Over the last year, a number of you have asked how to get my Derringer-award winning novella, “Catherine The Great,” and while you can get it in last year’s Holiday Spectacular compilation, that’s only available in ebook. Many of you want paper…and I get it. I do too.

So, we decided to put it into paper. And by the time we got to that project, I had also written three other mystery/crime novellas. One is a thriller (Kizzie) and two are more straightforward mysteries. We put all four in a Kickstarter that launches today.

Here’s the video for the Kickstarter. Over the next week, I’ll also share the book trailers with you for the novellas. However, if you’d like to see them now, head to the Kickstarter. They’re all on it, along with a lot of other goodies.

As you can tell, this is one of my favorite things to write. I hope you end up getting the books.

This past year has been so crazy that it took Dean to remind me that I hadn’t publicly acknowledged how lucky I am.

Last year, I won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award for Best Novella/Novel for “The Court-Martial of the Renegat Renegades,” which is a Diving story. This year, I won the Readers’ Award for Best Novelette for “The Nameless Dead,” which is not a Diving story. “The Nameless Dead” has an opening that I actually heard in my sleep and managed to wake up and write it all down. I really don’t know where these stories come from, but I’m so pleased that readers like them.

Readers for The Short Mystery Fiction Society voted my novella “Catherine The Great” as the winner (in a tie) for the Best Novelette. I’m honored to be in such good company, as David Dean also won for his story “Mrs. Hyde,” which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. “Catherine The Great” appeared in The WMG Holiday Spectacular Calendar of Stories last year. You can get your copy in The Holiday Spectacular #5, which is a compilation of all of 2023’s stories.

I am so very honored by these readers’ awards. All three of them. Judged awards are nice and they give the writer (okay, me) a lot to smile about. But readers awards mean more to me. These folks spent their hard-earned dollars on the product, generally a magazine or anthology, and so they have hard opinions about what’s good and what isn’t.

The fact that the readers have loved my work matters a lot to me. So, I want to say thank you. Thank you for reading my work. Thank you for supporting it. And thank you ever so much for taking the time to vote for the stories—all of them, not just mine. I greatly appreciate it.

I’m really excited by this honor for a couple of reasons. The stories are blind-judged, so name value means nothing. Just story quality. That’s point one. Point two is that “Catherine The Great” came from our Holiday Spectacular (and will be reprinted in the big overall volume this summer, so you all can read it). And the third point is that the story was just so much fun to write. I had no idea where I was going when it started, but I’m happy with the way it ended.

If you want to see the entire list of nominees, please click here. Winners will be announced on May 1.