A Bestseller!

I’m so very pleased to have a story in this anthology: 

Sunday’s Denver Post reports that Terror at 5280’ is number 2 on the local best seller’s list for paperback fiction.  Woo hoo!

Freshly Starting

Champagne makes a great toast, but what I love the most about the New Year is the chance for a fresh start.  It’s more than just resolutions (I’ve already broken mine--have you?)  For me, the excitement is in the new beginning.  It’s a second chance, a time to ask myself “what am I going to focus on this year?”  

That’s pretty good, but THIS New Year is extra exciting because:  

1. There’s a new decimal in our year, and
2. It’s a leap year, so we get a Bonus Day to do all the things we love to do!!!

There’s something very exciting about a list of fresh starts.  Even though the list contains the same concepts year after year, each New Year I have a chance to start afresh all over again:  

• road map--my writing goals for the year help me compose a new road map toward those goals.  Last year I got pretty close, but this year I get to start all over again, planning a new course.  Maybe this one will be the charm!  
• calendar--even though I always rely on my very familiar and comfortable format for tracking writing, I love visiting the stores and choosing which calendar will match my fresh start of the year.  This year I want to study lights and darks (in both writing and art), so I picked a Thomas Kincade calendar.  
• new shiny--the next, new writing project presents a new skill set to learn, and the excitement of the challenge lures me to my desk in spite of January’s cold, dark morning.  It’s the same in art, as I’m branching out to a brand new type of subject that is totally opposite from anything I’ve ever painted before.  
• new reading plan--cleaning out the storage locker, I’m finding boxes of books I forgot I owned.  I’m going to focus on reading some oldie but goodies in the year ahead.  It’s so easy to get distracted, caught up in new stories!  

Wrapping Up

Between shopping sprints, baking, and gift-wrap frenzy, I’m also thinking about the end of my Work In Progress.  It’s not a mystery, so without a crime to be solved, a villain to catch, justice to be served and order restored, how do I know it’s the end?  

Well, it is a little tougher to recognize without those handy mystery elements.  This WIP is a fantasy adventure novel, and theoretically the adventures could just keep piling on.  But no matter the genre, all endings have certain things in common:  

1. The story has to have resolution.  (check) 
2. Characters have to grow.  (check) 
3. Goals have to be reached.  (check)
4. Loose ends have to be tied.  (well...almost...)

But my favorite?  

5.  The end of the year makes a great deadline for ending a book, which is mainly how I know this one is almost done.  

Seriously.  Finishing the WIP along with the year just feels...tidy.  It’s a great way to clear my desk before taking a break for holiday partying.  After that, I’ll sharpen my pencils for a brand-new project at the first of next year.  After many months of this old WIP, I can’t wait for the New Shiny!  

But, Trouble always lurks, trying to undermine my careful plans.  For many months I’ve been feeding questions to my subconscious about all those loose ends.  Why are they there?  Why is character x doing this and that?  Why is character y even in this book?  What does it all mean?  Not being a plotter, I just can’t conjure the answers until my subconscious decides to spit back the answers.  

With the days on my calendar dwindling to the end of the year, and still with no answers in sight to tie up everything, I’ve been working myself into a sweat.  Then, thankfully last month, eureka!  The answers came in a blazing flash.  Nothing like waiting to the last moment, right?  It’s going to be tight, with only a couple more weeks to work them in, but at least I’m finally on my way to the end.  

Reading!

Terror at 5280' 

Book launch on Sunday, December 1 at 6pm at Bookbar in Denver (4280 Tennyson St).

I will be reading at this event tomorrow--hope to see you there! 

  

Story Sale!

My short story, "Electric Stalker," will appear in the anthology Terror at 5280', coming this month from Denver Horror Collective.  

Their guidelines asked for local stories, so I chose to write about one of this region's scariest features--lightning!  

Science Fiction mysteries

This week it was my turn to blog at Mysteristas as Sue Star:

My mystery book club recently read The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters.  The first of a trilogy, it’s about a newly promoted detective who stays on the job, even though his colleagues are bailing because everyone is going to die in 6 months when an asteroid hits earth.  

Besides being a fabulous book, it raises some interesting questions.  Some of the members of book club asked why we had chosen a science fiction book.  But is it?  Its premise sounds science-fictiony, given the looming apocalypse, and Locus, the trade magazine of the science fiction community, had featured several articles about the book.  I was intrigued, since I love science fiction and also write it under another name.  

But this book is more about the investigation into a suspicious death, with the added layers of characters responding to their difficult situation.  And the book won the Edgar Award in 2013 for best paperback original.  This prestigious award is presented by Mystery Writers of America.  So, if professional mystery writers say it’s a mystery, then it’s a mystery.  Case closed.  

But it’s also science fiction.  

I am reminded of another time when an author I know wrote a science fiction mystery and hoped to see it marketed as a mystery.  The book ended up being shelved with science fiction, probably because the author was already established as a science fiction writer.  Any genre can also contain a mystery (and imo, a mystery makes any book better!), but science fiction seems to trump mystery when it comes to cross-genre.   

So I couldn’t wait to find out what my book club of seasoned mystery readers would think of this book.  Several of them had been skeptical at first and wouldn’t have chosen to read it, if not for book club.  As it turned out, all but one loved it.  They focused on the investigation of the case, and the way it unfolded fit their expectations, leaving them satisfied.  Not bad at all, I’d say! 

Burning Candles

My latest mystery released this fall.  It’s about an American woman in Brazil in 1959.  She hides from her past by running there, only to find that the Brazilian cop she’s married has secrets far darker than hers.  She struggles with her new identity and a culture of cults and illegal abortions, while a series of murders link her new husband’s secrets to hers.  Will she become the next victim?