It’s been five years since I started putting together the ideas for my first book. That book became a series of five. I haven’t completely ruled out the idea of continuing the series, but for now I want to concentrate on other projects, including my long delayed historical fiction set partly during World War One. [Does that sound familiar? This time I mean it!]

Besides novel writing, over the years, I’ve written a number of short stories. I’m at the point where I think I have enough for a collection. Although, there are no hard and fast rules anymore –you can publish works of any length through Amazon– 40,000 words seems to be the magic number for a collection of short stories. With that in mind, I plan on revisiting my older stories with an eye for revision and expansion. As I work them out, I will likely post them here, so for those of you who’ve been following for a while, some of them might sound familiar.

If the short stories come together, I might do the same thing with my poetry. Since the poems, by nature, are much shorter and the volume would be slim, I thought about pairing them with my own illustrations, photos or other artwork. The idea for these projects arose from the ‘housecleaning’ I’m doing for the move: organizing things to keep and things to discard. The same can be applied to my writing: some of it is ready to go with just a little cleaning up, some of it needs major repairs, and some of it can be trashed. [Not really trashed… I keep everything, even if it’s just to spark a new idea. But you know what I mean]. With polishing, I hope these pieces will shine with new life.

In the coming weeks, my offline world is about to get a little crazy, so I hope you will enjoy these older stories and posts. Interspersed of course, with my adventures in Ireland as I look for a new home.