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Adrian, a spy for the King, sees a nobleman murder a servant. His desire for truth is pitted against the dangers of a high-stakes political game. When his friend Draken insists on pursuing justice, Adrian must protect those he cares about as the political games of powerful men alter the lives of everyone around him.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

"Unmasked" anthology

 Kevin J. Anderson is Director of a graduate writing program at Western Colorado University, and every year, his class puts together an anthology as part of their coursework. This year, the title of the anthology is "Unmasked."


A friend of mine, Melissa Dalton Martinez, is in that program, so it was a thrill to hear from her that my story "Death by Misadventure" had been accepted into the anthology. There was a strict word count limit, and I had to cut my story from 6500 words to 5000 before I could submit it. That edit pass was a painful and educational process.

The edit I just went through tonight was the result of both Melissa and Kevin running through the submitted story to fix up commas, typos, grammar, spelling, and all that fun stuff. The weird part is that reading through their edits, I saw exactly what I'd done wrong on most of them, and was surprised they'd slipped through my earlier edits. The moral of that story is that even editors need editors.

This anthology will come out later this year. I look forward to seeing it. Now it's time to finish up edits on two novels and get them both out this year. One I may have mentioned before is World War One with marines, biplanes, and gargoyles. The other is space miners fighting to survive on a distant outpost.

Yeah, I write in a lot of genres. For short stories, it's more extreme than with novels. I've published in ten genres plus poetry in short form. At least with novels, I've stuck so far to, um, three. Maybe four. But I certainly have fun with it!