And we’re off! My 2-hour Fiction Writing Essentials online workshop is filling up, and I’m putting together a 2-hour Guided Autobiography Introductory workshop I’ll be offering online and at several in-person locations.

Anyone attending who wants to dive deeper can sign up for the 6-week classes once I have them scheduled (YourWritePath.com). 2024 is turning out to be everything I’d hoped it would. And we have a new cat! James, our first male, and our youngest: 10 months old, a bed cat, an attention seeker, and he gets along great with Wilma (still my baby at 9).

You can now register for classes and workshops with Event Create, including payment! Here’s the link for the upcoming Fiction Essentials workshop.

I’m finally doing it: I’ll be offering workshops and classes later this year, in Guided Autobiography, fiction writing, and more. First up is an online 2-hour ‘fiction essentials’ in May. As the little wooden sign says over my desk, “Actually, I can.” Here’s the course at my Payhip storefront. I’m keeping these to 10 participants, online and in-person when I find a space.

You can also Venmo me here ($30):

I left Indiana three days after graduation high school, leaving for California. It was my creative writing teacher, Mr. Kenton Monjon, who told me he thought I was one of the few students he’d had who he thought could make it as a writer. And here I am!

I just spoke to two senior creative writing classes yesterday, and I have two more to go. It’s great experience for me: bored high school students are a tough crowd. It’s like being a standup comedian in front of an audience that doesn’t laugh. You keep going. You learn to roll with it. These are all skills I’ll need in the coming months as I embark on Your Write Path.com, offering Guided Autobiography courses, journaling and writing workshops, and of course Dreamshaping. It’s all about living our dreams!

Listen to a 3-chapter sample at the Mark McNease Mysteries Podcast

Fasten your headphones! ‘I, Warlock’ the audiobook has arrived.

“He hoped love was eternal … because he was.”

This is my third audiobook with narrator Sean Rhead, and what a pleasure it is! Listen at Audible.

About ‘I, Warlock’ (currently on sale for $1.99, and available on Kindle Unlimited) 

I, Warlock tells the story of Julius Tide, born part-vampire, destined to be all warlock. Julius is an almost accidental warlock, born into a family of witches. He meets the beautiful Charlotte one day at a country fair, and proceeds to dedicate his life to marrying her. Keeping his witching ways a secret, he becomes the night to her day, the guilt to her innocence, as he rushes to solve a mystery that has her family in danger and their futures in doubt. Good confronts evil several times over in this epic battle to save or sacrifice the world, set to the backdrop of a love story for the ages.

Now you can join my ARC (advance review copy) team for review copies of recent and upcoming releases. Just SUBSCRIBE HERE. And coming up next: Fatal Mistake: A Harry Hell Novella.

I’m officially on the Board for the Mystery Writers of America-New York Chapter! I’ll be heading up the mentoring program. Great start to the new year.

Subscribe to Mark McNease On Topic HERE

Tis the season for stockings full of crap

Who doesn’t want to end the year with a Trump-ordered impeachment of President Biden, the man who kicked his ass once and will kick it again?

Who doesn’t want to see Ukraine abandoned in the manger while Jesus, Mary, and the Republican House head off for selfies and sleigh bells?

Who doesn’t look forward to a continuation of all-Trump-all-the-time media coverage of the only man whose obituary I long every day to read?

Who takes comfort in knowing even monsters die?

Me! Me! Me!

Can we stop calling them ‘Supreme’?

Unsurprising, to say the least. The Republican justices (for that’s what they are, not “conservative”) are political hacks through and through. They lie and deceive and live lavish, kingly lives bought and paid for. We can’t do anything about their unaccountable power at this point, but we can stop pretending they deserve the least bit of respect, no matter how they decide. America is so broken, in so many ways. It all appears to have been a very long-lasting fiction that is now threadbare and exposed as the corrupt-from-to-to-bottom smoke and mirrors it always was.

From Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

“With each new peek behind the curtain, this fantasy becomes more difficult to buy into, even for those desperate to believe. It turns out that the justices—at least five of them on the right—are functionally indistinguishable from cynical partisan lawmakers making deals in the Senate cloakroom. It turns out that abortion rights vanished in America because five conservatives barely tried to hide the fact that they could do that, simply because they could do that. And it turns out that they’re increasingly bad at covering their tracks.”