The Comeback Kid

At this time a year ago, I was just beginning to understand that my editing business was in serious trouble. I’d had slumps before — it’s just the nature of the business — but this one, which would stretch out for the next several months — was unprecedented in my seventeen years of self-employment. (More about that here.) The short version: I ran out of money, had to take a job delivering mail and packages for my local post office for Bataan Death March wages just to cover my baseline living expenses, and wondered, as I stared down the barrel at my 60th birthday, if this was how I would be living until I stopped living.

Well, just as things got really bad … my business came back. The slump began in November 2024, and while I can’t drawn a firm causal link to the presidential election, my author friend Tod Goldberg suggested that many writers were so disappointed by the result that they lacked the “emotional attention” to push their novel manuscripts across the finish line. And that strikes me as a correct interpretation of events.

At any rate, business started trickling back in July, got stronger and steadier in August, and by early September, my editing services were booked out to the end of this year. Today? I’m pretty well locked down through March, maybe April, of 2026. I was able to quit the post office by mid-November, and I managed to hold up my end of the always stressful Christmas bargain in my house and even catch up (somewhat) on my bills and credit cards.

Hopefully things stay strong. If only so I can concentrate on the reason I created this Substack in this first place — to discuss the intersections of my two cultural passions: crime novels and the 1970s.

To that end, I’m working on some lists: a “second top-ten crime novels of 2025,” to recognize all the fine works I started and finished after I turned in this top-ten list in early November for The Rap Sheet. I’m also working on a criminally overdue update to this Mystery Tribune piece I wrote about my favorite crime novels set in the 1970s but published in the last decade. (Trust me, there have been a lot; a lot of crime novelists, it seems, want nothing to do with the diarrhea rodeo otherwise known as 2025, and I don’t blame them one bit.)

I’m also working on a piece about the ever-elasticizing definition of “noir” in fiction, and have some pretty sharp-elbowed opinions about that.

Apart from that, I’m poking away at my eternally unfinished crime novel, as well as what I hope will be my first published short story in three years, one based on my experience of having a pardoned January 6 terrorist on my mail route. (The last story I published can be found in this anthology.)

And I’m working on getting The Killing Rain, the Seattle-centric crime-fiction anthology I edited in advance of the 2024 Left Coast Crime conference held in nearby Bellevue, back into print after its publisher, Down & Out Books, went out of business back in October. The rights reverted back to me, and I’m hoping to release an updated edition early next year — and include a story of my own that I rejected when it became clear that it needed more work than I could give it by my deadline, and that it simply wasn’t up to the high standards of the fourteen stories I did select.

(I am immensely proud of The Killing Rain; three of its stories were selected for two prestigious year-end story collections, here and here. Congratulations to authors Robert J. Binney, John Bosworth and Tod Goldberg. It, and they, deserve renewed life.)

I trust I’m not alone in hoping 2026 is nothing like 2025. See you on the flip side of the calendar.