Now It's Two-Cent Tuesdays: The Other Series

This was originally supposed to be where I announced volume 4 of the Scarlet Knight series had been released.  But guess what, it's already out!  The entire series is out.  Where have you been?  That's right, you didn't care.

Anyway, so today I'm talking about my OTHER series you don't care about, the Chances Are trilogy!  If you followed this blog and remembered anything from the last year, you'd probably remember pictures of Stacey Chance and sometimes her alterego Steve Fischer.  I mean, I did just post a picture of her for the April Phony Photo.

I had thought about trying to query the first book of the series, Chance of a Lifetime, but after the dreadful performance of the Scarlet Knight series, and that this book couldn't crack the top 400 in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest--Mystery/Thriller division--I just wasn't up to another round of soul-crushing rejection.  And maybe I could have gone to small publishers, but I've already seen how well that works out.  So I'm just putting them out through my imprint, which is just as good as any small publisher out there.

If you're still clueless about the story, it's a fairly simple concept.  Detective Steve Fischer is a big strapping cop who's tough as nails.  He's spent years trying to get the goods on the notorious gangster Artie "Lex" Luther.  Then one night Steve gets a tip that Luther's robbing a pharmaceutical company and that he is personally overseeing it.  Steve goes there to check it out and tangles with Luther's 3 top goons before he fights Luther himself on a boat in the harbor.

Luther's stolen some experimental drug and when he has no other weapon at hand, he injects it into Steve.  That incapacitates Steve long enough for Luther to finish him off and toss him in the harbor.  So now Steve is dead, right?

Sort of.  A body comes up from the harbor but it's not Steve--it's a girl!  (As you could see in the picture above.)  The side effect of the drug Luther injected Steve with is that it saved his life, but regenerated his body as a young woman instead.  The science of it makes no sense, so let's just move on.

The girl goes back to her apartment, just in time to be jumped by another of Luther's goons who's been dispatched to torch the place.  The girl escapes and then finds Steve's partner Jake Madigan.  (Jake is named after Jake Cardigan of the TekWar series, which I had recently watched on Netflix.  Viva Shatner!)  Jake rechristens the girl Stacey Chance as they investigate the pharmaceutical company robbery.

And from there Stacey has a lot on her plate.  She has to get the help of a doctor who worked on the experimental drug to try and find a way to change herself back to Steve.  She has to track down Artie Luther to get back the notes on the drug, which are crucial to finding any cure.  She has to adjust to this new life as a woman, which is really difficult.  And she has to nurture a burgeoning friendship with Steve's estranged daughter Madison, whom she chances upon (punny!) in a coffeehouse.

So there's a lot of stuff going on:  action, mystery, drama, and even romance.  It's a hell of a story.  Of course you have to suspend a lot of disbelief too.

You can buy it here in all ebook formats from Amazon, B&N, or Smashwords.  You can buy the other 2 as well if you want.

I'll talk more about those two over the ensuing months.  I know you don't care, but what else am I going to talk about?

BTW, a little Fun Fact is that I really struggled on the first draft of this story with the opening chapters where Steve goes after Artie Luther.  Much of that struggle is recounted in an entry on my first blog called Rogue's Guide to Rogues.  But you should probably ignore where I call it a "shitty story" and say "it still sucks".  I mean that was the first draft and Hemingway said those are shit, so clearly I was on to something Hem-esque there.  The gist of the problem was the villains were too generic.  In order for the revenge plot later on to work it needed more specific bad guys.  On that entry you can also see early Sims renditions of Steve and Stacey before I discovered how to install add-ons to the game.  Though you people will probably say you like the old ones better because y'all are a bunch of contrarians.  Anyway, the other Fun Fact is one I've mentioned before--Stacey's original name was Stephanie.  That seemed to make sense Stephen-Stephanie.  Then later I Googled Stephanie Chance and found out there was a real person with that name who died tragically and so I looked for an alternate name.  Then I saw Stacey means "resurrection" in some language or culture and that made a lot of sense.