May ’24 Update

Here is the current line-up for my collection of short stories:

1. The Silent Steps of Murder — which you can read here early and for free
2. The Last Gaze — a story about optography and the sins of the past and all that jazz.
3. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Pazuzu — honestly, it’s the story of Rowan Manory rolling back a bizarre locked-room murder piece by piece until the solution becomes obvious…to him. Hopefully, it’s not obvious to you, dear reader.

WTSTP involves a demon that appears in mid-air, in a locked room, of course. There’s also a curse.

I took a long time figuring out where to enter this story. I almost always start with a case being brought to Manory, but I’ve been having some fun with joining Manory after the murder. This isn’t natural for me because it demands more in the way of interviews and…well, we all know how we feel about too many interviews. If Manory has the case brought to him, there’s automatically a journey he and Williams must begin. I feel comfortable springing surprises on them early on because the reader (you) have been presented the case just as Manory has.

Coversely, joining Manory right when he happens upon the murder necessitates him (and you) getting up to speed, learning the identity and behaviors of the victim, establishing a motive, etc. It sometimes feels less active.

But hey, detectives question and they interrogate, don’t they. I’m going to embrace the challenge. I’ve been watching a lot of true crime recently. Even though modern techniques didn’t exist under the same conditions in the first part of the previous century, there were instinctual decisions that pointed toward future standards. .

Obviously, I’m not moving with the speed I had envisioned nor is my original vision for the length of the book looking likely. I was thinking I would write 12 stories — one for each month of the year. Now, I’m not so sure. Five stories could be the length of my average book. I don’t think I’d be cheating people if I released a five story collection at 50,000-60,000 words. I may ditch the overarching strangler story. I barely have it mapped out anyways). In the future, I could write a short story every so often and in a couple years, I could sandwich another book of short stories in between novels. That would dramatically increase my shoddy output. It’s a thought.

Yeah, I could not write the 3rd story starting from where I was starting. The story kept running into ridiculous places where nothing made sense. A lot of it involved characters doing things they would never do because of information they possessed.

Now, I’ve fixed it. They don’t possess that information. Genius, right? It took me like three fucking months to do that. I swear to God, writing makes me so stupid sometimes.

On a different note, Tom Mead interviewed me. You can read it in his newsletter on June 1st. What’s that? You don’t get Tom’s newsletter? You can sign up for it here.

Ummm…I think that’s all for now. I’m busy working on the book. In June, I’ll probably do a round of editing on all three stories. The Last Gaze needs a new sequence near the end. I combined two revelations into one scene, and it diminished the power of one of them. I need to fix that. The first story, I’m basically happy with, but I need to clean up some of the odds and ends. I don’t know, I may keep the strangler. Who knows? My output may dramatically increase in the fall.

What comes after editing? I’ll start the fourth story which will have a dying message.

I’ve yapped long enough. Take care.