Happy Bookiversary!

Happy Bookiversary, Two Over Easy All Day Long!

In case you are not steeped in the verbiage of publishing, a “bookiversary” is exactly what it sounds like: the anniversary of publication.

Two Over Easy All Day Long was published on May 1, 2024.

My how time flies! Except . . . not really. I’ve seen writing a book compared to pregnancy and giving birth. If so, this book had a gestation period of over ten years.

(For those of you who have never been pregnant,
or never lived with a pregnant person,
that’s a long time.
Or, as Luis the shifty-eyed detective
—who has most assuredly never been pregnant—
would say:
a long friggin’ time.)

And if writing a book is like giving birth, promoting a book is like parenting a newborn: exhausting, rife with mistakes, and riddled with questions to which everyone else seems to have answers.

One piece of advice that’s bandied about is that authors should not rest on their, er, laurels after publication, but should quickly write another book. (All while parenting a newborn [novel] and, if you’re like me and most other writers, working a day job, too. “Sigh” is inadequate to express my feelings about that.)

I promised readers a sequel to Two Over Easy All Day Long, and that is most assuredly in the works. But, as mentioned, the gestation period for the first novel was ten years. I’m also working on publication of Jaysus, MooMoo, and The Immortal Woos. (Email me if you’d like more information!) In other words, neither the sequel nor Jaysus, MooMoo, and The Immortal Woos is likely to be available soon.

In the meantime, The Dogs of Looser Island: Who Laughs Last launches on Substack beginning May 3, 2025.  Subscribe and find more information here sharilane.substack.com (@sharilane) and here www.alaughingdog.com. If you like what you see, please share!

Here’s the scoop: like The Dogs of Looser Island: What the Dogs Know (© Shari Lane 2022), Who Laughs Last will be published in serialized format, with new episodes dropping twice a week for about four months. Also like the 2022 episodes, a central set of events is introduced in the first episodes, and later episodes explore the lives of other characters touched by those events.

Unlike What the Dogs Know, the episodes will be available only on Substack, with episodes sent to subscribers by email. Free subscribers will receive announcements and random, story-related Musings, as well as the first part of every episode. Paid subscribers will receive entire episodes, plus access to prior episodes in the archives.

And of course, with or without a subscription you can always head over to www.alaughingdog.com to see the photos of readers’ pets, past and present Musings, contact information, and the Disclaimer (a mildly entertaining explanation about the fact that the Looser Island stories are fiction—you’re welcome to try to identify one of the San Juan Islands or Gulf Islands as the “real” Looser Island, if that tickles your fancy, but it is an enterprise doomed to failure, because there is no island that really “is” Looser Island).

Check out the Prologue on Substack
or on the Dogs website,
and watch for the first episode on May 3, 2025.

Photo by Hannah Lim on Unsplash

Two Over Easy All Day Long News

The Kirkus Review is out, and I am so very proud. Read the review here. Excerpts: “Lane is a talented stylist, and her prose glistens” and Two Over Easy All Day long is “[a] quirky murder mystery with a wonderful sense of place.” 

Book Review

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (Ballantine Books 2022) was given to me by my dad, who knows how much I love words and women’s history, making this a perfect gift.

Esme assists her father in defining words for the Oxford English Dictionary, still a work in progress in the early 1900s. An unexpected pregnancy, World War I, true love and deep loss, and woven through the book, the fight for women’s suffrage. Esme discovers that the words society ignores and refuses to acknowledge, especially words used by and about women, tend to end up defining women and their worth.  

A lovely read, and definitely recommended!