"DALLAS HOE-DOWN" IN SEPTEMBER 2007 ISSUE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK! 05-23-07
FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd is back in Texas, stalking a shady supplier of medical equipment who exploits former college cheerleaders and athletes to do the dirty work. Read an excerpt on my Short Fiction page.
A NEW DAWNA SHEPHERD SHORT STORY IN MARCH 2006 09-14-05
In "Mongol Mash" Dawna's traveling undercover on the Trans-Mongolian railway, striving to protect an American basketball player from dangerous enemies. This appearance in the March issue will be Dawna's seventh appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. You can enjoy an excerpt on my Short Fiction page.
TEXAS TWO-STEP NOMINATED FOR AWARD 06-27-04
Members of Mystery Readers International have chosen "Texas Two-Step" as one of seven nominees for the 2004 Macavity Award for short mystery fiction. "Texas Two-Step" appeared in the February 2003 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and you can read an excerpt in my short fiction section. The award will be presented at the Toronto Bouchercon in October.
DAWNA SHEPHERD AND I SHOW UP TOGETHER IN JUNE 01-31-04
"Hazmat Heel-and-Toe," my latest short story featuring Dawna Shepherd will appear in the June 2004 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Immediately following the story, I add a few thoughts of my own, in answer to questions posed by the editor.
BOOT SCOOT EARNS MACAVITY AWARD NOMINATION 06-09-03
My short story "Boot Scoot" is one of five nominees for a Macavity Award for the Best Short Story published in 2002. The awards are voted on by members of Mystery Readers International, an organization of fans, readers, writers, editors and publishers dedicated to enriching the lives of mystery readers. "Boot Scoot" appeared in the October 2002 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and you can read an excerpt in my short fiction section. The award will be presented at the Las Vegas Bouchercon in October.
TEXAS
TWO-STEP 01-06-03
My latest short story can be found on page 28 of the February 2003 issue of
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery
Magazine.
AND IF YOU CAN READ ESTONIAN 01-06-03
Both my novels have been released in that language by Olion publishers in Tallinn, with the following titles and ISBNs:
12 TRUMMARIT (9985-66-281-4)
TULELÕÕMAS ÖÖ (9985-66-292-X)
DAWNA SHEPHERD SHORT STORY IN 2003 05-20-2002
In "Texas Two-Step" Dawna's favorite sport collides with the murky world of
college sports betting. This will be Dawna's fifth appearance in Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I don't yet know which issue, but while we
wait, you can enjoy an excerpt on my Short Fiction page.
DAWNA SHEPHERD SCORES AGAIN! 09-18-01
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine just sent me a contract for "Boot
Scoot," my fourth published short story featuring the hoopster-turned-FBI
Agent. On leave in Texas, Dawna finds herself face-to-face with a bounty
hunter ready to cause her a whole lot of trouble. The story will be
published late in 2002. I've put the first scenes on my Short Fiction
page, to give you a hint of what's to come. Dawna's third outing, "Hokey Pokey
Bucuresti", is now slated for Alfred Hitchcock's March 2002 issue.
ANOTHER DAWNA SHEPHERD SHORT STORY IN 2002 08-08-01
NOW 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING HAS LISTENERS AS WELL AS READERS 08-08-01
12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING AVAILABLE IN TRANSLATION 08-08-01
I'M MOVING TO DENMARK 04-20-01
NEW SHORT STORY COMING NEXT FALL 02-20-01
NEW NOVEL IN SPRING OF 2001 12-01-00 For readers who'd like to start at the beginning, iPublish is also
creating an electronic book from 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING.
"Hokey Pokey Bucuresti" will be published in a spring 2002 issue of ALFRED
HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. In her third appearance in AHMM, Dawna and
her FBI colleagues cooperate with the Romanian National Police to run a
sting operation against human traffickers operating out of Bucharest. Once
again, Dawna's basketball experience comes in handy, as she coaches her
younger partner in would-be sex slavery. You can read an excerpt on my
Short Fiction page.
This spring, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped announced the release of a two-cassette recording of TWELVE
DRUMMERS DRUMMING, read by Nanette Savard. The recording can be borrowed
from libraries participating in the Library of Congress free reading
program for the blind and physically handicapped.
A Japanese translation of the book was published in 2000 by Bungeishunju
Ltd and it's also available in Dutch as DE TWAALFDE NACHT, from Luitingh
Sijthoff publishers in Amsterdam.
In May of 2001, my family and I are moving to Denmark so that our three
children can experience their Danish heritage and I can satisfy my
yearning for new adventure. We'll be living in a Copenhagen apartment,
the kids will attend public school, and I will try once again to learn
this language that my fictional characters speak far better than I do.
Former college basketball star and current FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd will make
her second appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine later this
year. My short story "Polonaise" is slated for publication in the September
2001 issue. Read an excerpt!
EAST PAST WARSAW, the third novel featuring U.S. Foreign Service Officer
Casey Collins, will be published as an electronic book in March 2001.
This is a stand-alone book, but readers of the 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING and
NIGHT ON FIRE will encounter some old friends: Holger Sorensen and Bella
Hinton play major roles, along with Belgian commandos Hans van Hoof and
Ebertus Wouters. As the title implies, Casey revisits favorite haunts in
Poland but the action also takes her to her girlhood home in Oregon's
Willamette Valley. EAST PAST WARSAW will be available from the iPublish
division of Time Warner.
In celebration of Dawna Shepherd's first solo outing in an upcoming issue
of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, I'm posting excerpts from three
stories starring Dawna, plus the complete text of my 1997 story
introducing Casey Collins. Happy reading!
Visit the Short Fiction pages!
INTO PRINT
AND ONTO
THE WEB 05-05-00
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine just bought my first short story
featuring basketball-playing FBI Agent Dawna Shepherd. Look for
"Hungarian Dance No. 5" in the November 2000 issue.
What's more, the Foreign Service Journal has posted my nonfiction article about writing from experience on their web site. You can find "How to Write Foreign Service Fiction" at http://www.afsa.org/fsj/feb00/dev.html.
CASEY COLLINS IN DUTCH -- AGAIN 02-20-00
CASEY COLLINS GOES ON
HOLIDAY 02-09-00
Still resting up after her whirlwind adventures in Denmark and Devon, Casey is taking a
breather as she awaits the January 2001 paperback release of NIGHT ON FIRE.
DAWNA SHEPHERD STEPS UP 02-09-00
FBI agent Dawna Shepherd made her first appearance in NIGHT ON FIRE. Now she's
demanding a novel of her own. I gave her a trial run in a short story. Here are the first
two paragraph of "Hungarian Dance No. 5"--
AND I TRY MY HAND AT NON-FICTION 02-09-00Dawna Shepherd didn't bother sampling the inch of Bull's Blood gleaming crimson in her glass. In D.C., fast-tracking in a Hoover Building cubicle, she drank wine maybe once a year, but what the hell, the brass had sent her back to Europe and the native red had good effects. Still, she hadn't ordered it for the taste. She hand-signaled the waiter to fill the goblets. He grinned, silver and gold-studded teeth a nice complement to the jeweled buttons marching down his starched shirtfront to his black cummerbund. In tune with Hungary's new market economy, he smoothly topped all three glasses and set the linen-draped bottle down with a smiling flourish.
One of Dawna's National Police contacts had recommended the restaurant for its authentic cuisine, live folk-dancing show and "ludicrous displays of public drunkenness." So it was a bonus that Budapest's Café Cristal also had a waiter as sharp as he dressed. Ordering from this fellow would not be like starting her first lecture at the FBI's overseas training academy. All the Central European cops said they understood English but as soon as they got Word One in Dawna's West Texas accent, their foreheads scrunched up, their eyes glazed over. She'd been talking at half-speed ever since. "Three goulash," she said to the waiter, slowly, but without holding up three fingers, just a test.
After a half-dozen attempts to turn that experience into fiction, I finally re-wrote it as a first-person anecdote. It appeared on my publisher's web site in an essay entitled, "I Never Worked for the CIA." You can read it here by going to DIANA CONFESSES.For years during and after my Foreign Service career, I'd been entertaining people with tales of my life overseas, so I figured it wouldn't take much effort to turn those anecdotes into published fiction. Three years after leaving the Foreign Service, I enrolled in a class at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, to learn how to write short stories. It was a writing workshop in which students shared copies of finished work so that we could critique each other. My first piece was based on a day I spent with the station chief's right-hand-woman in an outpost on the eastern edge of El Salvador. I jammed spooks, guerrillas, Contras and Navy Seals into fewer than ten pages. Hot stuff, I thought, as I daydreamed about who would play my heroine in the movie version.
Puzzling stuff, was the reaction of my classmates. My heroine's behavior didn't make sense to readers. Never mind that I'd stuck to the facts as I remembered them. I'd come up against the hard truth of fiction writing: veracity doesn't automatically confer verisimilitude.