OK, kids, the new book is out! It is fiction, set in a bookstore (where did I get that idea) and based on a true incident. Jack came home from his prison visits one day with a napkin covered in drawings and figures. The prisoner he visited at Lee Penitentiary–a tunneler who had escaped several times– had drawn him a diagram of how to reinforce our bookstore basement. Jack felt this was safe because, “I didn’t tell him where we lived.”
I stared at Jack, “We’re the only bookstore for miles and I’ve never seen his face. What if someday he escapes again and comes here? He could pretend to be one of the Quaker prison visitors and I wouldn’t know if you weren’t here.”
Jack laughed, so that night I murdered him in this book. The rest, as they say, is history.
When you buy the book, you own the rights to sell it on. Seriously. You can put it on a platform of your choosing (Lisa Dailey, owner of Sidekick Press, can help but she’s a pro so value her time) and sell it from there. Or you can pass it on to a friend from your own download, but you cannot GIVE it away. The rules are simple: sell it for $4.95 if you sell it for money. You may also trade access to the book for a favor (someone going to the grocery store for you? Mowing your yard, dropping off meals?)
A lot of us have spare time right now and need something fun to read. Plus a lot of us have lost our jobs and need a little help. Lisa and I will be using 100% of the money paid for Bad Boy to help people in her native Seattle and my beloved Southwest Virginia. YOU can use the money for any good purpose – including keeping yourself afloat. Proceeds or barter, it’s yours to do with as you see fit. ENJOY
Need a little enticement?
When Mary Ferguson’s beloved husband Henry dies, she quits her job at the college to run their bookstore and café in the tiny town of Bramwell, West Virginia. Resigning herself to the quiet life of a widow, Mary receives an email from an old friend of Henry’s–and something deep inside her catches fire. This friendly yet awkward and shy man says he was a fellow Quaker working alongside her husband, visiting lifers in prison whose families couldn’t or wouldn’t visit them.
He is still a good listener, and Mary soon feels alive again. Despite the dire warnings of everyone from her dog Ringo to the café’s cook Paige, Mary throws herself into a dark adventure that could have graced the bookshop’s “Romantic Fiction” shelves. Or was that “True Crime?” As her life plummets down a rabbit hole, Mary struggles to figure out what’s real, what’s imaginary, what’s literary, and what’s going to happen next.
Our time has come, gentle little sweet people with weird hobbies! This past week, I have blessed the names of those who sew quietly at home, hoarders who handed over supplies, and geeks who own 3D printers.
Mandy and Bonnie and Karen and Lisa (yet a different one – word to the wise: get to know some Lisas; they get stuff done) and Anni and Beth and the other Beth and Betty and Summer and Mary Sue and a thousand other women and men getting cloth masks out to the home team: y’all rock. Those masks do three things: 1) help us not touch our face in public 2) slow the virus spread; it can get through the holes in fabric, but in the same way a small fish at a big net sometimes it bounces off a fiber instead, this is extra protection sufficient for public use 3) remind the wearer that they are loved enough that someone wanted them protected, and made or bought them a mask. Mental health is nothing to be sneezed at these days–er, no pun intended. Feeling loved is important, and we can literally feel the love warm and snug on our faces, every time our glasses steam up.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 