Good luck to you with your book!

Many years ago, I was your first “file clerk” while I was on the journalism department faculty at Texas Christian University. You were kind enough to critique my writing in exchange for my clerical assistance. Now that life has taken me to a place where I can write fiction full-time, I have completed a mystery novel. In the intervening years, I have enjoyed keeping up with Midnight Louie and seriously miss Irene. Rita

Cheers, Carole

I’m sorry the publisher didn’t respond, but am impressed you mailed them! With hundreds of authors and thousands of books, mail on specific books could easily, and does, get lost. Circumstances years ago kept postponing my getting to write the third Taliswoman book. I don’t like unfinished trilogies or series any more than readers do, but in writing more than fifty books, it’s been beyond my power to change a couple of times. The “Probe” series was four books in my mind, not two. I’ve heard from other readers waiting so long for the third Taliswoman, as you have. It doesn’t help that online book sites have listed it for years!! I’m thinking I’ll have to finish it on my own at some point. Meanwhile, I now have an urban fantasy series going, and,if that continues to be successful it might lead to finishing the Taliswoman series. Carole, glad

I like your words “force and dedication.” More true than I knew when I started. Fiction writing is more like a vocation in the religious sense of the word than a profession. It comes to take over your whole being, and time, much of the time being consumed by the art of being and staying published, especially these Internet days. As Billy Joel writes, “surviving is a noble art.”

I love the intricate work of making a past time come alive, and there is no more intricate past time than the Victorian Age, I find. Younger readers may not have the attention span for highly described worlds, I’m afraid. I’ve had several Irene Adler short stories published I’d like to put out in print or e-book form myself, when I have time. The most recent is in the current anthology, Sex, Lies and Private Eyes.” Not a title you’d associate with Victorian times. The Robert Downey, Jr., Sherlock Holmes film has stirred interest in Irene Adler, and I have eight titles about her out there. Not in Barnes & Noble so much these days. I haven’t stopped writing or publishing, but the chain bookstores have stopped carrying many authors in sufficient numbers to notice. I’m so involved in working I hadn’t thought readers might think I had vanished too.

Not the case. Glad you visited the web site. Check the online B&N site for what’s new. Almost all of my mysteries are available in print paperback.

This April 13-26 my three-book Delilah Street noir urban fantasy series (Dancing with Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, and Vampire Sunrise) will be featured at Barnes and Noble stores during a chain werewolf and vampire promotion. Maybe not your cup of tea, but Delilah’s Silver Zombie is coming out next November in paperback, Midnight Louie will have Cat in a Topaz Tango out in paper June 30 and Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme Aug. 2, and, who knows, the new action-oriented Sherlock film might spur a return of Irene Adler to novel length again. She already went on hiatus once. PBS is reported to be doing more Sherlock Holmes stories in the new Downey, Jr. action vein. Perhaps they’ll do better by Irene Adler than the entertaining movie, which had reinventing Sherlock as an agenda, not taking a deeper look at Irene Adler.

Midnight Louie has three more lives coming up with books V,W, and X under contract. .

Check the newsletter page on this site and, if you don’t get it, sign up for the annual newsletter in print or e-scribe PDF form to keep up with the long and short of my fiction output. And I should be adding content to this site as time permits, which is sure to be piece-meal. Thanks for posting. Cheers! Carole et. al.