Happy Holidays

The fall and winter seasons are my very favorite times of the year. And I am very pleased with my publisher, The Wild Rose Press (TWRP), who contracted I Bid One American. I love that story and am just thrilled to see it getting published. To my amazement, I no sooner signed the contract than I had a cover! Talk about a quick art department.

It looks like they are pretty quick off the mark in terms of getting books out there, which suits me. I'm hoping for a release date in early 2008. In the meantime, I'm putting the final touches on the first of a triple play of short stories, entitled: Malice, Revenge, and Murder. They are short stories set in the Regency period, in June 1809, August 1809, and September 1809, respectively. I hope to release them through Amazon Connect's Shorts program, although I know TWRP also publishes short stories so… One way or the other, 2008 is looking good to me as a writer.

Those three short stories are very loosely related—in fact the only real relationship between them is a reference to a certain character—but together I'm hoping they will do a nice job as the backstory for the hero in another of my books, The Vital Principle. With luck, I'm hoping to sell that one to TWRP, also. It's a—-yes—a Regency mystery/romance.

And here's the cool thing. As a writer, you're taught not to weigh down a story with a lot of background information (i.e. backstory) for your characters. But sometimes, a character's background includes one or more rather interesting events. Such as a murder or two. So rather than boring your audience, you can write related short stories that are, in essence, the backstory. The advantages of this are numerous.

1. You get to write short stories, which are a lot of fun. J
   
2. You can sell the short stories as a promotional tool for your bigger, bolder, badder (or gooder) novel.
   
3. You can finally tell all those background bits to the readers, without annoying them by taking up pages and pages of reminisces and background as would happen if you did this in your actual novel. Your short stories are "what happened, when it happened" rather than, "oh, way back when, this happened…" memories stuck in your novel.
   
4. You can round out your characters without doing the full-length novel/sequel thing (which I dislike intensely—I loathe sequels—speaking as a reader).
   

It's all good.

So now I have to get going and do just a few more edits on Malice so that I can send that story out this week.