Practice makes perfect. Okay, not perfect. But better.
Second time around, the formatting and uploading and approval of the novel went SO MUCH SMOOTHER! A proof copy of MODEL FOR DECEPTION is winging its way to me as we speak. That’s the print version. I’ll take a look at it, and hopefully it will be as expected. Then I’ll send it out to review services to see what they think about it. If they like it, you’ll hear about it. If they don’t, I’ll bury the reviews, and we shall never speak of them gain.
The BIG PLAN is to release MODEL FOR DECEPTION Valentine’s Day 2019.
MODEL FOR DECEPTION is a cozy mystery. Here’s the back cover blurb:
Vangie Street is older—thirty-two to be exact—when she takes up modeling in the “big city” of Memphis. She loves showing the fabulous clothes almost as much as she loves her pound-puppy Retro, her cute if slightly decrepit Midtown cottage, and her hunky new boyfriend Nash. Life is perfect—until an expensive earring shown by Vangie’s modeling partner Heather Jackson disappears at the Memphis spring fashion season kickoff. When Heather herself disappears, Vangie must use her “clothes whisperer” intuition to puzzle out the truth of what’s going on….and keep her own self out of trouble.
Model for Deception is a cozy mystery featuring fashion model Vangie Street who reads people by their clothing choices. Vangie’s sleuthing insights leave us wondering: what exactly do our fashion choices reveal about us?
I’ll do a cover reveal later. The cover was drawn by Roy DeLeon, a fellow Paraclete Press author. Paraclete published Making Crosses: A Creative Connection to God. Roy wrote Praying with the Body. In addition to being a writer and oblate, Roy’s an artist. He’s very talented. I think the cover for MODEL FOR DECEPTION is going to be my favorite cover I’ve ever had. I know you can’t wait to see it. <3
(“Godzilla vs. The Code” first appeared in Barrelhouse)
My husband has a favorite Japanese actor, and he can pronounce the man’s name. To-shi-ro Mi-fu-ne. At our house, Mr. Mifune appears in Samurai movies, mostly on Saturday afternoons. I’ll walk into the TV room and there’s my husband on the couch, reading subtitles. The men on TV are dressed in black, they huff out their lines.
(“Mother Mary Commutes to Memphis” first appeared in The Pinch)
“Elvis Presley Enterprises shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the submissions of every kind throughout the universe.”
EPE Legal Notice
White robes squashed against blue-swirled upholstery, wads of chewing gum lined on a fuzzy armrest. The salty smell of boxed fried chicken mixing with diesel exhaust, music whining from a teenage boy’s Walkman.
(excerpt from Model for Deception, a Vangie Street mystery, currently being shopped to agents)
The Next Step kitchen was abuzz with activity: one man was washing dishes, another removing clothes from the dryer, someone else peeling a cucumber. I walked through the room at a clip, not only because of the slightly unpleasant smell of leftover spaghetti. Truth tell, folks at the Next Step shelter made me nervous. I knew poor—half of Kurt Jamison’s clients were skinny white women in faded sundresses with a baby on the hip and a toddler at the knee. Clients at the Next Step were different. Not just because they were overwhelmingly male. My wariness was due more to the sense of isolation each seemed to exude. The men milling through the house came across as disconnected from the rest of the world, as if the Next Step were simply a way-stop on what was otherwise a long, solitary journey.
In the Beginning was the dress. And the dress came up from New Orleans and lived in a closet in Memphis and waited for a party. One day, the husband said, “We have a party.” And the dress came out: the velvet-flocked, spaghetti-strapped, leopard-printed, spandex-induced dress. And the dress slipped on the gold bracelet and the gold necklace and the gold earrings. And the dress picked out the closed-toed pumps because the dress knew that one more inch of skin would be too much. And when the husband saw the dress, the husband said:
On August 7, 2001, I stepped into the 50th Anniversary celebration of the discovery of oil in Williston Basin, Williston, North Dakota. I knew no one. My family had not been back to the Williston Basin since the December night in 1960 when my father had run his car into a train—as squarely-hit as any the police had ever seen—and died.
(“Held at Gunpoint” first appeared in Image; the story received a Special Mention from Pushcart Prize)
A new couple—a white couple—came to the funeral service, but Preacher Butler went ahead and told it anyway. “Morgan Cook served sixty-five years in this white folks’ pigpen and now he’s gone to the resting place.” Everyone nodded—they hadn’t seen the couple slip in, sit on the back pew. Preacher fluttered his robes, told it some more about Morgan lighting the white man’s world, then everyone listened to the stuttering tape to the grandkids.
