For the fun of it:

A tongue in cheek cookbook. Very minimalist.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8WVJL6

Site being managed again.

I can now get comment emails forwarded. Also note that the book links to the right have been updated.

Site will be repaired or replaced.

The very kind lady who started maintaining this site for me is older (like me) and at that point in life she has more on her plate to deal with than taking care of my site. She was doing it basically as a favor. But some things like the e-mail redirect for comments don’t work. and I also lost my Ameritech address as unusable. AT&T has had our accounts screwed up for a long time. It got to the point my wife was needing to call every two weeks to get them to reset my password because this big TECH company only offers voice support and I am deaf.
I asked for my domain name back and am now negotiating with a capable young man to either repair this site or create a new one. It’s not going to just disappear. – Mac’

On readers and reviews

I have 312 reviews this morning on my latest book. They are entertaining if you don’t take them too seriously.
Let me tell a story about weighing other’s input too seriously.
When I was in high school I worked as a bus boy at a sort of a half restaurant / night club. The place had a lady playing requests on an organ at the center on a raised stage and she would sing on occasion.
They served some high end items but normal family dinner type things too.
The owner was cost conscious – which is good in a manager – but she had no FILTERS.
A 90 pound little old lady would say – Oh, honey your chicken dinner is wonderful but I can’t eat that much! She would immediately run into the kitchen and tell them to cut back the portions. Then a 300 pound truck driver would complain the chicken dinner left him hungry. Back to the kitchen she’d go…
One of my reviews today said the story went too slow like “drip coffee’.
The very next review said I flew through it too fast and it should have been three books.
You can’t make everybody happy and you will drive yourself and everybody around you crazy trying.
If you liked it well enough to finish it and not demand a refund I thank all of you. – Mac’

Fair Trade published.

I may make a few small edits but the last three beta readers have been repeats. Enjoy….

Minor typos and errors updated just now 9/26 evening. They take time to post.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GYNTLTV

Invasion story out to beta readers

I’m getting useful feedback. The title will be Fair Trade. Here’s the cover.

A little snippet / mostly done / I’m fine.

In reverse order: Some folks got worried since I don’t communicate frequently. I understand. I’m 74 and the COVID virus is particularly hard on old people. I’m also fat but I have none of the co-morbidities associated with that. My blood sugar is normal and blood pressure under good control. Our county was hard hit as all of them were neighboring Detroit. Now however while the chart for Oakland county shows a Delta surge the graph of deaths is flat and declining. Being an antisocial curmudgeon is beneficial for exposure. So many are upset they can’t jam in sporting events or airliners – while they’d have to pay me to do so.

The invasion book is at 200k words + and mostly done. It’s been fun and I’ll go back and finish the next April book next. It may be the last or next to last bridging to the Family Law books. I’ll probably take some time to create more paper editions after that. I can do it now but it was a huge deal to learn how to satisfy Amazon’s demands – especially on covers.

Here’s a little snippet.

“What is it? I’m in conference with the scholar,” Three Fingers said irritated.

“Your pardon, sir. This is the scholar’s assistant. We are still on limited emissions and he neglected to plug in his communicator. We have news we thought he should have that he’d want to tell you.”

“Well, out with it then man,” Three Fingers encouraged.

“The sensor module you had parked on the backside of the big moon has detected emissions. It isn’t anything from out-system. The natives have several devices returning video and data from the next planet in the system.”

“Next in or out?” Three Fingers demanded. “I thought there was no other radio noise?”

“Out. It is smaller, red in appearance, has very little atmosphere, and with no active magnetic field. A very inhospitable chill desert planet. The video it shows is being sent from vehicles but there is no speech being transmitted or any indication it is manned. In each case, it seems to be showing the area around a wheeled vehicle, and the tracks it made to get there are sometimes visible. They seem to be robotic devices,” the underling speculated. “We missed them at first because the power level being used is very low for planetary distances. What the interest could be in such a desolate rock is beyond me.”

“Thank you, Beelus. We’ll tap the feed if we want to see more,” the scholar said, dismissing him.

The man didn’t immediately leave.

“There is news about the other devices recovered if you want to hear it.”

“Certainly, go ahead,” Three Fingers invited.

“The large flat device that was attached to the computer turns out to be a very specialized antenna. We know how to make them but they are only used for long range radar installations at a fixed ground site. Those are purpose-built, but the technicians insist this has all the hallmarks of a mass-produced consumer product like a music player. It has several very high-density semiconductor devices we don’t understand, and contains tiny servo motors to aim it.”

“To aim it at what?” Three Fingers asked pointedly.

“It was in an open area pointed at the sky. There is very little air traffic in that remote area of their planet for it to connect to aircraft. The only theory advanced by one person was that it tracks and communicates with satellites, but nobody else agrees. They are all holding out for an alternative explanation. Oh, and the skinny pliers? They were shown to the head of maintenance without telling him their source. He tried them out bending some wire and removing some lock clips and declared them of very good quality. So good we had a hard time getting him to release them back to us.”

“Very close to our level of technology,” Three Fingers told his scholar.

“Yes, that is becoming disturbingly evident. I’ll have more to report soon, I’m sure.”

Another small invasion snippet

“Frankel, Loewry, and Goldberg. How may I help you?” The young woman’s voice was steady but her eyes reflected shock at seeing a dog faced alien against a strange background.

“Hello. My name is Blue, the same as your color. Be aware when you reply the response will be what you humans call laggy. We are out by your moon and it takes a few seconds for the signal to make the round trip. I am second in charge of this vessel and wish to speak to a senior partner of your firm about representing the crew of our ship to land and be granted favorable immigration status in the United States of America.” He had that written out and read it carefully.

“Mr. Loewry is on call right now,” the receptionist said. “I will request he speak with you.”

“Mr. L, I have a new client call on line 3,” Cheryl said. “I think you should replay my video before answering the, uh, gentleman.”

Cheryl watched Loewry replay the call and his face turned red as he got angry.

“Cheryl, we pay you to screen calls precisely because we don’t wish to speak to every nut case and fraudster who can look up our contact info. Those supposed aliens were in the news about a month ago. If they were real, they’d be holding news conferences on the Whitehouse lawn by now. They thoroughly discredited the crank astronomer who started this. For crying out loud, they are selling rubber masks of the ‘aliens’ already. The kids will be wearing them for Halloween. The stories all over the internet have them landing in Idaho to steal potatoes, taking people for joy rides and other utter foolishness. Just hang up on him. Don’t waste another word. And don’t bother me with other aliens of any flavor,” Loewry instructed her.

Blue couldn’t hear Loewry’s response. Cheryl simply looked distressed and the screen went blank.

“Communications failed?” Blue asked.

“Nahhh, she hung up on you,” Jed said. “Her boss probably made her.”

“Hung up is terminated?” Blue asked.

“Yeah, that’s an old expression from when the handset for a voice only phone actually terminated the call by being replaced on the instrument.”

“What shall I do?” Blue wondered.

“Life is too short to try to fix stupid,” Jed advised him. “There’s too much of it in the world. That’s why I gave you four firms to call. I thought one or more might turn the work down.”

“What is the word for that particular kind of bad behavior? Blue asked. “She did not treat me correctly. Am I wrong?”

“No, she was what we call rude. Don’t hold it against her. I’m sure she wouldn’t have done that on her own authority. Her boss undoubtedly ordered it.”

Micro-snippet of alien ‘invasion’ story in progress.

“Did you get some response?” The NASA director asked his Space Force peer.

“Yes, we passed by fairly close, a hundred and fifty kilometers away. We wanted to make sure it was obvious it wasn’t a direct line approach like a weapon strike. We had time to repeat a long string of math at them several times. The package our people put together started with prime numbers as a universal common point and got progressively more complex. The hope was after establishing that as a common ground, we could in the future build language from the operations such as addition and subtraction leading to plus and minus, more and less, greater than and less than.”

“Did they respond with strings of numbers that showed they understood?” Durkin asked.

“Not exactly,” Gott said. “Here, I’ll let you listen to their brief response.”

The voice was odd but perfectly understandable English.

“Yes, yes, we count too. Please be patient. Your call is important to us.”

“They put us on hold?”

“Hey,” Durkin said, trying to put a positive spin on it, “at least we didn’t have to work down a message tree to get that.”

April – hardcover

I just published the first hardcover version of one of my books. April was just able to squeak under the 550 page limit Amazon set on their new in-house publishing service. It was a challenge getting the cover accepted as it needs wrap to go around the boards. It’s a case bound book with no dust jacket – the cover design is right on the wrap. I went matte finish as I always thought glossy looked cheap. I hope this helps those who have a hard time reading off a monitor. My others will follow as I am able.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1970096063

What’s happening…

Work continues on April 13, and a stand alone ‘Invasion’ book. I have not started on Family Law 7 but have some ideas. I’m itching to describe Central’s explorations and planets.
I tried having third parties format my books for paper at great expense and little satisfaction. I’ve now learned enough that I reformatted “April” with the latest file that has many fewer errors and typos. I did not list it as a second edition because the story line is unchanged. I sold very few paper copies so it isn’t a money maker. It’s more a service for collectors and those who have trouble reading off a screen. I also increased the price a couple of dollars to $18.99 because it was a LOT of work and the product is better and worth more now. I was only making about $2 off a print “April” and am still making about the same as a kindle sales now.
About readability… I’m experimenting with producing a LARGE PRINT edition of April. It’s such a large book that in a 6″ x 9″ book it would go over 1,000 pages. That’s not exactly the sort of book you can hold in your lap and read comfortably. I may go big – 8.5 x 11 or even split it into two books and sell them as a set.
Now that I have the (mostly mental) tools to publish paper I expect to have paperbacks of all my books. I also expect to have hardback books, but not the fabric covered publishing house versions with dust jackets. They will be the hard cover with the cover design printed directly on the end boards.
I don’t intend to stop writing to do the formatting. I will switch back and forth to make the work load easier. The same way as I work on two or more books so I can get a mental break by switching.
I also have a wife and a life I am not willing to ignore. My wife is taking Fridays off all summer and yesterday we used the first of these to take a long ride out i the country. We saw sandhill cranes, wild turkey, and a black bear. I’ll be 74 next month and intend to do this as long as I can.

Book finalist for award.

Who Can Own the Stars? is a finalist for the Prometheus Award.
Can’t make link active – sorry.
http://www.lfs.org/releases.shtml

New book published.

Decided to go with “Another Word for Magic”.
Just uploaded it to Amazon. Sorry – can’t make link work. Cut and paste please.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0917X4YTW

Another Name for Magic

Should be published in the next day or two. Errors are pretty much done and just waiting on a cover.

April #5 and #8 re-edited

A Depth of Understanding – and – It’s Always Something.
I just uploaded #8 at 10am 3/22 so it will take a little time to propagate in their system.
They both should have improved spelling and grammar for those who get jolted out of the story by errors.

Family Law 6 to beta

The title is “Another Word for Magic”
I thought I had another reader promised and can’t find my note.
If you have skills and experience and I’ve missed you volunteering drop me a note at mchandler@ameritech.net
The mackeychandler.com comments address here is useless – full of spam ans a horrible interface. It’s hard to even delete messages. I’d turn it off if I knew how.
CLOSING IT NOW

Family Law 6 – a tiny snippet

“Oh, my goodness.”

“Sam, I hate it when you say something like that out loud and then expect me to beg to know what has you upset. Can’t you just go ahead and tell me?” Bill asked.

“I’m sorry. Lee stayed at the hanger rather long. I expected her to head home. She waited to leave until a couple of Red Tree soldiers showed up in full gear. They had duffels and some equipment cases like they aren’t just paying a visit and they appear to be putting cameras and sensors out.”

“You probably precipitated that,” Bill King speculated.

“Then why not right after my visit?” Sam asked.

“Fair point. But maybe they would have been lax without anybody nosing around. The way you described it the aircar was just a shell at that point. You said it was up on stands. I bet it didn’t have the pods mounted yet, did it?”

“No. I can’t say I ever saw them sitting around either,” Sam admitted.

“Well, in any case, now they have a functional vehicle, with whatever is in those pods to make it go,” Bill said. “You may assume the chassis you saw before is nothing special so it wasn’t worth guarding. Be happy you didn’t go snooping around and get caught by Red Tree’s Finest instead of an irate mechanic. I doubt they’d let you go as easily.”

“I can’t argue that. These boys looked hardcore. I’ve been trying to think how we could use this locally instead of reporting it home and everything I come up with is simply too dangerous.”

“Keep thinking that way. And warn me if you suddenly get crazy brave because I don’t want to be anywhere around when you start juggling this time bomb.”

“No, I won’t do anything stupid,” Sam promised. “It’s just frustrating. We’ve been here years and when we finally start getting some important intelligence everything has changed so it’s pretty much useless to us.”

About the CONTACT service here.

WordPress is not very user friendly in some ways. And I am no expert user.
I discovered after several people couldn’t contact me that I had a huge backlog of messages in my contact folder. Some quite old and several fairly important.
I set my email to forward posts from contact@mackeychandler.com and now found out it isn’t doing it… Doing web searches on the matter I find this is a common problem not easily fixed.I tried to set up a gmail account to forward them to since AT&T is a horror story to try to configure. The WP server won’t accept authentication from there…
WP uses PHP and I may have to go to SMTP to get the forwarding I want.
Please be aware making comments instead of using contact is much better.
Last night I sat and deleted HUNDREDS of contact messages for sunglasses, Russian ladies seeking sexual partners, sure fire investment services…from the backlog. I responded to a few old messages but still have to go through several hundred not spam.
I apologize if anyone thought I was just ignoring them and indifferent.
So bear with me please people.