Gee—it is 2023 already?

I really dropped the ball. On. A. Lot. Of. Stuff.

Not gonna lie: 2022 was a shit show. I’ll explain why in the next couple of posts. We dealt with everything from a destructive water leak in the house to a death in the family and personal health crises.

When stuff like that happens, the last thing you’re going to prioritize is keeping up with your blog and updating your website.

Which brings me to today. As most of you know, I contribute a post every three weeks to SleuthSayers, a blog cooperatively written by a group of mystery writers who mostly write short stories. I’ve been good about posting there, but bad about posting the results here.

I’m proud of those posts. Because that longstanding blog has a built-in audience, I tend to spend a lot more time crafting those pieces, and they constitute actual personal essays on my part. It’s a form of writing that comes naturally to me, and I like having a complete record of them in one spot—here—my Internet home.

Today, for example, I’ve got a post running based on a history-based road trip we took this spring. We went to Annapolis for a wedding, then took a circuitous drive back home that took us to Philly, Baltimore, DC, Mount Vernon, and Williamsburg.

Today’s post is entitled The President Who Played Detective, and other adventures. That’s a reference to none other than George Washington. It was cool to stand in the man’s study, but even cooler to see how the estate remembers the 150 or so enslaved and free black Americans who are buried on the property.

I hope you’ll take the time to check it out.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be trying to revamp the site, clean up the links, and catch up with my past SleuthSayers writing in a logical fashion. I’ll also be sharing what’s been going on with my work, and Denise’s. She alone has had a flurry of books pubbed that also need some huzzahs, with a new one pubbing this fall for young readers.

Please stick around. I’m sorry for the long delay. Life was hard, then it got harder. And there was still so much work to do.

But right now, I’m enjoying the summer. The garden is the best we’ve had in a long time. Flowers and veggies growing abundantly that we have never been able to keep pest-free and healthy until this year.

If you like my work, kindly consider bookmarking SleuthSayers.org in addition to my site. Heck, go check the work of my wife, Denise Kiernan.

You can read about my most recent books elsewhere on the site. The two latest that I’m most excited about are the cozy mystery, Murder on Book Row, and the cross-gender Santa Claus fantasy, Sorceress Kringle.

That’s it for now. Gotta scoot. The garden’s not going to water itself.

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Garden image above by little ol’ me.