Books Coming in 2025! Wild Hunts and Mermaids

In 2025, I intend to publish a book in both of my current series: Myths Endure in Maine and Myths Endure on Mars.

I will be posting chapters from books in both series over the next few months. Publishing "serials" is a surprisingly good way to force discipline on a writer. Not that Dickens et al. did it for that reason. They published for money and they threw in 10,000 words here and there to earn more money. But having material "out there," potentially available to readers, forces one to look at the material from that angle. I'm convinced, for instance, that scheduling a peer review for my students helps them more because it forces them to produce before the due date than because they actually pay attention to their peers' feedback. 

Hermes' Book: Hermes' book is based on a story I wrote over twenty years ago. In my world-controlled-by-gods, the gods can tweak natural law. In a bid to keep their positions as "top gods," Zeus and Hera attempt to out-manuever the gods of agriculture by taking back control over the rules of death. They can only control death if it is a punishment rather than a cycle of death and rebirth. And they can only control death as a punishment if they have the means. 

They consequently task Hermes with finding the hounds for the Wild Hunt. In the original story, Artemis was tasked with locating these dogs since they are linked directly to Actaeon, the young man who saw Artemis bathing and was punished by being ripped apart by his friends-turned-into-dogs.

Hermes takes over the task in this version. An opportunist with no particular moral code, he crosses from the gods' "bubble" world to our world to hunt for these dogs. What Zeus and Hera do with them once he finds them--not his problem. 

Not yet. 

Rhys & Lider, a Mystery with Merpeople: My detectives in the Myths Endure on Mars series are currently on Earth. They are requested by a family of Siphons or merpeople to locate a young man, Brae, who disappeared when his engagement was broken. Initially convinced that another Siphon family temporarily kidnapped Brae to end a breach of promise suit, Rhys and Lider instead become convinced that the young man is collateral damage in someone else's political agenda. 

The story is a part-retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid."