Update

I haven’t posted for a while, so I thought I’d post a little update. Not that there’s too much to update.

The Dolls trade paperback is finally available. And even after all the time spent trying to weed out every error and mistake in the text, the first thing I did when I got my copy was open to a random page and find a spelling error. Talk about wanting to strangle yourself. Ug.

But it’s out and it’s pretty clean. It looks nice. I did some fancy stuff with the chapter numbers for the final release, flanking them with ivy so they sort of go with the theme of the book a bit and I played with some of the spacing making the book look and feel a little nicer. In the end, I wound up making the font 12 point instead of 11, so I grew by twelve pages. It’s a nicer looking book because of it, though.

Here’s something exciting: I just ordered the proofs for my new short story anthology! I sort of jumped the gun on this one. I planned on doing a HUGE anthology of basically every short story I’d written that I didn’t think was complete crap and put it out next fall. It would have been around four hundred pages. But I am starting to do readings, and having only a YA book to read from is a bit of a handicap, so I decided to take the cream of the crop as far as my shorts go and do a book sooner than planned. This one has ten stories in it and they are by far my best ten.

It’s going to look nice too. It’s 5 x 8 and 270 pages long which will give it a bit of heft. Each story starts with a little preamble with me talking about how it came to be written or something else clever (or not so clever . . . I can never tell when I’m being clever).

The book doesn’t have a specific genre. The stories range from quiet and tender to military science fiction, but they all work together I think because they all ultimately have my voice behind them. The anthology is called Sometimes the Angels Weep and the cover is shown here. It’s actually a wraparound cover with a really nice sunset on the back that was incredibly hard to get text to look good in front of, but somehow I managed to do it.

People are going to start thinking I have this weird infatuation with angels because all my books are titled with them, but I chose the title because nearly every story in the book has one thing in common: it shows the fallibility of humankind in one way or another along with showing how we can strive to be our best and come closest to God. It’s at these times when we strive for greatness that we miss the mark and fail the worst, sometimes, and that is when I see the angels crying. At least for the characters in the stories being told in this anthology. Please don’t read any religious beliefs into that statement any further that that.

I heard from Kensington today. They sent out the page proofs for Dream With Little Angels. Apparently we’re ahead of schedule, so I have until the middle of January to get them back to them. That’s good because our mail service is so bad it could take that long just to send them. Besides, I’m a slow reader. It’s one of my biggest problems (there’s a list. It’s pretty long).

That’s about it for now. Y’all go now to Amazon.com and purchase a copy of the Dolls trade paperback and wait impatiently for Sometimes the Angels Weep. That’s what I’d do if I was you.

Michael out.