Alan Cook's Blog - Posts Tagged "alan-cook"

When my amnesia mystery, Forget to Remember, was published, I was looking for an effective way to promote it without a large outlay of money. I found it at Goodreads.

Membership in Goodreads is free, as you know, and allows readers to post ratings and reviews of the books they’ve read. In addition, authors can post the titles of books they’ve published. Information about who is reading and reviewing each of the author’s books will then appear on his or her home page. You can also have friends on Goodreads (does that sound familiar), and you will receive information about what each of your friends is reading.

What intrigued me is that Goodreads also allows authors to list their newly published books for giveaways. They don’t charge for this service. I signed up to give away five print copies of Forget to Remember (e-book giveaways aren’t allowed). During the period of several weeks that my giveaway was available, 1,118 people signed up for it.

That’s a lot of exposure, considering the fact that I was only out five copies of the book. What happened was that many of the people who signed up but didn’t win a copy purchased the e-book version of Forget to Remember. The month after my giveaway ended I had the best sales month of e-books I’ve ever had—by far. At one point the Amazon Kindle ranking of Forget to Remember almost broke into the top 100 bestsellers. The sales of my other e-books also jumped.

If you have a recently published book, or will have in the future, I recommend using the Goodreads giveaway as a promotion. You’ll have a hard time beating the return you receive for the money you spend.

While my wife and I were planning our cruise around South America that would give us a total of six continents visited, we were wondering whether we should select an expensive option—a day flight to Antarctica. Our geographer grandson, who was eight at the time, said we should go. Then he could say he knew people who had been to all seven continents.

While envisioning my third Carol Golden novel, "Dangerous Wind," I could picture Carol circling the globe in pursuit of freedom—or perhaps more correctly, in pursuit of whatever people were trying to take away our freedom. At the moment, the earth is all the territory we have to live on, work on, play on. We can’t yet move to the moon or to Mars. If we can’t find freedom here we can’t find it anywhere.

Writing about travel has been popular ever since people started writing books. Homer did it in "The Odyssey," Marco Polo wrote about his travels to Asia, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes."

"Dangerous Wind" is not just a travelogue, however, although Carol gets to visit some of the most famous places in the world, natural and manmade. It has action, adventure, suspense and mystery. Carol is abducted from her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by a mysterious group apparently with the government (remember Reagan’s sarcastic phrase, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”) and immediately flown to London.

Here she learns that her mission (which she did not choose to accept) is to find an old boyfriend she doesn’t remember because of her amnesia (her memory was lost in "Forget to Remember"). Then it’s on to Switzerland and the Matterhorn, a mountain every schoolchild can recognize.

The plot thickens as Carol uses her mathematical skills to decode a message that will take her to Cairo and the pyramids. From here she will travel to China (the Great Wall), Australia (Ayers Rock aka Uluru) and various places in South America including Ipanema Beach in Rio (are you old enough to remember “The Girl from Ipanema”?). She also goes to Tahiti and Bora Bora.

"Dangerous Wind" climaxes on the Greek island of Santorini, one of the most beautiful and fragile dots in the world. Santorini, you see, is a live volcano. Originally known as Thera, it blew up around 1600 BCE, sending tsunamis throughout the Mediterranean Sea and leaving the crescent that is Santorini today. A devastating earthquake in 1956 reminded us mortals that the volcano could erupt again at any time.

Oh yes, Carol also gets to visit Antarctica, land of snow, ice and penguins, as my wife and I did, so that she can tell her grandchildren she’s been to all seven continents.

Pop quiz. Name the only two Americans who have written James Bond novels. No, not Ian Fleming. He invented 007 but he’s British and has been dead since a previous millennium.

Give up? They are Jeffery Deaver and Raymond Benson. Raymond and Jeff have written lots of other bestsellers too, as you may know. And now they’ve teamed up as editors of an anthology of Cold War stories called "Ice Cold" (appropriate, right?), under the direction of Mystery Writers of America.

They asked some of their best-selling buddies to contribute stories for the book, including Sara Paretsky, J. A. Jance, T. Jefferson Parker, John Lescroart and Gayle Lynds. Oh, and they also picked ten stories from the hoard of starving but competent writers in the universe. The good news is that I’m one of them.

My story, "Checkpoint Charlie," will be in the book, to be published April 2014. Call it serendipity, but the timing for this book was perfect for me. I found out about it when I returned home from a trip to Germany, including a visit to Checkpoint Charlie and the museum there.

When the Berlin Wall was up (from 1961 to 1989) the only legal way you could get from West Berlin to East Berlin, and vice versa, was through Checkpoint Charlie. Many people tried to cross the border illegally, mostly from East to West. Some of them made it; some of them died in the attempt.

The museum commemorates those attempts. It’s a poignant trip back to the days of the Cold War. People tried to go over and under and through the wall. Many of the conveyances they used are in the museum. The collection includes newspaper articles by the score. There’s a movie about the demolition of the Wall. It’s difficult to understand how valuable your freedom is until you’ve lost it. A trip to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum will highlight that in bold letters.

My wife and I first visited Checkpoint Charlie in 1993, not long after the Wall came down. A piece of the Wall was still there, and small pieces of it are on display today, there and elsewhere. In its prime it was covered with graffiti—the graffiti of frustration. If you ever get to Berlin, be sure to visit Checkpoint Charlie and go through the museum.

And be sure to purchase a copy of "Ice Cold." We don’t ever want to forget those days.

I wrote a poem about the Berlin Wall after our first trip there. At one time it was on display in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

Over and under and through the Wall they came,
parched with a thirst they couldn't quench.
Tunneling, flying, leaping, crawling, hidden
in car seats and carts, determined to wrench
themselves free from tyranny's stench.

Oppressed, tortured, imprisoned, shot—
still the thirsty would not could not be denied.
The spring of freedom beckoned, so close, so far;
yards, feet, nay inches away they died—
and friends and loved ones cried.

Some made it! a baby hidden in a bag in a cart;
desperate men who leapt on a moving train;
a hollow car seat, tunnels, boats,
a makeshift glider, balloon and plane;
putting an end to the thirst and pain.

And then one day, one wonderful day,
they hammered and shattered and tore down the Wall!
Thirsting, singing, shouting, laughing, hugging,
chunk by chunk they watched it fall—
and the terrible thirst was quenched for all.

I have published one children’s book—"Dancing with Bulls"—but I have written a dozen stories for my grandsons, Matthew and Mason. Thirteen if you count the one I’m working on now. Actually, the new one is more of a young adult or YA story. After all, they’ve become teenagers. Children do that, I’ve discovered. They are the heroes in these stories.

They save the stories and hopefully will still have them to read to their children. I’m not seeking immortality, but I do believe this is a good way to connect with them. I also write poems for them. I suggest that all of you who are writers and would-be writers can do the same. What better legacy can you leave your descendants than something you’ve written.

Many of my stories are available to read free at http://authorsden.com/alancook.

To help get your creative juices flowing, I’ll tell you a bit about some of them. The first story I wrote for them was called “The Case of the Missing Presidents.” Mason, the younger boy, hears some older boys talking about trading presidents in the school cafeteria. He thinks they’re talking about trading cards, but when he tells Matthew about what he heard they figure out that the other boys are really talking about money—bills of different denominations with the pictures of presidents on them. They help to bust those boys who are stealing from the cafeteria.

In the second story, called “Homerun,” Matthew catches a homerun ball at a baseball game and returns it to Tank because it was a record-setting ball for him. When Tank believes the ball has been stolen, Matthew and Mason help recover it for him. In another story, Matthew helps save a boy who has fallen partway down a cliff, and then becomes a detective to find out who pushed him.

One of my personal favorites is called “The Secret of Nim.” I like it because I’m a sucker for games. It starts out like this: “Mason couldn’t believe his eyes when Sue Ellen disappeared from the school playground. One second she was there, walking across the balance beam; the next second she was gone.” This is the first story in which the boys are transported into another time, or, in this case another world. Matthew and Mason have to figure out how to get to this world in order to rescue Sue Ellen, and they have to solve a number of games of Nim, a mathematical game. One of the characters in the story speaks only in rhyme.

Another story is based on a real experience I had. The boys find a box full of money. (No, I didn’t get to keep it.) I also wrote a story based on the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus and one about my great grandfather who was in the Civil War. Matthew and Mason have to save his division from ambush at Antietam.

Many of my stories have a cute girl in them, but the one I’m working on at the moment has a genuine romance. As I said, the boys are teenagers now. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

What have you done that nobody else has ever done? Keep in mind that billions of people have lived since human beings were first recognized as such, so this is a difficult question. Or is it?

For example, you may have washed your dishes today using a technique you invented that nobody else has used, at least on your dishes. If you want to get technical, we all do things nobody else has done every day, from getting up out of our own beds to driving our individual routes to work.

However, I’d like to talk about accomplishments that have more cosmic significance and give more satisfaction than just washing our dishes in a unique way. But don’t take offense; I realize that washing dishes is very important in a civilized society.

If you are a writer, or a reader who writes occasional reviews for Goodreads.com, I maintain that you are doing significant things that nobody else has done. You are putting combinations of words together in a way nobody else ever has. If you write something that goes much beyond “Dear Grandma, thank you are the present.” this is true. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to do this. Writing letters, emails and even tweets qualify.

When I was in high school I had to memorize some lines from Macbeth that start, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”. For some reason I can still remember them quite accurately, even though I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Shakespeare’s words are deathless.

So are yours, even if the only people who have read them except yourself are your grandmother or your twitter followers. And not just because all the tweets that have ever been written are being saved for posterity, whoever that is.

Words are important, especially written words, and we should take appropriate care when we write them. The poet, the playwright, the novelist and the nonfiction writer are all creating new combinations of words that express ideas. So are journalists, blog writers, book reviewers, and authors of letters, emails and tweets. Well, perhaps not all writers of emails and tweets. Some of them are mundane, unoriginal and downright boring.

However, if we take pride in what we write, we can alleviate the boredom and raise the quality of our prose or poetry to a higher level. Then perhaps more people will want to read it.

We all want to soar like the birds—
Distinguish ourselves from the herds.
To do it is fun;
You’ll know when you’re done,
You’ve written original words.

See, I’ve just written a limerick I’m sure nobody else has ever written before. I know some of you are thinking, Thank God nobody has written that trash before. But you get the idea. Now put on your thinking cap and write something original.

I have written 13 stories for my grandsons, Matthew and Mason. The first one to be published in book form was Dancing with Bulls. I have now published a second story as a book. I call it Pictureland.

The inspiration for Pictureland is a painting on the wall of my living room. It is a twilight scene in a city, with buildings, pedestrians, an incongruous horse pulling a cart, and a light rain falling. It looks like a pleasant place to be.

Looks are deceiving. It’s actually a place without a constitution or laws, where tyrants practice mind control, and have implanted chips in the heads of the residents. When Matthew and Mason enter Pictureland on a whim, with help from Amy, a girl in the picture, they don’t know this, but Amy quickly clues them in.

There are multiple paintings represented in Pictureland, and the residents include not only the people in the pictures but also those living in the surrounding areas, as imagined by the artists. Most of them are “good” people. A few are not.

Matthew, Mason and Amy set about trying to get rid of the tyrants before the three are thrown into the Bloody Tower (which is in a picture of the Tower of London) and possibly, in the case of Matthew and Mason, executed by having their heads cut off, a la Anne Boleyn.

This is an adventure story, and the boys certainly have adventures, but there may also be a (gasp) moral. Can we recognize our own world in the book? At least, we don’t have chips in our heads—yet (although I know of some folks who think they do), but if the powers that be know where we’re going, everyone we’re talking to and all the websites we’re visiting, isn’t that almost the same thing?

I’m reminded of what Lord Acton said about power corrupting. Have we given too much power to too few people? Think about it.

We can’t hide from statistics. They lie in wait for us everywhere. We can’t ignore them by repeating old saws such as “Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.” And eventually one statistic will make us all equal, namely that the death rate is 100 percent. So how do we use them to our advantage?

They, whoever they are, are always telling us we can beat the odds. For example, government bureaucrats inveigle us to play state-sponsored lotteries. If you think this is a good idea, read the book co-written by my brother: Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, by Philip Cook and Charles Clotfelter. Sure, there are winners all the time, as pointed out by David J. Hand in The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, but they won’t be you, and as a side note, winning large lotteries will ruin the lives of the winners.

One problem in trying to beat the odds is that you can’t predict which longshots will come in for you. My wife and I ran into our next-door neighbors at a line in London Heathrow Airport, and I ran into a member of the only University of Michigan NCAA championship basketball team, in California, while wearing a T-shirt commemorating that event. He rumbled “Nice shirt, and was gone before I could say anything.

Those coincidences would make David Hand yawn. Of course they happened. Or if they hadn’t happened to us, other coincidences would have. The problem is that of all the thousands of possible coincidences that could happen to us, we can’t predict which ones will.

In my mystery novel, Aces and Knaves, Karl Patterson, who may or may not be a compulsive gambler, depending on who you ask, knows all about statistics. He says, “Anything that can happen will happen eventually,” although he doesn’t necessarily apply this principle to his own life. He is shocked when he has an extended losing streak playing blackjack. Well, you wouldn’t think that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner could gammon a world champion backgammon player five games in a row, but he did.

Another of my brothers, Stephen, a mathematician, pointed out the fallacy in my father’s get-rich-slowly scheme. Dad’s idea was to bet low on an even bet, which, for example, can be found at a casino craps table. As long as you win you keep betting the same amount. If you lose, you keep doubling your bet until you win, which will make you even again. Stephen said that won’t work in the long run because you’ll either have to redouble your bet until you run out of money or you’ll exceed the house betting limit.

Okay, we’ve been talking about losing streaks (which could also be winning streaks), but remember that they don’t exist. Every roll of the dice, every hand dealt from a newly shuffled deck, every coin flip, is a new event, not connected to what happened before. If you flip an unbiased coin and it lands heads ten times in a row, the odds of getting heads on the next flip are still exactly 50 percent.

So what’s my point in all this rambling? Don’t try to beat the house, whether the house is a Las Vegas casino or a state lottery. And next time you run into your wife’s brother in Paris while you’re with your girlfriend, just smile and say, “I knew this was going to happen.”

I'm feeling kind-hearted and am giving away Kindle copies of my 7th Carol Golden novel, "Your Move." If you have an Amazon Kindle account you can have one if you send me your Amazon Kindle email address: alcook@sprintmail.com Of course, I would appreciate reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Limited time offer (whatever that means).

Somebody is killing people who work for subsidiaries of conglomerate Ault Enterprises and playing some kind of game while doing it. Carol Golden is called on to help identify the killer because she has experience in breaking codes and playing games. Amy O’Connor, a former scam artist and long-distance hiker with an eye for men, becomes her partner by accident, and together they search for clues in interesting places. The hunt takes them to the tops of significant mountain peaks in the United States, including Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental U.S., and to other unusual locales such as the thinly populated Lost Coast region of northern California. Carol finds that incidents in her past that are lost to her because of her amnesia may come back to haunt her before she can win this deadly game.