E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

 I am in Florida now, revisiting my old home turf, where I raised my son, and wrote my five Florida-based mystery novels, including my newest novel, RED TIDE . The weather has been weird, just as it has been weird in Seattle, now my primary residence. Seattle has been experiencing the hottest summer in recent history, unprecedented DROUGHT , and this following a winter with the lowest snowfall on record: only 16% of normal snowpack in the Cascade mountain range last winter. Meanwhile Florida is under an almost constant threat of flooding, which is occurring in the Tampa Bay area, where I stay, on an almost daily basis. Several rivers in the area have flooded to the point that hundreds of people have had to evacuate their homes, and there is no end in sight. Back when I first started writing my Tony Lowell Mystery series, beginning in the 1990s, Seattle had the wettest CLIMATE in America, and summer weather in Tampa Bay (or in St. Petersburg, where I lived) was actua...

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...

This image represents perhaps the oldest, if not most powerful symbol in the world: the so-called 'All-Seeing Eye.' Whose eye, exactly, is this, and what is it they see? The most obvious and common assumption, of course, is that it sees all and therefore, presumably, it is the eye of God. But which God? The earliest representations of this symbol were the seven manifestations of the Eye of Horus, in ancient Egypt. Sometimes depicted as a falcon, Horus could literally see all and was considered by his Rosicrucian and Masonic descendants as probably the original named God in the human panoply. Later versions, adopting the pyramid, and later on a simple representational triangle, all have their historical basis in this original Eye. Christians converted this triangle as to represent the Trinity. In 1782, the Eye of Providence was adopted as part of the symbolism on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States. It was first suggested as an element of the Great Se...

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-...

With apologies to my readers, it has been a long time: one year, to be exact, since my last posting. I have been busy, mind you. My Italian publisher Newton Compton Roma contracted another book, as second in a new series featuring investigative reporter Jake Fleming, who, in my prior book, Il Libro Segreto di Shakespeare , discovered evidence pointing to another author of the Shakespeare Canon (and no, it was not Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford). I am still seeking an English language publisher, which is a unique situation to be in indeed, given that this book has been published (under my pseudonym John Underwood) in seven languages, to date. The last time this has happened was For Whom the Bell Tolls , by Ernest Hemmingway. Not that I am claiming peerhood with Hemmingway, but that is a fact. Meanwhile, a true hero of mine (granted, I am a professional iconoclast) has resurfaced, literally, and I consider this very good news indeed. Richard of York, the last of the Plantagen...

Whether or not the Reader accepts the premise that William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, was not what he seemed (i.e. a writer/poet and man of letters) or my own premise that he was in fact the inventor of Hollywood (i.e. the first celebrity producer) William Shakespeare was not a fool or a foil, as depicted in the film Anonymous : he was anything but. I see him not only as a forerunner to Cecil B. de Mille and Louis B. Mayer, but also a forerunner to the Vampire Capitalist and Wall Street corporate greedmeister as depicted in the movie Wall Street by Michael Douglas. Shakespeare had a lot of business savvy, was denounced for being greedy just like Gordon Gekko, was accused of piracy and plagiarism just like Dan Brown and Steven Spielberg, hoarded grain to drive up prices during a famine just like Monsanto, owned a theater company (i.e.studio) just like Goldwyn (well, a partner, anyway, with my own ancestor John Underwood among others), and fostered a bastard son who became England...

Recently, the film Anonymous attempted to make a case that Shakespeare was a fraud--a premise I support in my own book Il Libro Segreto di Shakespeare --but with different conclusions as to who the true author really was. I'd say read the book, but unless you are fluent in Italian, Russian, Czech, or Polish you can't, until an English language publisher is finally willing to step forward and put this book out there. Thus far they won't, making this the first book in literary history to be a bestseller in foreign translation, and not published in the author's native language. Apart from the fraud part, I take issue with Roland Emmerich's film primarily because it is irrelevant. Unfortunately, he and his producers spent $30 million trying to convince an uncaring filmgoing public that William Shakespeare was actually the 17th Earl of Oxford, the Elizabethan equivalent to Donald Trump. Or rather, it was like trying to convince American readers that Michael Moore is rea...

Recently I attended a rather remarkable catered event sponsored by Amazon.com's answer to the democratization of publishing--CreateSpace--whose motto seems to be 'Anyone can be an author.' Unlike, apparently, in the old un-democratic days when you had to be able to write, with a product that passes at least somebody's version of muster (usually one of those now-nearly extinct educated female editors with a no-nonsense approach and a degree or two from Barnard or Wellesley). Yet here in the now in Seattle, it all seemed fitting, because one of the key topics was having a so-called 'platform,' and as former publisher and editor Alan Rinzler (who has published and edited such dauntingly diverse clients as Toni Morrision, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Shirley MacLaine, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, and Robert Ludlum and thus has stood on lots of platforms prior to this one at the Asian Art Museum) put it, "who are you to write about this subject?" Indeed...

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Matthew 13:57 I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time , and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country. So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so h...

I have a conundrum that may be unique in the annals of the literary expose. I just received via parcel post a package of books from Russia (see below). They are in Russian, of course, and published by Ekmo, a Russian publisher. They look very cool, actually, a nice hardcover edition with an embossed color illustration, as you can see. I am the author of this book, and have no idea what the Russian title is, but my original title was The Shakespeare Chronicles , written by me under the pseudonym John Underwood: my paternal great-grandfather's name, and also the name of one of Shakespeare's Boon Companions. Here's the thing: there is no English language version of this book. (Full disclosure: there is an obscure nonfiction trade book by the same title and a different pseudonym of Desmond Lewis. This is actually the basis of my book, and is part of the plot). My foreign agent Danny Baror sold rights to my book to Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Italian publishers back i...

I was raised in a Quaker family, and grew up protesting nuclear weapons in Times Square back in the Fifties (remember 'Ban the Bomb'? That was me, a naive six year old, holding one of those signs). When I graduated from Syracuse University in 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and so was my generation. We truly believed we could change the world, bring peace and prosperity and justice to all, and—well, you know how all that turned out. Two decades later, after working so hard to change the world with so little success, I finally concluded that presenting the “truth” as I saw it didn't always work, if ever. Sometimes, I was beginning to realize, good storytelling may be a better way to reach people than on-the-nose reality. Or even gently presented reality laced with humor, the way the late great Art Buchwald mastered this skill with his political satires. Having taken my best shot at doing good without much success, I decided to try my hand at doing well, or at least mak...

Dear Readers: What an ordeal. Here I had a great blog, all was going smoothly, when suddenly, for no apparent reason, it vanished in a cloud of digital smoke: poof! Oddly enough, my last blog was titled: The Politics of Pot. Could there be a connection there, somehow? Could those who have attacked and demonized Michael Phelps just for being a normal American kid be on my trail as well? I was writing about my non-conformist, unorthodox, ex-hippy detective Tony Lowell at the time. Tony Lowell, as it happens, just like probably a hundred million other Americans who remember the Sixties (or at least still listen to the music) has been known to do a Michael Phelps on occasion. They hypocrisy of calling that action a crime is so monumental and sweeping (thanks to the recent powers-that-be of the past decade) that it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh demanding that all "druggies" be put in jail, while snorting Oxycontin between sets. Puhleeze, enough already, and let's hope our almost...