The Excerpt:

Watch for a new chapter of my serial novel soon!

Claudia Barry owned Manhattan’s West 33rd Street.

She stayed close to the buildings, away from the crowds, aware of every face. Every movement got her attention. It was an old habit and hard to break. It had kept her alive. She took deliberate strides toward 8th Street.

The drizzle had stopped, the skies were still overcast, and the sidewalk wet. It would have been impossible for her to miss the action fifty feet ahead of her.

The Big News:

This week’s sample is the first eight sentences from A Year Without Killing (my third book.) It recently was selected as a finalist in the East Texas Writers Guild’s First Chapter Book Awards.

According to Roger Middleton, president of the Guild, “We received an overwhelming number of entries from around the world, including authors submitting from Australia, Great Britain, Canada, Cyprus, Italy, South Africa, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.”

Each entry was judged by three different judges from a panel representing, editors, authors, educators, and avid book readers. An additional three judges were brought in to select winners from the finalists.

Read the entire first chapter of A Year Without Killing, HERE.

Share your work with us!

Join us here at Weekend Writing Warriors.The  same link will take you to the work of dozens of talented writers. For a treat, please check out their work, too.

Many of the contributors to Weekend Writing Warriors also

participate in the Snippet Sunday group on FaceBook.

Cindy A invited me to participate in a “Meet Your Character” blog hop. Cindy is the author ofThe Milk Carton Murders due out next spring. Meet Cindy and view her blog, HERE.

FCEtier at Blue Ridge Books for a book signing in Waynesville, NC.

Now, Meet My Character:

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?

Claudia Barry – fictional

2) When and where is the story set?                                          

Current times, eastern seaboard USA

3) What should we know about him/her?

Readers meet Claudia in my first book, The Tourist Killer. She’s sixty-two years old and has successfully negotiated a career of over thirty years. Now she’s contemplating retirement and examining her life. What’s next for a professional assassin? Who do you retire? Her assigner convinces her to take a year sabbatical rather than retire outright. A Year Without Killing is the sequel and chronicles her time off.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Is retirement from this career any easier than retiring from the CIA or the mafia? How do you break away and stay alive? Claudia must now find a way to be at peace with herself so she can enjoy the rest of her life. AsThe Tourist Killer ends, she and her lover are in separate parts of the country and neither knows the fate of the other.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

 Claudia wants to settle down with John Hixon and pursue life without the burden of being the harbinger of death to others.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?

A Year Without Killing, my current work in progress is the third book in the Barry-Hixon series and is the sequel to my first book, The Tourist Killer. I participate most weekends in a blog hop, titled, “Weekend Writing Warriors” and most of the excerpts I publish for the next few months will be from AYWK. Catch up with Claudia and her exploits HERE.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?

    E-book and trade paperback versions should be available in the spring of 2015. A Year Without Killing will debut in serialized form, with two chapters per week in either late fall of 2014 or winter of 2015 on the publisher’s site, Venture Galleries.

To keep the meetings going, I’ll tag:

Caleb Pirtle , Stephen Woodfin , and David Stokes.

Seated in the reading room of Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville, NC.

Received many requests about this, so now, my author’s page on FaceBook is live.

Click HERE to visit.  “Likes” appreciated!

Click on the photo to see the story of how it evolved.