Next week at Maine Crime Writers we’ll be featuring posts from Barb Ross (Monday) John Clark (Tuesday), Special Guest Al Lamanda (Wednesday) and Kate Flora (Thursday), with a “mystery blog” on Friday, the last day of January.

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Kate Flora: I’ve been in San Francisco for a couple weeks, perched atop Russian Hill with a view of the Bay Bridge. Getting away to a new place to write is always good for me, and now I’m happily 100 pages into a new book. SF is also a place to have dinner with friends, and one night I was introduced to Peggy Northrop, editor of Sunset Magazine, who has an exciting new e-publishing venture, shebooks.net. Here’s what the website says about shebooks:

Shebooks is the new e-book publisher of great short books by women, for women. We publish long-form journalism, short memoir, and short fiction by some of the best writers in the United States and beyond, both well known and yet to be discovered. 

This may be a new submission venue for those of us with stories too long to be short, and for memoirs and essays. It’s also going to be an exciting new venue for readers. Not just mystery fiction, which is our usual world, but a great discovery that I wanted to share.

In other news, we’re not quite ready for the public announcement, but a committee formed by Maine Writers and Publishers is working on The Maine Crime Wave, a one-day Maine mystery conference we hope will become an annual event. Maybe by next weekend, I’ll have some specifics for those of you who love mystery writing and writers.

Do you have a blog site we should be linked to? Please let us know and we’ll be happy to exchange links. How about a mystery in your family, or your community that you’d like to share? Remember that we love guests, and stories.

And speaking of guests, you’re going to love Al Lamanda’s post this week, involving new uses for a spaghetti pot. Crime writers, it seems, are never dull.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora: kateflora@gmail.com