Prohibition Peepers part 3 — How to create closed captions

0085 00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:51.200
  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to
  discussion talking about closed captions.

  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to  
discussion talking about closed captions. 

0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
  Sure, why not?

 Sure, why not? 

Closed Captioning

We return with the final how-to tutorial of creating a slideshow for Michael Bracken’s Prohibition Peepers. I doubted any of the tens of trailer viewers would rely upon subtitles, but I wished to expand my skills working within a non-critical environment I could share with you. This is largely technical, so feel free to read more interesting essays by my colleagues.

Subtitles include a multiplicity of flavors and formats. They presently have no one standard, nor even a mere two or three.  The most common kind is .srt, which stands for SubRip. I chose to work with its close cousin, Web Video Text Track. The .vtt format is newer, more featured, and natively supported by the HTML5 standard. It also uses the decimal point standard found in most English-speaking countries.

Subtitles can be married to videos in three different ways: physically separate files, embedding, and burning. YouTube and smart television programs can work with multiple files, usually bearing the same name but different suffixes:

ThePrisoner.mp4

ThePrisoner.srt

ThePrisoner.vtt

You might also see files for languages and variants, say, British and American English, French and Canadian français, Cuban and Mexican español. File names may be labeled like this:

ThePrisoner.en-UK.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-FR.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-CU.vtt
ThePrisoner.en-US.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-CA.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-MX.vtt

Burning Questions

Once you’ve created a closed caption file, then what? Depending upon your target platform, you may have three choices.

1. Associating Files

If you use a computer to peek closely at a movie DVD or a downloaded smart television movie, you’ll find numerous files. These include the movie itself in one or many segments, perhaps a preview, sound tracks in one or more languages, and closed caption files also in one or more languages. Separate files permit the viewer to adjust synchronization of sight and sound. YouTube also works with multi-file uploads, so I separately uploaded the slide show video and CC files, which YouTube accepted without complaint.

2. Embedding

Still curious, still expanding, I went beyond uploading multiple files to YouTube. I used an embed technique to create standalone videos, i.e, combined video and captions in a single .mp4 file. Videographers can embed subtitles with iMovie, independent apps like Shutter Encoder, or a web site that combines closed caption files with movie files. This results in a nice and convenient single file for viewers.

3. Burning

You may also see mention of ‘burning’, not to be confused with making DVDs. This method permanently overlays video images with text; that is, subtitles become an unalterable part of the picture. Only two advantages come to mind, (a) aiming for older platforms that don’t support closed captions, or (b) control over how subtitles look independent of the player.

Excelling

Throughout the audio/video process, I relied on spreadsheets in several ways. I used Excel for odds and ends like building an authors list, preparing scenes and maintaining the script, but spreadsheets turned out to be a key tool for closed captions.

Although the .srt format is older and therefore more common, the .vtt format has a distinct advantage for North Americans, Britons, Swiss, Asians, and Oceanians. We use a dot ‘.’ as a decimal point and a comma ‘,’ to visually group digits. Most of Europe, Africa, and South America do the opposite.

This quirk arises in subtitle files. A primary difference is .srt uses decimal commas and .vtt uses decimal points. More significantly, the English version of Excel understands the decimal dot, which means it works nicely with .vtt files.

In theory, we could work with a default time format, but a slight modification provides finer time codes. Select Custom from Excel’s number format window and use either of these format codes:

hh:mm:ss.000

or

hh:mm:ss.000;@

Thus, a one hour, twenty-three and three quarter minute time code might look like:

01:23:45.678

Nitty-Gritty

Closed caption files are plain text that can be opened in TextEdit, BBedit, WordPad, and so on. For the most part, white space consisting of blanks, tabs, and single lines of code are all treated the same. The following are equivalent:

86
0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
Sure, why not?

00086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225 Sure, why not?

Each of these is called a cue. Each cue is separated by a double-spaced blank line. Leading zeroes can be omitted, including the hour:

86 3:52.0 --> 3:53.23 Sure, why not?

Subtitles can be positioned on the screen, and they can be formatted with common HTML codes and CSS. I didn’t have a need for the latter, but I used HTML <i>italics</I> in a few places.

Down and Dirty

Some high-end programs and web sites offer audio-to-text timelines– usually for a fee– to build closed caption files. I wasn’t impressed and since my project was small, I stepped through the video and made notes the old-fashioned way– by hand.

In addition to the formatting above, the rules are straightforward. Obviously, the ending time of a cue must come later than the beginning. Likewise, each start time has to be greater or equal to the start time of the previous cue.

Although rarely used, the rules allow for cues to overlap or persist on-screen. That could be useful when off-screen action can be heard but not seen.

A number of closed caption apps can be found on-line, most still using the .srt format. If you happen to use one of these and want .vtt, you may be able to selectively scan-replace decimal commas with decimal points.

Try to save your captions as a .vtt file, but you may find it safer to save as a .txt file and rename it.

ThePrisoner.txt

➨

ThePrisoner.vtt

Adding closed captions is easier than it sounds. Consider it for your next video. And be sure to pick up a copy or two of Prohibition Peepers for Christmas.

More information follows.

Prohibition Peepers part 2 — How to create book trailer video

Love that cover!

Prohibition Peepers, the trailer how-to continues from last week. Visual presentation typically drives videos, but as described last week, ours is centered around a soundtrack of a 1932 radio news broadcast. Today I'll thread two paths, a how-to for those interested simple, quick video creation and, historical notes and thoughts as I’m constructing this castle in the air.

Tools of the Trade

Any straightforward graphics apps and video creation program will do. I chose simple apps, nothing fancy.¹

Apple’s iMovie assembled pictures along with last week’s sound track, which was handed off to YouTube. Any simple video builder should work; Windows offers several options. It should be possible to create a slide show with Microsoft Power Point, but its learning curve requires more patience than I have Adderal. I opted for a dedicated video program.

It is possible to create a presentation with nothing but YouTube, but maintaining files locally felt more comfortable.

For graphics, I used both raster (bitmap) and vector images. Abandoning high-priced Adobe, I switched to Serif’s Affinity suite. It’s a clean, easy to use, inexpensive panel of picture programs. One of the best features is that Affinity files are interchangeable, meaning any Affinity program can work directly with any Affinity file. It makes life easy.²

Finally, we’ll touch upon AI.

To Err is Human

Abruptly, I made my first mistake. In the past, I’d loaded a few items to YouTube, mainly a collection of Rocky King TV shows. Visual recordings of the era weren’t locked into any one size. Historically, aspect ratios have appeared as 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, and 16:9, but others proliferated.

I erred immediately. I had decided upon YouTube’s original default 3:2 as a compromise between stretching, cropping, and ‘letterboxing’, awkward ways of dealing with aspect ratios outside the norm. After creating an initial half dozen or so 1800×1200 images, I opened iMovie… and could not find the menu item for aspect items. Annoyed, I opened YouTube’s editor… and once again could not find the menu for screen rations. They were gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Demised.

WTF? (Lithuanian for Huh?) I googled and googled and finally learned in recent versions, YouTube and iMovie have settled upon a common aspect ratio, 16:9. Damn. Never guessing both Apple and Google had finally standardized, I’d wasted valuable time and effort. Let my error guide you.

Fortunately, the waste wasn’t as bad as first thought. Many of my source images were 1800 pixels high. I settled upon 3200×1800 as my working size in the Affinity programs. A multiple of 100 and a power of two facilitates quick, mental calculations. YouTube’s HD maximum is 1920×1080, so I was over-engineering.³

Action

I had numbered each paragraph of the script and appended that same number to graphics I intended to use. iMovie permitted me to load all at once and optionally space them n seconds apart. The final result would not be evenly spaced, but 5 minutes ÷ 28 slides allowed me to spread them across the timeline, meaning each was somewhat proximate to its intended position.

1. The first slide recognized the significance of border radio, chiefly remembered in songs by the Doors, Z Z Top and others, and at least one movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou.
2. Next we hear a sly evangelist trawling for donations. I had a little fun with the picture, an interrupted letter suggesting a small story in itself. Earlier in 1932, the post office had raised first class rates from 2¢ to 3¢. On the theory people like my mother might still have 2¢ stamps, I pasted a 1932 2¢ and 1¢ on the envelope.
3. Likewise, the $2 bill series date was consistent with 1932, but a sharp detective might notice oddities. The handwriting is feminine but looks a bit young or naïve. The Reverend asks for a dollar donation, but Prunella intends to send two dollars (value of $45 today) plus a letter. He suggests a plain white envelope, but our charming correspondent selects pink lavender stationery… you can almost catch a scent of perfumed powder in it. What might happen when the Rev read the letter?
4. Unregulated patent medicines were loaded with alcohol and opiates. Little wonder laudanum became the preferred energy drink, the feel-good medication sold by the doctor’s breathy assistant. Dr Cruikshank looks awfully familiar.
5. When I was a child, ‘Tear It Down’ and other Clyde McCoy pieces appealed to me. His lip control and wah-wah mute could almost make a jazz trumpet talk. The hotel interior pictured is the real McCoy… the actual Congress Hotel ballroom.
6. A teletype introduces the news with a silent movie news placard bearing ‘A Mixed Metaphor Production’, suggesting the irony of radio visual aids hasn’t been lost.
7. The news opening referring to the incoming president and that Congress just approved 3.2% beer is factual. The next part about Ness, Moran, and Capone appears in support of the events in my story ‘Dime Detective’. Likewise the next paragraph refers to John Floyd’s story, ‘River Road’, and the awesome Windsor Manor without giving away the plot.
8. Celebrity news comes next, homicides involving a dancer and an actress (‘Getting Away Clean’ by Joseph Walker and ‘Bearcat Blues’ by Susanna Calkins). Here we make an unusual departure. Neither pictured performer is real. Each is AI computer generated using ChatGPT teamed with Dall-E. I experienced a LOT of difficulty rendering the images. The programs has great difficulty with rendering eyes and counting fingers and arms.
9. An ad for Penny Mickelbury’s Bubba’s Gym in ‘The Devil You Know’ provides a transition to sports. The Chicago Bears playoff is factual, but of course Steve Liskow’s story, ‘Peace of Mind Guaranteed’, is fanciful.
10. Hugh Lessig returns us to a fictional page of mystery history in ‘Cloths of Heaven’, a sad tale of the first woman Prohibition casualty. Amazingly, I found a photo of an actual rum-runners boat seized in Virginia.
11. I slipped in a slide of a simple (and operational) crystal radio schematic where my real voice can be heard.
12. The wrap-up reflects the beginning. The outro pictures the actual Blackstone Hotel featuring homeboy Benny Goodman who, in 1932, hasn’t yet made a national splash. He plays as credits roll, wrapping up with the message that Prohibition Peepers can be found in fine speakeasies and bookstores everywhere.

 

 

 

  

© 2023 Prohibition Peepers

  

Done! I saved the file as an .mp4, ready to upload to SleuthSayers’ channel.

This article grew longer than I like, so next week I’ll explain how to add closed captioning.

Tables

Daddy, Where Do Anthologies Come From?

“Daddy, where do anthologies come from?”

“Did you ask Mommy?”

“She told me to ask you.”

“Sigh. I knew you would ask this question someday, Little Writer, but I really hoped you’d be older. What happens is that a would-be editor spends alone time wrestling with his muse—”

“Like you and Mommy wrestle sometimes?”

“Not…exactly. We’ll discuss that kind of wrestling when you’re much, much older. Anyway, one day, about nine months after the would-be editor wrestles with his muse, the Stork of Inspiration arrives with a diaper in its beak, and inside the diaper is a nascent anthology: a concept, a catchy title, or something more.”

“Why does it arrive in a diaper?”

“Because sometimes the ideas are shi—aren’t very good and must be disposed of in the file of ideas-never-to-be-used.”

“But the good ones, the healthy ones, what happens to them?”

“That’s when the would-be editor starts feeding the anthology.”

“What does an anthology eat?”

“Writers, usually a dozen or more before it’s fully grown and is released to find its way in the world.”

“Can I edit an anthology someday, Daddy?”

“Oh, Little Writer, not everyone is experienced enough or responsible enough to edit an anthology, and that’s why you should always use protection when wrestling with some muse you pick up in the bar at a conference, especially when it’s likely to be a one-idea stand. But maybe someday, when you’re ready and you’ve developed a long-term relationship with your muse, you, too, can edit an anthology.”

“Oh, Daddy, I think I would like that.”

PROHIBITION PEEPERS

Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment (Down & Out Books, released September 2023) was a twinkle in my eye long before the Stork of Inspiration delivered an anthology diaper to my doorstep.

Anthology editors sometimes ask writers to commit to a concept before they pitch the concept to a publisher, and a great many years ago—so long ago I no longer have the original dated email, but likely in the mid-2000s based on some sketchy notes I made at the time—Robert J. Randisi asked if I would contribute to Club Noir, an anthology “to feature stories of night clubs in their heyday. Think of Nick & Nora Charles, martini glasses, hat check girls, cigarette girls, band singers like Frank Sinatra and Helen Morgan… and crime.”

After I told him I was quite interested, I wrote most of an opening scene featuring a cigarette girl and a private eye, made some additional notes, and stuck everything into a file to await word from Randisi that the anthology was a go.

Word never came.

In the late 2010s, while cruising through my idea file, I stumbled upon the barely started manuscript of “Cigarette Girl,” liked what I read, and started noodling with it. I completed the story in April 2020, sent it out to and, by late 2021, received it back from the two top short mystery fiction markets.

By then I had edited a handful of anthologies for Down & Out Books, so I pitched Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment, an anthology of private eye stories set during and just after the end of prohibition. (This is only the second time I have created an anthology specifically to utilize one of my own stories. The first was Small Crimes [Betancourt & Company, 2004], which included my story “Dreams Unborn,” a story that was my first to be included in the Other Distinguished list of The Best American Mystery Stories.)

I invited several writers with whom I had previously worked and a few I knew but with whom I’d not previously worked to contribute and, well-fed by fourteen writers, Prohibition Peepers was released to the world last month.

Contributors include Susanna Calkins, David Dean, Jim Doherty, John M. Floyd, Nils Gilbertson, Richard Helms, Hugh Lessig, Steve Liskow, Leigh Lundin, Adam Meyer, Penny Mickelbury, Joseph S. Walker, Stacy Woodson, and me.

Leigh Lundin created a cool book trailer for Prohibition Peepers. If you’ve been following his SleuthSayers posts, you know all about it. If not, watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zspr3Unrh0

Time Warped: How Not to Write a Historical

No excuses, this comes far too late to be an acceptable movie review, but this article has another purpose— how not to write historicals. Although I wrote this long ago, I pushed it aside as other articles took priority. It dates back to one of John Floyd’s articles, where we found ourselves among the tens of people who kinda, sorta liked the movie, Django Unchained, which I watched with my friend, Sharon. She agreed with the rest of the world that the film was, to put it gently, flawed.

1858

Both Sharon and I were distracted by a staggering number of errors and anachronisms in the movie, especially items from the wrong century. To our disbelief, the DVD came with a Tarantino interview in which he bragged about the historical research. That was, pardon the pun, djarring.

Anachronisms leaped off the screen. They included wrong period clothing, wrong period guns (multiple), wrong period props and accessories, and very wrong period verbal expressions (mother-ƒer? Seriously?). When non-experts notice 20+ errors in a film, that celluloid is in trouble.

Except for two pieces of incidental music, I won’t address the soundtrack beyond saying the modern cuts djangled the nerves. It felt like an amateur YouTube video where contributors slip in unrelated cuts of music and images, without regard to the story. David Frost called out-of-context media the Lord Privy Seal effect.

Likewise, accidental appearances of modern devices aren’t included here. For example, some sharp-eyed viewer noticed a security camera high on the veranda of the antebellum mansion.

Time Warped

1. The movie contained the famous bust of Nefertiti, incorrectly referred to as Cleopatra. It wasn’t discovered until 1907. (I learned of Nefertiti as a child. My mother gave my father a bust for his birthday. I mean she gave him a statuette.)
2. Teddy Bears, associated with President Teddy Roosevelt, wouldn't appear until the 1900s.
3. Thousand-dollar bills weren’t issued until 1861.
4. The Confederacy had not been formed and the Civil War had not begun, so Confederate uniforms wouldn't have existed in 1858.
5. Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t group until the end of the Civil War.
6. The town of Lubbock didn't exist until 1890, well after the American Civil War.
7. The word malarkey came out of the 1920-1930s.
8. Für Elise famously wasn’t discovered until 1867, four decades after Beethoven’s death and nine years after the movie’s period.
9. The song ‘In the Sweet By and By’ was published in 1868, a decade after the movie.
10. Flip-top beer bottles may or may not have been a German innovation, but at least in the US, they weren’t patented until 1875.
11. Beer pumps were first noted in the UK in 1691 and patented a century later in 1785, but this methodology of draught beer only became popular in the mid 1900s.
12. Drinking straws made of paper were invented in 1888.
13. While cigarette holders were introduced in the 1700s, they didn’t become popular until the flapper era through the 1970s.
14. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in 1864 and patented in 1867.
15. Hearing aids weren’t invented until the 1900’s and miniature aids didn’t appear until the latter half of the 20^th century.
16. Attendant to the previous, the first primitive plastics weren’t introduced until 1907 and materials suitable for hearing aids and chin straps took another half century to come about.
17. Even some guns were out of place and time.
1. The Remington New Model Army revolver, used by Django and Billy Crash, weren’t manufactured until 1860.
2. The Remington double-barreled Derringer, used by Django and Dr. Shultz, weren’t manufactured until 1866.

Bonus Points

Sharon caught most of the following:

18. Cool looking sunglasses and contacts weren’t available in 1858.
19. Hats with cord locks and eyelets were a 20th century invention.
20. Likewise, trousers with belt loops weren’t an 1850s convenience.

I can’t think of another movie that flooded the screen with historical inaccuracies. What about you? Do you have such a film in mind?

Editing Evolution

My process for editing has changed over the years, and especially more so lately as the number of editing projects has increased. My first editing projects happened back when manuscripts arrived in the day’s mail, and all editing was done on hardcopy. Some of those manuscripts bled red (or blue, or whatever color pen I was using that day) by the time I finished.

At the back: A novella in progress.
The other three piles:
Anthologies in progress.

Email eliminated the need for authors to send hardcopy, but not the way I worked. I printed, read, and edited on paper before entering my edits and comments into the appropriate Word documents. Over time, I realized my process was responsible for the decimation of much of the world’s forests.

My current process, which may evolve yet again in the future:

1. Before I read a submission, I reformat it to double-spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman; flush left, ragged right; .5” paragraph indents, and no odd spacing between paragraphs. Then I do a quick search-and-replace to fix common problems such as improper dashes and improper quotation marks. I do this because I’ve discovered that the visual appearance of a manuscript (font, font size, etc.) impacts my opinion of it. By making every submission look the same before I read, I find it easier to judge the work based solely on the writing.

2. I read the manuscript on my computer, and I have track changes turned on. As I read, I correct obvious errors (their for there, for example), delete extraneous words, and make notes about things that confuse me. If I find myself making multiple corrections and changes, or find myself  inserting multiple notes, I’ll stop reading and reject the submission.

3. Then I run the file through spellcheck, which almost always identifies something of concern. Sometimes spellcheck finds an error I missed and sometimes it identifies non-errors, such as slang words and dropped gs (goin’ for going).

4. At this point, anticipating an acceptance, I print a hard copy and read the story one more time. Occasionally, I find something serious I glossed over when reading on the computer screen, and I reject the story. The likelihood, though, is that if I’ve reached the point of printing a hardcopy, I’m going to accept the story.

5. If I have identified any additional corrections or have any additional questions, I input them into the Word document.

6. I then send the edited Word document, which might be clean as a whistle (I love those writers!) or may look like the electronic version of a paper manuscript bleeding editorial red ink, to the writer.

7. Upon receiving the edited manuscript, the writer curses me, my ancestors, and my progeny (I may be projecting because that’s what I do when I get an edited manuscript back from an editor).

8. At some point, the manuscript returns. Sometimes writers accept every correction and change, sometimes we arm wrestle over something, and sometimes—if my corrections, changes, and notes are extensive—there may be another back-and-forth exchange with the writer.

9. Once I have all the edited manuscripts in hand, I collect author bios, write an editorial or an introduction, and then organize everything, determining in which order stories will appear in the anthology or magazine issue.

10. Then I spellcheck the completed manuscript and print a hardcopy, which I read cover-to-cover.

11. If there are any additional corrections necessary at this point, I input them into the final manuscript, and then send it to the publisher.

I have had the opportunity to work with three co-editors—Trey R. Barker with Guns + Tacos, Gary Phillips with Jukes & Tonks, and Barb Goffman with A Project to be Named Later—and each brought a different skillset to the party. Even so, the process remained much the same, with each co-editor having a pass at each manuscript and adding their corrections, changes, and notes.

The ultimate goal, regardless of my process and regardless of whether I’m working alone or with a co-editor, is to ensure that each published story is the best it can be and that the final product is worthy of a reader’s time.

Though this is published post-Bouchercon, it was written pre-Bouchercon. I hope I had the opportunity to meet some of you there!

What Fired Me Up to Write a Fireworks Story

Shortly before July 4th last year, I posted this on my Facebook page:

One day I am going to write a story in which someone who sets off fireworks in a suburban neighborhood, not giving a crap about the animals he's scaring, gets what's coming. And I won't feel bad at all. 

 

Sincerely,

 

The mom of a freaked-out dog

 

Boy, did the responses pour in. I got 145 likes, 29 loves, 47 hugs, and a smattering of other emojis. The comments were just as enthusiastic. Here's just a handful:

• PLEASE please write that story!
  

• Also endorsed by moms of small children, fire marshals, ER staff, those with PTSD. Please do something to those who sell the fireworks also . . . 

• I'm happy to consult on this one! People here are also very concerned about their horses being frightened by them. Apparently several were injured last year
  

• And I would read that book and recommend it to everyone I know. My poor boy Paddy has not left my side for hours now. 

• You’d get lots of support from those of us in California who are sniffing for wild-fire smoke after every very illegal bang.

• This has always been my least favorite holiday simply because of the loud noise and the fear and confusion it causes to animals, pets and wildlife both. Then there are the accidents to humans and fire potential.
  
  

Buoyed by the 100+ comments, I decided to write a story addressing the impact of fireworks. Then I saw a call for stories for an upcoming anthology to be titled Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3: The Color of My Vote. Authors were asked to submit stories involving voting and color. We were giving wide latitude in how we interpreted the theme. As you may imagine, I thought of fireworks. They come in all kinds of colors. People who shoot them off frequently say they're being patriotic (red, white, and blue). People who don't like their impact see red. People who sell them want green. There were many more color associations I could make. Yes, I thought, a story involving fireworks could be a good fit.

 

Then I had to work in a voting aspect. Maybe, I thought, a city council could be about to vote on a proposal to bar residents from shooting off fireworks. I created a main character, a teenage girl, who is desperate for the ban to pass because of how fireworks set off in her neighborhood scare her dog, Bailey. The vote is expected to be close, and she has a friend whose neighbor is on the city council, so they decide to try to push him to vote their way ... with an unconventional approach.

 

Now it's almost a year later, and Memorial Day—another holiday associated with fireworks—is right around the corner. It's the perfect time for Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3 to have been published. And I'm delighted the book includes my story "For Bailey." It's not the straight-on revenge story some people were hoping for, but it does address the effects fireworks can have on veterans with PTSD, firefighters, the environment, wildlife, and, especially, pets. I should add that I do not endorse any real-life crimes against people who set off fireworks or sell them. But I do like using fiction to try to open some eyes to the impact fireworks can have while offering an entertaining tale at the same time.

 

The anthology is out in trade paperback and ebook. It includes 22 stories of crime and suspense, ranging from comic to tragic and from cozy to noir. You'll also find a few stories involving science fiction, horror, and fantasy. The publisher is donating all the proceeds to Democracy Docket, an organization fighting voter suppression in the United States.

Here are the authors with stories in the book, in order of story appearance:

David Corbett, Faye Snowden, Eric Beetner, Sarah M. Chen, Gabriel Valjan, Jackie Ross Flaum, David Hagerty, Thomas Pluck, Katharina Gerlach, Stephen Buehler, Ember Randall, Camille Minichino, Patricia (Pat) E. Canterbury, James McCrone, Ann Parker, Miguel Alfonso Ramos, Misty Sol, DJ Tyrer, Anshritha, Bev Vincent, Barb Goffman, and Travis Richardson.

You can order a paper copy of the book through many indie bookstores. Click here to find some near you. If you prefer Amazon (paper or ebook), click here. Paper copies are also available through Barnes and Noble. Click here for them.

The anthology supports a worthy cause, so I hope you'll consider picking up a copy. I also hope you enjoy my story and you and your loved ones (human and furry) don't suffer too much from the effects of fireworks this summer.