Here's a sneak peak at the cover reveal for LARCENY & LAST CHANCES, a Superior Shores Anthology edited by Judy Penz Sheluk, which includes my story, "Red Ink." Stay tuned for the publication date announcement coming soon.
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Updated: May 4
At nine o’clock on Sunday morning, just after breakfast, there was a loud noise that sounded like a thunder clap. The lights went out, along with every device that ran on electricity. Over the next two hours, my husband and I read on our Kindles, with nothing else to do. It was a sharp reminder of how much our lives relied on electricity. Here in Southwest Washington State, the outside temperature was in the low 40s, and the sky was gray with rainclouds. As the temperature in the house dropped, I pulled sweaters and gloves from the closet and wondered what had happened to the brief recent days of sun and cloudless skies.
The power outage wasn’t supposed to happen. When we moved here from Florida, I mentioned to an electrician that we were considering getting a generator. He assured me that in our neighborhood, the power lines were below ground and outages were rare and brief.
It was what I wanted to hear. After Hurricane Charlie in 2004 had left us with no power for a week during a hot, humid August in Florida, we bought a generator. For the next 17 years, my husband started up the generator every month, replaced the gas as needed, and then replaced the machine with a new model each time the old one gave up the ghost.
Then came Hurricane Ian in September, 2022. When we returned to the house after evacuating to higher ground, we at least had the comfort that we’d have a generator if we found the power was out at home. We had no idea that the storm surge had destroyed everything in its path including our house along with its contents and, of course, our still unused generator.
We were fortunate that the power outage in our Washington home only lasted two hours, but during that time, I thought about how powerless we were, not just literally during the outage, but in so many aspects of life.
Perhaps that was one of the things that attracted me to writing during my youth and into the present. There are so many things I can’t control, but when I sit in front of my laptop, the stories I tell are completely in my own power. Unlike some of my fellow authors, my characters never dictate the story to me or demand I make them smarter or prettier or braver. If they did, I’d probably be seeking help. The only voice in my head is my own. It has assumed the guise of a retired longshoreman, an obstreperous elf, a mysterious woman with a hidden past, a veteran with PTSD, and a range of other characters. But at the end of each writing day, the story has been told by all-powerful me.
I can’t control the weather or the electric grid or the insanity of the current state of the planet, but I can rule the fictional worlds I write about. How lucky is that!
In the 1980s, after thinking of myself as a writer since childhood, without having actually written anything since college, I decided to add to the balancing act of wife, mother, and lawyer by writing a novel. Since my favorite books were mysteries, I started there.
It never occurred to me to try my hand at short stories first, which would’ve made more sense for someone with a tightly packed schedule. For one thing, I rarely read short stories, preferring the meatier plots and characters of a full-length book. If I were to follow the adage, write what you know, mystery novels should be my sweet spot. Also, I feared I wasn’t capable of coming up with more than one story idea a year, as I would have to if I started on the trail of short stories. Even just one idea was going to be a challenge.
I read a few writing craft books, but was otherwise on my own. This was the 1980s, pre ubiquitous computers and the World Wide Web. Manuscripts were sent out to publishers and agents via typed hard copy with an SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope for you youngsters out there).
I started with a detailed outline and couldn’t imagine writing any other way. Sometime later, I realized that besides plotters there were pantsers, those who wrote by the seat of their pants with little or no idea where they were heading as they wrote. I still can’t wrap my brain around that.
My first book was a mystery involving the discovery of a naked woman with amnesia hiding in a bush on the Boston Common by a lawyer out walking her dog. I then wrote a second one featuring the same lawyer and then a third. At some point along the way, I found a New York agent who shopped book 1 around. That led to a collection of flattering rejections, praising my writing but feeling that my lawyer wasn’t different enough from other similar books. I guess I should’ve given her purple hair or a limp. Then life got in the way, and I gave up writing.
Jumping ahead to 2020. I had retired as a prosecutor and now was trapped at home. Faced with the depressing times of quarantines, handwashing, and supply chain issues, I decided to try writing again. Now I had the benefit of the internet and discovered that publishers of anthologies posted Calls for Submissions online for anyone to respond. But short stories? Did I dare?
After a short mystery fiction reading binge, I felt ready. When one of the anthologies called for stories inspired by songs from the ‘60s (Peace, Love, and Crime), I was off and running. “Nights in White Satin” was my first published story. Since that time, I’ve had 21 more stories accepted for publication in various anthologies and online magazines.
I can’t pretend that coming up with ideas has been easy. I know writers who erupt with story ideas as often as the Yellowstone geysers spout. Not me. The development of every one of those stories has been tortuous.
But here’s the real reason I’m going to stick with the short form. Recently, I discovered a 40,000 word romance manuscript I wrote in 1999, hiding in the back of an old filing cabinet. I decided to see if I could make it into something I’d be comfortable sending to a publisher. For the last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling it into submission and still have a ways to go. Since my short stories usually range between 3000 and 5000 words, this experience has been somewhat overwhelming. Most full-length mystery novels are between 85,000 and 100,000 words. Not going to happen again for me, but I’ll be forever grateful for finding that Call for Submissions that started me on the short story road.
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