Death by Disguise, MLA Winner

I am honored and delighted to be able to share that Death by Disguise won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Speculative Fiction. I was not expecting that at all! I was honored enough to be named as a finalist; actually winning the award was not on my radar at all.

The ceremony was held at Bates College (a very nice touch–I think I managed to work a joke about that into my acceptance speech, though I was so dazed I can’t really remember much that I said), and was absolutely lovely. I was pleased to be able to meet and cheer for so many wonderful Maine writers in every category. Our family settled in Maine just as the pandemic was starting to shut everything down in the state–not a good time to try to build or join a preexisting writing community! I joined the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance anyway, and spent a lot of time hoping that eventually they’d move back to doing in-person events rather than Zoom (which gives me a migraine if I use it for long). Now that they have, I am looking forward to participating in more events and workshops, and hope to get better acquainted with my fellow Maine writers. This award has certainly helped me feel more like I belong here!

This award has also helped push me into a project I’d been contemplating for some time but hadn’t gotten around to yet: rebranding Magic Most Deadly so that its cover matches the style and feel of the others in the series. When I wrote and published MMD (ten years ago this September!) I didn’t really know much about branding or how to choose a cover design. While I loved, and still love, the cover that my designer and I eventually came up with, it doesn’t really give off quite the right vibe for the “cozy fantasy-mystery” genre this series has, nor does it carry the Whitney & Davies logo that we developed by the time Glamours and Gunshots was published, and which has been on every subsequent book in the series.

My goal is to have the new edition available by the end of September, to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of MMD’s publication. We’ll see if I make it! I am also making some substantial edits to the story, as that was my first published book and honestly, it shows. I won’t be changing anything about the heart of the story or the characters, but I will be tightening it up, eliminating some unnecessary bits, bringing the characters into better focus, all that sort of thing. Using the skills I’ve learned through writing 3 more novels, many short stories, and four novellas in the ten years since publishing MMD to make it the story it was always meant to be!

I’m also going to be switching over print distribution for the Whitney & Davies novels from Amazon to IngramSpark over the course of the summer, so if you are a bookseller and have been wanting to carry these books but have been unable to due to the difficulties of buying wholesale through Amazon–good news! It will soon be much easier for you.

And hey, if you haven’t read the award-winning Death by Disguise yet, you can click here to buy. (You can buy the other books, too, but I might recommend waiting for Magic Most Deadly until the new edition comes out–unless you’d like to own both and compare them, in which case, have at it!)