New Cozy Mystery! / Happenings In The Outhouse 30-May-2025

 "Meet Kevin Stubbs.  When Kevin isn't flipping pancakes or burgers at Rose's Kitchen, he is patrolling the streets of small-town Charity, Minnesota. Juggling two demanding jobs can be difficult, but when a fire claims the lives of two prominent members of the tight knit community, the investigation leads him into places where he never dreamed of going."

This book, "Sunny Side Up With A Side of Bacon" is available in ebook format on Amazon as well as other ebook retailers.

This is the first is my Short Order Cop cozy mystery series.

Enjoy!!

Rule Five: Keep It Out On The Market Until Sold / Happenings In The Outhouse 23-May-2025

Rule five.  The last rule.

But is it, really?

Keep your story out, either making its rounds in the short story market or indie publish it.  It won't make any money sitting in a drawer or computer file.  No eyeballs will read it.  No one.  You never know which story will hit a reader the best and will drive them to read more of your stories.

Which brings me to what I like to call rule six . . . write something else.

Keep writing.

And have fun!

Rule Four: Put Story Out On The Market / Happenings In The Outhouse 16-May-2025

At the most basic levels, there are two paths to publication: traditional and self-publishing.

Traditional means to go through an agent or magazine publisher.

Self-publishing means to do it yourself.

For decades, I tried the traditional route by submitting to agents and contests and magazines.  When, I discovered self-publishing in 2011.  I researched the heck out of it until I decided to give it a go in April 2012.

And I have not looked back, except I still submit to contests and magazine publications.

The bottom line on this: get your story out there.  If it gets rejected, don't take it personally.  Put it out there again.  If you have completely exhausted all of the contests and magazines, then try the self-publish route.  But for crying out loud, no one is going to discover it if it's sitting either in a drawer or in a file folder on your hard drive.

Get the story out there.  Now!

Rule Three: Do Not Rewrite / Happenings In The Outhouse 09-May-2025

For Heinlein, the entire rule states: "Do not rewrite except to editorial order."

When I first encountered this rule, I didn't quite know what it meant.  So I dug deeper.

When we first write, we're using our creative voice.  It's raw.  It's got edges.  It's unique.  As we rewrite and rewrite, we're polishing our unique piece of work until something that's . . . frankly, dull and boring.  The creativity is lost.

Now, it's okay to fix typos and errors in the story.

But that's all.

What author Dean Wesley Smith taught me was to cycle.  Cycling works like this: write a set amount of words (300-500 or so) and then circle back to where you started, fixing what needs fixing on a typo level or adding details, and then moving another 300-500 words past where you stopped before.  Once you are done with your story, you have kept much of your creative voice in it.

Again, that's all.

The Importance Of Staying Organized / Happenings In The Outhouse 02-May-2025

I am so close to finishing my latest work-in-progress, the first novel in a cozy mystery series, that I am excited to see it finally come to an end.

But as I am nearing the end, I am seeing the importance of story organization.  With a mystery--truly, this can be any story too, not just mysteries or similar genres--there are elements of a crime and the law enforcement agent seeking to discover the truth behind the crime (if there, in fact, is one) that authors do not want to miss something.

Along the way, I have made notes on various parts of the investigation, but I still go back, in case I miss something.

As with any story, be it short story to novel, I try to make notes as to where the story went and where it's going.  Over the years, I have tweaked this process, and may still do so in the future.  In the end, it's important to stay organized or else you'll make a mistake in your story and cause the reader to either stop reading your story or (and this is much worse) will never pick up one of your stories ever again.