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The latest JET, titled JET – Mayhem, is now available on pre-order at Amazon, with a release date of October 13!

It can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/JET-Mayhem-Russell-Blake-ebook/dp/B0CJH331JK

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I just did an interview with the lovely Pam Stack, and discussed my 18 years in Mexico, as well as my bestselling non-fiction, Expat Secrets of Mexico. Worth a 20 minute listen if you are interested in what my life south of the border is like.

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The Eighteenth novel in the JET series just went live on Amazon, and it’s a real humdinger of a book, if I don’t mind saying so myself. All the usual twists and turns, with a host you won’t see coming.

I hate to give away the plot in advance, so that’s all I’ll say, but I’d imagine those who adore the series will love this installment.

You can find the book here.

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While you’re waiting for my next JET to be released in September, I thought I would recommend another thriller to occupy your time. My friend Ernest Dempsey just released his latest book, Heavy Lies the Crown, and I think you’ll like it.

The main character, Dak Harper, is a former Delta Force operator. After his commanding officer betrayed him, he picked up a new gig from a teenage millionaire with a penchant for finding stolen artifacts on the black market.

In this story, Dak goes on the hunt for the lost Welsh Crown of Prince Llywelyn that’s been missing over 700 years. The crown was purchased on the dark web by a mob boss in London, but a young upstart murdered him and stole the crown in a play for greater power. So Dak finds himself in the midst of a turf war, faced with enemies on all fronts.

I don’t usually recommend other authors. But this story has such a fun storyline, I thought I’d suggest it. And Ernest is a nice guy. And no, I don’t owe him money. Although I’m hoping he buys the first rounds whenever he makes it down to Mexico.

If you’re looking for something to while away the time, you could do worse than Heavy Lies the Crown. And the new JET is shaping up really well – one of my better efforts, if I say so myself! So stay tuned. I’m halfway through it, and tapping my fingers to nubs to get it done.

Honest.

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JET – Body Double, the seventeenth installment in the JET series (nineteenth if you count the pair of prequels) is at long last going live on Amazon!

You can find it here.

This one was a long time coming due to other commitments, and I suspect the next one will be nearly a year due to a new 12 book series I’ve agreed to co-author with a name author whose work I’ve long admired. So 2022 is largely spoken for with that occupying my time, but we shall see…

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At long last, the eleventh book in the bestselling The Day After Never series is finished, edited, proofed, and is live on Amazon!

I don’t want to say too much about it and give anything away, but it was tough to write. So tough that about halfway through I tossed the draft I had, and started again from scratch. I’m so glad I did, though, because what came out the other end of the sausage machine was infinitely superior to my original idea.

So stop whatever you’re doing and head over to Amazon and pick up your copy today. No time like the present, and nobody’s getting any younger. Hope you enjoy it.

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Somebody asked me about costs in Mexico, specifically in Colima, where I spend a lot of time these days.

I just ate breakfast. 3 eggs, scrambled with chorizo and cheese, beans on the side, with tortillas. A bottomless cup of locally grown coffee.

Cost was $4.25 USD. My friend had two giant quesadillas with chorizo inside, and coffee. Came to about the same.

Last night had a couple of beers at my favorite watering hole. $1 apiece. Pricier places may go as high as $2. Depends on the mood.

My electric bill for two months with AC running constantly in my office and all night in my bedroom: $100, or $50 a month. Gas runs about $15 a month for the water heater and dryer and stove. Water about the same.

Rent for 3BR, 3 bath houses in gated communities run from $500-$800, unfurnished. On the street, more like $400 and up.

My favorite soda is 50 cents per liter. Or about $1 for a two liter bottle. A taxi ride 3 miles across town is about $2. My cell phone with unlimited US and domestic calls, and 2 GB of data, is $10 a month. I’m on wireless everywhere I go as all restaurants have it, so I rarely exhaust that, at which point I re-up for $5 to last the rest of the month.

Homeowner’s dues on an 18 hole, 5 star golf course are about $175 a month. Gym and club membership, including two pools, two restaurants, a bar, pilates, spin, karate, aerobics classes is $125 a month, including all the golf you want to play per month (I don’t play, but still, WTAF). A visit to the hospital ER costs $25. About the same for a specialist in private practice, although you can go to a doctor next door to the plentiful pharmacies and pay $2-$5 for a general practitioner who will write a prescription for whatever ails you. And the meds will cost you next to nothing. A two tablet dose of Ivermectin costs $4. A month’s supply of blood pressure meds $10. And so on.

To say that life is inexpensive is an understatement.

Crime is non-existent in Colima, the capital city of Colima State. Which is confusing, because Colima State has a high murder rate due to cartel activity in the port city of Manzanillo, over an hour drive away, and Tecoman, which sits near the border of Michoacan and is a contested town for narco-trafficking (the cartels shoot each other’s street dealers in the bad areas on a daily basis, which is very much like Baltimore or South Chicago or Compton or Hunter’s Point or East Palo Alto or any other city’s drug dealing neighborhoods).

Colima City is 45 minutes from there, but key is that it is far inland, so off the narco-trafficking route up the Pacific coast, with really only one highway in and out, so no way for the bad guys to escape if they’re being bad. That, and in a city of 400K, everyone knows who the scumbags are, so it’s hard to be anonymous when committing crimes. Plus it isn’t a college town, so not a lot of young males between 17-22, which is the demographic that commits most petty crimes and drug offenses. Those folks go to Guadalajara, two hours away, for university and to get out of the small town as soon as they can, so there aren’t the unemployed youths that get up to no good in many cities.

Been here over a year, and loving every minute of it. Not because it’s a bargain, but because it’s a nice place to live. I’m in Guadalajara maybe 8 days a month, and in beach towns for relaxation about 5 – 7 each month, so I mix it up between the big cosmopolitan city and toes in the sand. With the money saved due to the cost of living I can easily afford a trip to PV or Barra Navidad or Nuevo Vallarta or Punta de Mita or Cabo every month without stretching the budget.

If that sounds amazingly idyllic, well, it is.

In other news, I managed to get banned from Facebook for three days by posting an opinion piece that conflicts with the official COVID narrative, including citations from official sources. It appears social media doesn’t want anyone questioning that narrative, and is working with the MSM and the world’s governments to quash any rational skepticism showing that the narrative is pure malarkey. You can find the post that got me banned, as well as several others you might be interested, at my new Russell Blake Uncensored site.

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I’m pleased to announce that I have created a new blog that will be devoted to non-authorly things that can get one censored on big tech platforms where only official narratives are allowed.

That blog is aptly titled Russell Blake Uncensored, and can be found here. You might wish to bookmark it or sign up to be notified whenever I post a new one. I’ll be covering all the topics I’m hesitant to address on my FB page for fear of anonymous “fact checkers” deciding to memory hole me for wrongthink, which is happening increasingly all over the world.

This page will continue to be dedicated to topics of interest to authors and readers of my action adventure fiction.

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Hard to believe that ten years ago I published my first novel on Amazon kindle. Since then sixty-something books have gone under the bridge, and I’m grateful that I’ve managed to develop an audience for my work, such as it is.

The self-publishing landscape has changed so radically in that ten years it’s almost unrecognizable. Back in 2011, you got free organic visibility from Amazon in a host of ways, so discovery was relatively easy via free first books in a series, or via bookbub, or by pricing low, or by including a novel in a bundle with other authors. It was the Wild West, and like all gold rushes, everyone involved knew it was destined to end.

And end it did. Nowadays, ebooks aren’t new, or news. The novelty of getting a tome for a few bucks isn’t a viable discovery tactic. Likewise, free doesn’t do much, as there are millions of ebooks out there, many of them free, or worse, perceived as free (value-less) via subscription services. The also-bought widget on Amazon is constantly being changed, and disappears periodically, so that discovery tool is iffy at best. Which leaves advertising, or more appropriately, pay-to-play, which is how most retail businesses operate once they are mature, which the ebook business is.

Most authors don’t have the money, or the time, to mount effective advertising campaigns that will earn them more than beer money, if that – partially due to a glut of the desperate who will gladly bleed cash just to get their labor of love seen. Which means in an auction system like Amazon’s, the price to advertise rises until it isn’t a money maker for most. Even a few years ago you could see double the money on ad spend, but over time that dropped to 50 cents of additional revenue for every dollar spent, and then 25, and then…well, you get the picture.

After ten years, I’ve slowed my production to a trickle, partially because during this time of pandemic-driven social upheaval I find it difficult to concentrate on writing the next one, as it seems trivial and meaningless compared to what is happening in the real world. Just keeping up with the daily flood of new information and revelations seems to be a full time job, and it’s hard to immerse myself in the page when the world seems to be headed for a train wreck of biblical proportions. So I’ve spent much of my time digesting info and writing social commentary on my FB feed, which I’m going to stop very soon in favor of a new blog where censorship won’t be as big an issue as the major tech platforms, where anything that diverges from the groupthink consensus of the official narrative is branded fake news and censored lest folks actually get multiple viewpoints to consider…and make the “wrong” decision.

As to writing, I’m working on the latest Day After Never, and when I’m done with it, I’m seriously thinking about taking six months or a year off to focus on other things. I have numerous projects vying for my attention, and it just seems that with the body of work I’ve created, there’s no shortage of Russell Blake material to read. I’m considering extending my “Retirement Secrets of Mexico” non-fiction into a series of Retirement Secrets books, to include other locales of interest to folks who are researching expatriating, but again, the time involved may not be worth the ultimate reward. I have restaurants, construction projects, an expat community I’m helping with, a crypto project I’m exploring…all of which take up time, leaving precious little for writing.

That said, I can’t imagine not writing, as it is an integral part of my life and personality. So it will be a hiatus, not an abandonment. And I may do a co-writing project with an author whose work I enjoy, so anything can happen, and my hiatus may turn out to be extremely short lived. We’ll see. One thing I’ve learned after a decade as a vocational scribbler is to never say never, and to expect the unexpected. I periodically am approached by production companies about developing one of my series, but have resigned myself to low expectations on that, as Hollywood tends to talk big but is easily distracted, and so far has yet to come to the table with anything worth serious consideration.

I’ve been lucky enough to make a lot of good friends during this decade of publishing, and more than my share of enemies and critics, which goes with the territory anytime you experience success. I consider myself fortunate to have an eclectic bunch of fellow travelers I would have never known had I not sat down at the keyboard and begun my first story, and for that I’m eternally grateful. As to my enemies and critics, as always, they can bite me, and I plan to live to dance a jig on their forgettable cold dank graves.

So that is my state of the union at ten years in. I believe the next six months will be some of the strangest and most dangerous of my lifetime, and my plan is to concentrate on preparation and projects with huge payout potentials while I decompress from the grind of producing a novel every six weeks, which pace I maintained for nine years. My gut says I’ll be happier generating a couple novels a year that interest me rather than treating it like a job, which I have for too long. It is a job, and it’s one of the best in the world, but I’ve been asking myself for some time do I want to live to work, or work to live, and it seems sensible with time my most precious limited resource, to spend more attention on the living part, and less on the working part. I’m sure I’ll get pushback on that from some readers, but truthfully the old bear doesn’t know how many summers he has left to come out of the cave, and nobody ever lay on their death bed wishing they’d worked more (cliche, but true).

I’ll post more info on my new blog, tentatively titled “The New Mexican,” shortly. It will be a hodgepodge of my usual politically incorrect views, of expat thoughts and tips (after living in Mexico 16 years), of societal commentary, of economic topics I find interesting, of crypto musings, of pandemic reporting as events unfold, etc. In other words like my FB feed used to be, before every third post received a warning label or a threat to block. Watch this space for more on that, but probably not until I finish Day After Never 11.

So in summary, it’s been a hell of a decade run, and I plan to continue as before, but at a more sane pace, with an emphasis on enjoyment, not on production. Because all work and no play…

Well. You know.

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A new interview with yours truly just went live. For those wondering about my murky past, or whose shirts I wear, or whether I put the toilet paper on the older inny or outy, this one’s for you.

In it I share my collected wisdom from decades on the planet.

Which means it’s a short interview most should be able to manage in a couple minutes.

Here’s the link.

Enjoy.

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