February Stories

As all short-story writers know (and if they don't, they soon learn), the stories you write and sell can then take quite a while to get published. My waits from acceptance till publication have ranged all the way from a couple of days to a couple of years--and when they do finally get published, it sometimes happens in clusters.

Example: Since my most recent post here at SleuthSayers two weeks ago, I've been fortunate enough to have three stories appear in two publications. Also, as is often the case, each of those three stories is totally different from the others. 

If you're at all interested in this kind of thing, here are some quick summaries: 

February 8 -- "Vanity Case," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #232

This story, besides being shorter than most of what I usually write, is an actual mystery, with a crime and several suspects to choose from. (There's no separate "solution box," as in the Solve-It-Yourself mysteries in places like Woman's World, but all the clues are there for the alert reader to find and use.) The story features small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine, her overbearing mother Fran, and her stalwart deputy Ed Malone, who are recurring characters in a series I've been writing for a long time now--more than a hundred Fran/Lucy installments have been published so far. This one's a Valentine's Day story (pun intended), and involves the early-morning burglary of an electronics store and the task of figuring out which one of three possible suspects is guilty. No dead bodies, no bloodshed, no politics, no literary heavy-lifting, but hopefully fun to read. I must thank Barb Goffman for prodding me into submitting this holiday story.

February 9 -- "Me and Jan and the Handyman," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 

This one's not a whodunit, or a traditional mystery in any way. It's just a crime story, a TTT (Twisty Turny Tale) featuring wealthy socialites, construction workers, federal agents, blackmailers, informers, bankers, world travelers, prison inmates, etc. It's a fairly long first-person story, and just quirky and "different" enough that I thought it might work for Ellery Queen since most of my successful EQMM stories have been weird. And thank goodness it did get accepted there, although the recent change in ownership of the magazine caused it to take awhile to appear in print. Sincere thanks to the wonderful Jackie Sherbow, who I bet would agree with me that stories with complicated plots and multiple reversals are always the most fun to write. 

February 15 -- "Mutiny in the County," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #233

The third of the three stories in this mini-tsunami of releases, "Mutiny in the County," was unusual in several ways. First, it marked only the second time I've had stories appear in consecutive issues of Black Cat Weekly (the first was in June 2023--Issues #92 and #93). Second, it was one of the only two stories out of the 22 I've had published at BCW that were submitted through the portal to John Betancourt instead of being acquired via Barb Goffman or Michael Bracken. Third, it was one of only four of my BCW stories that were SF/fantasy instead of strictly mystery/crime. It did have a crime that was central to the plot, but it was otherworldly in that it featured a sheriff's-deputy protagonist who discovers that he's really, of all things, a character in a short story. (The antagonist is the writer.) As you might imagine, I had a good time with this one--cross-genre stories, like those with many plot twists, are usually more play than work--and I was pleased and grateful that John liked it. 

Anyhow, that was my rare three-stories-in-eight-days occurrence for the month--and probably for the year--but it's always a kick when that kind of thing happens, especially when the content and structure of the stories are vastly different from one another. (If you're a writer, has that kind of happy surprise happened to you? I suspect it has.) Sadly, I predict there'll be fewer of those clusters of out-of-the-blue publications in the future, for all of us, because there'll probably be fewer markets out there to send stories to. But I could be wrong.

I truly hope I am.