Cleo

We lost a beloved pet friend, Daisy, on January 28. We woke up and she was stretched out on the living room floor. We were devastated and were resolved to skip getting another dog for a few months.

Daisy

Dog grief is a strange thing. We couldn’t resist checking several shelter websites by Jan 31. Daisy had been a hard luck rescue and we felt the best way to honor her memory was to pursue another hard luck rescue. On Feb 1 we saw this picture.

Cleo at the shelter

This poor baby looked so lost and forlorn we knew we had to meet her so down we went to the shelter. But we couldn’t meet her. When she was picked up as a stray they found out she was seriously injured. When we arrived she was still in recovery from her injuries, the worse of which was a large deep bite wound just below her ear. It was so deep at first they thought she’d been shot! The bite had fractured some bones in her jaw and they didn’t know if she’d be able to eat. If she couldn’t eat the prognosis was euthanasia. She ate.

We couldn’t go to the shelter on February 2 due to some medical appointments so we called. They said she was still in isolation but she was doing well and would be available for us to meet on the 3rd and to come on down.

We got there when they opened and they brought her out. She’d still been in the medical wing. The technician carried her and put her down, then she looked up at us and rolled over for us to rub her tummy. We were hooked.

She’d recently had puppies and she had an additional bulge in her lower abdomen. The shelter spays or neuters all dogs & cats but she had to wait two weeks until her bite wounds healed to be spayed but we took her home as a “foster-to-adopt” which theoretically would change after the spay was complete.

The first photo I took of Cleo

Veterinarians volunteer on a rotational basis and the first and second spay appointments were successively postponed because the vets knew this was no routine surgery and not enough time had been set aside the first two times: they determined she had two inguinal hernias.

When that surgery was complete, they decided they needed to address her other serious health issues, determined by pre-surgical examination. She had serious dental issues and she was heart worm positive.

After a two week recovery from her surgery, she went in for what turned out to be NINE extractions. They also determined that she had already lost ten teeth. Good thing dogs have 42!

She recovered from that and is eating very well. She’s been on an antibiotic protocol that is a prelude to getting the multi-shot heart worm protocol that begins at the end of this month.

Through all of this, she’s been a trooper and is an absolute joy. You wish they could tell you their stories. She’s 100% genetically a beagle, although her dapple patterns mean that somewhere way down the line some ancestor acquired the merle gene. That means that dog breed purists don’t consider dogs like her, pretty as they are, to be ‘pure’ Beagles.

What we think: she was used as a hunting dog breeder (Beagles are used a lot in NC hunting) and the hernias were a result of her latest pregnancy (or multiple pregnancies). We think she was abused because she still shies away when you reach down to pet her head. Her dental issues are probably a result of long term confinement … it’s called cage-biter syndrome. All conjecture. Our theory is that the previous owners well knew she’d developed the hernias and abandoned her as soon as her puppies were weaned. An alternate theory is that she was abandoned or escaped before she gave birth and she was injured trying to save her pups. No puppies were found with her. She’s still officially a foster-to-adopt until the heart worm treatments are complete.

There is no way of knowing her truth, but that’s all behind her and we love her.

New ‘Old’ Domain

My previous site host doubled their rate so I let that service expire and transferred my old domain here.

So, https://thefensk.com will bring you right here. I’ll be updating the site to include book information as well as hosting the blog.

Long Time No Here

Sorry to have been so quiet for so long. As I like to say, Life Intervenes. I’m in the process of getting back on track and plan on posting with more regularity.

I’d still like to invite you to check out my books at tfenske.com, eBooks are now available for Nook, Kobo, and at a lot of other sites. Sadly, they are no longer available for Kindle Unlimited. That’s a long story so perhaps I’ll share it sometime. Paperbacks are only available through Amazon. Not as long a story but still somewhat sad since many people don’t like to shop from them, but alas, that’s where my publisher is focused right now.

I’m also in the process of transferring an existing domain here. My old web service provider basically doubled their price, but the domain was updated in January and I kind of like that domain. My social media mogul of a daughter had convinced me to come up with the more professional domain I mentioned above, so the web page was redundant. But this blog still had the same old WordPress address, so hopefully all will go well and soon this will have it’s own address. The process was deceptively simple, so I’m sure I screwed it up somehow.

This heads us back to the “life intervenes” statement I made starting this post.

While on that subject, meet Cleo, the latest addition to our clan. She’s a rescue, dog from unknown origins, a stray picked up in Burlington NC seriously injured on January 31. She had several bad bites, including one that left a hole in her neck that they at first thought might have been a gunshot wound. We took her on as a foster-to-adopt and trust me on this: she is one of the sweetest dogs ever.

She still has some problems to overcome though. During the setup to be spayed, they found she had two inguinal hernias and also needed serious dental work and she was heartworm positive. She’s currently recovering from her surgery, hence the donut (she just looks thrilled, doesn’t she?). Dental work scheduled for next week. She’s already started the heartworm regimen. The shelter is handling all of this. Hopefully, after that, her 2024 will start looking up.

She had obviously recently nursed puppies, so we assumed the hernias were caused by pregnancies, perhaps several. She’s a beagle with marvelous ‘blue tick” merle patterns that indicate a cross to achieve that look. We suspect she might have been in a puppy mill of some sort, possibly trying to get pups with that same pattern. My theory is that they knew about the hernias and she was put out rather than deal with them. Then again, she’s pretty smart and quite adept at detecting weaknesses in an enclosure. Ten minutes at the dog park snd she had already found three spots along the fence line that showed weakness.

So, anyway, that life intervened stuff can be good.

Adios to a Friend

I said goodbye to Gypsy this morning. She was fourteen and was always a loyal and loving companion. She was an awesome cat.

We rescued her along with four siblings from one of our out buildings in 2008. We gave away three and kept Gypsy and her litter brother, Dobie.

She was a feisty kitten. We’d feed all five all at once and she was always first to the feast where she’d lay claim to “her” pile of food, straddling it and hissing and spitting; it was hilarious.

She’s been an exemplary cat , very opinionated and headstrong. Example, when she was still a kitten I found her sleeping among the branches of the Christmas tree.

She loved her naps and spent a lot of time snuggling with me.

Most of all I’m going to miss her kisses. That’s right. Miss Gypsy (as I often called her) absolutely loved to give me kisses, right on the lips.

Adios, my sweet girl, I’m already missing you.

Thomas Fenske is an author living in North Carolina. https://tfenske.com

FLASH FREEBIE !!!

With the release of Harmon Creek coming in June I wanted to fill in these last few days with something. Then it occurred to me: FREEBIE!

Get it here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088QX1LHW

I have to admit that I’ve been surprised that THE HAG RIDER is almost universally liked. It appeals to both adult readers and YA readers.

Yes, it’s about the Civil War and yes, it’s about a Confederate soldier, but it’s also about his struggle to come to terms with his conflicted viewpoints. And through it all, he is protected by a slave witch hired by his best friend and mentor, another slave. His allegiance is not to the South, it is to his soldier brothers for whom the war is camp duty and friendship.

Give it a try. It’s free May 18-21.

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in NC. His next novel, Harmon Creek, is due out in June 2022 http://tfenske.com

Turning Truth Into Fiction

Harmon Creek opens with a man sitting uncomfortably in court. We find out his name is Claude, and Earl Swanger is his attorney. Claude is a black man at odds with the world he lives in. He was arrested for petty bootlegging during prohibition and the sitting District Attorney is prosecuting him like a hardened criminal. Why? Because Claude is represented by his opponent in an upcoming election.

Claude is not part of the real story, at least as far as I know, but he’s based on a real person. My wife knew the real Claude much later when she’d visit the house of Earl’s widow, Lily May. He was a common presence in the house and on the property. The two had an interesting relationship. Well, relationship is probably the wrong word because there was nothing romantic here. He was a neighbor who had an uncommon devotion to “Miss Lily May” … he was more friend than a handyman and he certainly did a lot of work for her, but for the mid-Twentieth Century in a racially divided America it was certainly a kind of Driving Miss Daisy sort of friendship. Knowing this man was one of my wife’s fondest memories of her visits.

I have always been intrigued by this notion, so I endeavored to add Claude to the equation to perhaps inject some sense to it, at least in my mind. Also, the character Claude adds a great deal of depth to the story and creates a side-story that interweaves with the rest of the novel to make it more compelling, or at least I hope so. In most ways, it is as much Claude’s story as it is Earl’s.

Although the family thought Earl’s death was outright murder, after digesting as many facts as I could, I didn’t think so. I’ve studied murders and although some are cut and dried, most revolve around something quite different, more likely a misunderstanding that got out of hand.

Some of the later witness statements devolved into insinuations by the mysterious woman that Earl had perhaps been drunk or possibly had been behaving inappropriately with her. She apparently changed her story several times, with each iteration becoming more prone to the latter notion.

Please understand, I’ve read family letters both from him and about him, and this man was a nice guy, not prone to cheat on his wife, certainly not a drunk, and anyway, to do so in the middle of a campaign would be political suicide. I also didn’t think an incumbent would be so stupid as to assassinate an opponent. It’s too obvious.

Cheating? I mean, this was a small town, and Miss Lily May was out campaigning for Earl in another section of the district. It was getting into the final stretch. No, this was out of character for this guy.

Ah, but a setup…that would work. Even a somewhat dirty DA wouldn’t be above hiring someone to lure his opponent into the appearances of impropriety. Once I created this premise, the rest of it pretty much wrote itself. I had a backdrop of truth to paint my story against and the increasingly sordid tale meandered across several of the complications that naturally follow these types of crimes.

It’s an old motif. Witnesses who can’t keep quiet, or who you can’t trust completely, must be kept quiet by whatever means. And if the DA is dirty, he’s probably in cahoots with organized crime, which wasn’t just active in Chicago and New York; Huntsville TX sits within the range of a major organization operating out of Galveston at the time. Similar operations existed in Dallas and New Orleans. It makes sense that if there is unwanted attention in even a backwoods part of the operation, it is in these organization’s best interest to help smooth the waters and, if necessary, help each other in the process.

I don’t want to spoil the fun … you’ll just have to read it!

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Thomas Fenske is a novelist living in North Carolina.

Look for HARMON CREEK in June 2022 on Amazon or ask your favorite bookstore to order it.

http://tfenske.com

How We Got Here

The story behind the story

The basic premise of Harmon Creek revolves around the death of Earl Swanger, a Texas attorney seeking political office in 1930. His quest for the office of District Attorney was cut short when he ended up dead next to an under-construction bridge.

I first heard about this from my wife Gretchen. Earl Swanger was her great-uncle, he was the brother of her maternal grandmother. She grew up with stories about Earl, or Buddie as they called him. The family’s opinion definitely tended toward a politically motivated murder.

When I delved into the case by looking for existing newspaper accounts of the incident, I was surprised at the apparent flurry of these articles. The first headline that caught my eye was from the Bryan Daily Eagle, July 10, 1930:

HUNTSVILLE ATTORNEY, CANDIDATE FOR
DISTRICT ATTORNEY FOUND DEAD UNDER
BRIDGE, WAS STABBED, AUTOPSY SHOWS

That’s interesting enough, but let’s take a look at the accompanying article:

———————————-

HUNTSVILLE, July 10 AP

An autopsy performed on the body of Earl R. Swanger, 37, candidate for district attorney, found beneath his wrecked automobile, under the Harmon Creek bridge, revealed three stab wounds, officers announced late Wednesday.

Dr. J. L. Martin, who conducted the investigation, said one of the wounds was in the chest, one above the collar bone, and one on the shoulder. He said a large blood vessel had been severed by one of the cuts and that Swanger had bled profusely inwardly.
Dr. Martin said the wounds could have caused Swanger’s death.

The coroner’s verdict was withheld pending a further investigation in connection with Swanger’s death.

Swanger, who was formerly county attorney of Leon county had been electioneering in Trinity county and was en route home when he was killed, officers believed. At first, it was thought his car had plunged from the bridge accidentally.

HOUSTON, July 10 AP

A woman who left Huntsville Tuesday night with Earl R. Swanger in his car for Trinity was questioned late Wednesday at her home in Trinity by Sheriff N.L. Speer.

Swanger’s body, with three stab wounds, was found beneath a wrecked car near Huntsville this morning.

She said she had been to Huntsville on business, and had accepted Mr. Swanger’s invitation to ride back to Trinity with him.

She said that en route to her home a man who she knew drove up behind them, and that she decided to complete the trip with him instead of Mr. Swanger. She said that she got out of the car and that Mr. Swanger proceeded to Trinity.

She did not even know that Mr. Swanger was dead until informed by the sheriff, she said.

The county attorney’s force, headed by County Attorney R.T. Burns and Justice of the Peace R.J. Camp, in addition to Sheriff Speer and his deputies, are conducting a probe into the candidate’s mysterious death.

————————–

You can see that this story was pulled from the Associated Press news feed. I found many similar articles from small-town newspapers in the Texas area. The death of a political candidate was big news. It even got a huge headline in The Houston Post-Dispatch: TEXAS CANDIDATE MURDERED ON ROAD.

All the early articles had the same basic information: apparent stab wound along with a mysterious woman and man. By the next day, it was reported that the sheriff overruled the other county officials and pushed for the official explanation of the death to be ruled an accident. I think this was when I first started to realize that things were very fishy with this story. His reason? He said the wounds were caused by nails from the construction. This ruling was less than forty-eight hours after the death.

There were other details, to be sure, but they were inconsistent throughout the stories. In a couple, the woman claims she “didn’t kill him but if she could have she would have.” There was also a mention of a possible previous altercation with a man from Houston. I know enough about journalism to know that newswire articles were often embellished, especially at the time.

The most intriguing aspect of the story was how quickly it faded from the public eye. The story disappeared from the news less than two weeks after it was first reported. I mean, gone, disappeared, kaput, nada.

I’ve written murder mysteries, and this seemed to me to be a fertile ground to be explored. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a true story in there too, but I’m a novelist, not an investigative journalist. So, I dusted off my plot generator and percolated all the known facts into what I think is believable crime fiction: Harmon Creek.

More next time!

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Thomas Fenske is a novelist living in North Carolina. Look for Harmon Creek in June, 2022.http://tfenske.com

Help me help a friend with her celebration

Today at 12PM EDT my friend and fellow writer Staci Morrison will be hosting an event on Facebook to celebrate both the one year anniversary of the inauguration of her MILLENNIUM epic fantasy series AND the publication of the fourth volume in that series, Sword OF THE SPIRIT.

Congratulations to Staci … four books in one year is quite an accomplishment!

I’ll be participating at 1PM EDT with some information about my own books … You can join at 12 for Staci or you can join at 1 to see what I have to offer. Other authors will be participating. There will be drawings for free books and some other stuff as well. I’ll be giving away a copy of THE HAG RIDER!

Click here to join the fun >> on the event link for Millennium Madness << Click here to join in the fun!!!

Remember, it starts at 12PM EDT!

… My New Release – Phase II

First things first. I realized after pushing out my last post that I neglected a few things about web site development. I’m trying to remember the first web site I created, but it was way back. 1992 or 1993. You read that right. I had a web site before most people knew the wide wide world of webs even existed. I created it by hand. I remember a colleague who I shared it with asked me “what book did you use?”

I blinked. “Book?”

Anyway, using tools to build websites is a new thing. And moving to a single page format like my cheap new web hosting site requires a bit of tweaking to get it right. But I can use things through links. Like it links this blog just great. And I have a perfectly good Amazon Author Page out there, listing all of my books. They pay developers six figure salaries to do a better job than I could ever do with my multiple book pages on my old site.

Enough about that. Here I am a little more than five weeks out and I am slowly gearing up my massive marketing machine. That’s how it feels sometimes. I often tell people that writing a novel is hard, revising the manuscript is harder, and marketing the sucker kicks me in the ass. Yet, with this being my sixth novel, I’ve learned a few things.

There are plenty of people waiting in the wings just dying to take my hard earned money and help me market my new release. I call most of them “preaching to the choir” services. They prey upon authors and, sadly, most of their focus is to other authors. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that in order to be a good author one must read a lot. But in my experience, most newer authors don’t read very much in the realm of other newer authors. Some do, (and I love you very much) but most don’t.

Then there is the whole eBook/print book thing. My small press is geared primarily toward eBooks, although print books are available and, more recently, available at places beyond Amazon. More on that later. I still don’t understand the aversion to eBooks. I’ve actually read more since I embraced eBooks than I had for years. My Kindle App is loaded on both my tablet and my phone, and it keeps my place on both. If you’ve ever been stuck waiting some place and wish you had something besides a two year old weathered magazine to read, well, pull out your phone and you can just start reading.

Anyway, the key to actually making money in the book biz focuses on getting your books into bookstores. It’s a tough nut to crack for unknown authors. I worked in scholarly publishing for 20+ years and can tell you this: you have to be able to carpet bomb them and that takes capital. See, when bookstores order twenty copies of your book in the hopes that it will sell, they expect that they will be able to return the unsold stock for full credit if the books don’t sell. Huge publishers absorb this cost of doing business. For every best seller they likely have dozens of not-so-best-sellers. Small presses and Indie authors can not compete on a national level so we have to resort to … well, whatever the hell we can.

Here. Now. Me. This. This is what I am doing here, trying to entertain you in a lame attempt to get you to remember my name and even better, my new release, HARMON CREEK. See what I did there? I put in a link. New authors take note. EVERY TIME YOU MENTION YOUR BOOK, put in a link. I don’t have a sales link yet, so I put in a link to a book page I set up on my old website. I have lost count of the book tweets and Facebook posts with authors mentioning “my new book” and they will say “available at Amazon” … yet NO LINK! I should already be navigating there. I guess I should search for you or your book? Really?

Another thing that helps is catchy graphics. Believe it or not, that was originally the purpose of this post, to illustrate the importance of catchy graphics. I’m a writer, not a graphic artist. I do, however, have visual representations that pop into my punkin haid from time to time. All of my book covers were first conceptualized by me. Thankfully, all but one were actually designed by someone who knew what they were doing. The lone cover I designed myself is my free cookbook (companion to my adventure mystery series) and it shows. But I think it matches the cookbook itself, which was designed to mimic the type of local self-produced cookbooks one might find in a rural cafe in the 1980s. I collect vintage cookbooks, I know that genre well. What I came up with, in my lame and crude attempt at design was this:

My book cover, surrounded by true life headlines relating to the primary subject matter of the book itself. Not too bad but I knew it could be better. Enter my awesome and talented daughter Audrey. Dancer turned social media expert that she is, she took my photoshop file and made it into something truly inspiring:

Same cover photo, same headlines, but she knew how to do things I did not and she made it both visually stunning and, well, amazing.

So, basically, what I wanted people to know was that the book is based on a true story. It’s personal to our family as well, the subject was her great-great uncle, her mother’s great uncle. I’ll be sharing more about the back story in coming posts, so stay tuned.

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Thomas Fenske is an author living in North Carolina. More information here: https://tfenske.com

The Slow Road to My New Release

I just finished what I call the galley reviews for my June release, HARMON CREEK. Some people might call them the page proofs. What that means is that the book is in the pipeline and it will be foisted upon an unsuspecting public come June 1, or thereabouts.

My media savvy daughter reviewed some materials of mine (I’ve been book marketing for going on seven years now, but still consider myself a rank amateur). Two things she pointed out were my “yahoo” email address (been using it for over twenty years), and my book’s web page domain (thefensk.com).

I’ve used “thefensk” as a marker for a long time. I think it was originally a suggested username on some web site and I liked it. It is flippant and fun, but it doesn’t convey a sense of professionalism. With my new book coming out I want to embrace professionalism.

Sadly, I just renewed my current web provider for two years and also renewed the domain. But that’s too long to wait. They also charge a lot extra for an email address in that domain. So, my other option was to find a good intro deal for a new host, and one that would be more cost effective in the coming years. I was successful on both fronts … so although I’ll still update what I call my legacy site for the foreseeable future, I also have a more forward-looking NEW SITE located at https://tfenske.com!

I’ll be using the new site for most promotion aspects and I could certainly use a lot of help getting it established in search engines, so please click on the link!!!! Yes, this link: https://tfenske.com

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in NC … look for his new release, HARMON CREEK in June.
More information on this and his other books can be found by starting here: https://tfenske.com