Announcement: New Short Story
Finally making some progress on writing fiction in 2025
Hi everyone. Apologies for missing my weekly posting schedule. Life has been a bit hectic lately and I’ve needed to focus energy on career and family.
The good news is that my next short story is in its final draft stage and has been reviewed by the World’s Best Beta Reader™. In the next week, the manuscript will go through another round of edits & revisions. I plan to publish the story next weekend here on MFS. Later, the story will be included in an upcoming anthology of short fiction that I plan to publish later this year.
Since this is a short story, it doesn’t really warrant a cover, but Substack is a visual medium, so here’s “cover art” that should set the mood:
Something Like a Criminal is a mystery/thriller set in Rochester, NY around 2010. It features a younger version of one of the popular characters from my novel, The Good Killers, and maintains continuity with the events in that novel. In the story, a young woman is wanted by the police. She has to figure out why, and figure out how to escape, before they catch her. To get free, however, she has to make a decision about her friends that will change all their lives forever.
I mention continuity because a novelette that I wrote a few years ago, Coyotes in Winter, doesn’t quite fit with the established “universe” of The Good Killers. I’ll fix that eventually, but for now, that novelette offers a different take on the characters and events in the novel. Basically, I wrote Coyotes before Good Killers while I was beginning to figure out how to write stories in the mystery/thriller genre. Finishing Coyotes gave me the confidence to take on a novel-length story in the genre.
I have to admit that I’ve had writer’s block while working on the next novel in the Rossi/Lopez series (which has the working title of They Also Breathe Fire). Getting away from that for a while and working on a very focused story has helped a bit with the writer’s block. This was a fun story to write because I could get into a character that I enjoyed writing. It was also an exhausting story to write. She’s the main character now, and it took a lot of effort to get into the head of someone who carries around so much psychological trauma and still manages to function. Writing a main character that’s of a different gender is always a challenge, too.
Until next time, I invite you to check out this song by Sharon Van Etten called “Every Time the Sun Comes Up” which really helped me get into this character’s head:
Sharon Van Etten - Every Time the Sun Comes Up
There’s something about Von Etten’s style and songwriting that really captures the sense of a seething inner turmoil, especially in songs like “Serpents,” and even in quieter works like “Love More.”
Listening to music by female singer/songwriters is one of the tricks I use to get into the mind of female characters. Along with that, I read work by female fiction authors, journalists, and bloggers, and pay very close attention to the issues that trouble my female friends and family members. I also run characters past my trusted advisors and apply something I call the “Sigourney Weaver Test,” which I’ll describe at some point in the future. I still suck at it, but I think I suck less than I did 35 years ago.
Have a good week, everyone.
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Oh, I’m curious about this “Sigourney Weaver Test” —don’t make us wait too long!