If you’ve been lollygagging around and haven’t ordered Secret Agent Manny or The Scarlet Letter Opener (book 1 in the Red Ink Mysteries series) yet, next week is your lucky day! (Wait, whut?)
From Sept. 1–7, Secret Agent Manny will be just 99¢ for the Kindle edition!
No need to set a reminder on your phone (although, hey, I’m not gonna stop you). I’m sure I’ll inundate you with reminders all next week. That’s how much I care.
I have been chained to my desk so long now that I’m starting to feel like a character in a depressing Charles Dickens novel. If a bunch of orphans in ratty clothes start gathering around me and singing in Cockney accents, I’ll know it’s time to find a way out of this home office.
Until then, though, let me do a brief run-down on my summer:
1. editing The Tell-Tale Heart Attack to death. It’s the second novel in The Red Ink Mysteries series. It nearly gave me a heart attack just trying to finalize this project and get it out the door. But, as of last week, OUT the door it went! If you haven’t read the first book, The Scarlet Letter Opener, that’s a fun place to start. I cut my teeth on mystery writing with that first one—and it’s kind of “mystery lite,” for lack of a less derogatory term. This second book was a lot more fun to write. Half the time even I didn’t know whodunnit. (Oh, that first book smells like it’s time to go on sale. Be on the lookout for that sale in a week or two.)
2. going on yet another cruise with the hubster. He wanted to enter Carnival’s big Grand Blackjack Tournament to see what that’s like, and since he won a free entry back in December, well, there we were, on another cruise ship in May. Great fun … but not a good time of year for me to be away from the desk for a week. (You know, the one I’m currently chained to.)
3. attending the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference in June. The yearly trek to Grove City, Pa., was (as usual) like a big writer-family reunion. Crazy-good fun with crazy-good people. As a board member, I had a lot of tasks to complete before conference started, including doing the booklet layout in time to have printed copies ready to take with me. There’s nothing quite like late nights, jazzed up on caffeine, gathering faculty data and troubleshooting layout issues with Amazon! I’m kidding: there are a LOT of things just like it, but most of them involve torture or stints in hell. And speaking of typesetting …
4. typesetting books for everybody but me. It’s a good thing I enjoy typesetting book interiors, because I’ve been doing those in my sleep lately. Some were for friends (we’re all debuting new books at Beaver County BookFest next month). Others were for a great cause and hobby of mine: TYPEWRITERS. You can pick up these amazing TYPEWRITTEN anthologies of what a non-digital world might look like here: Paradigm Shifts (which happens to also contain a story of mine) and Escapements. Both books are bargain-basement-priced, in order to get them into as many hands as possible. These projects were a labor of love. And although I thoroughly enjoyed working on them, squeezing these projects in after that crazy cruise was the result of copious amounts of caffeine and lots of loud grunge music at all hours.
5. outlining and planning six new, shorter books in an upcoming new cozy mystery series, under a pen name! It’s been great fun finding a voice through my alter ego, Muriel Preston, who apparently writes cozies (shorter ones than I’ve been writing, so they’ll be churned out a lot faster). Her first series will be the Totally Tech series. Six covers ready to go!
6. heading back east soon for a few days of visiting family and outlining the six Muriel Preston cozies. Apparently I’m going to unchain myself from this desk, then drive six hours to the other end of Pennsylvania, only to chain myself to a completely different desk. Hey, whatever works! I love road trips.
Once the autumn kicks in (not a moment too soon for me), things don’t slow down. I’m staring at Beaver County BookFest in early September, the AAUW Kitchen Tour in late September, a trip to West Virginia for a big book festival in early October (as an attendee this time), the yearly gathering of typewriter nerds (also in West Virginia) in late October, a few board meetings, and …
She’s younger than I am. She’s prettier than I am. And thinner. Much thinner. She has gorgeous long hair, flawless skin, beautiful blue eyes, and keeps her nails long but still manages to type a lot faster than I do.
She drinks espresso shots throughout the day, listens to smooth jazz, used to be a chain-smoker until she quit cold-turkey about ten years ago, and joins the gym every January, though she stops showing up at all by March.
She’s been married—twice—but both times realized the guy was just too big a distraction from her work. Each of the men wasn’t surprised when she left. They’re all still good friends, and on rare occasions she’ll take them both out to dinner or a movie. At the same time. Then they all get creeped out about it and don’t have any contact for at least six months.
She is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. I, on the other hand, am a conundrum wrapped in bacon.
Starting this winter, the not-so-mysterious, nothing-like-me, completely fictitious Muriel Preston will start churning out light, short cozy mysteries. Just because she can.
My own cozy mystery series, The Red Ink Mysteries, is now officially two books long. (The Tell-Tale Heart Attack is finally available, folks.) The third book, Charlotte’s Website, is due out by Christmas.
But our new friend Muriel? She’ll be churning ’em out a lot faster. She has nothing better to do, after all. She lives for her work. Lucky for me.
Her first series, the Totally Tech Series, will contain five separate quick reads. I’ll update here as these become available. For now, take a gander at her tentative titles:
