Over the last week or so I worked on a column that’s due this weekend, did three flash fiction stories (the two weekly ones and the monthly one for the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge) worked on a couple of other stories I have in the pile and (to my surprise!) wrote the beginning of a mystery that occurred to me after chatting with someone this afternoon.

I’m going to break with tradition here (and go against the advice of one of my favorite writers, Henry Kuttner, who advised against talking about works-in-progress) and list a few things I have in the pipe. Some I’ve started recently, some from a ways back. I’m not going to be too specific. Better writers and bloggers than I do blogs this way; maybe this will goad me into finishing more of them!

A full-length “slick fantasy” baseball story I am aiming at the Saturday Evening Post. (I actually got a nice rejection for an alternate history I sent them a while back!)

Another baseball story, this one a mystery/crime story titled “Over the Fence Is Out, Boys.” (The title is an ancient baseball song quoted in the Three Stooges theme.)

A domestic horror story titled “Please Don’t Eat the Neighbors,” for which I owe Robert Lopresti for the idea to actually write what started as a Facebook joke.

A mystery/crime story set on a prison work crew called “The Absent-Minded Convict.”

A Christmas Mystery, just revised that is going to Ellery Queen’s.

A non-genre story that is also going to the Sat. Eve Post, titled “Youth Like Summer Brave, Age Like Winter Bare.” (Title from Shakespeare.)

A science-fantasy story I dreamed up (the basic idea anyway) while driving my beat up old Chevy Nova (my first car) home from work one night in either 1983 or ’84.

And I need to start up the second of a series I DO have planned out of a mystery series set in Ancient Rome. The first of this series in in a slushpile at the moment!

That’s about it for now!