Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog – Quite the Life (and all in Times New Roman 10pt!)

A Twelfth of Carrabis (April 2025 Newsletter)

Musings
Winners and Runners Up
RoundTable 360° Space as Art – Are you and your space playing nice with each other?
Greg Hickey’s Cover Reveal
That Think You Do Volume 2 needs First Readers
May Writers’ Workshop
ATTENTION ALL UK-BASED FOLKS!
A Little Game

Depending on your half of the globe (people with a western bias non-consciously divide the earth along a north-south axis, hence half the globe is the Americas, the other half is not (and take a moment to appreciate the hidden bias in the explanation itself! Wonderful, isn’t it?). People with a southern bias divide the globe along an east-west axis, hence half the globe is below the equator, the other half above (and again, appreciate the hidden bias), your a month or so into Spring or Fall, and regardless of bias, culture, or continent, you’re in a transition and/or preparation month.

The oldest recorded festivals are the Solstice gatherings with the Equinox gatherings a close second the further one’s culture is from the equator. Spring and Fall mark the times when we plant or gather, harvest or seed, and our agrarian rhythms are still strong in us and dominate the most ancient parts of our psyche. Solstice festivals are typically marked by beneficient and beatific deities, Equinox festivals typically by deities of anxiety and hope; Fall spirits are “we had a good year, what will the next bring?” while their Spring cousins are “The Darkness is vanquished, the Light comes!”

The northern hemisphere wakens while the southern hemisphere gathers in for Sol’s slumbers. The Great Southern Lands rest, eyes close, burrows go deep to avoid the cold, and The Wild bulks up for a Winter’s rest.

Our bodies and psyches still surge, ebb, and flow to these ancient rhythms. Seasonal Affective Disorder and Diurnal Mood Variation are extreme examples of the ancient internal tides seeking peace with modern life’s unnatural clocks.

Take a moment, if you’re willing, to close your eyes and feel the earth’s energies moving through your body, preparing it for one Solstice or the other, and remember we our visitors here. We are guests in someone else’s home, an Airbnb beyond imagination. Best to leave it nice and clean for when the owners return.

April 2025 Announcements

Last month’s Little Game had seven winners, one who gave me a chuckle and two who had me laughing out loud at their responses:

Aiden Ryan, Dan Linton, Clarissa Wilkenson, and Linda Pirtie win an ePub version of Binky
Sally Chetwynd gave me a chuckle with “It would take 60 musicians the same amount of time, but only if they were performing Beethoven’s 4.5th Symphony.” and also gets the ePub.
Bob Merry and Danaeka Scrimshaw both had me laughing out loud, Bob with “Hmm, it would be difficult to determine the amount of time not knowing the instruments that were being used, or the ages and birthplaces of the players.”, Danaeka with “That’s like asking how long it takes to grow a baby if 9 women are pregnant instead of 1.”, and both get autographed copies of That Think You Do Volume 1 for their efforts.

RoundTable 360° – Our 24 April 2025 RoundTable 360° session is Space as Art – Are you and your space playing nice with each other?.

Cultures across the globe and throughout history have recognized people’s energies and places’ energies need to mix well for both to prosper. Creators sense that energy exchange and sometimes rely on it to realize their creations for others.

Artist and ArtFitter Anne O’Brien leads a discussion on living space, working space, me space and you space in the Thursday, 24 April RoundTable.

Reserve your place at the RoundTable for Thursday, 24 April 2025, 1:30pmET (please check local times).

Brother Greg Hickey’s Cover Reveal – Greg is proud to present the cover reveal for my forthcoming Marcus Carver sci-fi crime novel Murder in Retrograde with and offers the following:
To reserve your copy of this page-turning near-future mystery, pre-order Murder in Retrograde today and get it as soon as it launches this fall.

That Think You Do Volume 2 needs First Readers – 2025 is a year of many projects and many works-in-progress for me. One such project is getting That Think You Do Volume 2 ready for a late June 2025 release, and we could use some help with it.

Specifically, we could use some first readers willing to read it through, offer comments, suggestions, edits, let us know their thoughts, write reviews, perhaps a Foreword, perhaps some backcover copy, …

Email me if you’d like to be a first reader, and thanks.

Writers’ Month Long Workshop –

May Writers’ Workshop – May 2025’s writers’ workshop covers many if not all phases of craft and storytelling. The May workshop is on Wednesdays, 7-28 May 2025, morning and evening openings available. Sign up here.

You can an idea of what craziness (and learning!) will ensue on my Experiments in Writing posts.

UK ALERT! – Sister Rika Chandra brought the following to my attention: The UK Government is proposing to weaken the copyright law that allows writers and everyone in the publishing industry to earn a living from their creativity.
They plan to make it easy for AI firms to use everyone’s books for free to build their AI models. If creators are not fairly paid for their work in the age of AI, then the books that inspire us will cease to be written.
That’s why Pan Macmillan has joined the Creative Rights in AI Coalition, and if you feel strongly about this too we encourage you to write to your MP to ask them to help stop this and protect creative rights. You can do this very easily at Creative Rights in AI Coalition – Write to Your MP.

Note that weakening copyright will spill over into all creative work – visual, music, graphic, written, spoken, sung, …

A Little Game – Here’s one to baffle all the visual people out there:
Below is a sign. Where would you expect to see it, and is something missing?

The first five people to get back to me with a solution get a free Those Wings Which Tire, They Have Upheld Me ebook. The first person to get back to me with a solution which makes me laugh gets a signed copy of That Th!nk You Do Volume I (and no looking it up on the internet, folks!).

That’s it for April. See you next month!

Enjoy!

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 10 – My Cousin Vinny

Oh, how exciting! A brand new never-before-seen chapter!

Enjoy.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 10 – My Cousin Vinny

Martin caught the soft drink cooler’s light blink twice then go out. Sheriff Quarrals, at the Pavoni and reading the instructions for a coffee, also caught it. “How much you pay for that new unit and the light goes out every few weeks?”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve got some spare bulbs up in the apartment. Mind watching the store for five or so minutes?”

Quarrals went back to the instruction manual and waved him on.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Martin instituted Croyden’s Cone of Silence and lifted a phone handset from a drawer.

Tony Morelli’s low tenor came on the line. “Long time no talk, Larry. How is life in small town America?”

Martin chuckled. “Parochial, Tony. How’s east coast America?”

“What’s interesting about Stacey Allen Knox?”

“I got bored, Tony. Don’t know if our Unsub’s dead, gone to ground, done a runner, … Nothing new for the last month and I do random lookups on whatever’s in the news to keep my hand in, that’s all. You keeping tabs on me, Tony?”

“Did you see she just got back from Rio?”

“Rio interests you?”

“Rio interests a cross-department team with East Coast Operations being one of the departments in the cross. Nobody would’ve cared except she’s a named attorney who routinely works with internationals, not all of whom play nice with their US partners, so she was added to our persons-of-interest list.” Director of East Coast Operations Anthony Morelli paused. “We had eyes on her. She walked out of her hotel in the center of town, took a left, stopped in front of an alley between two skyscrapers, and disappeared.”

“One of our people lost her?”

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Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Muriel and Agatha in Carrabisville

Once a while celebrities visit us.

Great authors.

Great painters.

Great vocalists.

Great actors, musicians, poets, …

The list is endless.

For our part, all that’s required is ears to hear and eyes to see.

Oh, and there is one more thing…

A heart to appreciate.

An Experiment in Writing – Part 27: How to Read as an Author

I started taking writing classes and attended workshops – some recognizable and prestigious…or so they told me – since the 1970s.
In all that time – fifty years! – no teacher, instructor, writer, author, professor, wordsmithing professional gave me what I’m about to give you.

And boy did that piss me off.

I’m happy to learn I’m the village idiot and everybody else knew this, that what I’m about to share is intuitively obvious to the casual observer, except no author, writer, or wordsmither of any kind whom I’ve talked with knew this. It was revelatory to them.

So here it is, and I hope it helps.

Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting from Scratch”

Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Get copies of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, you can follow along, and I need the money.

All Experiments

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 9 – Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night (rewrite)

Minor changes to some of the other preceding files. Nothing worth mentioning.

Yet.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 9 – Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night

Rhonda Gilbert lost her Company tail in a fifteenth-floor custodian’s closet at Trump Tower. The custodian’s closet contained one of her many New York City caches, one of hundreds across the globe. Wherever she posted, she used a mathematical formula based on the host city’s name to determine which buildings to use, which floors to use, and what to cache there. LiquidKey – a sweet little Special Services gadget – provided access to any mechanical lock. A Special Services app provided access to electronic locks.

Each cache contained a complete makeover. In this case, the athletically thin, black suited, middle-aged woman with thick, hip length blonde hair went in and an older, matronly woman with thick glasses, a slight lisp, ruddy complexion, and dark, Mediterranean features came out, each makeover took less then sixty seconds thanks to a special Quick-Change class her Russian handlers arranged for her when she first approached them.

Rhonda enjoyed playing both sides. She enjoyed having her own island which nobody knew about. She enjoyed the Russians paying her while they figured out how they could resurrect their empire, what shape it would take and who would run it. She enjoyed going to them, not waiting for them to come to her, with bona fides of a high-level US intelligence/security weapons research group they knew nothing about.

“Don’t beat yourselves up too much. Most of the people who should know about it don’t know about it.”

Irregular meetings were set up at various hotels – dives to five-star – at odd intervals and wherever her missions took her.

Lots of the stuff she told her handlers returned a nod, a “good job,” a “just continue what you’re doing.”

But everything changed when she mentioned Shaman to them, the US’ latest and greatest attempt to determine if ESP and now labeled PSI abilities existed, and if so, how to screen for them, how to foster them, how to develop them for strategic and tactical purposes.

One or two or her handlers completely lost their composure when she first mentioned it. Many sat forward. Most reached across the table for the files like greedy children seeing handfuls of candy for the taking. A few knocked phones off their cradles to make sure they got their candy first.

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Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters