Death on a Small, Dark Lake (ePub)

regrets.
•The Empty Tarmac of a Long-Abandoned Airport. Poems about having a midlife crisis.
•Love Poems A compilation
•Pray for Me: 22 Poems Probably Slandering God and Jesus
•Ballads from an Unlucky Fisherman: Poems from a fisherman
•Tweetable Limericks. 60 limericks small enough to be tweets
•Hiking Poems.

Co-Authored Poetry Chapbooks
•Who Would Be a God? Susan Ioannou and Lenny debate the merits of being a god.
•How to Dance Naked in the Moonlight. Katherine L. Gordon (Celtic pagan) and Lenny (skeptic) confront the ceremony.
•Cats and Dogs. With I. B. Iskov
•For Ko Aye Aung: A Plea for His Release from Prison. For Amnesty International, with other poets.

Non-Fiction Chapbooks
•If You Condemn Gays: The Bible on Homosexuality and Other Items.
•The Architecture of Suburban West Kitchener. A light look at house styles.
•The Architecture of The University of Waterloo. A light look at the campus buildings.
•Making Tourist Attractions for Towns and Small Cities. Advice.
•Technological Solutions to Global Warming.
•Hyphens: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century.
•Colons and Semicolons: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century.
•How to Review Draft Technical Writings
•Rebecca’s Trail (Grand River Trail) in Winter
•7 Temples to Bill Gates: a modern mystery
•The Great God Pan - or Not
•Two in a Tent: Camping Humor.
•Why Haven't Aliens Contacted us?

Songbooks
•Dance Songs for Weddings Available on Smashwords
•Canoe Songs. part of a set of six chapbooks about the love of canoeing. With illustrations.. Available on Smashwords
•18 Dingbat Songs for Kids Available on Smashwords

I’d like to thank all the people who downloaded my writings. And I’d like to thank Smashwords for making them available to the world.
I started out as a poet, and spent most of my life producing poems. Some of them are really fine poems, but, of course, the monetary value of poetry in this world isn’t much. Actually, I once calculated poetry has a negative monetary value; poets are lucky if they don’t have to pay people to listen to them.
But I always admired people who told me they were “writing a novel.” I don’t know why, but I did. So eventually, I sat down and wrote a novel, just to show I could actually do it. The result was Death on a Small, Dark Lake, more than two thousand copies of which have been downloaded. It wasn’t really very good, but at least I could say, “I wrote a novel!” I stuck to what I knew best, canoeing and the lake country north of Peterborough, Ontario, the edge of Canada’s lake country.
I wrote Death on a Rocky Little Island in an effort to make some more believable characters, but I can’t really say I succeeded. People have downloaded a few more copies of that, so maybe it was a bit better constructed than the first novel. It included canoes, of course.
Then one of my friends taunted me into doing something for NaNoWriMo, the endeavor in which a person tries to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I was, er, a few days over, but I got it done. It turned out to be a bit incoherent in spots, but in general, a lot of fun; I recommend it, if your standards aren’t too high. And there are no canoes in it.
By that time, I figured I could write something “literary.” The result – with more canoes of course – was Last Exit to Pine Lake. If it’s less fun, well, it’s meant to be. If most people don’t like it, well, that’s normal for literary novels, so it doesn’t bother me.
My literary bent done, I wrote Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees. It was intended to be fun, and it’s lots better than the first two novels I wrote. I even put myself, in a canoe, as a minor character.
Then I thought I’d just write a novel that would sell. For money, like. Smashwords said romance generally sold well, so I wrote Fire and Spark, under the name, “Laura Singer.” (You can search for it.) It wasn’t all that bad, for a guy’s first romance novel. Really, it is, although my wife said it should be subtitled, Five Canoes; No Sex. I again added myself as a minor character. But it didn’t sell, so I added it to my list of free books on Smashwords. You’re welcome.
Last fall, I finished another book that I thought would actually sell, Marley Was Dead: A Christmas Carol Mystery. My wife thought it was really good, mostly because of the historical details of social life. It didn’t sell, of course, so it’s free now. You’re welcome, again.
As for the poetry, the most popular are Hiking Poems and 21 Poems for Love, Weddings, and Anniversaries.
And then there’s the rest. The opinion pieces are just my explorations of things that I wanted to know more about. I studied the subject, briefly, and published my findings. They’re not scholarly, but well worth what you’ll pay for them. A few are getting outdated, but nobody’s written to me to ask for updates.
If you want to learn more about any of my writings, email me at lennypoet@hotmail.ca.