Just wanted to update my faithful followers with the latest red hot news to come my way!  LOUISIANA BLOOD is a FINALIST in the SCREENCRAFT CINEMATIC BOOK CONTEST.  It was always my plan to reverse engineer the book into a film, and this is the first step in that journey.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

The winners of the Inkshares Mystery Contest have been announced, and I’m happy to say that "Cat’s Paw" is on the list! This means we will be going forward with all the editing and rewriting and nosegrinding that goes into the publication process, and, probably a year from today, the book will make it into your hands.

Onwards!

A happy new year to everyone, and all the best for 2019! We’re kicking things off with an interview with Battles of the First World War, a podcast which delivers exactly what it says in the name, a comprehensive examination of individual WW1 battles. Mike, who runs the podcast, took a break from the trenches to have a few words with me about my own military experience and how it relates to my fiction.

So, things seem to be going well. Over on Amazon.com, we’re just four (4) reviews short of fifty. I’m told that fifty reviews is when Amazon begins to take a book seriously, and starts doing a bit of the work in pushing it -- which in turn means I and everyone at Inkshares can devote more energy to creating the next book. So if you haven’t left an Amazon review yet, please do.

As for the "next book", an initial draft of "Cat’s Paw" has been written; tomorrow, I begin working on the next draft. I think we should be getting definitive news within a few days about whether it’ll be chosen as one of the "additional winners" of the Mystery & Thriller contest. Fingers crossed!

(Pre-ordering now should entitle you to a signed first edition, by the way. I admit that I never really understood the draw of things signed by me -- unless it’s a cheque -- but I was recently contacted by a bookseller asking for a signed copy of "A Gentleman’s Murder", so clearly I know nothing about how these things work.)

Meanwhile, I’ve also been working on a pilot screenplay (there’s a possibility I might be tapped to write the proposed TV adaptation of "A Gentleman’s Murder" myself) and catching up with my reading. On Inkshares, the latest projects to have caught my interest are "Goodbye Horses" and "All That Glitters". "Goodbye Horses" is a comedy; there’s murder involved, of course, but primarily it’s about the madcap woes of a Texas small town sheriff. "All That Glitters" is a mystery woven through one woman’s relationship with her parents when repeated murder attempts come knocking. So, yeah, check ’em out.

And have fun!