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Near Misses: My Honorable Mentions from the Writers of the Future Contest is available tomorrow!

My fifth book, Near Misses: My Honorable Mentions from the Writers of the Future Contest, drops on May 21st. This is a standalone work of four unrelated short stories. If you're unfamiliar with me as an author, this is a short, inexpensive book, so it's a low-cost way to see if my prose works for you.

I advertised Seasons of Music and Mystery on Amazon Ads, and put the Kindle version on sale. People clicked through on the ads at a slow rate, but after 20 clickthroughs, no one bought a copy, so I ended the campaign. Nobody got a copy on sale, either.

Started Amazon Ads for Seasons of Music and Mystery. Hundreds have seen the ad, no one has clicked through yet. The kindle version is also on sale until the 28th, and you still have 12 hrs to get it for 99 cents.

I've overhauled the site, adding a new page for my new series the Lady Seis Mysteries with some explanation about the series and links. I've also added the Lady Seis characters to the Dramatis Personae page. Last but not least, I've revamped the navigation to make it obvious those things at the top are buttons to click, and not random words. I'm wondering if my high bounce rate might be because people don't realize there are other pages to look at.

Slacked off on posting to the blog here, but I'm back now. Fair Means or Foul is now my official novel-length next project, and I'm working on the plotting. There are four threads to manage, and I'm having some trouble keeping them all in sync and having a sense of progress. This was often a problem with real pulp-era novels; there's a lot of running around and narrow escapes without any real sense the story is going anywhere.

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