A Little Eddy in the Tunnel of Love

Coming out of the tunnel of book marketing for SAVIOR, it's an opportunity to take stock of where we are.

The book seems to be selling. It hasn't snowballed into best seller status, but has held its own in the Kindle rankings over a month period. Yay. Thank you reviewers, in particular Diane Bylo of Tome Tender, Stacie Theis of Beach Bound Books, Dianne Nelson of Sand In My Shoes Reviews, Roberto Mattos, and Diane Donovan of Midwest Book Review.

I doubled my readership on the blog here during the April A to Z challenge, a byproduct of having daily posts on a current subject and flagging that subject beforehand. Like weapons technology that produces positive spinoffs for the civilian market, so book marketing has taught me a thing or two about blogging. I need to set up a schedule to get out more blog posts. So, presuming there is a readership that cares and takes note of these sorts of things, and you have to presume that there is or you'd go virtually crazy, here is what that schedule will look like going forward:

Farm and Country Monday (posts on land, sustainable living, farm life, animals, vegetables --including myself, etc.)

Fishbowl Thursday (looking out at the panorama of the world through the lens of my little life)

Writing Weekend (reflections on The Process, guest posts from fellow writers, reviews. etc.)

Suggestions for posts, submissions and rants can be sent to me in the comments section or if you prefer and find email easier, then by all means have at it:

 tcaplan (at) mcttelecom (dot) com

The sun is out after heavy rains last night. I can feel the current picking up. The tunnel of love is calling again. Gotta go.

Bonus:
(Overheard at Edmund's this morning.
Tourist: When exactly do the blackflies go away around here.
Shopkeeper: When the mosquitoes come out.
Me thinking to myself: Just in time. LOL)

A to Z: Underground

Underground is the region below the Earth's surface. It is dark and therefore considered lifeless, although in truth the soil teems with microbes and insects, a community of living organisms with as many as 170,000 species. But generally underground is represented as the land of the dead, where human souls were once thought to reside and where the damned must spend their eternity. Not many people work underground, but miners still do, spending their days in cramped tunnels, and subway workers maintaining the underground transportation  system in cities such as New York must sometimes descend deep into the Earth to carry out their jobs. Sometimes they are attacked by rats in the subway tunnels. Other hazards of being underground include getting lost in caves, which sometimes happens to spelunkers exploring labyrinths deep underground.

It's one of my recurring fears, getting trapped underground, cut off from all possibility of rescue, and so when I wrote SAVIOR, it was the worst fate i could imagine in which to place my character, Al Lyons -- in a prison complex deep below the Canadian oil tar sands, where he could die and never be found. The pressure cooker of isolation is one of the worst feelings we know. People are social creatures by instinct, although sometimes we wall ourselves off intentionally or unintentionally from others out of our very anxiety to escape the ultimate fate and evil of death. We sometimes hope that some unknown power or destiny will ride in to our rescue, but in the end, most of the time we have to save ourselves by tunneling until we see the light of day. How do we keep going? Where do we find inspiration? That is a question I think I am always trying to answer.

SAVIOR is available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.