Let’s go beyond the horror of life in the nowadays and throw out another pitch for my novel, “Brown-Eyed Girl With A Cold Corona,” self-published two years ago via Outskirts Press, and offer up yet another plea to please at the very least give a few seconds without remorse to consider buying a copy.
Not that expensive, and what could it hurt?

The Amazon/Kindle page is here.
My author’s page at Outskirts Press is here.

One five-star review:

Not since the Time Travelers Wife has a story tugged at my heart, f*** with my head, and left me so chilled, haunted and thoroughly impressed. A vivid, romantic and ultimately chilling debut, I sincerely hope this author doesn’t stop here. A new, genre bending talent has been unleashed and I personally can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Generally, every couple of months since March 2022 I do one of these self-reflecting posts on my novel (the last one here).
This is a three decades project — from the first post on being published this note:

Although ‘Corona‘ is fiction, the main narrative is composed of my actual life in the mid-90s being ‘tweaked,’ a concept supposedly an easy guide to creating a story, and despite how I felt at the time, it was indeed an uncomplicated potline to follow. Writing a fictional story based on my actual life — weird, and interesting if done well. In reading the proofs, I maybe did capture elements of an era (and life) with normal, everyday observations and interchanges with other people doing about the same thing. One crazy ingredient — the tale is also a romantic fantasy with a little paranormal thrown in for good measure (or ‘tweak‘).

Now just a matter of wait and see the reaction for readers to this major, long-ago personal project, after such a long time in that before-mentioned cardboard box. How will it come across as a paperback book you can hold in your hand, and maybe too, find later in the used-book section of a second-hand store.
Even at this point, I’m not sure if I’ve made the right decision in going with self-publishing, vs the conventional literary-agent-to-publisher route, and how will book sales be affected. Questions with no answers right now.
In a current historical note, the word ‘Corona‘ in the title doesn’t quite hit me hard as it did a couple of years ago when COVID started its initial run. I was just finishing a brand-new edit of the manuscript — my daughter had the written version made digital (Google docs) — and the whole scene depressed me so bad (death and disease and T-Rump and lockdowns) the virus name prompted me to stop work for months. My novel’s entire, continuous storyline is fashioned around a Corona beer. Oddly, simple ‘COVID’ eventually replaced ‘coronavirus‘ in the media as the go-to word for the pandemic. Weird. And fortunately for my ‘Corona‘ girl.

A quick summary from the back cover:

Life can sometimes alter course in a finger snap. One second existence seems normal, the next, an out-of-step leap beyond the imagination. A night bar-hopping during Spring break on the California coast shifts from the typical to peculiar and strange in scant moments.
As if out of thin air, she was suddenly sitting close, leaning inward at the little table, her face directly at him. Large, brown eyes intimate and captivating, demanding full attention. The bar’s loud, swirling noise of music and muffled chatter seemed to have quickly vanished into shadow.
Easily, he closed off everything with total focus only on those liquid-brown eyes. In minutes, he fell completely head-over-heels in love, gobsmacked like a virgin little boy.

However, in just a brief, single tick when he’d once glanced away, she vanished. So astonishingly quick the episode, he never got a name or a telephone number. And other people had seen her in the bar, so she was real. Or was she? Such is the beginning.

In an ensuing couple of days, he tumbles like Alice down the rabbit hole. He’s no virgin little boy, but middle-aged and fighting the loose tendrils of a mid-life crisis — divorce, children (for instance, he occasionally smokes pot with his 15-year-old daughter), intense guilt about everything, and booze, all combined for close-call disaster. Yet petty compared to the wondrously-haunting hallucinations he encounters created off that one night with the young woman,

An illusory mystery revealing a murder, though, in an abnormal sequence.

In context, the front/back cover:

And, did I mention the ‘Corona‘ Amazon/Kindle page is here?

Just as I am, paperback the plea:

Life as a writer, or not, yet here we are once again…