Hello, All!
I'm happy to announce that my latest book, The Ghost of Devastatingly Handsome Stuart Abbott Tells All: A Spirited Novella, has been published and is now available on Amazon in both paperback and ebook editions.
Did Stuart ever find another like her? Or was he destined to be nothing but a sex object instead of a text object?
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| Just some of the books lining our walls |
Meet the Fixxer—with wit and aplomb he works the fruitful fields of Hollywood fixing the sins and correcting the stupidities of the denizens therein. In Blood is Pretty he comes to the rescue of “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen” to extricate her from the grip of the soul-sucking sexual desires of a producer born in slime, and takes on the task of buying off with money and muscle a film geek who won’t cooperate with a director of minuscule talent who simply wants to claim “V”—the geek’s “Holy Grail” of a film treatment—as his own.
What those in the know in Hollywood really know is that if they need a dark deed done, if they need a sticky personal or professional problem “fixed,” they can call upon the mysterious and dangerous Fixxer. Whether you are a successful comedy film director whose “Art” has never truly been appreciated because the country’s most important film critic has held a grudge against you since college, or you are a neophyte and naïve screenwriter who resents the professional blackmail she has just suffered, you call upon the Fixxer.
A unique first contact novel from the aliens’ point of view. The last thing the factfinders—who call themselves Life—expected to find while traveling in space in “The Curious” on a mission from their planet, The Living World, was other life. But one day, they stumble upon the third planet out from a backwater sun and find it teeming with a vast diversity of life, including one sentient and cognizant, if primitive, species that they dub Otherlife. Being not only from The Curious but inherently curious themselves, they begin to study the Otherlife and their alien culture, discovering such strange things as marriage, intoxicating drinks, weapons of minor and mass destruction, the gleeful inhaling of toxic substances, two-parent families, layered language, genocide, non-nude bathing, and—the strangest thing of all—religion.
This first contact between Life and Otherlife, disconcerting for both, has moments of humor and moments of horror—and neither escapes the encounter unchanged.
Winner of the Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Authors
Based on the beloved independent family film.
12-year-old Emma O'Connor is sent to live with her “aunt” in the small town of Doverville. Emma soon finds herself in the middle of a “dogfight” with the mayor and town dogcatcher. In order to strike down their “no-dogs” law, Emma must bring together a group of schoolmates, grown-ups, and adorable dogs of all shapes and sizes in a spectacular holiday pageant. The 12 Dogs of Christmas is a fun, heartwarming story featuring a diverse canine cast and is perfect for anyone who loves dogs, kids, and Christmas.
A modern comic adult fairy tale with an ensemble cast of Cinderellas. Instead of a kingdom by the sea, our story takes place in and around a residential hotel by the sea. The architecturally eclectic Briers Hotel is situated on Leech Beach, a not particularly inviting beach that is often fog-bound and always scruffy. But it’s the perfect setting for our Cinderellas, male and female, who put up with the scruffiness of life while striving to make it through their various personal seaside fogs. Theater; art; antiques; old movies; sex; more sex; death; fast and slow cars, chicken shit, and cow poop; military bearing and erotic emissions—not to mention the wicked witch, the sea serpent by the seashore, the village ogre, the village idiot, and several Prince Charmings—all figure into this merry tale with a multitude of happy endings.
Thomas P. Powell’s ascension in politics was both unusual and very American. From traffic cop to Vice President of the United States, his climb up the ladder of public service was often due to the push of random acts and not-so-happy accidents—although Thomas held the opinion that it was due solely to his singular innate moral authority. What matters is what’s within; that’s the Powell political philosophy. Then, on the cusp of his grasping the last rung of the American political ladder, something truly within suddenly appears. A horrible homunculus, an impetuous imp, climbs out of Thomas’s right ear to bedevil his nights, confuse his days, and take him on a crazy, wild, nauseating, and nuclear journey. It’s as if The West Wing was done as a Twilight Zone episode.
When a radical experiment into the nature of time is sabotaged, the scientific team finds themselves in an alternate universe where humans never became the dominant life force. Instead, dinosaurs evolved into intelligent bipeds, developing language and societal structures.
The scientists must learn to communicate with this alien species, who view them as unusual pets, and figure out how to recreate the original experiment in a non-industrialized world so they can go back home—assuming there’s a home, or even a universe, to return to. But the scientist who sabotaged them is trapped in this new world with them. And he’s looking to rise to power, even if his quest means the death of his traveling companions. A contemporary scientific romance in the tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne
THERE IS SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENING IN PLACIDVILLE!
It is 1962. Kathy Anderson, a serious actress who took her training at the Actors Studio in New York, is stuck playing Vivacia, the Vampire Woman, on Vivacia’s House of Horrors for a local Chicago TV station. Finally fed up with showing old monster movies to creature feature fans, she quits and heads to New York and the fame and footlights of Broadway.
She stops off to visit her parents and old friends in Placidville, the all-American, middle-class, blissfully normal small town in the Midwest where she grew up. But she finds that things are strange in Placidville. Kathy’s parents, her best friend from high school, the local druggist, and even the Oberhausen twins are all acting curiously creepy, odiously odd, and wholly weird. Especially the town’s super geeky nerd, Gerald, who warns of dark days ahead.
Has Kathy entered a zone in the twilight? Did she reach the limits that are outer? Has she fallen through a mirror that is black? Or is it just—just—politics as usual?
NAMED A "FAVORITE BOOK OF 2021" BY THE MONTREAL TIMES!
Adolphus is a happy, self-satisfied, middle-aged bachelor. A history professor, he has several lovely friends with benefits, including the bright and witty Peggy Bradford. His future utterly changes when Lavinia Carson, a wealthy man’s radiant and beautiful young wife, walks into Adolphus’s class. He discovers that Lavinia’s husband, Eugene, was the bully who had terrorized him during his high school years and left lasting scars. And who, no less the bully now, soon declares that he loves Adolphus! Thus begins a very odd love story. Adolphus. Lavinia. Eugene. Peggy. Who loves who? Love rejected. Love ignored. Love found. And cuttlefish pizza!
Award-winning, Amazon Bestselling author Steven Paul Leiva is your tour guide to some of the strange destinations he has traveled to over the years.
In Made on the Moon, travel with Leiva into the mind of one Stanley Lewis, a little man with a big dream. He had wanted to go to the Moon from the time he was an infant. Not a toddler, not a child, not a young man, but a babe in his mother’s arms.
Then go even deeper into Stanley’s mind as Leiva takes you to the poetic realm of this little man’s mind by presenting “What a Pleasure It’s Been to Piss in Porcelain: The Rude Poems of Stanley Lewis.” As you might guess, you don’t want to read these poems to your mother.
Next stop—Mars! We are joined on the tour by Cyrano De Bergerac and Baron Munchausen in the year 1641. Although the Baron is actually from 1790. A weird situation for historical personages. But then Cyrano and the Baron were also fictional characters. An imaginative tale about real imaginative gentlemen on a surreal trip, tripping over the real.
Then two short stops to conclude our voyages. You won’t even need an overnight bag.
With The Reluctant Heterosexual, Steven Paul Leiva concludes his thematic trilogy: The Love, Sex and Pursuit of Happiness Novels. All three novels examine these essential aspects of the human condition, with each focusing on one. By the Sea: A Comic Novel looks at our unease when unhappy. Bully 4 Love: A Rather Odd Love Story takes a skewed view of this most revered emotion. And The Reluctant Heterosexual, as the title predicts, concerns sex, which is not always the same as love, nor is it always a happy situation.
Subtitled A Tragicomedy in Four Movements A Prelude and An Interlude, each section of the novel, as in a musical composition, has its own tempo, mood, and form as it tells the story—and stories—of Robert Leslie Cromwell and Sandy Smith. Two Homo sapiens surviving and striving in the late 20th century.
Robert and Sandy are intelligent, creative, not unattractive, wealthy, married to each other, and in love. And yet their procreating bodies might as well be standing naked on a savanna in Africa in the late Pliocene Era.
It’s the sometimes-comical conflict between ancient bodies and modern culture. Can there possibly be a happy ending?
In a 1980s America different from our own, both familiar and not, Congress passed, and President Henshaw signed the Birth Cessation Act. Once it became law, no one would be allowed to have a child for twenty-five years, any woman under 24 weeks pregnant was required to have an immediate abortion, and all men were called up to report for a vasectomy.
“Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved.” Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb. By the early 80s, the government had statistical projections that the population growth was outpacing the available resources needed for all in America to live a comfortable and secure life. A situation that would inevitably lead to the chaos and violence of extreme civil unrest.
Most Americans, liking comfort and security, supported the government’s action. Most, but not all. And those who didn’t, including:
A world-famous female billionaire entrepreneur/inventor/film producer.
A major appliance salesman from Queens.
A well-to-do Manhattan college radical.
An unwed mother in Los Angeles who protests most horribly.
America’s premier pundit-columnist.
And a young man whose talks with his dead brother became loud enough to start a fresh new controversy in America.
This is a portrait of that controversy.
Retired History professor C.D. Beekman is known by the townspeople of Madison, California, as “the nicest man.” He’s always friendly and has kind words for everyone. When Professor Beekman prevents a mass murder at the local mall, he becomes famous far beyond Madison—he becomes a national celebrity. And when he puts forth the simple philosophy that Mass Murder isn’t Nice, he is dubbed “Mr. Nice Guy.” But is he? Is he truly Mr. Nice Guy? Or is he The Person Who Hated People? You decide.
“If I ruled the world...” is the refrain often heard coming from the lips of Joyce Bullock, four years beyond the age of fifty, only three pounds over the weight she should be, five-foot-seven with brown hair not yet gone grey. She is happily divorced. Or, rather, she refuses to be unhappy just because her husband had left her for a younger woman. She felt herself well rid of him, not because of the infidelity, but because his action was such a cliché. Joyce hated clichés, as she hated many things in the world, which seemed to be conspiring every day to piss her off. And so, “If I ruled the world...” was her mantra.
Then, one fine Spring day, the Universe decides to take a vacation and hands over the keys—metaphorically speaking—to Joyce. And so, what choice did she have? Joyce took over the world.
1:17 PM ON TUESDAY, APRIL 22, IN THE YEAR 2025
THE UNIVERSE BEGAN
Cosmologist Dr. Robert Porter is having a crisis of faith. Not of a faith he has lost, but of a faith he has gained. Robert now knew for a fact that the universe did not come into existence 13.8 billion years ago but rather precisely at what every person in the greater Los Angeles area would have considered to be 1:17 PM on Tuesday, April 22, in the year 2025 but was actually second one of hour one of day one of week one of month one of year one of the existence of the universe. Richard did not doubt that fact. In fact, he had total faith that it was true.
Includes the title piece written for the Los Angeles Times, and “The Man Who Was Himself,” Leiva’s memorial appreciation of Bradbury, commissioned by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America for the Winter 2012/13 edition of their quarterly magazine, The Bulletin. Other pieces were originally written for Neworld Review, KCET.org, and his personal blog. With a special foreword by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author David Brin.
My Books page on blog -- https://tinyurl.com/booksleiva
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