With my two book projects near the end, with only tweaking and publishing left to do, it’s almost time to move on to other writing projects. The publishing schedule I established in early 2012, only slightly modified since, had two short stories next. I’m going to stick with that.

The first will be an espionage story; or rather a crime story. It’s the first of what may become a series. I’ve explained this before, but will give it again here, in case I get a reader or two who hasn’t read it yet.

There was a night time police action in Cranston, RI, my hometown, sometime in the last six months. A friend of mine from junior high and senior high had gone out of her home to walk her dog, and encountered policemen on foot in her neighborhood. They didn’t tell her why they were there. The next morning they learned someone crashed their car into a business on Reservoir Avenue then fled on foot into that neighborhood.

The idea for a short story came to mind. I’ll make this woman a CIA agent. The man who crashed was an Arab double agent she was handling. He was stopped by a cop for some reason, panicked and fled. He crashed near her house and manages to make it there before the cops catch-up. The cops investigate, and while the don’t find the man, they do figure out that the woman helped him. They soon figure out she’s a CIA agent, and they can’t touch her without damaging various international operations.

I’m thinking of titling it “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”, the words that go with WZT. The correct word for Z is Zulu. That will be her code name, but the fleeing man used Zebra as part of a coded message indicating he needed urgent help from her.

I’m thinking of that as a title because maybe it could be the first of many three-letter titles for follow-up short stories. I can put this woman at different places around the world, places I’ve been. Her CIA career could follow my travels, and I can at least write about these foreign venues accurately.

I still have a lot to work out. I’m thinking of 4,000 to 8,000 words for the first story, maybe the same for any others I generate.

The second project will be the third in my Danny Tompkins stories, about a teenage boy whose mother dies, recording the grief he encounters afterward. These are not action packed, shoot ’em up type of stories. Reviewers have called them more like memoirs. This will be the last one, I think. I have no thoughts on how to make them action stories. This will be titled “Kicking Stones”, after a poem I’ve already written that will be part of the story. I’m thinking 3,000 to 4,000 words for this one, substantially longer than the first two.

That’s it for immediate projects. In a future post I’ll talk about my options for the next book-length project.