Winter Holidays And A Mystery

The mystery is a mystery story that I have in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “Serving Process” is a rainy Oregon story with a bit of a twist. You can get a copy here. The complete volume of last year’s Holiday Spectacular hit the virtual shelves this week! Thirty-eight stories about various winter holidays (including a June holiday from Australia). The stories […]

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News Update…Featuring Diving, Fey, Spade/Paladin, Short Fiction, and More!

Whoa. This fall, I put off my announcements waaaaaaay too long. I actually missed letting you know about “DNF,” the short story of mine that was in the 80th anniversary issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Good news: you can still get copies, either from EQMM’s site or on Amazon or other sites. The bad news is that the secondary sites charge an arm and […]

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Stories, More Diving, and a Half-Off Sale

I get busy, and I forget to update you folks, and then all of the news piles up into a big…news pile. (Okay, you know what I mean.) Let’s go by deadline. First, WMG Publishing is holding a half-off online workshops sale. We did this when COVID started to encourage people to stay in and learn. We hoped it would be a one-shot. It wasn’t. […]

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Recommended Reading List: May, 2017

It took nearly half the month before I had anything to recommend, even though I’ve been reading like crazy. That’s unusual for me. Usually I find something I like enough to share with all y’all. This time, my problem wasn’t that I read bad stuff. I was reading forgettable stuff. As in, I couldn’t remember what was happening when I picked the book up again. […]

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In Sunlight or In Shadow

I’m proud to announce that my Kris Nelscott short story, “Still Life 1931,” appears in In Sunlight Or In Shadow, an anthology based on the paintings of Edward Hopper and edited by Lawrence Block. I’m in incredible company, and the reviews on this book are incredible. You can see some of them on the publisher’s website by clicking here. The story follows a character of […]

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Business Musings: Serious Writer Voice

A lot of the stories I read this past year had wonderful plots. They had great characters and lovely twists. The stories were published, remember, and so they all had something unusual, something strong.

But that something generally wasn’t voice….

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Overdue News

Here’s the overdue news from December…

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Recommended Reading List: December, 2014

Not quite as many books, articles, or stories to recommend from my December reading as I found in my November reading, but I read just as much. One of my favorite novelists disappointed me greatly with the ending of his latest novel. He badly telegraphed a “twist,” and it came—I’m not kidding—on the very last page of the novel. The end. The abrupt ending left […]

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Short Stories, Discoverability, and More

This was the post I had planned to make last week, and ended up putting up the kitten video instead. If you haven’t seen the video, click here. In sixty seconds, it’ll teach you how to edit an anthology. Seriously. Honestly. Really. Go look. Now, here’s some of what I planned to tell you. The rest will apparently have to wait until next week (even […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story

Smokey Dalton gets a call from an old friend to help transport a battered woman and her young daughter from Madison, Wisconsin, to a shelter in Chicago. When Smokey and Marvella Walker show up at the drop site, they learn that the woman is both white and a racist. She refuses to leave with them. And that’s only the beginning of their problems. Chosen as one […]

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