In today’s group post, we’re sharing some what lies ahead for us in the next year. New books or stories being published, new ventures undertaken. Whatever the journey will be in the year ahead.

Kate Flora: I am absurdly excited that a domestic suspense novel I’ve worked on, loved, and revised for at least twelve years, Teach Her a Lesson, will be published in May by Encircle Publications. 

I’m also looking forward to a new published short story, Fideau Saves the Day, in an as yet untitled anthology of short stories featuring characters in contributor’s mystery series. It was fun to write about the clever dog Joe Burgess acquired from a bad guy who was arrested.

What do your, our readers, think about a our doing a MCW holiday story anthology?

Maggie Robinson: With any luck, The Book That Will Not Finish Itself will somehow get finished, a holiday novella related to it will miraculously appear thereafter, and the seeds of Something New, Contemporary and Quirky will germinate. 2022 was a somewhat lackadaisical writing year for me, and I have all the good intentions to change that. Of course, you know where that road leads. 😉

John Clark hopes to be ambitious in 2023. With ten or so unpublished books and a potential anthology of mystery/horror stories demanding to be published, Something Gotta Give.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I’m still plugging along on the total rewrite of my 1991 historical novel, Winter Tapestry. Originally written as a mystery, it didn’t sell in that genre but I was offered the chance to have it published as historical romance if I’d just “add 10,000 words” and beef up the romantic elements. The novel ended up being described as “a romantic adventure in Tudor England” and never quite fit into either the mystery or the romance genre. That version had multiple point of view characters. The current effort has just one and I think it’s going to be much better for it. I hope to finish a complete draft by the end of 2022 and then take as much time as I need in 2023 to revise and polish. Still up in the air is whether I will self-publish or try to get my agent interested in hawking it as a “new” book. I haven’t changed the characters or who gets murdered or why, but just about everything else is completely different. Wish me luck.

Jule Selbo: I will be storming ahead on 8 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery and have put as a deadline for myself for a solid draft – the end of February, 2023. I am at a juncture in it now where I am tearing my hair out – but I hope this misery will pass and I can get it down. That means I could get it to my publisher end of March – and since it is a series, they have pushed the edit/cover/etc stuff through pretty quickly. If it could come out end of June????(cross fingers) I’d be two months ahead of how 9 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery took.  I finish my last semester of university professor-ing May 2023 and though I’ll miss reading my students’ screenplays and adding guidance/thoughts/opinions to them – it will be marvelous to have that time back into “my creative life”.  CRIME BAKE and CRIME WAVE and probably KILLER NASHVILLE are the conferences ahead.

Matt Cost: My historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry, will be published on April 12th. Hungarian detective, 8 Ballo, is hired to find a missing young flapper as the tale weaves through legendary celebrities, gangsters, and gets complicated very quickly. Mainely Wicked, the fifth book in my Mainely Mystery series, will be published in August, in which Langdon is hired to find a missing man and becomes involved with witches, Wiccans, and a Wendigo. Pirate Trap, the fifth book in my Clay Wolfe Trap series, will publish in December, in which Clay and Baylee are hired to find a centuries old pirate treasure off the coast of Port Essex.

In audio books, Wolfe Trap was just released, and will be followed over the first few months of the year by Mind Trap, Mouse Trap, and Cosmic Trap. Mainely Fear will come to listeners ears at the end of January, hopefully with the rest of the series to follow throughout the year. Velma Gone Awry will debut in audio in the middle of January, three months before the paperback release. At Every Hazard will be available in early February. I hope to follow Jule around to Crime Wave, Killer Nashville, and Crime Bake. And of course, I plan to WRITE ON.

Maureen Milliken: I truly honestly plan on finishing the book I’ve been working on for four years, working title “The Most Dangerous Month.” It is not part of my three-book Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea series, but once I get MDM done and am flogging it to agents, I plan to write the fourth Bernie O’Dea. I won’t go on and on because after four years everyone, including me, is sick of hearing about it.

Open mouth, insert river and magical days.

Sandra Neily: I can relate to Maggie’s “Book That Will Not Finish Itself.” I do plan to get as close as I can to a finished draft of the 3rd Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Assault.” During the writing, four possible murderers are auditioning for the part of The One That Did It. I heard about this strategy from an A List author at Crime Bake and I did that in Deadly Turn.  And I’d like to serialize a sort of memoir that’s part river-guiding anecdotes (folks have begged me to go public with these for years) and part dam fight that hung over the fate of the free-flowing river, even as thousands of us fished, paddled or just loved it … daily. Oh, and if the stock market ever bounces back, I plan to bring out an audio book of Deadly Trespass.