Your favorite child

I often hear other authors say they couldn't name a favorite among their own books. Why, that would be like picking your favorite child, they say, and we love all our children equally (if for different reasons, perhaps).

I don't believe it. We're all trying to write the book we'd like to read, and some come closer than others to hitting the mark. Every novel is a disappointment in some way. The final product never lives up to the expectations we had when we started. But authors know which ones almost hit the bullseye.

Yes, it's a matter of personal taste. I like a rollicking tale full of laughs. One of my fans regularly urges me to stick with suspense and leave out the (eye roll, sigh) "funny stuff."

I'm happy to name a personal favorite among my 17 novels. It's "Bullets," which came out in 2003 to terrific reviews. It's my Vegas book, featuring a contract killer named Lily, a former homicide cop who's chasing her and a cast of hilarious (if deadly) bad guys. I just read it again, getting it ready for publication on Kindle (only $2.99!), and it still cracks me up.

Also freshly published on Kindle (and coming soon to other formats via Smashwords) is the fifth Bubba Mabry adventure, "Dirty Pool." I enjoyed reading this one again, too. Bubba goes up against his arch-nemesis, Texas private eye William Pool, in a race for a ransom. Fun stuff.

Check 'em out!

I knew it

Scientists find that people who are cheerful and optimistic tend to die younger.

Researchers in the Longevity Project studied 1,500 bright children who were around 10 years old when the study began in 1921. They found, over the subjects' lifetimes, that happy-go-lucky types took more risks with their health, trusting that everything would turn out fine.

Prudent, persistent types tended to live longer and be healthier, the researchers found.

Full story here.

(Thanks to Bill Crider for the link.)

Watch-gator

Police in Southern California raided a marijuana-growing operation and discovered a four-foot-long alligator. The 55-pound reptile apparently was a deterrent to thieves.

A drug task force found nearly 2,300 pot plants in the home in Hemet. The gator was turned over to an animal sanctuary.

Full story here.

Split shift

Like many of my fellow authors, I'm busily publishing my backlist on Kindle and other e-book platforms. My workdays are split between writing the new novel and dipping into books I wrote years ago.

The latest novels to become available as e-books are WITCHY WOMAN and SHAKY GROUND, third and fourth in my seven-book Bubba Mabry series. Only $2.99 each. I'll have the fifth one in the series, DIRTY POOL, up on Kindle by the end of the week.

I'm one of those authors who rarely reads his own work after it's published. Typos or mistakes make me crazy; stuff I wrote years ago sometimes makes me cringe. But I actually enjoyed proofreading these Bubba books. Still funny and weird and fast-paced.

I found quirks and allusions that still pop up in my writing. This included one line that I'd used fifteen years ago (something about New Mexico's silvery sunlight and turquoise skies) that I was trying to wedge into my work-in-progress. No memory that I'd used it before. Thought I was being original.

Anyhow, I still love Bubba, after all these years. Now that e-books are shaking up publishing, maybe I'll even write another Bubba Mabry adventure one of these days...

For now, I'm halfway through the first draft of my new standalone, A BOX OF PANDORAS, and I'm having a ball.

You don't tug on Superman's sweater

Police in Watsonville, CA, are searching for several youths who pounced on a man and stole his Superman sweater. The cops caught one of the youths (and retrieved the purloined sweater) after the hoodlums' van crashed into a tree, but the rest ran off.

Full story here. No word on whether the assailants wielded kryptonite.