I am one evening away from completing a short story and have it ready for publication. The actual story has been done for a month. While I was in my state of rebellion against responsibility I decided to let it sit. Then I submitted it to my critique group and received a few comments back.

The title is “Charley Delta Delta”, and it’s the second short story featuring Sharon Williams as the heroine. Sharon is a girl I went to school with, who I reconnected with on Facebook just before our class’ 40th reunion. The first story in the series, “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”, was published in September 2012 and has sold 11 copies. I actually think it sold one more copy that somehow Amazon didn’t register, but that’s another story. I use Sharon’s name with her permission, and she gets to read the stories before publication.

Sunday evening I agglomerated those comments and edited the story. The next day I made some edits that Sharon asked me to. In the stories her married name is Fonseca, and I had been spelling the name incorrectly (that’s not her married name in real life). I made those changes, and the story is sitting for a few days before I give it one last read and, if it’s indeed okay, publish it, probably on Saturday. I also have to do one more tweak on the cover based on Sharon’s request.

The basis for these stories is that Sharon Fonseca is an unconventional CIA agent. A married woman with children, her husband has various overseas postings that put Sharon somewhere in the world where her skills are needed. In the first story she was in America, living back in her home town. Accused of helping a suspected terrorist escape from the police, she was extricated from that accusation when Federal agents arrived and took her away.

In this book she and her family are tourists in Athens, Greece. An agent who is assigned to Vienna, Austria, is sent to Greece to keep an eye on her. He assumes she is a rogue agent. Taking his assignment seriously, he follows Fonseca in Athens tourist areas and to a topless beach in nearby Pireaus. He doesn’t know that higher-ups in the agency have an agenda outside of what they told him.

So where am I going with this series? At first I just wrote a story, the first one. Then I realized I could make a series of short stories out of it, putting Sharon in various places I visited in my overseas years and thus taking advantage of “the grand tour” I went on before I knew I would become a writer. So I’ve now written the second in the series. Will it be a series? I’ll have to think about that. Short stories have been fun to write so far. I have them in two series. The other one may have run out after three, but this one I can see becoming a series of between 50 and 100. I have that many places to write about.

So, as I often say on this blog, stay tuned if you want to see where this is going to go.