Category: Blog

Hello everyone, and welcome to (the last day of) April! I had plans (big plans!) to share a post today about character and finding your voice, but those plans were scuttled by the arrival of a long-awaited email from the agent I’d been talking with about See These Bones.

Long story short: she decided not to offer representation.

Instead of spending this post weeping into my (non-existent) beard, I wanted to share a timeline of the experience, from initial contact to ultimate rejection.

If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen the widely-circulated study that says most new year’s resolutions are abandoned by January 12th. Luckily, I’ve devised an ingenious solution to the problem… don’t even start your resolutions until mid-January!

Whew. That was easier than I thought it would be. Now we can all get on with the business of making ourselves better people! Ice cream and cake for everyone!

Dear 2018,

You’ve been a year.

I didn’t include an adjective, because I’m hardpressed to pick just one. So let’s settle for the obvious instead. Like your predecessor, the much-derided and ranted-about 2017, you’ve successfully persisted for almost exactly 365 days. Sometimes it felt longer. Other times–like the entire holiday season–it felt shorter. But I’ve done the requisite calculations, consulted a multitude of experts in the field, and offered up pastry sacrifices to the Oracle at Delphi, and I can conclude, with a fair bit of certainty, that you were, in fact, a year.

And that, as they say, is that.

Now, if you are looking for adjectives, I can do that too. Just be warned that it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

2018 is almost over, and 2019 is waiting out there somewhere in the weeds, flush with unknown potential and (presumably) bad intentions. Before the new year arrives, I thought it would be fun and topical to look back on the year that was.

Next week, I’ll cover the three 2018 accomplishments I’m most proud of, and the week after that will detail three challenges I’ve struggled with all year. But this week, we’re going with something a little simpler; cold, hard, analytical data.

That’s right… in a blatant case of Instagram-copying, I’m sharing this site’s five most viewed posts in 2018.

The Storm in Her Smile has now been shared in its entirety here on the site, and people seem to be enjoying it. In the near future, I’ll do another edit pass, and then post the full story as a separate page under the Short Stories menu, like I did with my prior short, The Stars That Sing.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the story itself. What went well? What didn’t? And what ended up confusing the hell out of me?

After four weeks, we’ve finally reached the end of my latest short story, The Storm in Her Smile. Last chapter, the Queen of Smiles finished the job that brought her to Mobile, sending Arturo Melendez to his grave. Now, all she needs to do is find whoever stole her electric motorcycle so she can get out of the city alive.

The problem, of course, to paraphrase Kathleen Turner’s character in Romancing the Stone, is that bastards have brothers…