Project updates: June 2025

Progress on the Ross/Lopez sequel novel and a new anthology

Hello everyone. Just wanted to give a brief update at mid-year works in progress here at MFS.

They Also Breathe Fire: this is the sequel to the first book in the Ben Rossi series, The Good Killers. I've been struggling with the plot of this book quite a bit. Quite a bit more than I expected, actually. This book is an adaptation of the first Ben Rossi story. I wrote that original version back in the 1990s before I’d decided to focus on writing mystery and thriller fiction. As it happens, They Also Breathe Fire is the second serious piece of fiction that I've written. The first one is the original story behind what became my second novel (and first novel in the Terry Perez series), My Favorite Suspects.

The original version of the story is a novella that is more of a literary fiction piece than a mystery or thriller. Going back to it now, my goal is to make it a bit more of a traditional murder mystery and with the thriller elements that held together The Good Killers and strip away all of the literary elements. With another goal of bumping it out to a full-length novel, I need to add extra characters, and it also gives me some freedom to explore the backstory of Ben Rossi and his partner Riley Lopez.

So, in the original version of They Also Breathe Fire, which also isn’t the original title, there is actually a murder that occurs and Rossi is pulled into attempting to solve the true reason and mystery behind that murder. (Looking back now I can see why no one in the local literary scene really looked at it as a literary story, but at the time I thought I was being edgy and cool.)

Of course, in the meantime, I've written an entire novel, novelette, and short story set in the universe that I created for Ben Rossi so I need to integrate this old novella with that universe. For example, in the original version of the story, cell phones as we know them don't exist. Other things that don't exist in the original story include ridesharing, large language models, social media, drones, Starbucks, that barista at Starbucks that you think is cute, the International Space Station, Covid, public wi-fi, coverage for pre-existing conditions, the International Combat Hapkido Federation (ICHF), 9/11, John Wick, entry-level fuel injected motorcycles, and several forensic techniques that were developed, and later discarded, due to those techniques being inadmissible in court or not based on solid science.

It’s safe to assume that there are some updating of plot points that must be made. I've also added several characters and fleshed out many of the secondary characters to give that full mystery/thriller experience.

This type of activity, of course brings out its own problems, such as what I found a few days ago, as I was going through my plot worksheet, I discovered that I killed off a character, then had her perform some important plot-related activity, and then had a different character kill her later.

Hopefully, I'll get that all sorted out before I publish it.

New anthology: If you've been following MFS for the past few years, you know that I've published some work here and some novelettes on Amazon. I've also been working on some story ideas behind the scenes as I develop material for books in the Ben Rossi and Terry Perez series. One outcome of this activity is the short story I published recently on MFS called Something Like A Criminal which is sat in the Ben Rossi universe, and features a popular character from The Good Killers.

What I've decided to do is to write another short story and then package two novels and several short stories, and maybe one or two pieces of short fiction, as my first anthology and get that up on Amazon. The anthology is something that I see as showcasing the different types of writing that I can do and provide an outlet for stories that aren’t directly related to my two main series. It will have a traditional contemporary thriller, a more literary noir story, a character-driven contemporary noir story, and a cozy. This new anthology doesn’t have a working title yet. Hopefully it will do well and that will give me another outlet for short fiction.

Last week, I finally got around to starting that final short story for the anthology. It’s a cozy style murder mystery, which is something I have attempted, but haven't really been able to bring a completion and I think it'll be a nice little addition to that anthology.

Nonfiction: The very first book that I published as an indie author is actually a nonfiction book on the topic of Security Issues Of Personal Medical Devices (which also conveniently happens to be the title of the book.) This book came out in 2023 and made a bit of a splash, mostly because no one had written a book on this topic and it's a very niche kind of subject, so that niche was quite interested. I wound up talking about the book on a podcast, which was a cool experience.

This book is directly related to the type of work that I do professionally in my day career. Fast forward to 2025, and now, like everyone else, I have to take into account the sudden burst of development in artificial intelligence. AI has also affected the world of personal medical devices and so I need to update my book with a few new chapters, update some of the sections on the latest research, and also update the sections related to regulations related to privacy law and the development of medical devices in the United States.

So that's all the updates for now. There have been significant developments in my personal life and professional life that have caused me to pause a lot of my writing activity. For example, I had originally planned to be done with the first draft of They Also Breathe Fire by now. I'm not. But we keep moving on anyway. It's also the second anniversary of MFS and I was planning on doing something about that, but I don't think anybody's really interested in the fact that it's the second anniversary of a SubStack? I mean, it's not like I'm teaching our nation's children to read.

So on we go. I hope you are having a nice pleasant and dry summer.

If you haven’t yet, check out the first novel in the Rossi/Lopez series, The Good Killers (ad).

Click this link to find all my books on Amazon.