August Monthly Stat Thing

Loren Rhoads is a friend of mine and she’s in one of my critique groups. I love her research stories. If you haven’t read any of her stuff—fiction or non-fiction alike, you have a treat waiting for you. Today, she’s got one hell of a research story to tell you. One of the stories in Unsafe Words, my new collection, features Alondra DeCourval, a witch who travels the world to protect people from supernatural monsters and vice versa. I’ve written a series of stories about her over the years. While I haven’t yet finished a novel about Alondra, I know a lot about her life. Many of the stories I’ve written take place in the year after her teacher suffers a catastrophic heart attack. Alondra panics, unable to face living in the world without Victor’s protection. She goes to more and more extreme lengths to save his life. Although “Valentine”...

I found a digital set of journal entries from 1990. It was my first real attempt at journaling. It was also before I understood what the internet was and that things written in digital form are forever unless you make a specific effort to get rid of them. I read the journal entries, had a good laugh and a small cringe, then I deleted them. No one needs to have access to private journal entries from 30 years ago when I was thrashing about in my college years. Talk about hindsight being 2020…(and every other 2020 joke out there). I’ve already rounded up 2019…and logged my accomplishments from the last decade of 2010-2019. I guess the only thing left is to talk about my plans for 2020. Hard numbers: Write: 1 BattleTech novel, 1 SF novella, 5 short stories, [other projects in the works]. Edit: 2 BattleTech novels, 1 anthology,...