When I saw them on the last day of Renovation, Francis Hamit and Leigh Strother-Vien were just fine. They gave me a review copy of The Queen of Washington, Francis’ new Civil War/espionage/alternate history novel. Unfortunately, soon afterwards they were struck by a sudden and severe illness:
A day after Leigh and I returned from our six-weeks long road trip we were mugged by a gang of microbes and given a new kind of pneumonia that they are still trying to figure out. We thought it was flu and would be gone in a few days. It wasn’t and was not. On September 30th we went to the ER at the VA hospital in Westwood. Leigh was released, although still very ill and I was admitted, to spend a week on IV fluids and antibiotics and oxygen before I could again breathe well enough to go home. We are told we will be weeks, possibly months recovering and are relying on our part timer to do a lot of things we normally do ourselves as a matter of routine. We have canceled all events just as the next book The Queen of Washington is about to be released.
Apparently someone at Amazon.com decided this book will be a best seller. They are pricing it at 34% off. An almost eleven dollar savings off the $32.00 price of the hardbound. Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million have similar offers. We are pleasantly perplexed by this since we get the same money per copy back. The discount is out of their end I’m assuming that the five star reviews for The Shenandoah Spy helped drive this decision. Here is a link to their page for The Queen of Washington.
As for the health crisis it is one. I damn near died. Almost beat Steve Jobs to the exit door. It gave me a lot of time to think. In the meantime, people of good will, who want to help us out a bit need only buy the new book on the offers mentioned above. Sales beget sales. And if you haven’t read The Shenandoah Spy please consider buying that as well. It’s still in print and in e-book formats.
Francis also says he is willing to send review copies of The Queen of Washington to qualified reviewers. It does slip into the “Alternative History” sub-genre of S-F, so those reviewers are welcome. Contact him via e-mail — Francishamit (at) earthlink (dot) net.
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Mike: To be accurate this thing hit us about a month after we saw you in Reno. In between I did books signings at Hastings Entertainment stores in Logan , Utah, Rock Springs and Laramie, Wyoming, and, after Bubonicon, Albuquerque. Then we went to Texas to clear out Leigh’s house she inherited there and try to get it fixed up as a rental property. That turned into three weeks of very hard work. So we were pretty worn out by the time we got home and suspect the trigger for the pneumonia was some people in Kingman who all seemed to have a cold. It hit in a matter of hours, from sniffles to real problems breathing or even moving. That whole trip seemed snake bit from the beginning, although we had a wonderful time meeting people at the signings I did.
I’m very sorry Leigh and Mr. Hamit became so ill — that it appears to be an unknown strain of bacterial pneumonia is especially distressing. Has there been a similar outbreak in Kingman?
David: We were at a hotel when we think we were exposed but we were also considerably run-down by six weeks on the road. I think this is an opportunistic disease that most people would not catch if they took care of themselves. Plus I an an Agent Orange vet and my immune system is compromised by that. It will take awhile to come back from this. I’m still getting vertigo and had to make a second trip to the ER for dehydration. It’s not one strain of bacteria but several working together. I’m going to get a copy of my records when I’m at the VA next time and see what the tests showed. This does hit fast and hard. You go from sniffles to a high fever and lots of hacking and coughing in just a few hours. It looks like flu but isn’t. One of the problems with the hotel scenario is that everyone who was exposed in Kingman went elsewhere the next day before it became obvious they had caught something.