I try to have at least ten pieces/queries/manuscripts out at all times with editors. It keeps the mail delivery exciting!

NOVELS

I have completed fourteen novel manuscripts. Here’s a little bit about each of them:

The Seeds of Time : Julia Renault is exploring an old house when an accident sends her back through time. She discovers that a hundred years earlier, she is a governess in a house full of plots and deceptions, fighting for her love and her life.

They Who Have Power : A small-town Indiana teacher goes to a state teacher’s convention and finds herself in the middle of political intrigue as a team of assassins targets one of the speakers.

The Way of the Helper : Alison Dennings joins the staff of a crisis hotline telephone service, using her experience living through her parents’ divorce and her subsequent responsibility for two younger sisters as grist for client advice. Determined to make a difference, she drives herself to “save” as many of the callers as she can and nearly loses herself in the process of balancing her different roles in life.

Traitor’s Game: A Star Trek: Next Generation novel : Kimbra Sanderson joins the crew of the USS Enterprise-D, thrilled at the opportunity to serve on the Federation’s flagship. Her pleasure is quickly ended when her sister is abducted and the only way to save her and the rest of Kimbra’s family is to kill Captain Jean-Luc Picard!

Conviction of the Heart : Pittsburgh family law attorney Suzanne Taylor is raising two daughters on her own while pursuing a successful family law practice. She finds love the second time around is a slow and painful process, as she is romanced by detective Nick Sansone. The real trouble begins when Suzanne takes the case of a battered wife whose husband is a powerfully-connected city councilman. The representation nearly costs Sansone his job and Suzanne her life.

Sons of Evil : What could be more wholesome and safe than a county fair? Amanda Sue Lyons is ready for her first job ever, working for two weeks at the Bucknell County Fair to earn money for her school clothes. She knew that some carnies were a little wild and different -- but never expected to find out that some were vampires! This is the story of Amanda’s discovery that the black-garbed boys who seemed to come out only after the sun went down were more than just strange foreigners from a big city. The first victims are 4-H show animals, but soon they come after Amanda and her best friend Katelyn. With help from Todd Peterson, the boy next door, and the fair’s fortune teller, Madame Lucia, Amanda pursues the mystery and saves her friend from death -- and worse -- by using her head.

With Just a Touch : Newly-divorced Sara Woods begins working as a reporter for a small-town Ohio newspaper, where she soon discovers there is a clinic to treat her recurring pain from a car accident. Once she starts the new-age treatment regimen along with her friend Dedra, she discovers there have been a number of deaths of young women at the clinic. Allied with independent Dr. Rick Paulsen, she sets out to investigate the story. She discovers that the clinic is home to psychic vampires, using the life force of these young women to re-animate the founder of their movement. In love with Rick, Sara finds that while he’s teaching her to resist the vampires, he’s also allied with the clinic doctors. Her trust falters in the face of a final showdown that risks her life to save the others.

Prophecies and Promises : Tamsyn McKiernan is a young lady from a middle-class family in turn of the century Key West just as the Spanish-American War breaks out. Her dream has been to marry her childhood sweetheart, patrician Thatcher Winslow, but as that dream is about to come true, she meets Robert Ashton, a ship captain with ties to Cuba, gun running and piracy. The genteel Winslow displays his true petty self after the engagement is sealed, and it is the dashing Ashton who turns out to be the real gentleman. The fate of the three is tied to the progress of the war and the desperation of Tamsyn’s merchant father.

Triad : Out on the edge of space, three female commanders of different factions discover that alliances and enmities alternately pull them together and apart as they must save themselves and their people from the onslaught of marauders determined to conquer their space. One commander finds love; one finds a lost daughter; the third finds the reward for betrayal. They learn through great danger and sacrifice that there is strength in numbers and true friendship.

Voodoo Dreams : Brianna Ward, a Pittsburgh attorney on a much-needed vacation at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, finds love and danger, thanks to a voodoo priest she inadvertently meets the first night she arrives.

Horizon Shift :Themes Rogers captains the midsize Confederation ship Doubtful that rebels with others against orders to subjugate a primitive planet by force. Using experimental ancient technology, his ship creates a wormhole that allows him to escape the conflict, tossing his ship into another universe, leaving it battered and half his crew dead. He rallies the survivors and begins the process of rebuilding, using his knack for collecting people who are lost or have hit bottom, and redeeming them as valuable crew members. What he does not know is that Jal Burko, his cruel former commander, was pulled across the universal rift with the Doubtful and is now hunting him to destroy him. It is a battle against time for the crew to discover what ship is after them as well as the secrets of the ancient tech, which holds the key to their return - or their survival. The crew, new and old, use their unique talents to finally reconstruct the device, surprised at the extent of its mysteries and its effects on all.

The Color of Death: After a terrorist attack goes awry, two young immigrants, Kwan Lin and Xi San, both scarred by their losses, leave a post-Apocalyptic San Francisco to survive under difficult conditions and help each other recover their humanity. The attack has wiped out mostly Caucasian people, targeted to do so. They gather comrades as they travel who enrich their lives and they all learn to survive together. This is a young adult novel which combines survival issues such as those in "The Stand" to racial, cultural and moral issues of "Crash."

Encounter: An elite firm of computer design/patent law attorneys take a retreat at a ranch in Taos, New Mexico, with a goal for team-building. A truckload of illegal Mexicans crosses the border, the occupants looking for freedom and a better way of life for themselves and their families. A freak snowstorm causes the truck to crash and this rag-tag bunch must take shelter at the ranch where the lawyers are enjoying their vacation. The meeting of the two groups is violent, poignant and enlightening, and none of those who survive are ever the same.

In Search of the Lost Chord: String theory holds that each object and living thing in the world vibrates at a particular frequency, like a plucked guitar string. So what would happen if that frequency was set off a notch by the addition of an inharmonious tone? When an A flat vibrates with an A? Jarred from his home frequency, would a person vibrate into an alternate dimension?

A man known as The Conductor activates a prophecy that when the Lost Chord is played, everything will come to an end. Some see this as a dire forecast of the Apocalypse; some see this as the gateway to the next, more perfect world, or Paradise. He seeks five companions, each of whom vibrate at a particular frequency, to help form the Chord, and he finds them among the universes: an autistic girl obsessed with rocks, a brilliant black girl from a world where hers is the dominant race, a wild child from a desert planet whose only friends are those she met online, a young man whose people have developed feline characteristics because of their climate, and a gamer who gets a real-life quest to save the universe.

Something else I've been experimenting with is the power of the WWW itself. You can do a lot to spice up even a fairly average story by making it interactive. Like this story about a man who finds more than he ever expected on his way to take a new job. Click here for the interactive story, Strong Medicine.

I also sell articles and stories on a number of topics through the website Constant Content.

If you're a writer and would like to sign up, let me know! If I refer you, I can get credit for signing you on, and then you can get credit for signing on more of your writer friends. They let you know what sort of articles are currently being requested by email daily, so if you're a quick turnaround, it's an easy sale!