My First Century

   Monday was the publication date for Happiness is a Warm Gun: Crime Stories Inspired by Songs of the Beatles.   My story is the lead-off,
because "I Saw Her Standing There" appeared on the Fab Four's first
album. I am particularly delighted by this publication because it
marks my one hundredth published story.  This seems like an excellent
opportunity to crunch some numbers and look at my oeuvre, so to speak. So let's get crunching.     As you will see here the majority of my publications have been in print magazines.  Of course, "print magazine" is a phrase that would have been completely unnecessary when I first got published, like "conventional produce" or "analog clock." And now I feel like I am designing an annual report for a very small niche corporation.   I was surprised to find that fully one quarter of my stories fall into the amateur sleuth category, largely because of my character Shanks. The Other category is consists mostly of stories with so many characters I can't identify one as the protagonist and use her/him to identify the category.   Here we get to characters, with Shanks taking the lead.  He is still very much alive (with at least two stories coming out next year).  Unfortunately the next two,  Marty Crow and Uncle Victor, seem to be retired.   We will probably hear from the other series characters, if the editors are willing.   Here are the decades in which my stories are set.  Since 8 of my tales get listed as fantasy/science fiction I was surprised that only one is set in the future.  Some were set in the future when I wrote them, but time has rolled past them.  I guess that makes them Alternative History stories by default.     And here we have publication dates.  So far the 2010s are in the lead but the 2020s are still young.  Speaking of the future, as I was a couple of paragraphs ago, what does the future hold for my writing?  Well, the day after the Beatles book was published the November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine appeared, featuring "When You Put It That Way." It's my 101st story, so the next century is on its way.   Let's see how far I get...