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Seasons of Music and Mystery , the first book in the Lady Seis Mysteries , is now available for preorder on Amazon.

I uploaded the files for Seasons of Music and Mystery , the first book in the Lady Seis Mysteries series. All it needs now is a cover, and I just commissioned one. Release is scheduled for March 21st.

I've commissioned the cover for Near Misses , and uploaded/set up everything. In about 10 days, I'll upload the cover and Near Misses will be available for preorder. The release will be May 21st. Near Misses is the four short stories I submitted to the Writers of the Future Contest that received honorable mentions (never did crack the top three). It's four widely diverse fantasy stories, all good enough that the Writers of the Future judges thought they almost made the cut.

When you build a table to check how much name overlap there is in the four stories. There are two Nicholases as central characters in two stories, but one is in the first story, and the other is in the last, so I'm going to leave it. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. The pool of names in Elizabethan England wasn't big (~50 per gender), so the same names are going to come up again and again. Elizabeth itself is extremely popular, especially toward the end of the period;

The streets of Tudor London hide many secrets, good and bad, natural and otherwise, and those who seem most blessed may not be. Take Sybil Trevor, Baroness of Seis and guest of the Queen. You might imagine she has nothing better to do than play her music, compose her songs, and be waited on by her troubled but loyal maid, Skade. But she does have a few problems: A priceless vase has disappeared Magpies as smart as people are looting the palace Her ruff needs starching A fake

I'm working with an artist to create the cover for Seasons of Music and Mystery , but I haven't had a chance to follow up and formally commission it, since so much else has been going on.

Sold six books and gave out a lot of cards at FenCon. Money-wise, that means I broke even. There were two ebooks right afterward that might be someone following up from FenCon.

I'll be at FenCon in the Dealers' room all weekend. If you're there, this is your chance to meet me in person and get an autographed book.

The Right Street , the third story in Seasons of Mystery and Song , the first book in the Lady Seis series, is complete. This story sees Lady Seis herself incapacitated, so she employs new character Jerome Street of the royal guard as her eyes and ears. Because it's never too early in a series to say, "Let's do something a little different." Now I need to edit the last story, To Drive the Cold Winter Away , and commission the cover, and we'll be ready to go.

A second review was posted for Traitor Devil , this one also positive. I think after at least three more, there will be some point to going back to using Amazon Ads. I tried the ads for months, and people were clicking through with reasonable frequency but never buying, so the ads were costing me money and getting me nothing. It is understandable: something looks interesting, but there are no reviews, so it's not worth the risk. I've gone through that logic myself.

Revised Seven Magpies in a Tree with the feedback I got from my writers' group. The overall response was positive, but I shifted things a bit, establishing the stakes just after the magpie escapes the initial encounter rather than leaving it until a later scene. I also cut down the meeting with the queen, since that was mostly about setting the stakes, which was now done earlier.

The first draft for To Drive the Cold Winter Away is now complete. It turned out to be 21,477 words, which seems to be the length my stories end up being. Guess it was premature to think it would be novel length. I'm now going to briefly work on something else for about a week to let it ferment. In the lazy old days I'd let it ferment six weeks, but I'm anxious to get the book out and the new series started. I'll probably commission the cover soon, so keep checking back to s

I took advantage of the winter storm (not nearly as bad as predicted where I am, but there's still ice everywhere and Texas drivers don't have a clue how to drive on it) to get some writing done. I've written 4068 words for next week, and that brings the total for To Drive the Cold Winter Away to 18481 words and we're in the home stretch plot-wise, so it's looking more like it's going to be the fourth story in the first book after all.

I've added another 4016 words to To Drive the Cold Winter Away . The current total is 14402, with ~40,000 words being minimum novel length. I'm almost at page 6 out of 10 of the outline, and editing will probably extend it a little more, so it looks like we may well end up with a standalone novel. But that makes it awkward to start with as a mystery series, since the central plot is about a duel our heroes are trying to stop. But then, a lot of the cozy mysteries I've read ar

4125 words for this week. I've been doing 3000/week for years, so I'll have to wait and see if I can keep this pace up. That puts To Drive the Cold Winter Away at ~10,000 words currently, and we're about halfway through the outline, so it's looking like more of a 20,000 word story. But I anticipate fleshing some things out in editing, so it might end up substantially longer. It may end up being a standalone novel yet. Plotwise, our heroes have reached Kent and started their

Now that the outline is complete for To Drive The Cold Winter Away , I've started on the actual writing. I've put in an extra six hours this week and gotten 4000 words in results. My average rate is about 500 words/hour, so it's going faster than expected. Based on how far into the outline the 4000 words have gotten, it's probably not going to end up at standalone novel length.

I've completed the outline for To Drive the Cold Winter Away , which came out to 7011 words, about the same length as the outline for Traitor Devil . So it does look like this will end up as a novel-length project. I'll have to see how the outline translates into text. If it ends up that long, To Drive the Cold Winter will be the first book in the Lady Seis series, and Seasons of Song and Mystery will be the second, once I come up with a replacement story for the season of

Well, that's interesting. The outline for To Drive the Cold Winter Away just keeps getting longer and longer (4072 words and counting). To a certain extent, this is a matter of the number of plot threads involved and keeping them all in balance. But I'm thinking it might end up being novel length: we'll have to see how long the outline ends up being and how the outline notes translate into text. And I'm not worried about bloating because it's all about the plot threads getti

Sorting through plot ideas and building characters for To Drive the Cold Winter Away . I've got time off work after Christmas, so I may get a long stretch of time to get a lot of writing done. Or maybe I'll go to zoos and museums. The first book of the Lady Seis historical fantasy cozy mysteries is tentatively scheduled for late January, with a preliminary title of Seasons of Song and Mystery: Adventures of the Lady Seis

Got some disapponting feedback on Seven Magpies in a Tree and The Right Street. I think I need to make the characters more distinctive and amusing.