Ten (!) Books

          

I will have published 10 books by June. Two come out in April, one in June, which means I now have 7 of them out.

When I started writing seriously, I think about 12 or 13 years ago, I fervently wanted to get ONE book published. I worked on that one book for about 10 years, including a few years before the serious full-time stuff began. When I finally had it polished into a literary masterpiece, I started sending it to agents. I was shocked and dismayed at first at the soulless rejections I got back. (In those more gentile days, all agents gave responses to submissions, even if they were one-sentence form letters.)

Hubby and I were moved to a tiny town for the next phase of his life after his ordination as an Elder in the United Methodist church. I quit my programming job and, as I said above, finished creating my masterpiece. What luck that I quickly discovered an online group of mystery writers, the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime!

This is where I learned to craft a better query letter, who to query and who not to, how to write a synopsis, and even, through manuscript exchanges, that I should not use the word “little” to describe nearly everything. (Thanks to James M. Jackson.)

Several hundred rejections and several completed manuscripts later, I did get ONE book published, thanks to all the helpful mentoring I received. But was that enough for me? What do you think? I quickly created a sequel to that book (CHOKE), then wrote a book I’d had a hare-brained urge to do (DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE).  After SMOKE AND BROKE, the CHOKE sequels were out there, I finally found a publisher for that first opus, which is now called EINE KLEINE MURDER. (I’m not counting a couple of false starts that turned out to be novella length stinkers.)

The icing on my cake came with a Penguin contract for the FAT CAT series, 2 of which are published.

(Books coming out next year are REQUIEM IN RED, FAT CAT TAKES THE CAKE, and DEATH ON THE TREK.) (Details at http://kayegeorge.com/)

I’m finding out that it’s never enough. There are quite a few more series I would like to do, but there are also sequels to my existing series in my head. I’d have to live another hundred years to write them all. I’m doing what I always dreamed of, published books, watching them actually sell, getting reviews, and writing more books. Life is good.

The picture includes short story anthologies, ARCs, and a couple of large print books. That’s why it’s more than ten.