Here's a Margo short story that I debuted at last year's Halloween event. It's now available to everyone on Cloudup, so here's the link. Enjoy!

Margo Monroe is back in her first ever short-format adventure. The entity that is trying to contact Margo and Ernie seems to prefer electronic means. Some of the tenants in the old building that the spirits call home are not thrilled to see the ghost hunters. Margo and Ernie are puzzled by their resistance until they discover the link between a decades-old crime and a local bigwig’s underhanded plan to remake their beloved hometown.

Get it here for just 99 cents on Amazon for Kindle. (Sorry Nook readers.)

Road trip alert! 

Granbury, Texas is a historic town about 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Not only is it the home of the Granbury Ghosts and Legends Tour, but for the past few years they’ve been hosting the Granbury Paranormal Expo. I will be there with fellow Ghost Scribes Ann Fields and Zander Marks, along with a whole boatload of other cool vendors and speakers. There’s something at the Expo for everybody, whether you’re new to the paranormal or have been chasing ghosts all your life. Tickets are $7 for a single day or $10 for the whole weekend. This is a great opportunity for fans of the paranormal, to commune with like-minded people.

Granbury Resort Conference Center

621 E. Pearl Street

Saturday, April 25 - 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Sunday, April 26 - 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Granbury is worth a trip, by the way. In case you’re from another planet, Granbury is famous in these parts for the Opera House, home of the Granbury Theater Company. The theater, which was built in 1886, is recently restored. You could take in their performance of “To Kill a Mockingbird” that weekend, then join a ghost tour that night. Plus, Granbury has the cutest little downtown you ever saw. 

The Ghost Scribes will be there all weekend, so please stop by and see us!

My long-awaited mini-biography of Mozart, which was scheduled for release last summer, is in publishing limbo. The publisher seems to have fallen into the same black hole into which socks disappear. I am not a happy camper, as I'm sure you can imagine. Unfortunately, I am under a contractual obligation to the aforementioned publisher. So please keep your collective fingers crossed that my lawyer will be willing to dispense legal advice for free. (Note to Walt: no more lawyer jokes, I promise!)

That's the bad news.

The good news is that a new Margo Monroe mystery will be coming to a Kindle near you very soon! This one, tentatively titled "Ghost in the Machine", is a bit of a departure from recent Margo stories. Too long to be a short story but too short to be a whole book by itself, it's technically a novella. But don't worry, it has all the fun-filled, action-packed ghostly adventure you've comes to expect from Margo and Ernie.

In the meantime, check out this excellent article on why novellas are the future of publishing. 

In case you missed the great Ghost Scribes Halloween bash on October 30, here are some highlights.

If you're looking for something to do on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that doesn't involve fighting the traffic and crowds, have I got a deal for you. The Ben Wheeler Book Fair is in Ben Wheeler, TX on November 29 from 9 am until 4 pm. Ben Wheeler is a charming little town about 15 miles from Canton. It's in the old Elwood School, now known as the Children's Library and the address is 5475 FM 858. I'm really looking forward to this event! If you're in that neck of the woods, please stop by.

Woohoo! Have I got something fun coming up!

I've teamed up with fellow ghost authors Ann Fields and Zander Marks to bring you Ghost Scribes. We're having a do on October 30th, the day before Halloween, and everyone's invited. You won't want to miss this one. We're having games, prizes, and readings. Buy scary books and have the authors sign them! If you're in Dallas or plan to be in the neighborhood come Halloween, we'd love to see you there.

October 30 at 7:00 pm at Lucky Dog Books, 633 W. Davis in the Bishop Arts District. Hope to see you there.

www.ghost-scribes.com

I'm really excited...I just learned that a short story of mine is being published in the October 2014 issue of the Texas Writer's Journal. I'm not sure if it's out in print yet, but the link is here: http://www.texaswritersjournal.com/subscriptions.html. 

I submitted it ages ago, and I'd sort of given up. But this morning I learned that I'm also a finalist in their annual contest. Guess I won't know until February whether I won or not, but it's exciting anyway.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the launch party for The Science Professor's Ghost. Check out the photos here.

Join me for a happy hour!

Please join me October 26 from 5 to 8 pm at Acme Social Club, 4900 McKinney Avenue in Dallas to celebrate the release of The Science Professor's Ghost. Everyone is invited!

We're having it early so you can go to your Halloween party or have dinner afterwards. Acme is on the corner of Monticello and McKinney just off of I-75. They have great drinks and delicious snacks and are close to all the great places on Knox-Henderson and Uptown.

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Do Europeans have it better than Americans?

Here's a link to a really fascinating article I found on HuffPost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/07/16-ways-europeans-are-just-better-at-life_n_3950351.html

I would say it's pretty much spot on.

Just once in my life, I'd like to be around for an opera flashmob.

Science Professor's Ghost is now available in paperback!

I'm thrilled to announce that my second book in the Margo Monroe ghost hunting series, The Science Professor's Ghost, is now out in paperback on Amazon and Barnes and Noble!

You can also find it in all the usual ebook formats:

• for Kindle on Amazon 
• for Nook at Barnes & Noble online
• for a whole bunch of different formats on Smashwords

The Science Professor's Ghost

Nigel Pritchett was the first murder victim in Throckmorton since 1934. When Margo Monroe gets a message from him on the day of his funeral, she is concerned but not terribly surprised--she's a professional ghost hunter, and her boss was the late professor's oldest friend. While Margo and her team set out to find out what happened to Professor Pritchett, they also find time to help a precocious fifth grader named Chester, who claims his school is haunted.
 Margo soon finds herself embroiled in more than she bargained for. Her job is to find out what happened to the late professor, before she ends up as a ghost herself. 

 The Science Professor's Ghost is now available! You can find it at Smashwords in a variety of formats, and on Amazon for Kindle. Print version will be available soon.



Special thanks to Dan Crider for the cool music!

Well, here it is April already and I see that my last post was about Christmas. It's been for a good cause, I promise. The last draft of my next book is almost ready. OK, so I'm 6 months late, but better late than never is what I say. Stay tuned--it's going to be a good one.

In the meantime, here's a link to an interesting article I found. It expounds on what I said in some earlier posts (here, here, & here), about how writers and other creative types are no longer at the mercy of someone else. A fellow named Michael Alford addresses this very issue in his post "The Gatekeepers are Gone". A very interesting read.

A Christmas Visit

I hope everyone survived the holiday season with sanity intact. I'm always happy when life returns to normal and I can walk in a store without being forced to listen to "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". I rant about this subject in a previous post, so I won't recycle it here. I spent Christmas at my parents' house, and something really cool happened that I just have to share. In the afternoon it started snowing, which doesn't happen often in Texas. Their house has an enclosed patio, and I was there watching it snow when a movement caught my eye. Before my wondering eyes, the door into the living room suddenly began to swing slowly shut. As I watched, it pulled itself quietly but firmly closed. I assumed it must have been my dad, who complains about the cold whenever this door is opened. So I opened the aforementioned door and stuck my head in to find my dad dozing soundly in front of the TV. My mom came in from outside, where she’d been taking pictures of the snow, and I told her about it. She looked at me like I’d had too much eggnog and said “It’s because the kitchen window is open.” But the kitchen window wasn’t open, nor were any other windows. About half an hour later, all three of us were sitting in the living room when we heard the front door open, then gently close. It didn't slam, just opened and closed like it always does when someone goes out or comes in. I went to have a look. The door in question is a storm door, kind of like a screen door except it's all glass. You have to turn a little lever to open it. The door was firmly shut, with the latch in place, and I looked around but there was no one there. It seemed like a good time to press the iPhone into service as a voice recorder, but our visitor had evidently departed. Nothing like this, as far as I know, has ever happened at my parents' house. Neither parent was particularly impressed. My only theory as to who it might have been is my aunt, who recently passed away. She and my mom were very close, so maybe she was paying us a little Christmas visit. I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2013! Cheers!

The subject of gun control resurfaces from time to time, usually when something horrible has happened. The latest tragedy in Connecticut is the most horrific that I can recall. Rather than offer the standard condolences to the victims’ families, I’d like to posit that when something like this happens it’s a tragedy for everyone. It isn’t just something horrible that happens to somebody else. It’s an indication that something is dreadfully wrong in our society.
In my opinion the endless debate about gun control is missing the point entirely, which is why is this even happening in the first place? The simplistic answer is that guns are cheap and easily available. However, the sad fact is that banning guns won’t do much to stop a truly determined psychopath. Somebody has already offered Timothy McVeigh as evidence for that one.
The uncomfortable fact is that tragedies like this happen on a fairly regularly basis here in the Land of the Free, but pretty much not at all anywhere else. (I think there might have been an incident in a German school several years ago.) It can’t be attributed simply to the presence or absence of guns. For example, the Swiss have guns in their homes. Men between the ages of 19 and 35 must serve in the Army and they keep their guns at home. Yet murders are so rare that they make front-page news. In the entire decade I was in Bern, the capital of the country, there was exactly one murder. A deranged man ambushed a girl walking home from the train station and stabbed her to death. It was front-page news all over Switzerland, and it had been more than ten years since the previous murder in Bern. And it didn’t have politicians clamoring to ban knives.
I don’t have any theories about this, except that Europeans in general and the Swiss in particular are extraordinarily formal and so polite that they seem positively frosty by our standards. They are generally well-educated, don’t watch much TV, and the consumerism so rampant over here hasn’t made many inroads in Europe, except maybe Britain.
In the meantime, here’s something that should make you very, very worried. According to the Huffington Post, Arkansas has officially become a police state. You will be stopped and questioned simply for walking your dog. I don’t live in Arkansas and don’t plan to go there any time soon, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a good thing.

Please excuse the prolonged absence. I try, but sometimes life gets in the way. Things have calmed down some, so hopefully I'm back for a while. In the meantime, here's a link to a lovely little review (in French, sorry about that) by French sci-fi blogger Spocky Qui Lit. http://spocky-qui-lit.blogspot.com/2012/11/au-rapport-mr-spock-2.html

Check out the September 2012 issue of The Dallas Writer's Journal! They published a fun little sci-fi short story that I wrote a while back. It's called "Toby's New Home". You can read it online here--go to page 8.

The sneak preview to my upcoming book is here! It's called The Science Professor's Ghost and the first chapter is available here. I hope you enjoy this preview. The book will be out in a few weeks, in plenty of time for Halloween.