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 …
wait …
wait …
WHAT YEAR IS IT??