The Round-Up: May 2025
A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits
First up, a couple of announcements! I’m absolutely delighted to share that my short story “Valiant-For-Truth,” from the multi-author anthology Through Western Storms, has been named a finalist for the Peacemaker Award for Western short fiction. This is such a thrill; I couldn’t stop smiling all day when the finalists were announced. It’s my third Peacemaker nomination, so…we’ll see if the third time’s a charm. Winners are announced on June 15th.
I’m also excited to announce my next anthology project, Follow the Lonesome Trail. Featuring short Western fiction and flash fiction from Allison Tebo, Emily Hayse, Rachel Kovaciny, Hannah Kaye, A. Hartley, and myself, it’s slated for publication later this year. Let me tell you, that’s a lineup featuring some of the coolest ladies in the indie publishing world, and I’m delighted to be collaborating with all of them! If you’d like to participate in the cover reveal for Follow the Lonesome Trail later in June, you can sign up through this form.
Wonderful post here from
about the richness of language in older books for young readers, and how it is absolutely a good thing for children to be challenged by beautiful prose that expands their vocabulary. As another one of those “weird kids” who loved wading through classic literature from a young age, I heartily agree!A charming piece from TV’s Jeeves himself, Stephen Fry, on the delights of reading P.G. Wodehouse.
If you enjoyed my recent post on early female detectives in fiction, you may also enjoy browsing this even more comprehensive list, covering every type of fiction from dime novels on upward, of fictional female investigators from the mid-1800s to the present. It includes some that I researched or considered but which didn’t make it into my post, plus many I’d never heard of.
For those of you who also love vintage books—did you know you can buy reproductions of those wonderful old illustrated dust jackets? Replica Book Jackets and Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC offer hundreds of titles between them, with collections especially strong on classic mystery fiction.
- hits another nail on the head with Your Children Need to See You Kiss, a splendid essay on pushing back against cultural disdain for marriage by setting a joyful example of happy marriages.
A lovely little musing from Emma Troyer on the mutually congenial occupations of farming and writing.
I haven’t found many famous people in my family tree, but one really neat discovery was that I’m a 4th cousin 5 times removed of American impressionist painter Edmund C. Tarbell. While perhaps not a household name to anyone besides art enthusiasts today, he had a distinguished career in his own time—a member of the Boston School of art and the “Ten American Painters,” who painted portraits of three presidents (Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover). I was browsing through his work again recently, and shared a few favorites in this note.
Apropos of the Chicago Sun-Times reading-list debacle, there was a little trend going around on Instagram recently: 15 Books To Read This Summer That Actually Exist. (Astonishing to think that has become the baseline qualification for a book, but here we are.) So I shared a list of fifteen book recommendations perfect for summer reading, and cross-posted it here to Substack Notes. (Coming later this week: my own summer reading list for this year!)
One final bit of housekeeping. Owing to Amazon’s adjustment to paperback royalties set to take effect this month, a few of my books will be going up a couple dollars in price. If you’d like to get a paperback copy of my historical fairytale retellings Corral Nocturne, Lost Lake House, and The Mountain of the Wolf or my Western short story collection Outlaw Fever at the lower price, order before the end of this week!
Thanks so much for the links to the dust jacket book companies - didn't know this existed as a thing. Marvellous!