A good time for fiction

I know; it’s been awhile. The Trump nightmare keeps getting darker, and writing about anything else has seemed frivolous. But life goes on. I am just determined to outlive this bastard, to dance rhetorically on his grave when all this passes, as it must.

So I’ve deleted Facebook and Twitter from my phone again, and I’ve resumed writing fiction. Rewriting it, too. Recently I decided to repackage all my published short stories into a single volume, and put it on Amazon as an e-book. I realized there aren’t quite enough of them to make a book, so I’ve written a couple more. In the process, I’ve gone through all the published stories and polished them to a showroom sheen. At times I’ve been embarrassed at how poorly some of them were edited before appearing in “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.” That’s on me, not the magazine.

A few weeks from now, the Kindle book should be on the market. I’m calling it The Least Best Place. It’s the title of one of my favorites stories, which first appeared as “Dead Black Cadillac.”

I don’t expect to make any money off this, or even break even, but it’s something to do. It’s a nice distraction from the creeping demise of a once-proud democracy. That’s the most important thing right now: it lifts my mood.

About the other stories: They all feature a recurring character, a deputy in a small Montana town who solves crimes big and small just because he knows most of the people so well. No DNA, no complicated ballistics or blood-spatter analysis. No serial killers or unreliable narrators. None of these tales will ever be nominated for an Edgar Award, but as I edited them again I found I liked them all quite a bit. Now I kind of wish I’d written more.