It Was a Very Good Year

When I summarized my writing accomplishments for this year, I was pretty amazed. I thought I'd share it with you, dear Reader. Here goes! 

As most of you know, A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die came out to positive reviews. I learned a huge amount about marketing, selling, and the limits of my own energy. I turned in 'Til Dirt Do Us Part, the second book in the series on time and wrote 62,000 words on the third book. 

I self-published two short stories that had previously been in anthologies: "Yatsuhashi for Lance" and "Reduction in Force." 

My short story "The Stonecutter" appeared in the Fish Nets anthology from Wildside Press. My short story "Breaking the Silence" not only made it into the Level Best Books anthology Stone Cold, but also won an honorable mention in the Al Blanchard Short Crime Fiction Contest. 

I finished writing and signed a contract with Barking Rain Press for Bluffing is Murder (written as Tace Baker), the second Lauren Rousseau mystery. 

I wrote 55 blog posts and contributed to a bunch more. Five other New England cozy mystery authors and I joined forces and started the Wicked Cozy Authors group blog, posting every weekday.

My story of revenge on a literary thief, "Just Desserts for Johnny," was accepted for January 2014 publication in Kings River Life Magazine. 

I was a panelist at four mystery conferences and spoke at a couple dozen library or bookstore events. And I quit my day job to become a full-time fiction writer. 

It was a fabulous year in my life. Thank you so much to all my readers and supporters!

Author Event Report

We had a great author event the other night. Susan Oleksiw, Leslie Wheeler, Mark Ammons, and I talked about short-story writing, answered questions, and read the first page of our stories from the Thin Ice anthology. We had a good turnout, good snacks, and great hosts at Rivers Edge Gifts and Books in Ipswich.

If you missed the event, Rivers Edge has some signed copies on the shelf for sale, and Level Best Books has free shipping for another week or too. And I am the featured author there this week.

This is exciting stuff, and I was grateful for the chance to be the "featured author, Ipswich's own," as our host Meg kept saying. And I felt blessed to have so many friends and family members show up in support and interest.

Now it's time to get writing again. Final revisions are still demanding attention, and then I need to immerse myself in the agent-query process. But what I really want to do is start a new short story and continue on beyond the 12000 words I already wrote in book Two of the Speaking of Mystery series.