Still available is the fascinating Jackrabbit. This is a historical crime novel about the latter career of Depression-era gangster John Dillinger. This criminal’s life was indeed stranger than fiction – so much so that I had to focus on only the last five months of it to keep from overwhelming myself and the reader. Check out the Jackrabbit page for details.
My latest novel, Fester Descent, has been out for a little over three months now, and the results have been, shall we say, a little underwhelming. One of the reasons was the poor coincidence of the launch date: February 28, the same day that Dear Leader launched the little “excursion” in the Middle East (or whatever he’s calling it today).
So that was a problem – or at least provided me with a convenient excuse. To be honest, there were warning signs before then. With Laughingstock, I discovered a site called BookSirens, which is a service that provides free advance copies to readers, who are then supposed to provide reviews. That was great, as I had a number of positive previews before the book even went on sale. I was hoping for a similar result with the new book, but alas it was not to be. Only one person signed up on BookSirens, and he was a friend (and I don’t think he’s left a review yet, either).
Then the book launched, and the sales were abysmal. I didn’t even have as poor a launch with my very first book, Jackrabbit. Of course, that had a more clear-cut gangster/true crime genre that resulted in an easily-accessed readership. My subsequent novels have been a little murkier in the genre department. Are they crime fiction? Dark humor? Something else entirely? It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole trying to classify books that don’t really have a clear-cut genre.
I also had some problems with my mailing list. I found out – a bit too late – that all of the emails I was sending to my mailing list that had a Gmail account were getting bounced.
And I also began second-guessing myself. Was it the cover? It wasn’t a world-beater, but it seemed OK, I did, however, use a cut-rate cover designer – and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that in America you get what you pay for. If you’re lucky.
Was is the AI-generated blurbs? Perhaps, but I thought they were pretty good. My general attitude towards AI is that it is best used to combat other AI – that is, to develop text that will twig Amazon’s algorithms and lead potential readers to the book. Hm, doesn’t seem to be happening.
Then there’s the inevitable self-doubt (and the accompanying self-pity): maybe I’m just a shitty writer. I’d like to think that I don’t have illusions in this department. I’m not spending my evenings assembling a trophy case for the inevitable Pulitzer. But I’d like to think that I get a little better with every novel I publish. By that (perhaps faulty) logic, Fester Descent should have been at least a little more popular than Laughingstock. But it wasn’t. So maybe I don’t get better each time. If that’s the case, I’m faced with two options: pack it in or keep trudging. I choose the latter – screw it, I have a great idea for a sequel to Laughingstock, and it’s already in process.
My writing is a labor of love. I love seeing the stories unspool in front of my eyes, even when I had no idea what the characters was planning on doing. I love building what I think of as Festerworld, with its wild and wooly cast of characters, pop culture items, publications and places. I sure ain’t in in for the money; I never make up in royalties what I lay out for professional editing, cover artists, u.s.w. I just wanted to tell a story and have people enjoy it. Maybe even enough to read it more than once. That’s my idea of a successful book: one that people keep coming back to. I probably haven’t gotten there yet, but I intend to keep trying.
I’ve almost exhausted my deep well of self-pity, but there’s one more thing I want to whine about: reviews. Book reviews, especially on Amazon, will make or break an indie writer. Amazon jiggers the rankings based on how many reviews a book has. If a book has 25 or more reviews, it gets boosted in the Amazon search algorithms. I’m sure that there are even better boosts for more reviews, but 25 is the only one that seems a realistic goal for the nonce.
Getting some folks to leave a review can be like pulling teeth. Some people don’t like Amazon, and that’s understandable. Some folks don’t realize that you can leave a review on Amazon without having bought the book there. Then there’s the people whom I’ve given a free copy in exchange for a review who punk out and never leave it. Rum show, people, very rum indeed.
OK, I think I’ve blown a sufficient amount of bile from my system to continue on my WIP, working title Gemini 13. I’ll keep plugging, and as always, my sincerest gratitude for your support.
This is the sequel to fan-favorite Fester, set twenty years after the events of the first book:
Twenty years after Fester, the town is still running on inertia and bad decisions. Everyone assumes things will work themselves out. They never do.
Bolly Bollinger is trying to keep his father’s auto shop afloat while the town’s last old-money family keeps raising the rent. His stress relief is a local tradition known as a “zoo run.” He roars past the Schmidt mansion at top speed, flips off history, and pretends that counts as control. One night, the response is a gunshot. Bolly survives, but the consequences don’t stop there.
When Candy Troutman—an informant at Mike’s Place, Fester’s notorious brothel—is found murdered in her bathtub, Chief Constable Martin Prieboy moves to contain the damage. He wants answers quickly, order restored, and the town reassured. Instead, he gets a case that resists simplicity and rewards the wrong assumptions.
As the investigation tightens, Fester looks elsewhere. A failing shopping mall stumbles into viral fame after a Fourth of July Fun Fair triggers supposed hauntings and an influx of ghost hunters. The events may even involve a long-dead Native American. No one agrees. Everyone has an opinion.
Meanwhile, a volatile heir to a dying dynasty retreats into weapons, paranoia, and his three pet monkeys. A disgraced former chief isolates himself with a Vietnam-era tank. The town keeps moving, convinced that spectacle counts as progress.
Caught between economic pressure, civic certainty, and a system that refuses to slow down, Bolly and Martin find themselves on opposite sides of momentum that no longer cares who gets crushed. Fester Descent is a darkly comic crime novel about small-town justice, institutional stubbornness, and the comfort of bad answers. Savage, satirical, and escalating with gleeful inevitability, it proves that in Fester, the truth isn’t hidden—it’s just less entertaining than the alternative.
The Devil Box
How about that description? Did you like it or dislike it? More importantly, did it make you want to buy and read the book?
I’ve been very leery of AI for a long time. Anything that made Stephen Hawking nervous seemed a good thing to approach with extreme caution. Therefore, I was never particularly interested in finding out much about it. Sure, people on my social media feeds were posting all manner of interesting images, animations and music. There was a time – and it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but it probably was – that I would have been all over those toys. But the older I get, the more of the ornery Luddite comes out in me. Perhaps it because, having experienced it from inception to now, I can see how the promise of the internet devolved to a rage-click disinformation engine. Rant! Rave! Kinds these days! With their hair and their music! Etc.
Of course, my attitude softened when it became apparent I could use ChatGPT to help me with something I really dislike doing: marketing my own novels. Specifically, coming up with blurbs for Amazon and other advertising platforms. This is like pulling teeth, and most authors I know despise it. How do you encapsulate a 100,000-word story that you’ve spent months if not years laboring over, and condense it into two paragraphs? And do so in a way that will help twig Amazon’s algorithms and quickly engage the interest of potential readers? Usually, it’s a numb slog of writing and re-writing the same hundred words – a dreary task at best.
My wife had been using ChatGPT to help her job search, so the Devil Box had already gained admission to the household noosphere. She had been having good success in crafting resumes and cover letters. As anyone who has searched for a job in the last decade or so would know, the trick is getting past the resume-screening algorithms and get your credentials in front of a person. Use an algorithm to beat an algorithm – seems like a fair trade.
It wasn’t too far of a hop to figure that ChatGPT should be able to help get a leg up on the Amazon algorithms as well, so I fed in the text for the back-cover blurb I had already written, as well as the major plot points of the story that I thought would pique a reader’s interest. It took a little bit of massaging, but I eventually came up with the little gem you see above. Time will tell whether the Devil Box will actually help me sell more books.
There’s more to be said on the use of AI in writing, but I think that can wait for another post. Right now, I’m way into Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, and want to get to the end of that puppy.
I’m in the home stretch to get Fester Descent edited and proofread ahead of the February 28 release date. It’s always a weird time during the revision of a book – trying to balance the desire to publish the best possible story with the fact that I’m sick unto death of reading it. The image above represents perhaps the fifth or sixth copy I’ve revised since the “final” draft was written.
I’ve also had a lot of good input, including from my wife NancyAnne and my Aunt Claudia who have graciously read the book with a sharp eye for spelling and punctuation errors – of which there is no shortage. I’m stiff finding plenty of errors as well. Most of those tabs are actually cutting the fat – removing excess and repetitive verbiage. Of which there is no shortage.
Now comes the most odious part of preparing the launch of a book – the marketing. Time to dive back into the sewer of algorithm necromancy and keyword conjuration. Also, I’ll be looking for beta readers, so if you’re interested, please drop me a line at crawford@sweetweaselwords.com.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and all similarly-oriented seasonal greetings. I hope that everyone has had an enjoyable holiday season and can find some time to rest, relax and generally get themselves ready for whatever 2026 is going to throw at us.
One thing coming at us in 2026 is my new novel Fester Descent, which is tentatively slated to be released at the end of February. I finished up the first draft of the MS earlier this year. Some timing miscues resulted in me sitting on it longer than I had intended, mainly because I had waited too long to get on the editor’s schedule. It was worth the wait to work with Paula Guran, though. She had edited the original Fester, and I learned a lot in the process. I was glad to be able to work with her again. I’ve spent most of the holiday so far reviewing her edits and getting the MS typeset. Now, it’s review time, where I read and re-read the novel to the point here I start to hate it.
But enough of that sorry action – here’s something much more interesting: the final cover design! I’ve actually beein sitting on this for over a month, but I wanted to wait until the MS came back from the editor and I had a clear idea of when the book will be available (2/28/26).
Here it is. Simple, but – I hope – intriguing. Who wouldn’t want to know what’s going on in a book with a tank, a monkey and a sexy leg on the cover?
Fester Descent cover
Happy rest of your holidays and a propitious New Year. Hang on to your hat – hang on to your hope!
I hadn’t intended on posting anything, but accidentally clicked “new post” rather than “new page,” so what the hell. I might as well tell you why I was adding pages – I’m back to working on Dungeon & Dragon, a serialized novella that got put on hold when I was in the throes of working on Fester Descent.
The latter is still a work in progress, but that progress is coming along nicely. The MS is in the capable hands of my favorite editor, and I’ll soon be getting ready for some test prints. Also, the cover is almost done; a cover reveal will hit soon. In the meantime, here’s a preview of the part I’m certain about:
That’s all for now. Be sure to check out Dungeon & Dragon, with new chapters hitting approximately weekly. Hang on for the holidays, friends!
Greeting from “war-torn” Portland! I will forgo the tempting political editorializing and get right to the point: I’m done with Fester Descent.
For now.
I finished with the third draft, and was contemplating a fourth. The idea didn’t really appeal – I had been immersed in the story for months, and needed a break. So I decided that three drafts was enough, and I could let the editor deal with the mess as it was.
Unfortunately, I had dragged my feet a bit in getting on the editor’s calendar, so she won’t be able to get started on it for a few more weeks. It’s well worth the wait, I think. Her name is Paula Guran, and she did the editing on the original Fester. I would have loved to have had her on Laughingstock. She hadn’t been available, and I’d had to go with an unknown quantity – with predictable results. However, with the delay, the book will probably not be available until early in 2026.
Things are good and the cover is nearly complete. A teaser is included above. After I’m done procrastinating (any week now), I intend to pick up the thread of Dungeon & Dragon, and see if I can bring that story to some nonsensical conclusion. New chapters soon!
Progress is being made on the latest MS; I’ve just completed editing the second draft of Fester Descent. The story’s tight, but could still use plenty of polishing. One polishing, coming up – but it’s also time to think about publishing and (UGH!) marketing the book.
I’ve already reached out to an editor who I’ve worked with before. She’s being cagey, as editors sometimes do. However, she did a bang-up job on Fester, and I’d rather work with her again than take my chances picking one randomly from Reedsy. That worked out very poorly on Laughingstock, and I’m not eager to recreate that experience.
While that drama is playing out, I’m looking at cover art – one of the most fun parts of self-publishing – mainly because I’m the one pointing our errors and demanding changes! No, it’s great to see how a written work will be represented graphically.
I found an organization that claimed that it could produce a professional-looking cover for a hundred bucks. Well, that just about fits my budget, so I thought I’d give it a go. (I’ll let you know the name of this organization once I’m satisfied with the work.) One bit of concern – will they use AI to create the artwork? There is a checkbox on the intake form about whether you want to avoid AI-generated content. It does not, however, specifically state that they won’t use AI if you check that box. I guess we’ll see.
Of course, conveying the intent of the book to the cover artists involved summarizing the book, which is something that many authors struggle with. I know I sure do. It needs to be done, so I got on it. Besides, this is just a clumsy explanation, but it will eventually morph into a reasonably decent back over blurb, and – eventually – a well-crafted Amazon Ads description.
I did submit an idea for a cover, based on some of the more interesting elements in the narrative. I asked the artists to create a cover that incorporates these three elements:
A brothel
An M50A1 tank
Upwards of three (3) monkeys
I’d like to think that a book cover with these elements just screams “great read!” Or maybe it will be something else entirely. We’ll see – stay tuned!
After getting off to a slow start, I finally got up a bit of momentum on the second draft of my latest project. After re-writing one of the early chapters, it was pretty much just picking up the redlines I had marked up the Shitty First Draft – easy stuff. Then my timeline came back to haunt me.
I had learned about the importance of having an accurate timeline from Paula Guran, who edited Fester. She was merciless in addressing the timeline, among other things. (Shame she wasn’t available for Laughingstock,which was an editing nightmare.) I hope she’ll be available to edit Fester Descent.
But just in case, I’ve been keeping a tight timeline as I’m working through the second draft. This is where I pay for the sins of the SFD. Timing issues are just one of many sins, but arguably the most problematic. And as I learned with Fester, you don’t want these problems to linger too long or they, um, fester.
So I’m jumping on it right now, at my earliest convenience. (No point in worrying about it during the SFD; that’s all about getting words on paper.) When cranking on the SFD, I was only worried about the sequence, not the timing. I just knew that event A came before event B, and to hell with the details. Now I’m dealing with situations where a character gets shot, but his wife doesn’t visit him in the hospital for five days. Oops! Gotta fix that.
It’s a knot, I think – and it pays to un-knot the story as quickly as possible. You can sometimes shove the knot down the rope a bit, but you sure don’t want to shove it all the way to the end – because it gets begger the further you shove it.
I think I’ve worked the knot metaphor for about as much as I can. Best to call it good right here. More news to follow as I finish up Draft 2 and start to think about showing it to an editor. I can hardly wait.
After nearly two months, I’ve finally gotten through “editing” the Shitty First Draft of my latest MS, working title Fester Descent. Now, when I say “editing,” I really mean reading and redlining the text, and making notes for the next draft.
Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that it took me so long to read through my own first draft. A nasty part of my mind tells me that a real writer would have gotten through the whole thing in a weekend.
In my defense, I have three good excuses as to the dilatory nature of my review:
I find it difficult reading my own writing, especially for extended periods
I had a whopper of a spring cold in May that sidelined me for nearly three weeks
I am monumentally lazy
However, now I’ve finished my review and now I have to write the Slightly Less Shitty Second Draft (SLSSD). Okay, I merely have to take a big breath and just start doing it.
Easier said than done, of course.
There is one thing that will make it a little easier: for a first draft, it’s not that bad. You never know what you’ll end up with at the end of a first draft, especially if you’re a pantser like I am. Usually, I end up with a large number of loose ends that have to be tied up, sometimes awkwardly. With this draft, that wasn’t so much of a problem. (OK, yeah, so I had to resort to a deux ex machina in the form of an Air National Guard F-16, but other than that…) Maybe it’s luck or maybe some small portion of accumulated skill, but it seems like things came together a lot more easily on this one.
That having been said, there is still a lot of polishing that needs to be done. Time to get down to it. Then sell some plasma so I can hire and editor.
I’ve discovered something about finishing the first draft of a novel: nobody really gives a rip but the writer. Which is understandable. For starters, nobody’s going to get to read it. There are only a handful of people who read any of my pre-publication manuscripts. The rest of you aren’t missing anything, believe me.
Nevertheless, I was mighty glad to be done with the Shitty First Draft (SFD) of my next novel. For starters, I finished it in less than a year, which is an amazing record for me, since I am essentially very lazy, and it usually takes me a long time to write anything. I fully credit this relatively fast writing time to my participation last year in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. This was great, as it allowed me to add 66,000 words to the MS in 30 days – a word count that normally would have taken my five or six months to produce with my normal glacial pace.
I had been meaning to participate in NaNoWriMo for years, and was glad that I actually took the plunge and did it in 2024, because it was recently announced that NaNoWriMo has gone bankrupt. A sad and sorry end to a 25-year-old institution whose laudable goal was to get authors to put words on pages. So long, NaNoWriMo.
The upside is that I now have a new MS brick to edit. I didn’t get started on revising it right away, however. First, I went back and reread Fester, as this is a sequel. Good thing I did, too – I had forgotten a number of important details of the original story that have an impact on the new one. The biggest was my faulty recollection that Billy Snyder had gone to prison following the shenanigans of Fester, when in fact he had used his J. Edgar Hoover-esque collection of intel and political dirt to keep his butt out of lockup.
Overall, I’m pretty well pleased with how the SFD came out. Usually, the end of the MS is a little chaotic at first, due primarily to my pantsing style of writing. This time, however, things resolved themselves with a relatively low level of chaos as I tried to weave the disparate story lines together. Despite – or perhaps because of – the mad rush of NaNoWriMo, the S-level is relatively low in this SFD. I think that with one more draft, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show this to an editor.
Hot New Item! Audiobooks!
This just happened recently – all of my books are now available as audio books. People have been asking after this for years, but I have demurred. Mainly, I didn’t have the time or the interest or the money. It can be expensive to produce an audio book – especially if the other formats don’t sell that well. Sometimes people ask, “Why don’t you narrate it yourself? You have a good voice.” I do indeed have a face made for radio, but these folks grossly underestimate how much time is involved in recording – and especially editing – an audio file. My rule of thumb is that it takes eight times as long to prepare a presentation such as this as the length of the presentation. That is to say, if the recorded audio book runs ten hours, it would require eighty hours to record and properly edit. That’s a lot of extra work to snag extra sales that would net me enough each month to perhaps buy a 2-pack of Hot Pockets. If they were on sale. So, no thanks.
However, Amazon has made it easy now. They have a computer-generated narration tool that sounds pretty decent, and only takes a few minutes to convert the text to an audio file. Best of all – it’s free! Of course, it involves AI – something that I have been loath to involve myself with, but this was just too good to pass up. I tried it out on Laughingstock and it sounded pretty good, so I pulled the trigger and created audio versions of all my books. See below for an example.
