Victorian San Francisco Stories: Volume 2
Over six years ago, I put out a collection of the four short stories I had written in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and since then, despite the fact that I give away this first volume of stories to anyone who signs up for my newsletter, I’ve sold over 4000 copies of the collection. At the time of publication, I wrote this post about why I enjoyed writing short stories. If anything, the reasons I listed are even more true now, when I have put out a second volume of short stories. The stories in this second collection come between the events in my last two full-length mysteries, Scholarly Pursuits and Lethal Remedies. As with my other short stories and novellas, they feature secondary characters from the series. The first story, Beatrice Bests the Burglars, finds Mrs. O’Rourke, the O’Farrell Read more…
2017 Goals #2: Do More Recreational Reading
In my goal setting post last January, my third goal was to do more recreational reading. And that is a goal I can definitely say I accomplished. The primary reason for that success was that I discovered the fun and convenience of reading short stories. While I have written short stories—about minor characters from my Victorian San Francisco mystery series––and I have even written about why I like to write short stories in this blog post, I hadn’t actually read many short stories for years…maybe decades. In fact, except for a number of years in my youth when I found the time to read the New Yorker from cover to cover (including the short stories), I don’t really remember when I ever chose short stories for my recreational reading––certainly not mystery and science fiction short stories. So, what caused the Read more…
Launch of Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi
For those of you interested in my work in the open-source Science Fiction series that I helped create (see this blog piece on the origin of this series), I am proud to announce that a new anthology of short stories, Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi, set in this world, has just been launched…zooming up to the top of the Amazon best-seller Science Fiction Anthologies list. Part of the acclaimed ‘Future Chronicles’ series of speculative fiction anthologies, published by Samuel Paralta, in Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi, twelve authors take us on an incredible journey with adventurers, scientists and colonists, as they push the boundaries against the unknown, against alien civilization, and themselves. I am excited to have one of the stories in this anthology, “Aelwyd:Home,” which tells the story of Kammie, one of the minor characters in my full-length Paradisi Chronicles novel, Between Mountain and Sea. Read more…
The three reasons I have fallen in love with writing short stories
I am the last author you would think would be writing short stories. As a writer who tends to be prolix, the short form wouldn’t seem a good match for me. I don’t write anything short––not emails, not blog posts, not books. Twitter, forget it––the most I can do is retweet those of you who are good at being succinct. I don’t even read many short stories, (except by 19th century writers like Alcott, Wharton, and James). Yet, this spring I took time off from doing the research for Deadly Proof, the next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, to write my third and fourth short stories, which are now part of a collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, that I just published on Kindle, and I have every intention of putting out more short stories in the coming Read more…
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