DRINKS BEFORE DINNER

The question would seem obvious--until you think about "intellectual property." If ideas, concepts, visions, proposals, etc. are property, what isn't? Maybe nothing. Even so, it's worth making a distinction between what you see in the photo, and what bubbles up in your head as you sit on your patio with a rob roy before dinner. For me, the anti-matter to stuff is what's between the covers of books. Yes, books are stuff, but everything that happens in the mind while reading is not stuff. So, if you resist the idea of being controlled by things, don't neglect to read.     And what better to read than one of my suspense novels, say, The Anything Goes Girl.

Question: What kind of novelist writes a blog, but doesn't provide a link to his author website? Answer:    An author who is perhaps overly reliant on Xanax.  The author webite in question is: www.bwknister.com Please visit to learn about my suspense series featuring Brenda Contay, a young journalist, and my soon-to-be re-released novel of magical realism, Just Bill.

Greg Levin, a novelist living in Texas has decided to wash his hands and probably his entire body of conventional wisdom related to genre "identity." His books aren't really this, that or the other, so he has chosen to call them "Other, not another." I like this idea, and think it applies to my novels. I call them "suspense," but that's not really accurate. When the protagonist and the antagonist meet just once at the beginning, how can I call GODSEND (my latest) a work of suspense?  I thought for a while of calling my stuff  Noir Lite or Untrue Crime. But no one's ever heard of such categories, so I think I'll start thinking of my stories as "Other." Anyone who's put off by this isn't likely to enjoy what I write anyway, so Other it is.