Yeah, I’m a little behind in my news-ing, so that’s where we’ll be the next day or two…
First up, let me say that I’m terribly excited to report that my short story “Just Business” is now available in the Crimes, Capers, and Rule-Breakers bundle! It’s a collection of 20 short stories with a great lineup of stories by a fabulous collection of writers.
Like all BundleRabbit sets, you can get it direct from BR (where you can DL individual stories, and wherein we authors get a deeper cut), or you can get them from Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or IBooks. Either way you go, $3.99 is a pretty good deal.
This is a story that first appeared in Analog, and was pretty well received. It also appeared in my collection Picasso’s Cat & Other Stories, in which I wrote the following introduction:
I originally wrote a couple hundred words of “Just Business” as a trial draft of a story I had agreed to write with Mike Resnick. I decided I didn’t like it much, and shelved it at the time in favor of another story—”STAN” that appeared in an anthology titled Mob Magic.
Years later I was in a dry moment and searching for something I was interested in deeply enough that I could get up the energy to write it, when I came upon this opening again. I decided I couldn’t help but like Mick, and realized that I had screwed up the original opening. When I fixed that, the rest just kind of happened.
This means that “Just Business” is a gangster story that died and later came back to life. This is, I guess, only appropriate given its content.