Authors Electric

The closest I've come to kicking the bucket was when peritonitis put me in a coma for three days at age 5. (That was in 1942, when I was saved by new antibiotic wonder drugs), and late one night a month ago, at age 89, when my inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, found me unconscious on the floor of my home office, where I had fallen due to low blood sugar - a hazard for   type 2 diabetic octgenarians on insulin like myself. Lucky for me she called 911. (I won't count the murder of a character that my friend and prolific  mystery writer Lewis Perdue named after me in his 1985 thriller, " The Linz Testament .")   The non-fiction me woke up in St. Fra ncis Hospital, in the pricey 'burb of Evanston, Illinois, not far from my home on Chicago's North Side. Not that  I'm a believer, but St. Francis, as well as Eleanor, must have been watching over me because I remain whole, and in possession of my faculties. I was bruised from my fall, but no broken bones. ...

Img-Eleanor Spiess-Ferris/ Ds-Roger Carpenter Perhaps this will sound gushy to the prolific masters of mystery novels among my distinguished colleagues here at Authors Electric . But I can't help being over the moon at the moment -- and deserving of a pause to enjoy! I reached another book publishing milepost the other day --  creating a cover for my latest book, putting production on it's final leg towards release, promotion, and, I hope, sales. It's a kick no matter how many books I've published, no matter how many candles on my author's cake. You can't judge a book by its cover. but the cover can get us to buy one, often as not. It sets the tone, particularly when it comes to fiction. It gives us a taste.  The best ones intrigue, tease, whisper compelling secrets and become an icon for the novel, its sequels and adaptations. Sometimes it's clever, morphing typography that tells the story, for example, Joey Hi's design for Lauren Beukes' Zoo City ....

Author Lewis Perdue A long-time friend from my San Francisco magazine days, author Lewis Perdue, recently began serializing his latest novel, The Nassau Directives, online, as a work-in-progress. The premise, typical of Perdue's techno-Machiavellian plots, involves a rogue drug-war agency cabal to poison millions of addicts as the “final solution” to narco-crime. The tag line reads: “A serial thriller from NY Times bestselling author Lewis Perdue. Even Lew doesn't yet know how it ends.” I perked up at the news – a high-wire digital writing act to be sure, just the kind of creative enterprise that my colleagues here at Authors Electric might relish, if not already practice (or think of practicing) in some form or another, myself included. Lew comes the closest to being a contemporary Renaissance man that I know. Quick, loquacious, energetic, a gourmet who is always down-to-earth, he never makes a big deal of being accomplished in technology, science, history, oenology...