E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

News: my new Tony Lowell Mystery RED TIDE (an eco-thriller) has just been published by Booktrope. Please click on the image for a link to my page on Amazon.com, for more details. I need to say, in full disclosure, that this book was 17 years in the making, for personal reasons including health, state of mind, a need to move forward, working overseas in China, sending my son off to college: the list goes on. But this series was ahead of its time when first published back in the '90s, and was in need of revival. And the post-Katrina post BP disasters in the Gulf of Mexico made the need to renew this series, and it's environmental overtones, all the more pressing. For a little history, my first book of this series, Hour of the Manatee , was winner of a national book award and competition (the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First P.I. Novel competition) back in 1992 (it wasn't published until 1994. It was followed by three more titles: Eye of t...

For those of you who once read my blogs, and might read them again, I am back. It has been a year of silence, that happily is about to be broken. I was fighting many battles in my absence, in many ways and at many levels: for my life. I am back, at least for now, because I have won those battles at last, if not the war. As to that, one cannot truly control the outcome of one's life, much as we might wish otherwise. Still, we can try. Imagine, if you will, having to pick up your life and move (we've all done that) but in the process, incurring a grievous injury requiring surgery. Then take it further: that you go to sleep in pain, and wake up a different person. Or two different persons: persons who do not relate to you, who are hostile to you and to each other. One is manic; the other profoundly depressed. So then you reach out for help and are given medications, and the medications trigger a terrible reaction. So then you try, try again, and finally find balance. Imagi...

As an author, I have had a long and complicated love and hate affair with eBooks, and know this will sound self-serving, but my first mystery novel, Hour of the Manatee , was the very first book ever published in electronic format. It happened like this: I'd been doing a reading of my second Tony Lowell Mystery, Eye of the Gator at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida, when a man came up to me afterwards and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. His name was Don something (real name best forgotten in any case) and he claimed to have invented the first eBook reader. Moreover, he had a working model to prove it. The year was 1997. What Don wanted was a book that had some public visibility to convert onto his reader as a demo, and my first book, as a national book award winner and still selling well, would suit his purpose perfectly, and I could see no down side at the time. So I agreed. Don's business plan, such as it was, was to publish eBooks in mini-...