hello, book!

Through the Cracks comes out officially tomorrow. I’m a little nervous. Much as I understand that each person reads a different book, and everyone’s tastes are different, waiting for reviews to appear can offer more nail-biting suspense than any thriller, though it’s not a particularly enjoyable kind of thrill; it feels more like waiting for the results of a medical test. Though people often liken the arrival of a new book to holding a newly-delivered baby, I don’t feel that way. It’s like a very long pregnancy, a birth, a few complications as you work with an editor to clean it up. Then it’s swept away to the hospital nursery for its final check-up and plopped back in your arms a year later.

Hello, baby. Oh, look at those sweet chapter headings. You have your father’s font. Now let’s see if everyone else in the world thinks you’re an ugly baby or not.

Meanwhile, I’ve been giving some thought to the baby’s older sibling. It’s not easy getting people to read a second book in a series unless they read the first (and let me tell you, a lot of people haven’t read the first.) My publisher wasn’t interested in releasing a paperback, and nobody wanted to do an audio version (and why would they? the production costs are enormous, and that makes the end product expensive; you have to have a fairly large guaranteed audience to make it worthwhile). So being a DIY kind of person, I  fiddled around with free software and made my own.

There is now a trade paperback version of In the Wind available through Lulu and selected independent booksellers. It’s not cheap–$14.00, plus a hefty shipping fee if you order from Lulu–but I didn’t want to do any harm to the independent booksellers who have supported me and do so much to promote books and reading. This is the price it takes to provide it to them with the discount that helps them pay their rent and light bill and not lose too much money at my end. I’ll happy if I break even. If I accidentally make a profit, it will go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Meanwhile, I got to learn a few things about cover and page design and how to make the layers in Paint.net to work.

I also recorded In the Wind in an amateur audio version. No, it’s not as polished as a professional audio book–I used open source software and recorded it in the spare bedroom. The cats were strangely fascinated by the whole thing, so you might hear an occasional meow in the background. But I have several friends who are blind, and wanted them to have a chance to read the book. You can listen online or download the .mp3 files, chapter by chapter. Thanks to my employer for hosting the files.

I really wanted to pull a Cory Doctorow and make a Creative Commons e-version freely available, but the publisher had secured electronic rights, as they do, and didn’t want to give those back. (It took months just to get the paperback rights reverted.) Strangely, though you can get the second book electronically, with a side of DRM, In the Wind is not available for e-reading. Hey, I’m just a librarian. Who am I to question the ways of publishers?

But that gives me an idea: you can always check In the Wind out from your local library.

pardon the interruption …

… while I do a bit of goofy-grinning navel-gazing. In the Wind got a really nice review in Crimespree written by Rebecca Tatham, who turns a nice phrase herself.  (“I don’t demand that the zippered pockets of my psyche be opened by some revelation during the experience. Sometimes a vicarious adrenaline rush, the pure fun of clever folly, or a well-chartered prowl through darkness is all I need.”) But she gives Anni’s adventures a nice thumbs-up, calling it

“a fast-paced, multi-layered investigation that smartly parallels our contemporary, post-9/11 culture of paranoia with the counterintelligence-fueled instability of the Vietnam War era. Anni is drawn into a conflict that involves members of a white supremacy group, a radical faction of the American Indian Movement, the FBI, and the Chicago PD. By forcing engaging, sympathetic characters into situations that threaten their personal or ideological securities, Fister explores the interplay between the perception of radicalism and the conception of civil liberties. This is an intriguing book that rewards on every level!

And a nice added note from Gary Schultz of Once Upon a Crime, one of the best book people I know.

a brief moment of navel-gazing

I’m very fond of the Trib. I miss having it delivered to my door, as I did during my sabbatical in Chicago, but I check my RSS feed daily to see what new havoc is happening in the city that my imagination has adopted as its home. And now I’m even fonder, since their crime fiction reviewer, Paul Goat Allen, said he liked In the Wind.

In print. In the book section. Page 8. Holy smokes.

The whole column is here – starting out with a rave for my near-neighbor Neil Smith, who brings a dark kind of mayhem to southwestern Minnesota with Yellow Medicine. After reviews of several other intriguing books, mine brings up the rear, a pair of Minnesota bookends. And . . . awright, he calls In the Wind “an understated crime-fiction gem” with “a highly intelligent story line that underscores disturbing similarities between the counterintelligence practices of post-9/11America and those imposed during the Vietnam War era.” It goes on:

Fledgling Chicago private investigator Anni Koskinen is hired to clear the name of a dissident accused of murdering an FBI agent in the ’70s. Her investigation leads to some troubling revelations about the government and human nature in general. Discerning fans of political mysteries and thrillers looking for a wildly thought-provoking whodunit should check out this surprisingly compelling read.

Okay, enough of preening. But it is cool to be in the Trib. My father was a journalist, so I grew up in a house where, at breakfast, you had to hunt for the butter under all the newspapers. My mother was distressed when she heard I read the Trib regularly; she still holds a grudge against Robert McCormick. It’s true that it’s conservative – the paper hasn’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate since Horace Greeley. But the paper covers the news with solid, meat-and-potatoes reporting, doing some excellent investigative series from time to time, including a groundbreaking series on wrongful convictions.

It feels oddly postmodern to say this,but I have a character who works for the Trib, a genuine good guy with a weakness for cops. Here’s a snip:

A man with short grizzled hair was standing on the sidewalk outside my house, tapping a notebook impatiently against his leg. He had the sagging suit and the broad build of a cop, but I knew he wasn’t one. I was planning evasive maneuvers, when he turned and his jowly face lighted up.

“Anni!” he called out, as if I were a long-lost friend. “Good to see you.”

“Wish I could say the same, Az.”

“Aw, don’t be that way.”Azad Abkerian, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, had been put on the cops and courts beat decades ago. It was typically the job new journalists got assigned to after an apprenticeship in obituaries, because it was easy. You didn’t have to go out and find stories; you just listened to the scanner. But Az had never moved on to better things. It wasn’t because he wasn’t a good reporter; in fact, he was one of the Trib’s best writers and had even been nominated for Pulitzer once. He just fell in love with cops and never got over it. He liked nothing better than rubbing elbows with detectives at a crime scene, carrying Vicks in his pocket to dab under his nose if the body was too ripe, going out for a drink with the guys afterward. He was especially delighted whenever one of the women who hung out at the bar, attracted to uniforms and guns, mistook him for a detective. It never occurred to him he was like those women, just another cop groupie.

Anyway, it’s a kick to see my name in the Trib. And now I’ll stop this nonsense and get back to reading the paper.

photo courtesy of william couch.