My short story “The Switch” is in the brand-new bundle Crimes, Capers, & Rule-Breakers!

Today is the last day of the 99 cent pre-order sale – on July 11th the bundle will be officially available (and delivered, if you’ve pre-ordered it) and will go up to its full price.

This is a super fun collection curated by my friend Rebecca M. Senese. Rebecca and I met a little over five years ago in a writing class on the Oregon coast. She’s a great writer – I still remember two of the stories she wrote during that class. Who knew back then that we’d both end up organizing story bundles?

I’m in the last week of the mystery workshop, and I now want to write gobs and gobs of mysteries! My latest homework assignment was to write the opening of a private eye/noir story, and wow was that fun. My detective’s partner is a cranky cattle dog (blue heeler) named Jake. 🙂 If I didn’t have five zillion other projects in progress, I would keep working on this one – but it’s definitely going on my list of things to write someday. I will need to figure out the plot, since all I have is the start of the story and even I have no idea what happens next (although obviously Jake will play a significant role in everything).

I also started the first draft of the witch story I mentioned last week, as well as a historical fiction story about justice that’s due in a month or so. I realize it sounds challenging to work on two stories at once, but these two are very different, so it’s pretty easy to switch between them. They’ve also both required a fair bit of research, so hopefully I’ve gotten most of that out of the way and can concentrate on the writing now.

My cozy mystery (inspired by the same writing workshop) is still on the list, I’m just holding off on it while I think through what happens next. I have the basics of the main characters sketched out (or at least the characters I know about so far), but the idea is that this would be a series, not a single book, so before I do any more writing I want to have an overall plan that would cover more than one book.

If you’re doing the math, that means I’ve started four new stories in the past few weeks, only one of which is one of the six stories that’s due by the end of the year. Ack! And I’m starting an online fantasy workshop this week – it’s brand new, so I couldn’t resist – so I’m sure I’ll come up with a few more stories thanks to that. 🙂