What the heck happened??
Good grief! It’s been over a year since I sent a Red Tales newsletter!
I blame the pandemic and various changes in my life. I pay the bills by developing software. I’ve been working government contracts in recent years, which is a dicey game. I got to work from home through 2020, then two weeks before the end of the year I got word the feds were cutting back funding, so my company had to axe me.
I landed a new position in short order, but no more telecommuting. I spent most of 2021 adapting to that, dealing with a minor basement flood, and adjusting to another major life change: my mother passed away in early September. (No, it wasn’t COVID.) She would have been 90 had she lived another month. As my father preceded her a few years back, I’m now the oldest living member of my immediate family.
Also in 2021, I published two books. The first, Weasel Words, is a humorous crime caper novel featuring a loveable pair of husband-and-wife thieves named Bernard and Melody. As you may recall, they originally appeared in a series of flash fiction tales published first on Indies Unlimited and then on Medium. You can read about them and get all those stories here. I also released Weasel Words as an audiobook. If you’re into that, look it up on Amazon or Audible.
Second, I gathered some of my short fiction from Medium into my first collection, The Realm of Tiny Giants. Although the stories are still on Medium, the versions in the book have benefited from my wife Kathleen’s editorial pen, and one of them was specifically rewritten for the collection.
I also finished my fourth Howard County Mystery Novel, A Day for Bones. It’s in editing and should be released sometime in the spring of 2022. Now I’m at work on a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel about, of all things, a pandemic (nothing to do with COVID, though; this tale began 15–20 years ago as a short story). Finally, a second Bernard and Melody novel is waiting in the wings.
As a result, I’ve written very little on Medium for a while, although over the past month I’ve been a bit more active again. Today, I posted a new flash fiction story, “The Target,” in Red Tales.
That’s how I’ve spent my last couple of years. How about you?
~ Dale E. Lehman
