... and, inside that gift shop, they sell some colorful items. Not that anyone should travel to Fall River, MA solely for the gift shop. Travel to Fall River to see Lizzie Borden's house, take the Lizzie Borden tour, and visit Lizzie Borden's grave -- if that's your kind of thing. When you're done, then stop at the gift shop. The employees are nice. 
 
One of the items inside the shop is shown above: Voodoo Rue. Rue’s a 7" handcrafted burlap doll that -- if you don't care to make the run to Massachusetts -- turns out to be available on Amazon. $30 bucks. 4.4 stars. Not that Renée knew it at the time.
 
So, Rue found a place in our carry-on and was carried back to North Carolina. Almost as soon as we returned home, Renée got to work. She wanted to create a Voodoo Rue that might have served as Lizzie's very own voodoo doll. When she was done, I asked if I could post about it.

"I tried to add in as many details from the murders as I could,” she said, so I asked her to write those down. What follows from here on out is for Lizzie Borden aficionados only.
 
The Strips of Burlap: The red stitching represents the wounds given to the victims.
 
The Skull Pins: Abby Borden, the first murder victim, was given 19 blows by her killer.  Andrew Borden, who was Abby's husband and Lizzie's father, only received 11. Since there were a number of pins in the box, I decided to make 19 skull pins. I stuck the majority of them into the back of the voodoo doll’s head (reflecting Abby's injuries), and to the left side of the head (reflecting Andrew's injuries). The one over the left eye also reflects a blow inflicted on Andrew.
 
The Axe: The possible murder weapon. Although Lizzie was right-handed, I put it in the doll’s left hand. I’m left-handed and felt the artist was allowed to fudge things a little.
 
The Prussic Acid Bottle: The day before the infamous murders, Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid (also known as hydrogen cyanide) from the local drugstore. She stated she needed it to clean a cloak, but I have my doubts. Lacking a doctor’s prescription, she was refused the purchase. Researching vintage prussic acid bottles, I found one that was blue, so I created an old-timey label go on it.
 
The Photos: Abby and Andrew Borden. Abby’s portrait is on the upper left because she died first on an upper floor. I burned the edges of the photos because, if someone is angry enough to kill somebody with an axe, they’re mad enough to burn their pictures, too.
 
The Card: Lizzie herself. It came from a box of playing cards we bought in the gift shop.
 
The Coffin: This was made from the original cardboard box. I used clay to simulate a wooden surface, then lined the interior with linen I “aged” by soaking it in black tea.
 
To complete the project took about 10 days. Renée had so much fun.
 
And how is your summer going?

The very nice Oyinyimika Junaid is a pleasure to welcome into the "Anne Glynn" world.
 
Oyinyimika completed the Italian translation of our sexy werewolf murder mystery, Twisted Games, swiftly and professionally. In the last seven years, she's translated—well, almost everything: fiction, non-fiction, academic works. And into a variety of languages, too, so we were delighted when she reached out, offering to give Twisted Games a try.
 
"Oyinyimika" is a Yoruba name that essentially means "sweetness surrounds me." What a wonderful name. "Harrell" means "ruler of the household," which is nonsense because (1) we had cats; and (2) have you met Renée?
 
Twisted Games is now available in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. You can find it in fine e-book outlets everywhere.

I began to wonder how badly I needed a cup of coffee in the morning.
 
Hal here, and I’m a long-time addict of the bean. Decades ago, when the Alaskan Highway mostly consisted of hard-packed soil and potholes, my buddy and I rode our motorcycles from San Jose, California, up and through the Sourdough State, and back again. It was on that ride that I, for the first time, enjoyed a cup of Joe.
 
As a younger man, I’d sipped at it a couple of times. Black and bitter, coffee was nasty stuff. I had no idea how my father could tolerate the brew.
 
When my friend and I took our ride, there were empty stretches of beautiful nothing along the way. (There were also road-raging truckers, a kindly stranger with an ample supply of pot, a flying rock that tried to take off my head, and a hidden hillside drop-off that nearly ended Tom’s trip way too early – and permanently – but those stories are for another day.) Toward the end of one day’s very long ride, with no shelter in sight, we came across a café.
 
In the middle of nowhere. No houses or outbuildings in view. Its sign lit, its windows bright, customers inside, it felt like a miracle when we saw the place. This was especially so because we were both so very thirsty. With a single dollar in my wallet, I was so very broke.
 
I might have been a long-haired biker in those days, but I still had manners. If a waitress was involved, I needed to leave a tip. Going inside, scanning the menu, the only thing I could afford (with tip) was a cup of coffee. So, that’s what I ordered.
 
Dad had always enjoyed his daily mud as black and bitter as sin. I added a liberal amount of cream and sugar to the cup in front of me, something he’d never have tolerated. Raising that cup to my dry lips, I intended to drink it all no matter how terrible it tasted.
 
It was bliss. I’ve been hooked ever since. Renée has always loved drinking coffee. I think her folks put it in her baby bottles.
 
We brew a pot every day using low acid ground beans in an electric percolator. An electric percolator is a simple thing. A pot, a heating element, a pump stem and a filter basket, you’re in business.  Misplace one of these items, you may find yourself digging through two bags of garbage to find the thing.
 
The pump stem is a hollow tube that brings hot water from the bottom of the pot to its top, allowing boiling water to be dispersed over the coffee grounds. It looks like this:

Assembling the coffee pot pieces to do the daily brew, we couldn’t find ours. Stainless steel, over eight inches long, it was hard to overlook. We went through the kitchen, opening every drawer. Looking inside the refrigerator and freezer because, you know, maybe there’d been a senior moment. Searching everywhere until there was nowhere else to check.
 
Which is when Renée asked, “What if it fell into the trash?”
 
There were two well-filled 15-gallon bags of stench in our garbage bin. Wearing gloves, masks, and eye goggles, we went through them together. I’m telling you now, on my deathbed, I may not remember the names of my loved ones standing at bedside, but I will never forget the smell that accompanied our search.
 
Yet it might have been worth it if we’d located the pump stem. Checking online, I found a replacement couldn’t be guaranteed for three weeks. Since it would be coming from China, three weeks was probably optimistic.
 
The next morning, coffee‑deprived but hand‑washing dishes anyway, we found it. Sitting under the lifted sink screen. The tiny stainless‑steel giver of life:

​If we hadn’t lifted the screen to clean the grate’s tiny rubber feet, the pump stem would still be missing. I’m made of sterner stuff, but Renée would have gone into withdrawal.
 
And she drinks decaf.

Through this weekend, One Bride for Seven Brothers: The First Brother is free on Amazon. For the first and only time.
 
With over 15,000 copies sold and nearly a quarter-million Kindle Unlimited page views, it’s been our most-read novelette to date. When it first launched, it sold on the strength of the title alone. It reads like a sweet mail-order bride story until, you know, it doesn’t.
 
That pivot caught some readers by surprise. Right as sales started to level off, the vitriolic reviews began. Early reviewers didn’t just dislike what we’d written; they hated our existence. But the heat from those reviews caught enough attention that the story started selling again. Better than ever, if you want to know the truth.
 
These days, I avoid reviews. It helps me sleep better at night. Renée is made of sterner stuff.
 
If you, like Renée, wonder how giving the story away will increase our royalties, I’ll tell you what I told her: Volume. I don’t know if a freebie will help, but with over 40,000 AI-generated e-books hitting Amazon every month, I wanted to try something to lift one of our titles above the tide.
 
If you’d like to read the story that caused one reader to throw her Kindle across the room in disgust, just click here.

​Hal asked me to share the steps I took to create my newest Halloween decoration. (Hey, it’s never too soon!) So, here goes:

That Thing I Did
 
This is what happens when you start a project, never finish it, but hold on to pieces of it just in case. The aforementioned project was a Day of the Dead gourd I was planning. It was supposed to have a kneeling skeleton and a bunch of other things I never got around to making. The upshot of this is that I was left with a partial skeleton that I refused to throw out. I mean, tiny skeletons be needing a home. I thought a miniature graveyard to put my skeleton in sounded just right, and I could display it on Halloween — bonus!
 
When starting a project, I often fly by the seat of my pants. There’s a lot of trial and error.
 
For this project, I began with a 12” round wooden plaque that I covered with clay (any time I refer to clay, it will be Sculpey clay). Sculpey clay is great. I prefer using the medium gray clay for most projects, which is harder than the white and holds detail well. You can bake it in your oven (I use a toaster oven I bought expressly for this reason.) The grave portion of the graveyard was bulked up with tin foil before adding more clay. I textured the clay with the pointy end of the tweezers so it resembled freshly dug dirt. I also made small cuts in the area surrounding the grave to mimic the look of grass. Then I used a textured roller to make the stone path. Textured rollers are great. You can create many realistic effects, from feathers to tilework.  

​I sculpted a few clay items to add to the base. These were the gravestone, grass blades and some extra bones. For really thin items like grass blades, a clay roller (think pasta roller, but for clay) is invaluable. After baking these items in the oven, I pushed them into the still-soft clay of the base. By baking the smaller items first, you can move them around without damaging them. I took pictures to record their location and then removed them from the base. I then baked the base.
 
Now I had to tackle the fence. I used a clay extruder to create the fence posts and crosspieces. What the heck is a clay extruder, you ask? It’s a little like the Play-Doh Fun Factory. But instead of pushing the clay through, you turn a crank. The extruders also come with a variety of stencil plates for making various kinds of shapes. It’s way easier to create a consistent thickness by using an extruder. I highly recommend it. Anyway, a lot of extruding later, I created 5 fence panels. These I baked. The stone pillars were made from a cardboard center, covered in clay, and rolled with another texture roller. Then I carefully placed the stone pillars around the base and pushed the fence panels into them. This made rectangular holes I could slide the fence panels into later once the stone pillars were baked. Okay, this is going on and on. The upshot is – bake all the stuff first that needs to be slotted into other stuff. That way you can stick it in and remove it without damage.
 
The gargoyles, eyeballs, and various other pieces were made separately and then glued on afterward. The pieces I stuck in the base and removed earlier were glued on after the base was baked and painted. The flames in the bowls are made from those plastic pockets you use in notebooks. I looked up on YouTube how to make a spiderweb on the wall with yarn and then scaled it way down and used sewing thread, glue and sealer to stiffen the thread. The ‘spirit’ is gauze covered with a 50/50 glue and water mix. It’s draped over a small ball covered in plastic wrap and allowed to dry. I also found the instructions to do this on YouTube. 

​After everything was baked, it got painted with acrylic paint and then sealed with Varathane Ultimate Polyurethane water-based sealer. Mostly, I used a mix of satin and matte. However, for the eyeballs on the fence posts and the eyes of the gargoyle heads and the rat, I used gloss. Eyeballs should be shiny.
 
While creating all this, many mistakes and corrections were made. I added parts as I went along and removed others. It’s a very organic process.
Things I Learned
 
1. Don’t set fencing on a base and expect it to balance for a long time unless the bottom is perfectly flat. It will fall. Parts will break, and you’ll have to make said parts over again. This will really piss you off.
 
2. If you don’t make sure your stone pillars are flat on the bottom, you will need extra support. You will have to drill holes in the bottom of the pillars after they are already baked. You will have to add wires to the holes. This will be tedious and will really piss you off.
 
3. It’s hard to make stable fencing out of clay.
 
4. When things get tough, punt.
 
Luckily, I enjoy punting.

​“Once I get an idear in my head,” my wife said, “there’s no shiftin’ it.” ***
 
Which has never been truer than this past week. I thought I’d get off easy with this blog. I’d post photos of Renée’s current creative obsession, express a few words of admiration for what she’d made, and be done.
 
That didn’t work out.
 
By all rights, her project, a Tupperware-sized graveyard, should be completed by now. It appeared to be finished to my eyes when she decided her particular graveyard would benefit from the presence of an oversized spider. It only took a few hours to create one. Then she declared the spider needed a web and – I’m not making this up – she’d have to weave one. Never having woven anything before, the first couple attempts didn’t pan out. Rather than pretend she’d changed her mind, as I would have done, she’s trying again. She’s painstakingly making the latest version out of string, glue, plastic and time.
 
So much time. There’s a chance we’ll be able to show some graveyard/spider/web pics next week. Or maybe next year. Or the year after that. Because, once she gets an idear in her head….
 
Then, good news, Anna Vanti provided me with blogpost material, anyway. She came through with her Greek translation of our After Things Went Bad and did an amazing job of it. The text reads as if it was originally written in Greek. So, if you prefer to read science fiction short stories in Anna’s native language, go to your favorite e-reader site and search for Αφού Όλα Πήγαν Στραβά. (“After Things Went Wrong.” She had her reasons for the title change and we agree with them.) You won’t regret it.
 
I can say this with confidence because not one person who comes here prefers to read stories in Greek. And, if I am wrong, let me say to that person now: "Έλα από το σπίτι, θα πιούμε καφέ και θα φάμε ντόνατς!"
 
*** Early in the movie, Babe, Farmer Hoggett tells his adorable spouse, "Once a sheep gets an idear in its head, there's no shiftin' it." He thinks sheep are stubborn? Wait ‘til he meets my writing partner.    

​BUCKET LIST: A list of things you'd like to do before you die.
 
That’s how the Urban Dictionary defines it. Being short of money and imagination, I have a single item on my Bucket List. If it turns out there isn’t an Island of Super Models where red Pull ‘n’ Peel Twizzlers grow freely, then I’ll have to find another dream to chase.
 
Renée has dreams of her own. “My Bucket List is a long one,” she said. “Starting with finishing this graveyard.”
 
(The graveyard really became a thing. She created a white skull for another project, and it didn’t fit. It was a decent little skull — you’ll see it in the center of the pic — so she kept it. It sat in her workroom until she decided it needed a graveyard to rest in. She’s been building one for weeks, with at least another to go. I just hope she doesn’t have any pieces left over when it’s done.)
   
“Also at the top of the list, I want to go swimming with the manatees,” she said. “Are people still allowed to swim with manatees?” Which shows she’s done as much research into manatees as I’ve done with the Island of Super Models. So, since she’s busy with the Graveyard of the Damned, I decided to see if her dream was doable.
 
Turns out, there are three kinds of manatees: the West African Manatee, the Amazonian Manatee, and the West Indian Manatee. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: What about the manatee’s relative, the dugong? Yeah, well what about it? Manatees have a paddle-shaped tail, while dugongs have a fluked tail. Nobody wants to go swimming with the dugongs and their nasty fluked tails. You want to talk dugongs, you take it to another website.
  
Only the West Indian Manatee gets to have swimming buddies. Protected by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, there are rules about human-manatee interaction.
 
First of all, no thongs. Even though you’ll be wearing a wetsuit, you’ll still know, so have some dignity. Second, book a trip to Citrus County, Florida and the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. This is pretty much the only place in the world where it’s legal to scratch this encounter off your Bucket List. And, since swimming with manatees is more fun when there are manatees present, you’ll want to be there from mid-November to late March, after the manatees have migrated from the Gulf of Mexico.
 
Once in Florida, you can sign up for a group tour to see the aquatic beauties – it runs around $100 for boat transport, a guide, and a wetsuit/mask/snorkel – and that’s the easiest way to go about it since nearly all the land surrounding the manatees’ favorite spring-fed areas is private property or protected refuge land without water access. If you want to DIY, you can launch off from a public park (Hunter Springs Park/Kings Bay Park), but bring your own 5mm wetsuit. You might need a kayak to reach our water friends. You’ll definitely need to have watched the “Manatee Manners” video (it’s the law). There are a couple of other concerns, too. If you’re DIY-ing (we would not), you’ll want to dig into all the details before you go.
 
Once a person’s settled into that warm Florida water, what happens next? Passive observation is key. Since swimmers are prohibited from initiating contact with the gentle giants, people are encouraged to bob along quietly on the surface, waiting to see if a manatee wants to hang. Which may or may not happen. Most manatees prefer to avoid humans, but there are some sea potatoes who might swing by to flirt. (There are all kinds of nicknames for manatees. Sea potatoes, gentle giants, water sausages, and nature’s speed bumps are among the many.) The social butterflies in the group may want to sniff your wetsuit, nudge you, or roll over to show their bellies.
 
It’s a big deal when a manatee flashes some belly at you. It means that particular mermaid is comfortable in your presence and may enjoy a little tactile interaction. Here’s the deal, though: legally, the human swimmer can’t join in on the fun without facing fines and possible jail time. No touching, remember? Conservationists say it’s better for the manatee not to get too comfortable with people, anyway. If they start associating people with belly rubs, they may fail to be cautious around boats and propellers. Propellers are not a manatee’s friend.
 
I’m not sharing any of this with Renée until that graveyard is done. 

In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey’s character says, "Valentine's Day is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap." Not knowing any better, I believed him.
 
Then, for this blog, I had to dig a little deeper. It turns out, Jim – or, at least, his movie character, Joel Barish – was full of crap.
 
Valentine’s Day has been around since forever. And, by “forever”, I mean since ancient Roman times. The Romans celebrated Lupercalia from February 13-15. It was a fertility festival where they sacrificed a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. Priests would cut the goat’s hide into strips, dip those strips into blood, then run around slapping women with the stuff. It was believed that this very minor assault would help those women become more fertile in the coming year.
 
All I can say is, it worked for me and Renée.
 
During the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I abolished Lupercalia and declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day. Those rowdy Lupercalia rituals were banned. The goal wasn't just to add a holiday, but to eliminate a pagan party. Since people like to party, this didn’t go over well, but Pope G. would have none of it. Lupercalia was gone.
 
It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that the day became romantic. In 1381, the famous English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Parliament of Fowls. Poems struggle to find traction these days but back then, lacking cell phones, tablets, and streaming services, people lapped up poetry with a spoon. When Geoffrey proclaimed that February 14 was the day birds chose their mates, the people got on board. “Courtly love” (chivalrous expression of admiration for potential mates) became the rage. Knights would write poems – “valentines” – to their ladies. Hearts started beating faster even without the bloody goat strips.
 
Another fun fact about the Middle Ages and Feb 14? People believed that the first person you saw on Valentine’s morning would be your future spouse.
  
By the 18th century, people began to exchange handwritten notes or small gifts on the day. Shipped over from England, Valentine’s Day cards were an expensive novelty until Esther Howland, a recent graduate of a women’s college, felt she could make them for less – and better. Beating Henry Ford to the punch, she set up an assembly line of female friends and local women to create “American” Valentines. (Around the same time, Richard Cadbury put his “eating chocolate” into lovely heart-shaped boxes for people to gift. Boxed chocolates were also a slamming success. But let’s stick with paper Valentines for today.)
 
Esther Howland’s cards were architectural beauties. Her team used "paper springs"—tiny accordion-folded strips of paper—to lift layers of lace and illustrations off the base card. Made from English lace paper, they had silk and satin ribbons. Gold leaf accents. Hand-glued everything. They looked expensive, and they were.  
 
Sixty years later, long after Esther had sold her business to care for her elderly father, Joyce Hall of the Hall Brothers (now Hallmark) began selling Valentine’s Day cards. As flat as a postcard, Joyce’s version could be mailed without getting crushed. Instead of physical layers, advanced color lithography and embossing gave the cards the illusion of texture. Importantly, they came with preprinted sentiments, allowing anyone who wasn’t Geoffrey Chaucer to express their love without stumbling over their words.
 
Most importantly, they weren’t expensive at all. Joyce Hall and Hallmark had figured out how to make romance an affordable commodity for all. Which brings us to today.
 
Valentine’s Day wasn’t invented to make us feel like crap; it evolved, was rebranded, and was eventually mass-produced so we could all share a bit of "courtly love." There are those of us who still believe in such a thing even if the giving is limited to cardboard sunflowers and a bowl of pho at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.
 
I’m just hoping it’s not too crowded. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Answer “Yes,” to any of the above, you’re one up on us. Renée and I are monoglots, as sexually-suggestive as that sounds, no matter how hard we’ve tried to learn other languages. Frankly, neither of us has tried that much. This doesn’t mean we can’t offer copies of our stories to readers in other countries, though.
 
And the reason we can do so is because Babelcube exists. Before BC, if a self-published author wanted to see their book in Portuguese, for example, they’d go to a professional translator. A 23,000-word novella like our werewolf-romance-mystery, Twisted Games, would have cost us from $2,300 to $4,140 per language (at the standard $0.10 and $0.18 per word) or more. There aren’t a lot of indie writers who can afford that kind of money.
 
Babelcube changed the math by creating a royalty-share model. This meant writers didn’t have to pay a translator anything for the work they did as long as both parties share the royalties for any translated book sales. There’s a sliding scale on who gets what, but Babelcube takes 15% of the net whenever a reader buys a book. It’s a long game, played for pennies at a time. With tens of thousands of translations out there, the Babelgang is surviving on volume.
 
(Cover designs by 1 Rat Studio Graphics.)
 
That’s my speculation, anyway. BC is famously private about its number of sales.

​So, what’s the downside of using Babelcube? There's not a lot of vetting being done. Because anyone can claim to be a translator, story quality can be questionable… or worse. Since there’s no financial penalty for quitting, translators can walk away from a project without finishing it. Also, now that AI has the world in its grip, some of the “translators” are relying on bots to churn out books quickly. AI does many things very well – and many things, not so good – but translating a book requires nuance and skill.
 
At this moment in time, AI isn’t nearly as good at the subtleties as people. Nuance isn't just about the words; it's about the culture. We learned, for instance, that French readers actually prefer the English title for steamy romances, while Italian titles have their own unique capitalization rules. Which is why we treasure the human translators who’ve worked with us.
 
This month, Babelcube released our previously-mentioned Twisted Games in French (traduit par Maëva Vervaëck) and Spanish (traducido por Adrian Buenrostro). Both did an outstanding job of capturing the nuance and "heat" of the story. Our science-fiction short stories, After Things Went Bad, came out in Italian (traduzione di Maria Giovanna Polito) this month, as well. Maria Giovanna Polito is excellent at what she does.
 
AI will probably take over their jobs in time, but we hope not. Until then, buy human.

We had every intention of being productive yesterday. We had our topic picked out, a fresh pot of coffee percolating – yes, we’ve gone back to using a percolator – and a block of time set aside to write Friday’s blog.
 
If you lived where we live, you’d already know why this post is arriving a day late. Friday was supposed to be the day of the Bomb Snow Cyclone. According to the weather apps we trusted, our city was on the brink of a meteorological event of cinematic proportions. Our designated “writing time” was set aside while we fell into a state of mild suburban panic. We placed bags of ice in our freezer, filled a bathtub with water, dripped faucets, set up a bed tent, and made sure we had enough nonrefrigerated goodness to survive a nine-day loss of power while the roads were impassable.
 
As this is being written, none of the promised badness has come to pass.
 
The irony is that this all came exactly one week after the Great Ice Storm That Wasn’t. That was last week’s blogpost. Then we were warned that our town’s infrastructure was about to crumble beneath a glistening coat of icy doom. We spent two days obsessing over snow shovels and fallen powerlines, only to wake up the next morning to… a slightly damp driveway.
 
(The image to the left? How we imagined our struggle against the elements versus the reality of us eating cold beans in a bedroom tent fort. Inspired by the great paperback cover artists of the past.)

Fool Us Twice?
 
You’d think we’d have learned our lesson. But when the words bomb, snow, and cyclone appear in the same forecast – and you’ve never heard those words combined in a forecast before – rational thought goes sideways. Instead of drafting paragraphs, we were inventorying D batteries. Instead of polishing prose, we were building a tent fort in the house’s smallest bedroom. Gotta keep that heat in, you understand.
 
And, just like the week before, the sky remained stubbornly—almost insultingly—clear. No blizzard. No cyclone. Not even a courtesy flurry so far. The weather apps still promise wintery whiteness. Later.
 
It’s always later.
 
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from preparing for a disaster that never arrives. It’s part relief, part confusion, and part “Wait… we spent four hours doing that when we could have watched The Night Manager written our blog?” Our corner of North Carolina appears to be sitting inside some sort of weather-shield bubble lately, which is excellent news for th power grid (and viewing The Night Manager) but terrible for our word count.
 
Going forward, we’re making a pact with each other: unless one of us sees a penguin sliding down street, we stay at the keyboard. Mostly. Because, honestly, it’s kind of fun to read inside the tent fort.