Excited to report that my Friday morning began with an email acceptance of my science fiction adventure tale “In the Span of a Heartbeat” by Black Cat Weekly online magazine!
My story will be featured in a January or February 2025 issue.
I’m thrilled and honored to work with editor and publisher John Betancourt, who has an extensive list of writing and editing credits for original works as well as media tie-in, including Star Trek. Stay tuned for more details!
My friends, I know we’re all besieged by charities seeking donations and our funds are limited. I hesitated to add one more, but this one’s close to my heart and you’ll get something in return for your participation.
April is Child Abuse Awareness Month and from now until April 30th, I will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of Testing the Prisoner to Chicago-based charity Prevent Child Abuse America. I believe in their mission to prevent the abuse and neglect of our nation’s children. You can learn more about PCAA by clicking here.
Why am I doing this? At its heart, Testing the Prisoner is a story of a child abuse survivor who escaped and built a better life for himself but soon learns that the emotional pain lasts for years and can manifest when the right buttons are pushed. When a series of hauntings pushes those buttons and unravels our hero’s idyllic life, he is given a choice to forgive his abuser and find peace in himself or allow his rage and bitterness to destroy him.
Both in person and through their reviews, a number of my readers opened up about their own experiences with child abuse and how Testing the Prisoner helped them address their own pain, take steps toward forgiveness, and find inner peace. What more could I ask for as a writer? Click here to learn more about Testing the Prisoner.
It doesn’t matter where you purchase Testing the Prisoner—Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, Kobo, or your favorite independent bookshop. Once I make the donation to Prevent Child Abuse America in May, I’ll follow up with the total here. Thank you in advance for your consideration and generosity.
Purchase: 
Excited and relieved to have conquered the third and final Microsoft exam to achieve my Enterprise Administrator certificate. Now I can get my life back, writing and otherwise!
I’m excited and relieved to report that on Tuesday, May 31, I passed the second of three Microsoft exams toward my Enterprise Administrator Expert certification. After taking the next week off to remind myself how it feels to have a life, I’ll begin studying for the third and final exam. If all goes well, I’ll schedule that for the end of July.
Later that same Tuesday, after months of research into various midsize SUVs, I traded in my 16-year-old Hyundai Santa Fe for a 2019 Hyundai Tucson. I’m still learning all of its “bells and whistles” and while it’s only a four-cylinder engine (where the Santa Fe was six), the Tucson is a smooth ride with excellent handling.
So what’s new on the writing front? Unfortunately, not much since the time I had previously dedicated to writing is now consumed by taking Microsoft courses and studying for exams.
However, I managed to complete a new ghost story in April called “Where the Skeletons are Buried” involving Miranda Lorensen, my psychic-medium character who was last seen in my 2018 novella, Like Mother, Like Daughters and her ghost hunting team introduced in my 2013 novel, By Your Side. Work with these characters again was like reuniting with old friends. “Where the Skeletons are Buried” is being shopped around.
I’m also re-outlining the next full length novel involving Miranda and her team. One of the original plot threads, while compelling, gave me pause in light of our current sociopolitical climate. The more I developed that part of the story, the greater was my discomfort. So, I scrapped it and am moving in a different direction.
Lastly, I’m waiting on responses about two different short stories from two different editors and a publisher that accepted a detective story from me last year for publication this year has completed their move from Delaware to California and should be ramping up their operations again in July.
Stay tuned for more updates on these projects.
On November 20, 2009, my first novel, Testing the Prisoner, was published by Firebringer Press. During the intervening decade, I managed to publish two follow up novels and nearly 20 short stories across 11 anthologies and a few websites. To date, I’ve written or contributed to 14 titles.
Compared to some of my contemporaries—referring specifically to indie authors who also hold full time jobs—that number might seem unremarkable, but I’ve reached an age where I’m less interested in competing with others and prefer instead to stay focused on my own career and produce at a pace that works for me.
Of course, I’m deeply grateful to all of the veteran writers who mentored me, the publishers and editors who accepted my work, and the friends and readers who supported me along this emotionally turbulent, but ultimately exhilarating, journey.
I’m proud of every story I’ve published whether online or in print and look forward to the next ten years of challenges. So what’s ahead in 2020? Keep scrolling…
In February, my short story, “Burn After Writing,” will be published in Scary Stuff, a horror anthology by Oddity Prodigy Productions. Scary Stuff was inspired by such classic EC Comics titles as Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and the magazines Creepy and Eerie. Oddity Prodigy is currently running an Indiegogo campaign to fund the publication.
Slated for a mid-year release from Firebringer Press is the third installment in the Middle of Eternity anthology series—Meanwhile in the Middle of Eternity. I created and edited this series with the goal of providing an outlet for as yet unpublished writers and a few established names. We began in 2014 with Somewhere in the Middle of Eternity and continued in 2016 with Elsewhere in the Middle of Eternity. Our third book will be the largest volume yet with a diverse array of tales from SF, fantasy, and the paranormal.
More info forthcoming on these exciting projects!