My First Blog Entry

This is my first try at blogging so I'm a tad worried I won't get it right. If I don't, please bear with me.

It seems appropriate to start off with a brief introduction of myself, so here goes.

My wife and I spent most of our lives in Maryland where she worked as an Executive Secretary and I trod the bricks as a salesman. When we gave up the cold winters of the north and moved south -- first to Florida and now in Fort Worth, Texas – I decided to try something I’d threatened to do for a lot of years. I’d always wanted to try my hand at writing fiction. That was in 1995, and the first step was to join a class at the local community college in Gainesville, Florida. The class happened to be about writing short mystery stories, so that’s where I started. And that’s where I stayed. No, not in Florida, but in short mystery stories.

Over the next few years, my stories appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. One of them brought home a Derringer Award in 2002. Along the way, I had the privilege of serving as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine.

After honing my writing skills with short stories, I wrote a mystery novel, MEMORY OF A MURDER, which was first published in 2005 and received nine Five Star reviews on Amazon.com and three more on B&N.com. A second edition came out in April 2008 and, I’m happy to say, is doing quite well.

I’m currently working on a sequel to MEMORY OF A MURDER as well as a stand-alone thriller and several short stories.

That's about all there is to say about me and my writing, so I'll stop here. I'll be blogging every other Sunday from now on and promise to come up with more interesting material.

Meanwhile, we can all look forward to reading what everyone else has to say.

Regards to all,

Earl Staggs