Dragons, Books, and Something New!

Life is change. Or change is life. Or is it time is money?  Stitches in time save goats?

I can never keep all that eldritch wisdom straight.

Regardless of my lackluster grasp of homilies, I'm going to do two new things in today's blog.

First, I'm going to talk about someone else's book for a change. Hey, stop all that clapping and cheering, I can hear you, you know.

Next, I'm going to introduce a segment I call 'Out on the Patio.' This will be an audio segment, recorded out on my patio, in which I blabber on about whatever inane subject strikes my fancy. There will be a link below.

Why am I doing this?

Mainly because I wanted to give you guys a change of pace. You come here week after week and read my rants and raves, and if I keep doing the same old same old I'll wind up boring you.  That's the main reason.

Also, I went to great lengths to purchase this nifty chrome-plated Blue Snowball professional microphone, and aside from a few ill-fated sessions of singing along with musical legend Billy Idol the Snowball hasn't gotten any use. My plan was to start a podcast. I still plan to do that, but I have to first get over this stage fright, and the 'Out on the Patio' segments seem like a good way to do this.

Finally, you'll all get the chance to marvel at my thick Mississippi accent. Mock away. But I'd really appreciate it if, when you're done laughing, you'd zap me an email and let me know how the sound quality was.  Too soft? Too loud? Muffled? Distorted? Made your dogs bark and your ears bleed?

Let me know!

First, let's talk about a book I just finished, Dragons of Wendal by Maria Schneider.

Before starting Maria's book, I plowed through several zombie novels and a couple of 'extreme' horror anthologies. To say I was aghast at the poor quality of these books would be a vast understatement. Formatting problems? All over the place. Grammar errors? Right, left, and rife. Bad storytelling? Oh yeah.

Dragons of Wendal was, if you'll forgive the analogy, a breath of fresh air. Spot-on perfect formatting. Impeccable grammar. Engaging characters, skillfully drawn, in a story that was by turns funny, frightening, and even (gasp) romantic.

Zoe, the heroine, is smart and plucky and accomplished. Her world is filled with magic and peril, but it is not just another Standard High Fantasy knock-off complete with red-faced blustery innkeeps and wise old whiskery mages. I loved Zoe's world. It lived and breathed, and visiting it was great fun.

I don't do spoilers, so I'd better shut up. Look, if you like my stuff, or Pratchett, or classic high fantasy with a modern twist, grab Dragons of Wendal. It's only $2.99 at Amazon for the Kindle; there's also a paperback version there for just a few bucks more.

And now for my audio debut!

Out on the Patio

You guys are my guinea pigs -- er, valued pre-release focus group. Let me know what you think by emailing me franktuttle@franktuttle.com!

Thanks. And stay cool out there!

Even Legumes Get the Blues

Maybe it's the heat.

And it's heat we have, in spades. The outside temperature Friday reached four hundred and eleventy hundred billion degrees, in the shade, beneath a bag of ice, wearing a suit made of ice cream.

And that was before things really heated up in the afternoon.

Even the snakes aren't biting. Instead, they squint and promise to hide under your pillow sometime in November. Even the omnipresent Jehovah's Witnesses have curtailed their soul-saving operations, figuring, I suppose, that this weather is so close to Hell as to make them functionally indistinguishable.

Whatever the reason, I just can't get my aging aftermarket brain in gear lately. I sit down to write. My brain stares at the screen for a moment and then wanders away, leaving my fingers to tap out sentences such as "The gyro hast regretted a frigid assemblage of melodious corn, forsooth."

That's not exactly going to wow the editors at Cool Well Press.

So what, you and I both ask, is your problem, Frank?

Heck if I know. I'm eating. I'm sleeping. I'm getting plenty of exercise, if by 'plenty' you mean 'as little as humanly possible,' and if by exercise you mean 'not exercise.' But that's fine, because I HATE exercise. I'm not even keen on being corporeal. It was fun for the first fifteen or twenty years, but you get arthritis and let's see you wax rhapsodic about it.

Maybe it's the slow book sales this summer. I see a sales rank dip down below 200,000 on Amazon, and suddenly just vegging out in front of the TV while 'America's Got Talent' proves America has little if any talent seems like a perfectly valid use of my rapidly dwindling supply of time.

Too, we must not discount prevailing public opinion, which may be summed up as 'Frank is inherently lazy.' There is considerable evidence to bolster this assertion. In fact, if the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot was half as pervasive, we'd all be waving to him as we met him on the street, three or four times each day.

I've tried positive affirmations, but I can't help but snicker at the things even while I repeat them to myself. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING! SEE THE FUTURE YOU WANT AND IT WILL BE THE FUTURE YOU EXPERIENCE!

Really? I want to be a 1999 Chevy Camaro.

I don't see any tires. I have lungs and not a small-block V6.

Bah. So much for that.

I know the only way out of the doldrums is through them. I have to keep typing, even if sentences such as "Gimlet races only brace the luckless vapors of solitude" are the only ones I produce.

I'm just tired. Maybe the weather will break. Maybe I'll find my center. Maybe the peach tree out back will start sprouting money.

The corpulent echoes of upright men sashay past, flags at half-mast, hats bespoke, ornery knees clicking...

Fifty Shades of Mug

I am writing in the wrong genre.

The buzz these days is all about the book Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm told Fifty Shades sells eleven billion copies per second on Amazon alone, and total sales of the book by all markets combined exceed the number of sentient beings in the populated universe by a factor so large mathematicians have been known to explode just trying to describe it.

This is in direct contrast to my own titles, which sell at a rate we will charitably describe as 'slightly slower.'

I took to a mountaintop recently to ponder, among other things, the reasons and causes for this inequitable disparity in sales. Okay, it wasn't a mountaintop, but sitting on that extra couch cushion does give me a commanding view of the foyer.There I sat, in a position of deep thought, through two entire episodes of Lizard Lick Towing.


And then it came to me.

My books feature very little of the content that made the author of Fifty Shades so rich they are now picking out a new sun because our current one is simply 'too yellow.'

Look through all my books. Spankings? Nope. Salacious romps in luxurious Wall Street offices? Um, no.

Even Markhat, who is a wise-cracking world-weary private eye, never gets any naughtier than a kiss now and then. Or, if he does, there's no way he's going to talk about it.

So maybe I need to move with the times. Maybe Markhat's next adventure should be entitled Steamy Rannit Nights, or Naughty Mama Hog. I have to stick with the three-word title motif -- you had noticed that, right? Well, it's a thing. All Markhat titles have three words. If there's a reason for that, it escapes me.

Of course, I'll also need to rename the new Mug and Meralda book. It was going to be called All the Turns of Light, but now I'm trying to decide between Pants in the Wind or Mug's Curious Encounter With a Rather Un-inhibited Philodendron Named Honey LaLove. 


Why not jump straight aboard the gravy train, though, and go with Fifty Shades of Mug?

I might even release a new version of All the Paths of Shadow - -see below!

And here's a Markhat title, renewed for the adult market!

Yes, the sky's the limit now!

Or you could just buy one of my plain old un-sexy books, linked below:

Frank's Amazon titles!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to research dirigibles...

That's Belfast! (A Save Lennox Post)

First, a bit of background.

Two years ago, in Belfast, a big black dog named Lennox was seized for the crime of being big and black.

Lennox never bit anyone. Never chased anyone. Never had a complaint spoken against him. He had a proper license. He had a good home. The Dog Wardens (that's apparently what Belfastians call the otherwise unemployable and the feeble-minded) were only at Lennox's home because they went to the wrong address. But because the Belfast Dog Wardens deemed him big and black, they also decided, using all six of their brain cells, that Lennox was a Pit Bull, a breed prohibited in Belfast.

What followed was a travesty. Photographs surfaced showing poor Lennox cowering in a tiny cage, surrounded by piles of his own feces. The official response by the Belfast City Council to these photos was a shrug and a puzzled 'Wait, what's wrong with fecal matter at one's feet?'

Two years passed. Various judges heard the claims of good behavior and non-Pit-Bullness. One of the Dog Wardens even perjured herself by claiming she was terrified of Lennox, despite a number of photos which showed the woman sitting calmly with Lennox, petting Lennox, even letting Lennox give her big sloppy dog-kisses.

A series of increasingly-corpulent Belfastian judges listened to all the evidence and wobbled their ponderous chins like Jabba the Hut sucking down a fifty-gallon drum of jello before blurting 'Off with his head!'

They even brought in a so-called 'dog expert,' who, after a brief interval of pointing at crows and insisting they were Welsh Corgies, claimed Lennox was not a Pit Bull, but was a settee, and could be dangerous, maybe, I see a lamp, what's a Pit Bull anyway?

You can read my previous comments on the matter here.

Today, though, marked the end for poor Lennox. The final judge, who I will not grace with even a name because I don't believe in adding Google points to bottom-feeding slime-worms, decreed that Lennox be put down at once.

His family won't even be allowed to say goodbye.

That's Belfast.

You've got your grossly incompetent, profoundly moronic Dog Wardens, who equate big and black with deadly slavering killing machine. You've got your City Council, who spend two years refusing against all evidence that the Wardens might have made a mistake. And you've got the absolute worst judges this side of the Fifth Galactic Arm, because they heard the evidence but clearly didn't understand enough of the big words to see what an idiotic case the Wardens and the Council brought against poor Lennox.

That's Belfast. Stupidity powered by arrogance compounded by incompetence.

Two years, they kept this poor friendly dog in a tiny metal cage. Two years, they put his family through Hell.

That's Belfast.

By now, I imagine poor Lennox is gone. And I imagine that the Belfast City Council and the Dog Wardens and the pudding-headed judges are all relieved that the whole business is history.

Except it isn't. You backwater, inbred Belfastian buffoons are about to learn, the hard way, what sort of impact negative press on the Web has on blighted little slums such as the one you call home.  There are those of us out here, well beyond the heaps of garbage that line your borders, who won't let people forget who and what you are.

So by all means, let's talk about Belfast. Let's talk about their tiny little cages, their ignorant and cruel civil servants, and the nasty air of casual cruelty that hangs over the whole wretched place like some persistent, noxious fog.

Because that's Belfast.

Rest easy, Lennox. None of this was your fault. No.

That too belongs to Belfast.


PS--
Please copy and paste this blog, or at least the URL, to the Lord Mayor of Belfast, email addy below:

lordmayorsoffice@belfastcity.gov.uk

Please be advised that the customary title for the Lord Mayor of Belfast is 'Peaches.' Or 'Twitface,' if you're feeling nobby.

Something Custard This Way Comes

One bit of writing advice I always give is this -- once you've submitted a piece, forget about it and start something new.

This advice doesn't play particularly well when I offer it to the checker at the grocery store, but other writers see the value in it. There is nothing to be gained from obsessive worry over a title that is now on an editor's desk. You can't hurry the process. You can't affect the outcome. All you can do is chew your fingernails down to your elbows and waste a lot of time.

So I started my new book the very day I sent out the old one.

But today, some eleven days after the submission, I find myself doing the very thing I so often warn others against. No, not licking outboard motors, but obsessing over a submission.

Now, eleven days in this business is nothing. Eleven weeks isn't even considered a long wait. I once waited eleven months for a yes or a no on a short story (it wound up being a yes). So getting impatient after eleven days is somewhat akin to starting your car in Dallas, driving a block, and wondering if you're in Alaska yet.

Thus, in order to purge the evils spirits of doubt and dismay which bedevil me, below are the most likely fates my manuscript has already suffered:

1) My submission is being passed from editor to editor as each bursts into great raucous gales of laughter and screams of 'Is he SERIOUS?'

2) The publishing house has decided to pass on the book, and they're taking out a full-page public rejection space in the New York Times just to make absolutely sure I get the point.

3) They ran out of synonyms for NO.

4) They've hired the entire clown cast of Ringling Brothers Circus to pile into a tiny car and drive to my house and throw 919 pies in my face, each accompanied by a cheerful shouted "We regret that your submission does not suit our current needs" followed by a nose honk, a squirt of lapel-flower seltzer,  and another thrown pie.

5) See #4 above, but with musical accompaniment by the Blue Man Group.

These are the things that fill a writer's unkempt head. I'll dream of clown cars, I swear I will.

It's All Good Fun Until 20 or 30 Kinfolk Get Gut Shot

Like 17 million of my closest friends, I've been watching the History Channel's 'Hatfields & McCoys' mini-series.

The first episode, which opens during the American Civil War, raised the bar on casual, almost recreational murder. The second episode teetered on the verge of self-parody, as pretty much everyone turned on everyone in a hog-fueled free-for-all of unkempt facial hair and petty yet brutal violence.

I'm not sure what's in store for us tonight. I can only assume that some point an entire basket of warm and fuzzy puppies will be brutalized to the accompaniment of period-authentic fiddle music.

I'm not slamming the script or the production values. I'm not slamming the production values because they're unimpeachable. The actors all look like they've spent the last five years doing heavy manual labor in the same clothes they're wearing. The beards are lush and properly grizzled, even those on the women, the chickens, the trees, everything. The weapons and use thereof are correctly portrayed. I'm pretty sure I even smelled pig manure in a couple of scenes.

The script can't really be attacked because the producers did their research, and as far as I know their portrayal of all parties involved is accurate.

What's my problem, then?

The Hatfields and the McCoys all have one thing in common -- they're awful, awful people. All of them. Men and women, boys and girls, spoons and forks. There's not a hero in the bunch. Even the old granny women are lurking in their rockers, Bowie knives at the ready, just dying to draw some Hatfield or McCoy blood.

I did get a chuckle when I realized every barn-dance scene resulted in at least one disgusting, pointless murder. Not because I find disgusting pointless murder humorous, but I've always been suspicious of barn dances because putting that many hillbillies and that much high-octane corn whiskey in the same vicinity simply cannot end well.  Which makes 'Hatfields & McCoys' the natural antithesis of 'Hee-Haw.'

Will I watch the final episode tonight? Probably, because A) I have weak impulse control and B) if the whole thing culminates in a Tarantino-esque orgy of death and blood at a barn dance I'll have joke fodder for weeks.

Yes. I'll watch it and I'll shave immediately afterward and I'll go to bed stone cold sober, and if a barn dance breaks out anywhere near me I'll wrap myself in the Internet and turn up the volume on some Industrial Darkwave to drown out the sound of fiddles and musket fire.

Things to Do in Denver When Your Novel Has Been Submitted

Markhat fans, rejoice, for the new book is off to the good people at Samhain Publishing.

Which means I (and you, yes, both of you) get to wait for the verdict. Will Brown River Queen be accepted, and soon take its place as Book 7 of the Markhat series? Or will Brown River Queen be judged lacking, and consigned to the 'Thanks-but-no-thanks' pile?

In fact, did the email with the book attachments ever get there at all? Sure, I sent the email. That is, I think I did. But what if the attachments have already been corrupted? What if my outgoing email server ate the whole thing? What if I just think I sent it, when in reality there's an editor out there who just received a Word file containing nothing but the letters E, I, and M?

I kid, of course. And no, I did NOT just check my Sent Mail folder. I am far more evolved than that, and in any case, you can't see me.

So, while I await word on Markhat's new adventure, I'm already underway with the sequel to All the Paths of Shadow.  And with any luck I'll get my podcast up and running soon too.

Of course, that's along with replacing the clutch in my motorcycle and putting new brake pads on Karen's Suzuki and keeping the jungle from overtaking the house and fighting crime in the dead of night. Although frankly I may have to cut back on the crime-fighting bit -- I'm spending a fortune on capes and pain relievers, and I keep falling asleep at the wheel of the Tutmobile.

It's a never-ending whirlwind of excitement, is the writer's life.

I'd like to thank my brave and heroic beta reader Kellie Bagne, who has the eyes of an eagle and spectacular grasp of grammar. She found eight pages of typos and problem areas in the rough draft. I found one, mainly because the hood of my crime-fighting costume keeps falling down over my eyes.

So wish me luck! I'll keep you all posted as quickly as word comes in. Also wish me luck with the new book!

Thanks!

Breaking the Law

One of the rare delights of being a fantasy author is taking a good hard look at the immutable laws of physics and, after careful and studied consideration, thumbing one's nose at them.

With the exception of the Wistril stories, I'm not one to have a wizard wave a staff and lay waste to whole landscapes. No, I prefer for my magic to make some sort of sense -- after all, the kinetic energy required to lay the aforementioned waste had to come from somewhere, right? If not, well, there goes Conflict, right out the window, because if my wizard can flatten armies with a wave and a word, what problems does he really have?

I tried to base the magic in All the Paths of Shadow on a feature of our world with which I am familiar. Electricity. Electrical current. The 'holdstones' Meralda uses are magical batteries. In her universe, magic flows like electricity, using many of the same conductors, in fact. That's why she's always winding copper wires around things.

And it's also why she can't mutter a few mystical words and send enemies flying. Yes, she can build marvelous devices, but they have limits. She has to be smarter than the bad guys.

Since I just finished the new Markhat book, and I'm letting a talented and fearless Beta reader have a look, I've dived right into my next book, which will be the sequel to All the Paths of Shadow.


Entitled All The Turns of Light, this new book will chronicle the further adventures of Meralda and Mug, as they take to the skies in a truly massive airship I am now designing.

I'll post drawings when I draw some I'm not ashamed of.  But that's not what I'm here to crow about.

Here's the deal. I need my airship, the HMS Intrepid, to be capable of a non-stop one-way voyage of some twenty-five thousand miles.

As you might imagine, that presents a few engineering problems, even if the story takes place in a world where magic works.

Now, airships aren't anything new to Meralda's world. I mention them frequently in the first book. It's even stated they've been flying passengers and cargo about for fifty years. They use 'lifting gas' which is obviously hydrogen, and they move using 'fans,' which are obviously propellers. I didn't go much deeper than that because we never boarded one in All the Paths of Shadow.


But the airships were always on my mind. I established that Meralda was familiar with steam engines. Heck,  she invented the electric motor on her world, along with electric lights. So we have access to steam engines and electricity. Still, what drove the airships, I wondered?

The Realms don't have petroleum. I considered and rejected alcohol based combustion engines as too inefficient. Steam engines are also out -- heating that much water to those pressures requires lots and lots of onboard fuel, and when your choices are wood or coal, you're in trouble.

I was leaning toward electric motors running on straight-up batteries when a better idea popped into my head.

And here it is!

The Intrepid's fans are powered by steam engines. But instead of boilers and heaps of coal, they're using what we would call quantum entanglement, which works like this:

Cast a hollow steel block with very thick walls, an inlet, and a steam escape valve. Call it Boiler A.

Using magic, pair this with an second block, which is identical in design and dimensions. We'll call this Boiler B.

The magical pairing is an expensive and meticulous undertaking, and it's why the Steam Guild is so wealthy.

Now, the fun part. Fill Engine B with water and heat it, burning coal or wood or the angry emails I'll get from environmentalists about burning coal. In our universe, Boiler B would boil, while boiler A sat there and looked confused.

But in Meralda's world of magic, if you build a fire under Boiler B, it's Boiler A that actually heats up.


So yes, something must be burned to generate the heat. And yes, there are losses involved in the transference from B to A.

But the airship Intrepid can take to the skies without having to haul a few hundred tons of coal around. And I feel like this 'works,' because I'm only cheating a little bit.

It's entirely possible that only a hardcore geek could get excited about applying the Law of Similarity to a fictional airship engine. But I'm a geek and proud, baby!

So be on the lookout for a new Markhat novel and a new Meralda and Mug! And by the way, if you haven't read All the Paths of Shadow yet, it's only $3.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Okay, back to work for me!

The Zen of Editing

If you've been wondering what Frank is doing these days and you guessed 'a brief stay in the Lafayette County Detention Facility,' well, you'd be wrong.

I've been editing. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I finished the first draft of the new Markhat novel, BROWN RIVER QUEEN.

Sure, there was wild celebration. About eight minutes of it. Because finishing a first draft gets writing the first draft out of the way, true, but it also ushers in the next phase of the process, which is the edit and re-write stage. Or, as I call it, the 'Flaying off my own skin with a rusty butter knife' stage.

First drafts are, for me anyway, limping, misshapen things. Let's say I forget the name of a street I mentioned 34 pages ago. I don't stop and go back and look -- I just type ****, which is my code for 'Go back and look this up, doofus.'

Same for the names of minor characters. The wine steward from Chapter 4? ****.  The date, if I've lost track of it? ****.

All those **** entries have to be cleaned up. Spell-check has to run.  I do my own searches on the words I habitually screw up -- discrete and discreet, I'm looking at you two. I also run searches on the characters I tend to transpose.

Then comes the re-read. Here I'm looking for repetition. Bad alliteration. Dialog tags that repeat or don't fit or are missing altogether. Plot holes. Subplots I may have started and then dropped. Notes I wrote to myself and stuck in the manuscript and forgot about. The last thing you want to do is leave an editor scratching her head over entries such as 'Make RT kr.ull w/o 9 of the thing.' You don't want to bring undue attention to the fact that you're making this stuff up as you go.

So yeah. It gets messy.

All this before I ever consider sending the manuscript out. In fact, I like to do all this more than once, because it's so easy to miss things. I know what I meant to write, and my traitorous lazy brain sees those words, and not the ones my fingers actually typed.

This time around, though, I've added a new practice to my usual round or re-reads and edits. For the frist time, I'm having my PC read the whole book, from start to end, aloud to me, while I turn away from the screen and jot down notes by hand on a notepad.

Word 2010 has a built-in speech function. I wish I had Word 2010. Word 2010 runs about one hundred and twenty bucks. Instead, I have Word 2007, which is 2010's mute sire. So I found a free text-to-speech program on CNET called Hal Text-to-Speech Reader, and I'm using that.

I pull up the actual Word file and copy an entire chapter. Then I paste that into Hal and grab my notepad. It's slow, even after setting the read rate to just below AUCTIONEER INSANE, but wow is it effective.

I've already read through the whole thing twice, and was feeling pretty good about the state of the manuscript-- until Hal started reading to me, in her robotic flat voice. Mistakes that sailed right past my eyes leaped out screaming in my ears.

Here are a few examples, taken straight my my notepad:

twenty of more (should have been twenty or more)
isn't hat right (should have been isn't that right)
is a good as (should have been is as good as)
to and from (should have been to and fro)

Those are hard to catch, when they're hiding in several hundred pages of text. But my ears caught them with no trouble at all.

I am weary of the robotic voice and the complete lack of inflection, though. And the often hilarious pronunciation of words and names I made up myself.

But it's still a good system.

The edits on BROWN RIVER QUEEN are going quickly, all things considered.

In other news, if you wanted to grab a copy of my YA fantasy book ALL THE PATHS OF SHADOW but  also wanted to wait for the price to fall, you're in luck! You can get the e-book from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble or the publisher for only $3.99, which is six bucks off the former price.

Here are some links, so click away!

All the Paths of Shadow at Amazon for your Kindle

All the Paths of Shadow at Barnes & Noble for your Nook

All the Paths of Shadow at Cool Well Press in any format

Chalk Up Another One

It is done.

I speak of the new Markhat book, BROWN RIVER QUEEN. I just added the words THE END to the first draft.

Another novel. Seventy-odd thousand of what I believe to be the right words. Written at a time of my life when frankly I'm surprised I was able to write at all.

I love this book. Maybe I've hit my stride at last. Maybe I've gotten to know the characters and Markhat's world so well I'm finally able to show it with clarity to you, the reader.

Maybe I just got lucky.

Whatever the case, I love this book. It's got thrills and chills and surprises. Long-time Markhat fans, who've been along for the whole ride, are going to learn some new things, and understand some familiar faces a lot better.

Now keep in mind I've haven't sold BROWN RIVER QUEEN yet. In this business, there are no sure things. But a part of me is absolutely certain this new book will be accepted, because yeah, it's that good.

I spent yesterday re-reading big chunks of it, getting ready to write the epic dust-up at the end. I'll be honest with you -- more than once, I read a portion, and was honestly amazed that those words came from my rather addled and dysfunctional brain. Seriously, folks, it's a mess in here. Did I really write that?

Now the real work begins. A first draft is just the beginning. There will  be re-readings. There will be re-writes. A couple of people out there are going to be heartily sick of BROWN RIVER QUEEN before anything hits an editor's desk.

And, assuming the book sells, then will come more of the same. Re-reads. Re-writes. Line edits. Did I have the sun rise on page 134 and again on page 136, even though only six hours had passed? Was Markhat wearing a black hat on 98, and a grey one on 101? Did I spell grey gray or grey? Did I use stair or stairs consistently throughout?

But I'll do all that work, and I'll do it gladly, because that is the only way to put out a book worth its price.

I may never get rich at this game.

BROWN RIVER QUEEN may never sell a million copies. May never be made into a big-budget movie.

But by gum, it will be a good book. And people will read it, and say to themselves at the end "That was a darned good book."

And that's the highest praise I can conceive.

The End.