Read an Ebook Week at Smashwords!

This week, Smashwords is hosting Read an Ebook Week, which is basically a huge promotion on ebooks all across their site. I'm participating this year by offering Hanged to Death and Tweet the Police for free. The Aspen House and The Fornarina Affair are both 50% off ($1.50).

There are a ton more authors participating, so if you like a deal be sure to check out Smashwords' Read an Ebook Week catalog for more discounted books!

Just a reminder...

Today is the last day The Lonely Hipster will be offered for free on Amazon, so if you haven't downloaded it yet, you know what to do.

ALSO! Starting tomorrow, January 23rd, I'll be offering another one of my short stories, The Sea Queen's Daughter, for free through the 27th. Grab it up if you haven't already.

Thanks to everyone for making The Lonely Hipster's debut week a success!

THE LONELY HIPSTER now available, free for a limited time!

Today's the day! The Lonely Hipster is available for purchase on Amazon.com. But you don't even have to purchase it because it's free to download for the next five days, January 18th-22nd. So click, read, and enjoy!

Want a summary? Of course you do:

A mystery where murder meets coffeehouse romance, beards, and flip-flops... 
Stantonville is a small town where everyone knows everyone else and they all get along—or do they? Adam McGill, Stantonville’s lone hipster, gets a lot of flack from the other residents for being lazy and suspicious. So when the town’s wealthiest resident, Peter Stanton, is found shot with a note that reads “McGill” in his hand, suspicion immediately falls on Adam. And the police aren’t the only ones he has to worry about—he's also being followed by the people who actually shot Stanton! 
With the help of the cute barrista in Stantonville’s lone coffee shop, Adam needs to find Stanton's shooter—and move out of his mom’s basement—before he winds up in prison. Or worse.

Pssst... One Day to Go!

The Lonely Hipster has a scheduled release date—tomorrow! Remember I'm going to offer it for free during the first week, so make a mental note to check this blog for buy links or search Amazon for it between January 18th and January 22nd.

Thanks to all my readers for their support and encouragement! I'm excited to finally be sharing this story with you.

Coming Soon: THE LONELY HIPSTER

Hello everyone! I know things have been rather silent on ye olde blog lately. I've been focusing mainly on non-fiction writing for the last few weeks and didn't really have any updates available.

However! I wanted to let you all know that I'm gearing up to publish The Lonely Hipster, a mystery—or hipstery, as I like to call it—about the only hipster living in a small factory town, in January. I already have the cover put together (thanks to my brother for agreeing to be my model! You can also see him on the cover of Tweet the Police) and just have to work on formatting. Very soon it will be ready to publish!

My plan is to offer The Lonely Hipster for free on Amazon.com during the first week after it's published, then price it at 99 cents for the next three weeks before raising the price to the typical $2.99, where I will keep it indefinitely. This way the first people to purchase the novella will get the best deal on it. So watch this blog for the release date and you'll be able to download the novella for free!

I also recently published two novellas, The Fornarina Affair and The Aspen House, to Smashwords. I'm still waiting on them to be published to B&N and iTunes, but I will update the buy links on my books page once they're available. In the meantime, if you use a reading device other than Kindle or a Kindle app, you can download the EPUB, PDF, and LRF versions of both those novellas at Smashwords.

I want to thank all my loyal readers, friends, family, and fellow authors for their support this year. I honestly would have given up on writing a long time ago if it wasn't for your encouragement and help. I hope you all have a great holiday season and here's to a fabulous year of reading and writing in 2014!

A Sneak Peek...

A twist on the fairy tale The Little Mermaid set in 18th-century Venice...

On a barge anchored in the middle of the Adriatic, Marco Lorendan meets a mysterious and beautiful woman. His fascination for her is sealed when she saves him from drowning and then disappears into the sea. Is she dead, or simply lost? Marco is determined to find out.

Living beneath the waters of the lagoon, Serena can change into whatever form she chooses, but cannot change her fate: to die in an ancient ritual that goes back to the founding of Venice. Serena wants to live in the human world with Marco, but how can she save herself if it means the destruction of Venice?

A tale of star-crossed lovers and the magic that created one of the most beautiful cities on earth.

Promo: TWEET THE POLICE now available!

Exciting news: my new short mystery, Tweet the Police is now available for purchase! You can currently get it at:

• Smashwords
• Amazon

It will be available at iBooks and Barnes & Noble online storefronts in a few days, and I will update my Books page when I have those links (note you can purchase formats for Nook, iPad, Kobo, Sony, and Kindle at Smashwords right now).

What is Tweet the Police about?

Story summary: Rick thought being a sheriff's deputy in the small New Mexico town of Ultima would be a quiet job--but that was before he met Mrs. Pendergast, the local busybody who fancies herself an amateur sleuth.

When Mrs. P sees a tweet asking for help on her new smartphone, she's determined to find out if the "tweep" is okay; and it's all Rick and her granddaughter, Sylvie, can do to keep up with her!

I got the idea for this story when I caught a joke by Jimmy Kimmel one night that someone had "tweeted the police." I thought "Tweet the Police" would be a great title for a story. And being a member of the Twitterati myself, I couldn't help but think about how tweeting the police would work in real life.

Law enforcement using social media to catch criminals isn't that unusual. Several people have been arrested after bragging about their crimes on FaceBook (which should definitely go into the Dumb Criminals file), and a city not far from where I live actually has a police team dedicated to scanning social media sites. Of course, solving the mystery in Tweet the Police isn't as straight-forward as looking up someone's status update.

The heart of the story, though, is the characters, especially Mrs. Pendergast. Mrs. P is a retiree who's still learning new things and following her passions. She deserves a lot more respect than she gets from the sheriff's office, which is something they find out during the course of the story.

I hope you all enjoy reading Tweet the Police as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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Promo: HANGED TO DEATH free for a limited time!

In anticipation of the release of Tweet the Police, I'm offering Hanged to Death free for a limited time. This edition contains a small teaser of Tweet the Police at the end.

Where to download:
Smashwords (Nook and Kindle editions also available here)