Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to "Cat’s Paw".

The "Cat’s Paw" campaign is running in conjunction with the Inkshares Mystery & Thriller Contest. This means that, although your pre-order confirmation emails mention a 30 January 2019 deadline, our real deadline is actually 21 November 2018. It also means that, until then, we’re counting the number of readers -- that is, the individual people ordering -- not the number of books ordered as is usually the case. For this reason, I’m asking each of you to see if you can’t get at least one friend on board. I’m sure you all know at least one person who’d be interested.

We’re at a rather precarious 2nd place in the contest at the moment. I don’t mind saying that it has me feeling rather anxious, though of course we’re only a week into the contest and a lot can happen over the next two months.

I’ll discuss more about "Cat’s Paw" and the inspirations behind it in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to this Facebook fundraiser a friend of mine has started for the American Cancer Society. Cancer is a nasty business, to put it lightly, and these people are doing some very good work.

Keep up the good fight,

- Christopher Huang

Thank you everyone who helped launch GUMSHOE RULES this weekend! I’m happy to report that my book is currently #1 in the Inkshares Mystery & Thriller contest. I sent out a lot of email these last few days and you came through with nearly 100 orders totaling more than 130 books (and counting) which puts me at almost 20% of the goal. I am grateful to everyone who ordered.

The challenge going forward will be how to scale this to get to the finish line as I’m rapidly running out of people to email. So if I can ask one more favor from everyone: please help me get the word out about this book. If you can email it to a family member, friend, stranger,  or strange family member, post it online on Slack, Facebook, Twitter or otherwise let people know about this project, it is greatly appreciated. Send them a link to: https://www.inkshares.com/books/gumshoe-rules 

 I am currently awaiting feedback from my developmental editor to revise the third draft. I’m sure there is a lot of work ahead of me, but it is great to know there’s an audience waiting for the book.  I’ll do my best to keep you posted on my progress and I’m happy to answer any questions that you have. In future updates I’ll tell you more about GUMSHOE RULES, some if it’s influences, why I chose Inkshares, the value of a creative side hustle, the selection of a pen-name and more.
Again, thank you for your support!
--Z.Z. Traver
PS. Here’s a photo of me with one of my favorite authors, Ian Rankin, whom I met at Bouchercon, a writer’s conference I attended earlier this month. He was very gracious but he did make a weird face for the camera.