Pun intended.

I’ve noticed other authors doing a “year in review” thing, so I thought, why not? I always enjoyed those “year in review” programs that news shows would broadcast in December. Sometimes it was a good stroll down memory lane; other times not. The year 1968 for instance.

So, here’s my 2023 author year in review.

My First Mystery

In March, my first ever mystery novel was published, Supreme Madness of the Carnival Season. The mystery revolves around the body of a long-dead baby a couple finds in the wall of one room in their historic house during a renovation. The woman, a highly successful romance author, decides she’s going to discover who put the baby in what eventually became her house. The story goes back and forth between wartime 1944 and roughly 2014, and the title comes from a line in the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

I’ve always wanted to write a mystery, and this experience showed me just how hard that is. I wrote the rough draft in 2012 for National Novel Writing Month, and 11 years later, after several rewrites, critique groups, and beta readers, it was finally ready for my editor in late 2022. Mysteries involve red herrings and misdirection, and it was a challenge–a good one–for my writing skill. Historical fiction is straightforward, i.e., it either fits the timeline or it doesn’t, but a mystery is unique and mine even more so because it combined mystery with historical fiction.

You can click on the link above to find out more, and it’s available as an eBook, a paperback, and in hard cover.

TREACHERY and RENDITION

In June, TREACHERY, book 3 of the 9/11 series, MEETING THE ENEMY, published. And before I could catch my breath, it was time for my final edit, beta reading, and editor review for RENDITION, book 4 and the conclusion to the series. Indeed, RENDITION, which is available now to preorder, will publish on December 23, 2023.

Tinker Mountain

In June, I made my usual pilgrimage to Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, for the annual Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop. For the past few years, I’d been taking a generative workshop with Daniel Mueller, where we study themes and the structure of short stories, receive a prompt, and write something. Then, we share that rough draft with the other work-shoppers. However, this year I took a critique workshop, where you submit 20 or so pages of an historical fiction work in progress for an in-person critique by the instructor and the other work-shoppers.

It was a good experience. I especially got some helpful and meaningful suggestions from the instructor, but this reminded me why I gave up critique workshops a few years back. The other work-shoppers’ criticism was mostly because they didn’t know the whole story from the 20 pages submitted. Of course, you can’t know the whole story from 20 pages, but they seemed to want an info-dump in the beginning that essentially tells the story and the back story. There were some great suggestions for clarifying terms and historical events, which I included in the post-workshop rewrite. Overall, though, I don’t do info-dumps in the first chapter. Let the story unfold, though I understand the frustration. I was intrigued by what I’d read from the other work-shoppers, but I’m patient enough to wait for publication to get the whole story.

Book Events

I had a few more of those in 2023, when COVID wasn’t a buzz-kill for in-person events. I loved being a panelist at the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity Con in September and having a table at the Hanover Book Festival in November. Sold some books at both events. There were some local mini-events at book stores and libraries. And this coming Saturday, December 9, 2023, I’ll have a table at my local YMCA for their Holiday Bazaar. I’ve done events before at this time of year, and I’ve found most people are focused more on the arts and crafts gifts than books, so I’ll have to have some good candy for giveaways.

I mean, I always loved getting books as gifts, didn’t you?

I also participated in two events for other authors, but the common link among us was history. Heather Cole wrote a nonfiction book about the presidents from Virginia, and Mollie Cox Bryan wrote an historical fiction novel, The Lace Widow, about the immediate aftermath of Alexander Hamilton’s death for his widow, Eliza, who, it turns out in Bryan’s novel, is a great early 19th century sleuth. Hosted by The Book Dragon independent book store in Staunton, Virginia, these events are called “Conversation with an Author.” I thoroughly enjoy them.

Writing and Editing

I did a lot of that, too, in 2023. First, I finished the rough draft of a novel I started in mid-2022, The Devil Passed By. This novel is about an early mission for my characters, Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin, which takes place in the summer of 1979 in Belfast, Northern Ireland–at the height of The Troubles. A total rewrite of that rough draft was my 2023 NaNoWriMo project.

I rewrote my 2022 NaNoWriMo project, Grace Under Pressure, and came to the realization that it plus two other NaNoWriMo projects, A Spy’s Legacy (2021) and For My Country (2020), would make an excellent eBook box set. All three are about secondary characters in my world of U.N. spies. So, I ended up rewriting the 2020 and 2021 rough drafts, too. A Spy’s Legacy has been through my beta readers and is now with my editor. The other two will go through that process after the new year.

I did some heavy editing, including a lot of rewriting, on the three books that will comprise the upcoming series Enemies Domestic: Mine to Kill, A Die Cast, and A Squalid Procession of Vain Fools.

I wrote 43 podcast scripts, 21 (counting this one) blog posts, and innumerable amounts of copy for my social media marketing posts. And about a half dozen short stories.

I edited five manuscripts for other authors, as well as my own editing (and editing and editing) of my several manuscripts.

And . . .

Two thousand, one hundred, eighty-four people ordered my books in 2023, and as a result, my debut novel, A War of Deception, hit No. 2 on an Amazon bestseller list–twice. People read 5,320 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, covering 26 of my 29 books. Not overwhelming success, but I met my sales/downloads monthly goals for the year with an average of 182 books per month. Not bad for someone who is notoriously awful at marketing.

I’m sure I’ve missed something authorship-related that happened this year, but I’ve got lots of writer stuff to do in 2024. What’s that, you ask? Well, I’ll blog about that in two weeks.