Tag Archives: thedancingqueen

99-Cent Spring/Summer Blow-out

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To celebrate the end of spring and the arrival of summer, this week ending Sunday, June 28th, I’m having a blow-out sale, with all my books available for 99 cents each. What a deal! And with their elegant new covers, they’re going like hot-cakes would if you slapped elegant new covers on them and marked them down to 99 cents. Wow!

Also, the new cover design was the final piece holding back paper production, so print editions will be coming available very soon, within days.

What great news for people who love good books!

The Dancing Queen Is 99 cents May 15-24

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[Cover of The Dancing Queen: A Jack Trexlor Novel by T.F. Torrey] In honor of the beautiful new covers, The Dancing Queen is priced to move at 99 cents for a limited time. Don’t miss it!

Be warned, though: It is a dark, intense, and wild ride, with potentially lethal amounts of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Side effects may include sleeplessness, loss of concentration, a sense of foreboding, and shaking hands, though these symptoms usually subside after a few hours. The author disclaims any responsibility for real or imagined damage resulting from reading the book. Try to remember it is only a story, and certainly not semiautobiographical.

May 15-24 at Amazon.

Free Promotion Wrapping Up

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My promotion for The Dancing Queen is wrapping up today. Thanks to everyone for helping to make it very successful. It was a lot of work for me (and taking care of a sick little girl didn’t make things easier), but I exceeded the goals I set for myself, and things should be smoother and better for the next promotion. Which will be this coming weekend. Thanks again to everyone for your help and support. If you haven’t picked it up yet, get your free copy of The Dancing Queen here:

And tell your friends. Thanks again to everyone.

The Dancing Queen E-Book Now Available

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It took a long time to get here, but I always knew this day would come. It is my pleasure to announce that today, more than a decade after writing the first pages, The Dancing Queen is ready to read, for sale now at Amazon. Wow!

The Dancing Queen follows the tribulations of Jack Trexlor as he works at topless bar, falls in love with a dancer, and uses his motorcycle for illegal escapades. Few will be surprised to learn that this is a recipe for epic disaster. I am very happy with how it turned out, and I’m psyched to have it available.

Before you run off and dive into the text, however, let me warn you that The Dancing Queen is not a carefree romp through the Phoenix of 1991. This is Jack’s story from his point of view, and he holds little back. If you’re turned off by sex and drugs and rock and roll, this is not the book for you.

On a fun note, this book really emphasizes the unreliable narrator aspect present in all the Crazy Jack Trexlor books. The story is not an attempt at objective truth, per se, and it isn’t even Jack in the moment; it is Jack telling the story of what happened from a later date (the present tense at the beginning and end). As such, it is colored on two levels: first, obviously, Jack is slanting the story of the events into the larger narrative of his life, but also in his description of what it was like in the moment, he is limited by what he thought was true, and what he thinks happened is not always what really happened. Some of these are more obvious, for instance, Jack’s troubles with his father. Others are more subtle. For instance, why did Shayla leave? who got Brandy the job at Sally’s? What really happened between Brandy and Rico? And what was Raven thinking in Chapter 1? Hint: Jack totally missed it.

Today, The Dancing Queen is available at Amazon for the special release price of 99 cents. This is short notice for weblog readers, but my newsletter subscribers have enjoyed early access at the special price all weekend. Guess what you should do.

Also, The Dancing Queen is participating in the Kindle Unlimited program, so if you’re a member of Amazon’s all-you-can-read program (as I am), you can read this book for free. How can you beat that?

One final note: right up until the final upload, every time I incorporated changes from proofreading, I made more changes. In the end, I may have introduced some new errors. ~~If~~ When you find typos in The Dancing Queen (or any of my things), please let me know right away.

This is a very happy day. The first trilogy of Jack Trexlor books is finally done. Yay! If you haven’t read them yet, I might suggest starting at the chronological beginning with The Crazy Jack, then reading The Desert King, and finally The Dancing Queen. The books stand alone just fine, but some parts reference parts in other books, and those work better if you encounter them in order. One question you’ll probably have at the end of The Dancing Queen, if you’ve read the other two books, is: Wait a second! Is that the same two guys from the other two books? Has it really been them this whole time, coming to this end? And the answer is yes, it was them every time. Cool, right?

Now, I’m off to work finishing Taxi Adventure, which is completely different in almost every way except being a good read. I expect to have that complete in the next two weeks. Don’t fall behind, get busy with Jack today!

This is a great day.

That Crazy Jack

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I’m making good progress on the line edits for The Dancing Queen, and that has me thinking about the future. The Dancing Queen will complete the first three books featuring Jack Trexlor. After this book, I will be blasting out a super-secret trilogy as fast as I can, hopefully in no more than one month. After that, I have planned two more books related to the trilogy and also super secret. Then Spring Rains. Then, maybe, I will be back writing about Jack.

I have three more Jack Trexlor books in active development, as in, they need to be written, and I am (and have been for some time) plotting and planning them. They are The Stolen Four (1981-1984), which comes between The Crazy Jack (1980) and The Desert King (1985) and tells the story of Jack’s time in the Arizona Insane Asylum, The Tonto Ten (1986), which comes after The Desert King and tells the story of when Jack went back to the desert and fell in love with Sylvia, and The Final Five (1990), which comes before The Dancing Queen (1991) and tells the story of Jack caring for his mother in her last days. All these stories are referenced from the other books, so they have to be written. And actually, I can’t wait to get into them.

But wait, there’s more! Jack’s mother’s illness plays a role in The Tonto Ten (1986) and defines The Final Five (1990), but another book needs to come in the four years between them. Right now, I have no idea what that book is, but I know it has to exist. Then, another super secret plot twist hinted at the end of The Desert King spawns yet another book. I know what sparks the action in this (currently untitled) one, but I don’t know much beyond that and the fact that it takes place in 2003, when Jack is 41 years old. That book ties up all the loose ends that I currently know of (except one), but it leaves unresolved what becomes of Jack. Fans will be happy to know that soon after that book, he actually, finally, truly, at long last, becomes a working artist, albeit of the starving variety. The last Jack Trexlor book that I know of right now has him living on Roosevelt Row in Phoenix, making his own art in his own gallery, and thriving on First Fridays. However, his fragile success is upended when a young lady (what else? and oh, yes, the final loose end, deliciously wicked fun) comes to him for help, and does Jack turn down the request? No, he does not. He never has, and he isn’t starting now. This book not only completes Jack’s journey to the life he has been seeking for over twenty years, it sets the stage for his future adventures. Cool, right?

So that’s it, the nine Jack Trexlor books I have currently written, in development, or in mind. How long, an astute observer might ask, could this be expected to go on? The answer, which might surprise you, is not long. My plan all along has been for there to be 13 Jack Trexlor books, one for every card in a standard suit. I currently have King, Jack, and Queen. Coming next are Four, Ten, and Five. On the horizon are Ace and two more not currently determined, but maybe Two and Three. That would leave only Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine to fill the suit. What then? Right now, silencio. That’s right, Jack spends most of his life getting his feet under him to live the life he dreamed of when he was 18, then he only gets to live that life for five books. I don’t know how he ends then, but I’m pretty sure he does. Shocking, right? I can’t believe I’m doing this to him, but I think I am.

Anyway, all that’s a long way off, surely no less than a year or two, even with my new, streamlined, awesome work arrangements. Now, I’m going to get back to work on the line edits for The Dancing Queen, which is turning out both terrible and great. I can’t wait to release it. If you haven’t read The Crazy Jack and The Desert King yet, go get up to speed with those now.

The Dancing Queen Rewriting Complete

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Hallelujah! The rewriting phase of The Dancing Queen is complete. All in all, it was 63 items of work. Mostly it was making minor changes here and there, like mentioning the sun going down. Many, however, were making minor changes everywhere, such as changing the names of characters. And, as the phase is named, many of the changes required rewriting parts of scenes or entire scenes as locations were moved, motivations changed, and relationships altered. Some of the changes were easy, but some of them were difficult. In the end, it took a lot longer than I expected, mostly because I wrote the first draft largely by the seat of my pants and the first parts of the story didn’t jive with the latter parts. Finally, though, the story should be coherent from cover to cover. Next will be the line edit phase, which will take a good chunk of time, but hopefully not more than a week, and it should be quick to publication after that. First, though, I’m going to celebrate a little tonight.

If you would like to be a beta reader for The Dancing Queen, now would be a good time to send me an e-mail.

The Dancing Queen Headed For Home

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I didn’t notice at the time, but a few days ago, The Dancing Queen passed the point where it can be read as a complete book, with no extraneous content or unwritten gaps or FIXME notices or anything of the sort. It still needs a few changes here and there, and then the overall line edit and proofreading, but now and for the rest of its life, it will be a book that someone could pick up and read. What a great milestone! It is truly on the homestretch now, perhaps only a week or so.