My EQMM Story's a Finalist for the Derringer Award!

Wow! It happened again. One of my stories got picked for a Derringer Award.

I was screwing around on my phone last night when I got an email listing this year's finalists. One of them was "The Woman in the Briefcase," the story that ran in the March/April 2016 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The official announcement is here. The Derringers are the only award in the mystery fiction world that are given solely to short stories. Twenty finalists are chosen—five in four different categories, according to the length of the story. "The Woman in the Briefcase" is up for the "Best Short Story" category, which denotes a story that is 1,001 to 4,000 words long.

For me, it's a cool honor on two levels. It's the first story I ever landed in EQMM. And it's the third time in four years that one of my stories has been picked as a Derringer finalist. (I won for Best Flash Story in 2015.) I'm hugely honored, especially since I haven't really done a lot of short fiction this past two years. I've been tied up with ghostwriting and trying to finish a pair of novels.

What's "The Woman in the Briefcase" about? It's strange, since most of the action takes place 30,000 years ago. A crazy caveman mystery is what it is.

I'm pretty sure the editor will make it available during the month-long judging period. But you can use Bookfunnel right now to download a copy of a quick-and-dirty e-book I just put together. I'll post EQMM's link if and when I have it. Either way, enjoy.

Look for my first-ever story in EQMM!

My short story, “The Woman in the Briefcase” appears in the March/April 2016 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM). The hard-copy issue hit newsstands earlier this week, but you can also grab digital issues as well.

I'm pretty excited because it's the first story of mine to appear in EQMM. I'd describe it as a forensic anthropology mystery with a twist.

You can download a single digital issue via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Magzter, Kobo, and Google Play. Just make sure you are downloading the March/April issue shown above.

Submissions stats: I finished this story sometime in August 2014. I submitted it to EQMM that same month, and didn’t hear from them until they bought it in February 2015,  six months later. So it’s appearing about a year after acceptance, eighteen months since writing and submission. Payment was $200, plus an additional $50 prepayment against a future EQMM anthology. That came to a total of $250, or about 7 cents a word.

Yes, I will eventually release an e-book version of “The Woman in the Briefcase," which I’ll offer free to readers on my list. If you’d rather wait for the free copy, please join my e-newsletter.