Got the bad news this morning that my publisher won't be doing more books in my Marla Mason series. Crappy economy plus okay-but-not-great sales made them decide to end the series.

I'm pretty depressed.

I don't blame them; from a numbers point of view, they did what they had to. Times are tough. And, hey, I got to write four books in this series -- more than many writers get. (Sorry about the cliffhangerish ending in Spell Games, though, which was meant to set up for the next book... I wrote it when a fifth book seemed much more likely!)

We will, of course, see if other publishers are interested in picking up the series, though that's always a dicey proposition. I may end up writing the book anyway and self-publishing or doing a fundable thing or a serial publication or something. I don't know. I'm gonna give myself a few days to be depressed, then I'll figure things out as various options exhaust themselves.

If nothing else, I'll just write some other novel. It's what I do.

In the meantime, there's still Bone Shop, my serial prequel novella about Marla. And if nothing else I'll keep writing short stories about her, because she's fun, and I love her, even though she's prickly and short-tempered and sometimes kinda mean. I hope you'll all keep reading about her too.

And because life is weird, I sold a story this morning to a top-tier market where I've never had work appear before, so at least I got some good news today to offset the bad.