December 2025
Hello all!
Happy holidays and wishes for a wonderful New Year to you all. It’s been a while since I’ve written a newsletter—not because nothing is happening, but because so much has been!
Let’s start with the big news first.
My novella collection Quartet was accepted for publication by Quoir, a small publishing house based in California. As you’d guess from the title, it’s comprised of four stories. In “Periphery,” an elderly woman has eye surgery to correct severe nearsightedness, and begins to see things out of the corner of her eye. Her ophthalmologist tells her this is perfectly normal—until one of the things she sees starts following her around and causing trouble. “We All Fall Down,” set during the Black Death in England, is about a young man who has survived the plague, and bands together with other survivors in a small town. He’s mostly concerned about finding enough food to eat, but has to face an entirely different threat when something starts killing the survivors one by one. In “The Tree of Knowledge,” a middle-aged Anglican minister in the English Midlands finds a mute, shivering boy alone in a graveyard one cold and windy night, and takes him in, not realizing the boy is hiding a devastating secret. And in “Canaries,” a depressed divorcé meets a woman who is bound and determined to fix what’s wrong with his life—and is not going to let the fact that she’s been dead for fifty years stop her.
I’m not sure what the publication date for Quartet will be yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
Quoir has also accepted my novella “Shadowboxing,” about a teenage boy who suddenly has the alarming realization that he and one of his classmates can hear each other’s thoughts, for publication in an anthology coming out next summer. And they’re currently considering my YA fantasy novel Snares as well!
I’m still trying to find an agent for my fantasy novel The Accidental Magician. Nine rejections down, how many to go? We’ll see.
As far as current writing projects go, I’m about three-quarters of the way through a historical novel with a paranormal thread, called Nightingale. It’s set in thirteenth-century Europe, and I got the idea from a book I bought from the good old Scholastic Book Club when I was twelve (and still own!). The book was Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt Hurwood, and the story was called “The Phantoms of Jedburgh Abbey,” a tale of duplicity, double-dealing, and murder in Scotland, centering around the (real) King Alexander III and his French second wife, Yolande de Dreux. My own story takes the original legend and flips it upside down. The Bad Guy in the old story, Simon de Montbard, is the protagonist of Nightingale, and the bad things he did turn out to have been for a very good reason. This novel plays out on a very broad stage—from France to Scotland and back again, then to the Holy Land and Cyprus before finally returning home—and asks some very big questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. If you liked my novel Kári the Lucky, you will love Nightingale!
We’re also making plans to re-release my Parsifal Snowe Mysteries series, comprised of seven books (starting with Poison the Well) centered around a psychic detective agency. They’re currently out of print but hopefully won’t be for much longer!
On the home front, we’re still doing our thing—Carol had a very successful year of art shows, she’s still teaching nurses’ aide training classes, and the dogs are still doing what they do best.
So that’s the news from upstate New York. As always, I’ll leave you with a suggestion to check out my website and grab a copy of any of my books you haven’t read yet. And a plea to leave a review once you do!
Happiest of Happy New Years to you all—may 2026 bring us all what we most wish for.