The Anthologies are here

Item the first, I'm still going to be here as time allows, so I may not be on for a while. Though I'm going to try to upload guest posts should I get any. I've got one or two people who have offered posts. We'll see who follows through.

Item the second, all three books are out on Kindle. Pius Origins  and Pius Holidays, both on Kindle. Pius Tales should be out sometime within an hour or so of this post, on Kindle and paperback.

Pius Origins is out, only $.99

Yaaay.

The short stories here include:

One Way to Get out of Jail
Sometimes, a legal defense can be murder.
We Have a Pope!
Spinning a story can go both ways.
Mile High Murder
A killer is roaming an airplane. And no one can stop him. Should anyone try?
Swiss Family Mafia
Being a bill collector can be trying.
Tinker, Tailor, Goyim, Spy
The Bostonian Catholic walks into Mossad. What is this, a joke?

But wait! There's more! Including character interviews and essays on their creation.

Also, ...

Pius Holidays is here, only $.99

Includes some fun stories as

God Hates ... Superman?
Crowd control made easy.
Erin Go Boom
Priest vs. terrorists. Oops.
Boys of the Old Brigade
Beating IRA terrorists 140 characters at a time.
See Something
Say something ... or beat someone's head in.
Let Freedom Ring
Terrorists come to blow up Boston. Nobody can stop them! Thankfully, there's a nobody on call.
Coyote Christmas 
Come for the party, stay for the wild animals.
O Little Town of BethMayhem
Terrorists are going to blow up Bethlehem on Christmas Eve.
Deck the Maul
A mercenary works mall security on Black Friday. Insert your own joke.

And, finally, Pius Tales, for $2.99 in Kindle, and $7.99 in paperback ... link to be posted. Sorry about that, there was a delay. Should be up today. Period.

Includes .... everything from above, plus additional content, essays, commentary, additional stories, story extras -- over ten thousand words of additional content.

Be well, all.

Call back post -- Bad Romance: How to be a Cynical Romantic

This first aired on my blog four years ago.

It's hard to remember that I had a blog for so long.

Anyway, this kind of tells you where I am as far as personal development goes. I went from "I'm a cynical bastard" to writing romance novels. Who knew?

Anyway, the next few days should be very much like this.  I have a guest coming into New York City for the next few days, and I'm going to be playing tour guide all the way.

This one is a little strange to look at.  The profile on Manana has been modified due to image issues, and the original pic is replaced with the lovely and talented author Kia Heavey.  If you haven't read her books, I do recommend them.

Again, there will be several of these over the next few days, so yes, I'll be out and about. There will be a radio show on Sunday, and that should go up, And I may even have a music post squeezed in somewhere.  But I'll be wrapped up until around Tuesday. And, since my blog audience has more than tripled since then, this should be new to a great many people.

Be well, all.

Enjoy.

Tinker, Tailor ... Mossad Murphy?

I'm a little behind this week, so, sorry that everything is slow.  This post will be a short one.

Numerous times when writing about Scott Murphy, I've made reference to another fictional character, George Smiley.  Originally a character in a John Le Carre spy novel, Smiley was a plain little man, in a plain little suit, who tried to offend no one, only answered questions with questions, and was no one really important.

Except that he was a spy.  He taught them, he ran them, he designed plans for them.  In some of Le Carre's books, Smiley ran the entire plot from behind the scenes, and never once made an appearance.

Many, many moons ago, three of the novels that starred Smiley were put into film.  Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy was one, as well as the sequel, Smiley's People.  Both times, it starred Alec Guiness.  A third film was made, called simply A Murder of Quality, starring Denholm Elliott .... if you've ever seen the Indiana Jones films, you might know him better as Marcus Brody, one of the sidekicks.

Now, granted, Scott Murphy has a lot of differences.  He's got all sorts of tricks and tips for committing mayhem. Just don't ask him to punch anyone ... or shoot anyone farther than ten feet away ...

So, why am I explaining all of this?

Well, because they've remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with a whole bunch of interesting actors. Since Guiness is dead, he's been replaced by Gary Oldman -- who I mentioned as this generation's Alec Guines not too long ago.  Smiley's sidekick is played by one Benedict Cumberbach, who BBC fans may recall from last year's Sherlock.

Now, it should be interesting to see how they play the movie, considering the original was six hours long, though my family has estimated that three hours could have been easily sliced out due to the speed of the film (eg: see Smiley walk. Walk, Smiley, walk), or due to the fact that much of the film was told in flashbacks, and stories, and interviews. The original film was interested in the methods and mechanisms of spycraft ... if one cut out a lot of that (which is repeated over, and over, and over again), then there's the plot and the character.

We'll see how it works.

Bad Romance: How to be a Cynical Romantic.

“[T]hink about it ... You know how good this is? .... How right it feels?  .... How easy it was? .... It just isn't f**ked up enough to really be you and me.”  ~Harry Dresden, in Jim Butcher's short story "Love Hurts."

In case the readers of this blog have not caught on yet, I'm a little strange.

At which point, I can just see each of you recollecting every other instance of borderline schizophrenia that I have described in my blogs on writing, and answering: “Duh.”

In this case, I have two very strong streaks in my personality. Lots of cynicism, and lots of romanticism …

On the one hand, I believe that all people are essentially good ... on the other, I believe that groups of people are stupid.

I believe in meeting someone, and being in love with them for the rest of my life ... and I go into first dates wondering how fast the phrase “let's just be friends” will appear in the conversation.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord ... and on the other hand, if one more person mindlessly spouts random Bible passage without knowing ANYTHING about the context or the meaning, I will be sorely tempted to hurt them.

And my problem is that I see nothing contradictory about the above statements. “Good” does not equal “smart;” and when people get into large groups, the average IQ only goes down. “Belief” doesn't automatically mean “theology scholar;” and if someone becomes a monomaniac about a favorite passage of Revelations (which reads like the author is on magic mushrooms), it's hard to do anything about it.

(Scott) Murphy's Laws of Spying.

My characters are real people to me.
Take Scott Murphy, from the Pius Trilogy.


(Scott) Murphy's Laws of Spying.

1.MURPHY WAS AN OPTIMIST

2.A relaxed spy is a dead spy.

3.Keep your head on your shoulders, or someone else will keep it…mounted on their wall.

2.The worse the weather, the more you are required to trail someone through it.

3. When your target drives to work every day like clockwork, the day you arrange for a car bomb, he'll walk.

4.If your mission is going really well, it's a trap.

5.Throw rocks before grenades— it desensitizes the reflexes of who you're throwing them at.

6.And remember: five second fuses are three seconds long.

7.The easy way is always booby trapped..

8.When in doubt: improvise. It's hard to trace a bomb when it's made out of Bisquick.

9.Make it tough for the enemy to get in.... and you can't get out.

10.Even paranoids have real enemies.

11.The shortest distance between two points is money.

12.Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

13.Control the situation. If you can’t handle the variables, the variables are going to handle you. The moment that happens, they will handle you right into a jail cell if you’re lucky, and a field execution if you’re not.

14.The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.

15.Guns may be nice tools, but they leave behind other problems. Bodies are messy and hard to dispose of unless you plan in advance. Try not to kill someone unless you really have to. And if you have to, invest in plastic wrap, gloves, and hefty bags (see: Dexter).

16.The closer the synagogue the better the bagel.

17.The spy who plans for everything to go well is usually the one who will be shot in the back with his own gun. Conversely, the spy who plans for everything to go to hell from the first minute will never have to use a single contingency plan.

18. Invest in people. If you rely solely on a multimillion dollar piece of equipment, the more likely someone is to circumvent it with something found at Wal-Mart.

19.“Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart.”

Corollary 1: Tracers work both ways.

Corollary 2: The seriousness of a gunshot wound is inversely proportional to the distance to any form of cover

Corollary 3: The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.

Corollary 4: Friendly fire – isn't.

Corollary 5: The day you need to clean your gun is the day the SWAT team arrives to kill you.

Corollary 6: A gun is hard to explain the security. A magazine you can roll up into a tactical baton, isn't.

Review: Always a Spy.....

REVIEWS OF BOOKS YOU (PROBABLY) NEVER HEARD OF. PART 1: “Once a Spy”

Since this is the summer, and beach reading is in fashion, I figure it's time to have a slightly more leisurely look at some of the books that are not written by King, Patterson, or Cornwell. These are books that have not had millions of dollars in advertizing dropped on them, but are suburb nonetheless.

Let's start....

Once A Spy, by Keith Thomson, opens with Drummond Clarke, a retiree lost in the fog of Alzheimer's. He spends his time making a pot of chicken and stars soup, and promptly, for reasons he can't really remember, pours it into the plant next to the windowsill. The plant is made of plastic.

Across the street, men wonder what happened to the listening device they planted in Drummond's home.

Charlie Clarke, degenerate gambler, prefers not to see his father. But, like clockwork, the day after Christmas, he gets his annual phone call. His father is seen wandering the neighborhood. Charlie hopes that this is the last time he'll have to deal with his always-distant father. He has plans to seal Drummond away in a nursing home, and use what little cash the retired appliance salesman has to pay off Charlie's own debt to some unsavory Russian loan sharks. Charlie has particularly high hopes when Drummond insists that he used to work for the CIA. Obviously, the old man has lost his marbles.

Until, that is, Drummond saves Charlie as his house is blown up, and hotwires several cars as father and son are shot at in a running chase through Brooklyn.

And now, Drummond and Charlie have the unusual experience of father-son bonding while under fire. With each new experience, Drummond has lucid moments that keep them alive, and one step ahead of their adversaries.

Now if only Drummond can remember why people are trying to kill him....

“Once a Spy” is a very well put together thriller that doesn't slow down until you finish the novel. While the fight / chase scenes are intelligent and creative, the real fun of the novel comes in between battles, in the quiet moments while Drummond Clarke is still lucid and remembers everything from his former life as a spy. This is when Charlie learns about his past, from moments as simple as why his father missed his high school graduation (Drummond was off the coast of Saudi Arabia in a wetsuit), to why he wasn't allowed to go into the local candy store (couldn't have a young Charlie ruining a covert dead drop, now could they?). The father and son moments are lightly handled, and not hitting the reader over the head with hammer labeled SUBTLETY. Instead of bonding over a camping trip, or fishing, it's over the body of a newly knocked out assassin.

The action / spy sequences are also well done. No one, adversary or protagonist, is stupid in this book. While Drummond is useful in a firefight, the adrenaline can only last so long, and so can the lucidity. It is up to Charlie in these moments, and he's being graded on a sharp learning curve.

It's certainly worth the ride.

Buy it here, now: Once A Spy

A Public Service Announcement: How to Spot a Suicide Bomber

I live in New York City, so a certain amount of paranoia is reasonable. How much is too much? Great question. However, given that the New York City skyline has a relatively recent hole in it, I don't think it's too much to consider that someone, sooner or later, might want to consider rendering more damage to the city.

Over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that most people—even those with limited knowledge of weapons, tactics, explosives, or anything harmful—can plan a better terrorist attack than some of the “masterminds” currently operating out in the world.

For example, one of the most likely scenarios in any major urban environment is suicide bombing. Load some people with bombs onto the A and the 6 trains in rush hour, or in the midst of time square—then you can start seeing examples of terror.

Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all sorts of signs for the simple reason that they are, by definition, all first timers. Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook, using pragmatic observation and psychological insight, and came up with a 12-point checklist, 11 for women—you'll see why. If you want to see the list being applied, I recommend Lee Child's novel “Gone Tomorrow.”

Now, the twelve signs that you might be looking at a suicide bomber.....