When Reading Was Fun

I ran across an interesting piece about California. California: The Physical Collapse of a Social State. They're squandering a hundred billion dollars a year on "fairness" spending while their infrastructure is falling apart. I already knew from news articles they were wasting a lot of money on frivolous things at the expense of necessary things. I didn't understand the breathtaking scope of it. It reminds me of a verse. Isaiah 59:1 "We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places like dead men." That sums up the California legislature quite well.

AoM is a science fiction mystery story. Police investigation involves a lot of boring elements. I've been doing some reading in the mystery and suspense areas to get a brush up and get my senses tuned for things that make for a more gripping read. I read a lot of mysteries when I was young, but not so much after I found science fiction and fantasy. Those genres include all others. For the mystery/romance book I read a flurry of mysteries, as mentioned sometime in another blog. I still needed another dip in the pool.

Back in 2015 I was downloading free promo books on Amazon and picked up One Night in Tehran: A Titus Ray Thriller. It's about a CIA agent and is more thriller than mystery. Despite the title, it's not set in Iran. I had more fun reading it than I've had in a while. The problem with writing is you learn a lot about story structure and story elements and plot devices, etc. Books become a lot more predictable, especially three-act formula books that all use the same boring structure. This book was different. It reminded me of when reading used to be so much fun. It also reminds me I need to grow past the three-act formula that I started using. Publishers like uniformity, but could I be doing better than that?

Reading the mysteries has given me some ideas for tweaking AoE. Nothing big, but I think I could make the ending more suspenseful by making one trivial change that would only take a few lines. I'm also thinking it's time to go through the mystery/romance one last time, make the hard fixes and put it on Amazon under a female pen name. I was thinking about pen names for AoE and AoM, too. The one that made me laugh was Drake Ventura.

Have a good weekend.