What's Up, Doc?

The Fall Author's Festival at One More Chance Bookseller LLC in downtown St. Marys on October 18 was a success. I met more local authors in our local authors group (ironic), and I sold and signed some of my books. That's always a good thing. I'll probably try to get to one or two more Farmers Markets before 2026 is kicked to the curb. Watch this space and my Facebook pages (my personal and the Mike Zimmerli Author page) for dates and locations. December can be iffy, and not so much for the weather but for all the activities that are scheduled in December. Did you know that we have Christmas in December? Yeah, me neither!

I'm continuing to focus on the next Blue Bridge Mystery, A Deadly Anthology, and will try to publish it in early 2027. Maybe I'll finish it in time to publish it on my birthday. Happy birthday to me! If not, I'll still have a birthday, and the book will still be coming. I'll point you to it on this page.

How far into it am I? As of October 20, I have 76,500 words on 315 pages. That means I'm working on the last quarter of the book. That's when I have to wrap everything up and make sure it still holds together when I say "Finished!" I already know I have to go back and fix a few things because, as often happens, the characters lead me off the planned route (at least they're not leading me off a cliff this time!). In any case, I'm enjoying reading the story as it flows onto the page. I know where I think it'll end up, but we'll have to see if my cast of characters agrees to go along with my ideas.

The story primarily takes place at the Camden campus of the Coastal College of Georgia, one of my alma maters. I graduated from there in 2009, having crammed two years into three, with an Associate of Science in History. Then I transferred to Liberty University and completed my final two years online, graduating summa cum laude in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Biblical Studies, just in time to turn 55 and become an official senior citizen.

There are some new characters in ADA (my shorthand for A Deadly Anthology), and who knows, some may stick around for cameos in later novels. The freelance writer from Wanted: Dead or Alive (Again), Oscar Metz, is back. Oscar was badly beaten in the second Blue Bridge Mystery (BBM) but was well enough to show up in Chapter 23 of To The Last Breath (BBM book #3). Now he's back with a few more lines of dialogue in ADA. He's not a leading man, preferring to stay in the background. That's why he makes a good ghostwriter for Hillary Lyst. Some of your favorite bad boys are on the loose again. Wheels and Dimebag are still doing The Man's bidding, but changes could be taking place there, too. And I'd like to welcome Georgia Bureau of Investigation Field Agent in Charge Mike Price, who's taking on some heavy lifting as Jimmy and Wendi try to solve a murder that leads to another murder.

TEASER FOR A DEADLY ANTHOLOGY:

In A Deadly Anthology, the sixth Blue Bridge Mystery to date, Private Investigator Jimmy Favreaux signs on for what should be the easiest gig of his career: serving as a teacher's assistant for his girlfriend Wendi's creative writing class at the Coastal College of Georgia's Camden campus. The ten students in the class are an eclectic bunch, including a freelance ghostwriter, a small-town journalist trying to move on to bigger things, a security guard, a guy who writes sword-and-sorcery under a pen name, and others equally unsure where their writing might take them. For Jimmy, putting together an anthology was supposed to be the hardest part. Then a body turns up in the campus parking lot, one murder leads to another, and the class learns that the best material, like the worst trouble, is non-fiction. A Deadly Anthology, coming in early 2027. And you thought nothing ever happened in Kingsland!

FYI: All my books are available in print (softcover and hardcover), Kindle ebook, and audiobook; digital versions are available exclusively on Amazon. NOTE: Kindle Unlimited just changed its name to Kindle+, so now I have to think about where the plus symbol is on the keyboard.

Down the road: After I finish A Deadly Anthology, I have a non-deadly anthology to work on. It's a collection of stories I wrote in the 1990s, when my children were teens, dealing with the usual teenage stuff and causing the usual parental stress. It's not a how-to-survive-your-kid's-teen-years collection. It's just how I made it through by writing and venting on a blog. It has less to do with what my kids did and more to do with how I dealt with it. It's tentatively titled I Should Have Raised Goldfish. That should give you an idea why it might not be the how-to you're looking for. But for pure entertainment, or to make yourself feel better about your situation, it might be good late-night reading when stress keeps you awake. Look for it in 2027.

That's it for now. More than I intended. I have never known when to stop. Check back later to see what's new.

Mike Z. (aka Zimmy)

Ask the Author: Tell us about your most recent book, The Cost of Survival.

Ask the Author: In The Cost of Survival, how does the environment and its surroundings function as an extra character?

Ask the Author: Is there a central theme or underlying message in your latest Blue Bridge Mystery: The Cost of Survival?

Ask the Author: Your work sits in a unique space—not quite a traditional cozy mystery, but not dark hardboiled noir either. How do you strike that balance between light humor and real stakes?

THE COST OF SURVIVAL

The Latest Blue Bridge Mystery: Book #5 – The Cost of Survival (Released August 2025). Jimmy and Wendi try to go on a vacation looking for relaxation but find a dead body instead.

To find all the books, just follow this link mybook.to/mikezimmerli

(No, I said Short Takes, with a "T," not Short Cakes, with sugar and flour and delicious fresh maple syrup.)

Short Takes include random posts that sometimes arise out of a day with a bad case of writer's block. On those days, I still have to write. That's how you break out of Writer's Block: you write anyway, whether you want to or not. If you focus on your inability to write the next chapter in your next book, you only think about the problem, not what's happening with your characters. Granted, you may not write anything worth reading, but you may write something that's worth reading, just not of the quality you're looking for to put in your current book. Some of my Short Takes come out of days when I have to write, even though I don't quite feel like it. Fake it till you make it can actually work. Sometimes.

Have you ever tried to run between the raindrops? Sometimes, when the rain is just beginning and the drops are widely dispersed—six to ten feet apart between where they land on the ground—you can almost pretend that you can do it. Run between the raindrops and avoid getting wet.

But of course, you can’t really. At least, I can’t. I can’t speak for you.

So I saw something interesting this morning. It began to rain and soon came down in sheets. In the remarkably short time it took for the rain to switch from a sprinkle to a downpour, I hurried from the bedroom (where I was lazing on a cloudy, retired morning) to let our little indoor/outdoor cat, Lucy, in and out of the rain. She’s smart enough to get into her little house just outside the back door on the patio if we’re not paying attention. So when I opened the door, she shot into the house like a blur of black licorice, then immediately started yelling at me for not letting her in before the rain turned into a squall.

I picked her up and consoled her, and we looked out the back door at the rain falling on her house. The eaves, unable to contain or move the sudden deluge, overflowed and poured water down onto her house roof.

As we stood together and watched, the rain slowed down slightly after a minute to a more moderate pace, and I saw the most remarkable thing: a tiny moth came up out of the grass ten or fifteen feet out from the door, and flew about unconcernedly, maintaining a height of a few inches above the grass. I thought I had a floater in my eye at first, but I soon saw several other moths do the exact same thing.

It was as if they were flying between the raindrops. They weren’t big enough to keep flying if they took a direct hit from the falling droplets, so I am still puzzled and slightly in awe of their ability to fly about in a rainstorm without being knocked to the ground and drowned. Maybe they’re too inconsequential for the rain to bother.

Then the rain stopped, and Lucy wanted to get down and to go back outside. So that’s what happened. And I’m still thinking jealously about the moths that can fly between the raindrops.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse