise's car into a 180 which then allowed another crappy truck to plow into her head on.
She lost consciousness when the airbag deployed and pushed the cell-phone into her head. Blood was everywhere. (Wiff had a great insurance policy, and the car, now totaled, could be replaced.)
The firemen extricated Denise with the 'jaws of life' and rushed her to the nearest ER. The need for Denise to make a decision between mushroom tartletts vs. deep-fried baby artichokes no longer existed. Wiff would be extremely disappointed.
Chapter Three
PATIENTS ARE A VIRTUE
Dr. Jack Douglas heard the ambulance before he saw it. The emergency vehicle reached the intersection and cruised through against the light with sirens full on and beacon flashing. Some cars actually pulled over and stopped. Most of the other drivers plowed along oblivious to the ambulance dodging and weaving around them.
Jack wondered how it felt to be in an ambulance with cars coming at you full tilt. "Inside that vehicle lies one of my guests," Jack thought not differentiating between the paramedics, the patient, and the occupants of the cars that nearly hit them.
Another guest. Another customer. Another patient. He would never run out of patients. "I'm running out of patience," he groaned. Two more blocks to the hospital.
He thought about the house he'd just rented at the beach. The waves slopped up to the base of the steps dulling the din on PCH. His living quarters were on the second floor with an unobstructed view of the Pacific. What the hell was he doing in L.A. traffic when he could be fishing? Not that he knew how to fish. He'd never learned as a boy, and he certainly didn't have time for it when he was in med school.
"I could fish. How complicated could it be?"
He pulled past the entrance to the ER and saw the paramedics unloading a gurney from the ambulance at the Emergency Room. He wondered if the gurney-person would eventually arrive at his doorstep at ICU. He'd know soon enough. The important thing was he still had time to chat up the nurses before the shit hit the fan.
Chapter Four
A STICKY SITUATION
The bridal boutique oozed the soft, cloying scent of gardenias while the surround sound system seeped Vivaldi's Four Seasons into the sub-consciousness of the brides-to-be: be happy, get married, buy, buy, buy.
Constance Taylor stepped into her ivory satin wedding gown with the assistance of Maria, a young Hispanic seamstress. Maria lifted the train and helped Constance onto the elevated dais. Constance did a little twirl and observed herself in the bank of mirrors.
"I've been planning this since I was a little kid. Mark and I shared the same playpen."
"Oh, that so nice. You marry best friend," Maria said.
Constance turned slowly to allow Maria, who knelt below the dais, to pin the hem to the correct length. The seamstress completed her task and stood up, a few pins protruded from her mouth.
"This most beautiful dress," Maria mumbled through the pin barrier.
"I think so, too. It's perfect."
"You like me take in waist a little?" the tiny woman suggested.
Constance grimaced and looked distracted. Her face turned ashen.
"Okay?" the seamstress fished for an answer.
"Yes, okay."
As the seamstress cinched the waist with a row of straight pins, Constance swayed and groaned. She grasped her side.
"I so sorry! I stick you?"
"Ohhhh! Ohhh God." Constance's response was to crumple on the platform without any regard for the disposition of the most expensive dress in the shop. "Help me! Help me!" Her weak pleas for assistance were smothered by the strains of Albinoni wafting through the shop.
Fear washed over Maria's face. Had she injured a very important customer? She didn't know whether to call 9-1-1 or just flee before the Migras shipped her ass back to El Salvador. She couldn't let that happen. What would become of her kids? She looked at the pathetic rich girl writhing on the dais. One little pin prick couldn't have done that. Could it? Maria rushed to unbutton the gown and ease it off the tortured creature. Then she called for help.
By the time the paramedics arrived, Maria had wrapped Constance in a terry robe and made her decent for her trip to the hospital. The emergency medics were totally uninterested in Maria's immigration status. A possible burst appendix and impending peritonitis took front and center. Maria picked up the wrinkled wedding gown and watched as Constance was loaded into the ambulance.
"Poor little thing. She plan this for all her life."
Same Moon, Same Sky: First Two Chapters
WARNING!!!!! If four letter words bother you: STP RIGHT HERE!!!!! The characters in this novel talk like twenty year old guys!
The eBooks on Amazon KINDLE and Barnes and Noble NOOK are correctly formatted and look great. Unfortunately those formats can’t be copied to my blog, so these first 2 chapters are from the manuscript on my computer.
SAME MOON, SAME SKY
by Elisa Medhus, M.D. and E. J. Daniel
Chapter One
Faded Gecko
I sat down at the foot of Momʼs bed. Bet sheʼd be surprised to see Iʼd found my
favorite shirt. Yeah, it was disreputable, but I got it on a bitchinʼ trip to Hawaii when I was
seventeen and learned to surf. It still fit. I liked it. Fortunately, even though sheʼd
pushed it to the back of the closet, she hadnʼt tossed it.
Mom was reading. Probably a medical journal. She did that when it was quiet and
Dad was still watching 60 Minutes on TV. I had my back to her, but I could see out of
the corner of my eye that it wasnʼt a journal. No wonder she didnʼt see me, she was
hiding behind People Magazine. What? That wasnʼt her usual style. Maybe she saw a
headline while standing in line at the supermarket about little green men having lunch
with the President and the First Lady. I wondered if aliens could attend the White
House in their natural bare-assed state or would they have to stop by Walmart for some
clothes made in China before they could pass through the W.H. security. I never heard
anyone mention seeing aliens with clothing. On the other hand, the lead story could be
yet another boring blurb about some wannabe actress on her fifth stint at rehab after a
judge had patted her hand and said, “Thereʼs no need for such a beautiful, talented
young lady to spend time with a lot of disgusting inmates at the local lock-up.
I shifted my weight as I turned toward Mom. She suddenly put down the tabloid and
stared at me. She looked taken aback. Bet she never thought Iʼd find that shirt.
“I donʼt believe it!” she said.
“Iʼm resourceful,” I said.
“You look wonderful!”
“Itʼs a little wrinkled, but it still fits. Okay. Itʼs frayed and the geckos are faded. Whatever.”
Mom leaned forward and tried to touch my hand. I got up.
“See ya,” I said and made a quick exit.
Chapter Two
Wet & Wild
Fuck! I hurtled down the tunnel slide at warp speed and nearly took out a couple of
rug-rats. Why the hell were kids lurking at the bottom of the slide? The pool is about
two city blocks long. Couldnʼt their parents park them in the shallow end? Maybe they
left their kids to their own devices while they boogied off for a latte or a cold one.
I hoped my loud FUCK got the attention of the babe lounging poolside slathering on
suntan lotion. Does that crap really work at this altitude? I swam over so I was just opposite the babe in question. The scent of HawaiianTropic wafted off this incredible specimen. H.T. always reminds me of my out-of-control days in Hawaii when hormones were allowed to do what hormones were supposed to do. This aphrodisiac clouded my mind. I had to get to band practice.
What the hell, Mom wouldʼve said, “Life is short.” Dad wouldʼve countered with,
“Take the bull by the horns.” No bull or bullshit here, and I was the one who was horny.
I offered up my sexiest, most persuasive smile. That always worked. But, did she
see me behind those trendy wraparound sunglasses that cost about a thousand bucks?
I couldnʼt tell. Okay. Sunglasses are necessary at high altitudes. Iʼm guessing there
are ultra-violet rays.
Since I couldnʼt get her attention, I climbed the pool ladder to give her the full effect
of my excellent body. Sheʼd have to be brain-dead not to react. Okay, that was crass.
It was possible that she didnʼt have all her faculties. But, at her age, which I judged to
be about twenty, she must still have functioning neurons and synapses. At least she
had long, sexy blonde hair (tinged a little green from the chlorine). Did that mean she
was a bottle-blonde? Whatever. She could be whatever she wanted to be. Shit. She
didnʼt react to my posturing.
I glanced over to the end of the hot springs pool. It was jammed with old folks in the
therapeutic section that was 104 degrees. Was that their answer to creaky, arthritic
joints? I canʼt visualize letting myself ever get that decrepit.
I plopped down on the lounge chair beside the unresponsive babe (which was
conveniently vacant: the chair, not the girl.) The Gods must love me to provide this
opportunity. The babe looked away.
Iʼm the lead singer-guitarist in my band. I sang, ʻAnd when I die, donʼt bury me tall,
just pickle my bones in alkeeholʼ. (Not one of my usual tunes. My Grandpa taught me
that to get Momʼs attention.) It also got the babeʼs attention. She swiveled her head
toward me. Yes! I do have a great voice even without band and backup.
Then I saw tears running down her cheeks. She removed her sunglasses and wiped
the blue-est of blue eyes. Great start, dude. What the hell had I done? Maybe I
shouldʼve chosen lyrics a little more upbeat.
My Mom wouldʼve jumped in and asked her what was wrong. Female tears scare the
crap outta me. I didnʼt want to know her problems. I have enough of my own. “What do
you think of the Ute Indians?” I asked in an attempt to move rapidly away from anything
else that might be on her mind.
She looked confused, ”What?”
“Donʼt you hike in the mountains? You mustʼve seen the Utes.”
“I donʼt want to see them. Theyʼd be pissed off,” she said.
“Cause they were run out of this valley and slaughtered?”
“Exactly.”
“Given enough time,” I said, “anyone can get over anything and theyʼve had enough
time.” That was, of course, bull crap. I hadnʼt worked out my shit yet.
“I donʼt like to talk about death,” she said.
Really?
In that case, I grabbed her hand, pulled her off her lounge chair, and she had just
enough time to toss her expensive specs on her towel before I dragged her up the
ladder to the tunnel slide.
* *
“You have to scream or itʼs no good,” I said.
We screamed. Every time. We mustʼve gone down the tunnel at least a dozen
times. Okay. I exaggerate. After she climbed out of the pool, she twisted her hair and
wrung it out like an old dishrag. Then she shook it. Reminded me of my giant schnauzer
who would wallow in the snow and then charge past me in the mudroom before I could
dry him off and wait until he got into the kitchen to shake. If Mom wasnʼt there, it was
cool. The massive furburger would plop down on the heated floor and live happily ever
after. But, if Mom was preparing a meal when Friedrich trotted in covered in snow, sheʼd
go into semi-meltdown.
Not that this girl actually reminded me of a dog. Not at all.
“I feel like Iʼm sixteen again,” I said.
“I hated being a teenager,” she grimaced.
“Iʼll bet. I can see you in one of those tiny cheerleader costumes jumping up and
down at basketball games with a bunch of other hotties.”
“Not for a second. I was fat.”
“What happened?” I looked at her ass as she bent over to adjust the beach towel on
the lounge chair. There wasnʼt an ounce of flab on this babe.
“I donʼt know. Guess I got fed-up being a blimp,” she said.
She looked sad again. Iʼm an asshole. Just when I thought Iʼd pulled her out of
whatever tragedy sheʼd been reliving, Iʼd shoved her back into it.
“Whatʼs your name?” I said.
“Crystal.”
“Your parents named you after a rock?”
Then she laughed. “And yours?”
“Stoner.”
“Be serious.”
“Well, my parents didnʼt call me that all the time. Sometimes they referred to me as
Erik.”
The eBooks on Amazon KINDLE and Barnes and Noble NOOK are correctly formatted and look great. Unfortunately those formats can’t be copied to my blog, so these first 2 chapters are from the manuscript on my computer.
SAME MOON, SAME SKY
by Elisa Medhus, M.D. and E. J. Daniel
Chapter One
Faded Gecko
I sat down at the foot of Momʼs bed. Bet sheʼd be surprised to see Iʼd found my
favorite shirt. Yeah, it was disreputable, but I got it on a bitchinʼ trip to Hawaii when I was
seventeen and learned to surf. It still fit. I liked it. Fortunately, even though sheʼd
pushed it to the back of the closet, she hadnʼt tossed it.
Mom was reading. Probably a medical journal. She did that when it was quiet and
Dad was still watching 60 Minutes on TV. I had my back to her, but I could see out of
the corner of my eye that it wasnʼt a journal. No wonder she didnʼt see me, she was
hiding behind People Magazine. What? That wasnʼt her usual style. Maybe she saw a
headline while standing in line at the supermarket about little green men having lunch
with the President and the First Lady. I wondered if aliens could attend the White
House in their natural bare-assed state or would they have to stop by Walmart for some
clothes made in China before they could pass through the W.H. security. I never heard
anyone mention seeing aliens with clothing. On the other hand, the lead story could be
yet another boring blurb about some wannabe actress on her fifth stint at rehab after a
judge had patted her hand and said, “Thereʼs no need for such a beautiful, talented
young lady to spend time with a lot of disgusting inmates at the local lock-up.
I shifted my weight as I turned toward Mom. She suddenly put down the tabloid and
stared at me. She looked taken aback. Bet she never thought Iʼd find that shirt.
“I donʼt believe it!” she said.
“Iʼm resourceful,” I said.
“You look wonderful!”
“Itʼs a little wrinkled, but it still fits. Okay. Itʼs frayed and the geckos are faded. Whatever.”
Mom leaned forward and tried to touch my hand. I got up.
“See ya,” I said and made a quick exit.
Chapter Two
Wet & Wild
Fuck! I hurtled down the tunnel slide at warp speed and nearly took out a couple of
rug-rats. Why the hell were kids lurking at the bottom of the slide? The pool is about
two city blocks long. Couldnʼt their parents park them in the shallow end? Maybe they
left their kids to their own devices while they boogied off for a latte or a cold one.
I hoped my loud FUCK got the attention of the babe lounging poolside slathering on
suntan lotion. Does that crap really work at this altitude? I swam over so I was just opposite the babe in question. The scent of HawaiianTropic wafted off this incredible specimen. H.T. always reminds me of my out-of-control days in Hawaii when hormones were allowed to do what hormones were supposed to do. This aphrodisiac clouded my mind. I had to get to band practice.
What the hell, Mom wouldʼve said, “Life is short.” Dad wouldʼve countered with,
“Take the bull by the horns.” No bull or bullshit here, and I was the one who was horny.
I offered up my sexiest, most persuasive smile. That always worked. But, did she
see me behind those trendy wraparound sunglasses that cost about a thousand bucks?
I couldnʼt tell. Okay. Sunglasses are necessary at high altitudes. Iʼm guessing there
are ultra-violet rays.
Since I couldnʼt get her attention, I climbed the pool ladder to give her the full effect
of my excellent body. Sheʼd have to be brain-dead not to react. Okay, that was crass.
It was possible that she didnʼt have all her faculties. But, at her age, which I judged to
be about twenty, she must still have functioning neurons and synapses. At least she
had long, sexy blonde hair (tinged a little green from the chlorine). Did that mean she
was a bottle-blonde? Whatever. She could be whatever she wanted to be. Shit. She
didnʼt react to my posturing.
I glanced over to the end of the hot springs pool. It was jammed with old folks in the
therapeutic section that was 104 degrees. Was that their answer to creaky, arthritic
joints? I canʼt visualize letting myself ever get that decrepit.
I plopped down on the lounge chair beside the unresponsive babe (which was
conveniently vacant: the chair, not the girl.) The Gods must love me to provide this
opportunity. The babe looked away.
Iʼm the lead singer-guitarist in my band. I sang, ʻAnd when I die, donʼt bury me tall,
just pickle my bones in alkeeholʼ. (Not one of my usual tunes. My Grandpa taught me
that to get Momʼs attention.) It also got the babeʼs attention. She swiveled her head
toward me. Yes! I do have a great voice even without band and backup.
Then I saw tears running down her cheeks. She removed her sunglasses and wiped
the blue-est of blue eyes. Great start, dude. What the hell had I done? Maybe I
shouldʼve chosen lyrics a little more upbeat.
My Mom wouldʼve jumped in and asked her what was wrong. Female tears scare the
crap outta me. I didnʼt want to know her problems. I have enough of my own. “What do
you think of the Ute Indians?” I asked in an attempt to move rapidly away from anything
else that might be on her mind.
She looked confused, ”What?”
“Donʼt you hike in the mountains? You mustʼve seen the Utes.”
“I donʼt want to see them. Theyʼd be pissed off,” she said.
“Cause they were run out of this valley and slaughtered?”
“Exactly.”
“Given enough time,” I said, “anyone can get over anything and theyʼve had enough
time.” That was, of course, bull crap. I hadnʼt worked out my shit yet.
“I donʼt like to talk about death,” she said.
Really?
In that case, I grabbed her hand, pulled her off her lounge chair, and she had just
enough time to toss her expensive specs on her towel before I dragged her up the
ladder to the tunnel slide.
* *
“You have to scream or itʼs no good,” I said.
We screamed. Every time. We mustʼve gone down the tunnel at least a dozen
times. Okay. I exaggerate. After she climbed out of the pool, she twisted her hair and
wrung it out like an old dishrag. Then she shook it. Reminded me of my giant schnauzer
who would wallow in the snow and then charge past me in the mudroom before I could
dry him off and wait until he got into the kitchen to shake. If Mom wasnʼt there, it was
cool. The massive furburger would plop down on the heated floor and live happily ever
after. But, if Mom was preparing a meal when Friedrich trotted in covered in snow, sheʼd
go into semi-meltdown.
Not that this girl actually reminded me of a dog. Not at all.
“I feel like Iʼm sixteen again,” I said.
“I hated being a teenager,” she grimaced.
“Iʼll bet. I can see you in one of those tiny cheerleader costumes jumping up and
down at basketball games with a bunch of other hotties.”
“Not for a second. I was fat.”
“What happened?” I looked at her ass as she bent over to adjust the beach towel on
the lounge chair. There wasnʼt an ounce of flab on this babe.
“I donʼt know. Guess I got fed-up being a blimp,” she said.
She looked sad again. Iʼm an asshole. Just when I thought Iʼd pulled her out of
whatever tragedy sheʼd been reliving, Iʼd shoved her back into it.
“Whatʼs your name?” I said.
“Crystal.”
“Your parents named you after a rock?”
Then she laughed. “And yours?”
“Stoner.”
“Be serious.”
“Well, my parents didnʼt call me that all the time. Sometimes they referred to me as
Erik.”
Friday, May 6, 2011
OOPS
I have no idea why those links failed to show up. The revenge of inanimate objects.
In any event, until I figure what's happening:
Search: http/:www.amazon.com then click on Books....Kindle eBooks and search for SAME MOON,SAME SKY
Go to: http://www.nook.com and search for SAME MOON, SAME SKY
Blog for Erik: http://www.channelingerik.com
Website for manuscript conversion: http://www.Booknook.biz
Hope this helps. E.J.Daniel
In any event, until I figure what's happening:
Search: http/:www.amazon.com then click on Books....Kindle eBooks and search for SAME MOON,SAME SKY
Go to: http://www.nook.com and search for SAME MOON, SAME SKY
Blog for Erik: http://www.channelingerik.com
Website for manuscript conversion: http://www.Booknook.biz
Hope this helps. E.J.Daniel
I'M A MORON.....
OOPS to link on my blog...it takes creating an HTML.
Hope these links work to make it easy for you to find SAME MOON, SAME SKY by Elisa Medhus, M.D. and E.J. Daniel
Link to Amazon Kindle eBook: this
Link to Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook: this
Link to Blog about Erik and a chance to ask questions to my co-author, Elisa Medhus, M.D.
this
Link to Kimberley Hitchens at Booknook.biz for formatting manuscripts for internet eBooks this
My novel: BLOOD MEMORY will be available on Kindle and Nook by Saturday, May 7. You can search with Blood Memory by E.J.Daniel. Other authors have also used that title. If you like satire, humor, and the paranormal, you'll like BLOOD MEMORY.
If any of these links don't work, I'm sorry...I'll figure it out!
Hope these links work to make it easy for you to find SAME MOON, SAME SKY by Elisa Medhus, M.D. and E.J. Daniel
Link to Amazon Kindle eBook: this
Link to Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook: this
Link to Blog about Erik and a chance to ask questions to my co-author, Elisa Medhus, M.D.
this
Link to Kimberley Hitchens at Booknook.biz for formatting manuscripts for internet eBooks this
My novel: BLOOD MEMORY will be available on Kindle and Nook by Saturday, May 7. You can search with Blood Memory by E.J.Daniel. Other authors have also used that title. If you like satire, humor, and the paranormal, you'll like BLOOD MEMORY.
If any of these links don't work, I'm sorry...I'll figure it out!
SAME MOON, SAME SKY links to internet
How to find our book SAME MOON, SAME SKY on internet:
Link to Amazon Kindle eBook: http://www.amazon.com/Same-Moon-Sky-ebook/dp/B004Z9FCXM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1304686694&sr=1-2
Link to Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Same-Moon-Same-Sky/Elisa-Medhus/e/2940012460639/?itm=1&USRI=same+moon%2c+same+sky
Link to Blog about Erik and a chance to ask questions to my co-author, Elisa Medhus, M.D.
http://www.channelingerik.com
And finally, if you are an author and want a company to format your book for sale as an eBook, contact Hitch at Booknook.biz
She will convert your manuscript into a professional looking book for sale on the internet.
Tomorrow, more about my other novels which will soon be for sale on Kindle and Nook. Mostly all ghostly in one way or another.
Link to Amazon Kindle eBook: http://www.amazon.com/Same-Moon-Sky-ebook/dp/B004Z9FCXM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1304686694&sr=1-2
Link to Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Same-Moon-Same-Sky/Elisa-Medhus/e/2940012460639/?itm=1&USRI=same+moon%2c+same+sky
Link to Blog about Erik and a chance to ask questions to my co-author, Elisa Medhus, M.D.
http://www.channelingerik.com
And finally, if you are an author and want a company to format your book for sale as an eBook, contact Hitch at Booknook.biz
She will convert your manuscript into a professional looking book for sale on the internet.
Tomorrow, more about my other novels which will soon be for sale on Kindle and Nook. Mostly all ghostly in one way or another.
Monday, April 25, 2011
PARANORMAL NOVEL ABOUT ERIK PUBLISHED TODAY ON AMAZON
4 A.M in the Rocky Mountains. I made coffee and listened to the ferocious wind in the pines. If it's a micro-burst, some Aspen trees usually fall. Aspens are actually one big family all joined together underground. We humans, who live above the ground, seem to have trouble thinking of ourselves as one big family. I wonder if the Aspens miss their relatives when they topple? In any event, it's not windy today. This was the description of a typical winter morning when I came downstairs to begin writing.
Writer's BLANK. I had no idea where I was going with this story. Then, I suddenly began typing and the story began. Sounds nutty? It was. This novel, SAME MOON, SAME SKY is available TODAY as a Kindle eBook on Amazon. It should be readable on many ereader devices including Nook. Followed in short order by four of my other novels. But this story is special.
I have never met my writing partner, Elisa Medhus, an M.D. in Texas and I never met her son Erik. What made this fictionalized story of Erik come together or get started in the first place is a mystery. I found Elisa's blog: www.channelingerik by chance on the net and began reading it this January. Eventually, we sent emails back and forth about life experiences: supernatural and otherwise. Elisa has written several non-fiction books and wanted to write a novel. I sent her some suggestions on how to get started, but she emailed me back and said she didn't think she could write fiction.
Hence, that windy morning in February 2011. I don't know what gave me the gall to do this: I wrote the first chapter and emailed it to her. Her beloved Erik died in 2009 at age 20. I hoped whatever I wrote didn't make her sadder than she already was. She mailed me back and said she loved the chapter and so my adventure with Elisa and Erik began.
I always write with humorous overtones, but writing a novel about a fictionalized Erik was a challenge. I'd think of something to give my character, like a Les Paul guitar. I'd send the chapter to Elisa and she'd say, "I gave Erik a Les Paul." Then, I'd say, "I think I'll give Erik a really fast motorcycyle." And she'd respond with "Erik loved to ride my Ducati." And so it went with more and more coincidences about a young man I didn't know. The chapters rolled off my computer every morning, and I honestly had no idea where they came from. You might like to know that Erik and I were/are both hunt and peck typists....index fingers only, if you will.
As the chapters would go out in the morning, Elisa would reply that same day with comments and edits. Her writer's voice blended seamlessly with mine (or Erik's) and I don't think readers will be able to detect where my writing left off and Elisa's and Erik's began. If this is too woo-woo for you, whatever. You wouldn't be reading this is you didn't have an interest in the supernatural.
One morning, about 8 A.M., I went back upstairs to my bedroom. No dirty laundry, clean sheets, a really nice room. It smelled like a guy's locker room after a sweaty football practice. At the very least, dirty sweat socks. Elisa laughed when I told her. Sweat socks are one of Erik's calling cards. An hour later when I returned to the room, the smell was gone. Remember: February, closed windows, and we do not have forced air heat which might waft smells around. And we don't have a young male athlete leaving dirty laundry tossed around.
I have to warn you, SAME MOON, SAME SKY is riddled with "bad" language typical of a twenty year old boy. It's Erik. Exactly Erik....so says Elisa. When you read her blog: www.channelingerik.com, you'll see that when Erik was HERE on Planet Earth and now THERE wherever 'there' is, he's retained his ability to cuss. If he needs four letter words to get his message across, I can type those. No problem.
I'm now writing a sequel to SAME MOON, SAME SKY which is tentatively called "T". We'll see how that goes and whether Erik can tear himself away from wherever he is and whatever pranks he's up to long enough to help me out again. Meanwhile, four of my other novels are being converted to upload properly to Amazon.
In my ignorance, I thought I could upload a nicely formatted PDF to Kindle from my computer, just as I did to an iPad. The PDF converted to an iBook of the novel on iPad looked great. The PDF at Kindle looked like crap. However they convert it to work across many ereaders caused this messed up formatting. I IMMEDIATELY UNPUBLISHED IT AT AMAZON. I didn't want anyone to spend $2.99 and get this horrific mess. They did WARN me at Amazon that a PDF might have problems. They were right. Fortunately, I found a company which has done a magnificent job of making this conversion and I'll tell you about that in another blog.
To purchase this book at $2.99 go to Amazon Kindle and search for: SAME MOON,SAME SKY by Elisa Medhus, M.D. and E.J. Daniel
More later on ghosts and spirits in my other novels and life in the Rocky Mountains with people and beasts, wild and domesticated. E.J.Daniel.
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