Michael Jasper's Blog

It took WAYYYY longer than I’d planned, but I finally have (most of) my book covers updated and branded properly! I still have a few more to do, but I am CLOSE.

My goal was to create an easy-to-read version of my name and the book titles on the cover (sans serif, baby), make it clear which books belong to which series, and — hardest of all, add beautiful images to hook potential readers.

I’m still nowhere near a professional cover designer, but I really like how these six covers turned out:

This one took some time, with me finishing the first chapter way back in July of last year, and then taking about half a year to rewrite a huge chunk of another novel, but just yesterday I wrapped up a first draft my first new novel in, well… YEARS!

Alas, I don’t have a final title or a cover yet (more on the cover below, lol), but as of right now, I’m calling this quirky little book Rarely Legal: The Misadventures of Augie and Ozzy:

I nearly killed my cheapie little printer making a hard copy ...

Hello! I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been super-busy with a million different things this summer, from fixing up our barn (so much time in that barn) to cutting grass (so much, so many fields!) to taking a class or two and trying to read more.

And I’ve been writing more again. My “Augie and Ozzy” novel, a sort-of “Finder Team” prequel that takes place 50 years before the other books in the series, is just about drafted. (Working title: Rarely Legal: The Misadventures of Augie and Ozzy.) I’m wo...

Today’s the launch day for the novel I’ve been working since 2017.

Okay, to be clear, I haven’t been working on this novel, Lost & Finders (the 2nd book in my Finder Team mystery series) non-stop since then. I wrote the first version of this novel in 2017 and 2018, and when it was published I was never happy with how it turned out. More details here.

I’ve been wanting to revisit these quirky characters–hefty Bim Mayer with his 5XL self and his special mental skills, and his buddy Hanky J with hi...

Another blog entry, and less than a month after my previous one? This has to be a personal best… at least for me in the past few years. Gone are the days of writing in my “online journal” just about every day. I guess I had more energy for that sort of thing back in the day.

These days I tend to add a new blog entry here when there’s some interesting news, and I’m happy to say that I do indeed have some good news to share. I finished writing Lost & Finders, my “mystery novel with a hint of the p...

Okay, somehow almost a quarter of this year has just about flown by. It’s been quite a year so far, and I’ve been trying my best to keep my head out of the news and focus on writing fiction again. I’ve succeeded about half the time with the former, and most of the time with the latter, so I’ll call it a win.

After getting back into writing fiction again last year (after almost five years away from it!), when I wrote six new stories, plus one early this year, I decided to finally fix up my novel ...

Just a quick update on the writing and publishing front…

First off, I finished a new story at the end of August called “Cool Mountain” that also features my knuckleheads from 1974, Ozzie and Augie. I had a lot of fun writing that story, and I’ll share an excerpt at some point this month.

Second, I’ve got a third story idea for these two guys (or maybe just one of them…) that I’m working  for this month. I just started it, but it fits in nicely with the other two stories featuring these fellas. I...

I had two elderly characters in my novel Finders, Inc. named Ozzy Mayer and Augie Shepherd who turned out to be some slightly unsavory fellas. But they were REALLY fun to write, because they were so different from any other characters I’d ever written — they were pretty amoral, selfish, and calculating, and they hadn’t done a day’s worth of honest work in their 60+ years of existence.

So of course I had to write a story about them… But th...

Just saw this on my WordPress admin page for this site. I cannot believe it’s been 16 years. I remember when I used to “blog” (or as I preferred to call it, “journal”) almost every day, in WAY too much detail.

Now, it just seems like too much effort, lol. But I’m glad to have this site as a record of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Later!

UnWrecked Press is happy to announce the release of Michael Jasper’s short-story collection What Was Left Standing. Nearly three decades in the making, we feel it was definitely worth the wait.

From the back cover:

We started the fires at dusk.

The opening to the title story of this collection by Michael Jasper is a distillation of the mix of danger, disquiet, and determination that runs through all sixteen stories

Whether it’s the return of a prodigal son to the family farm (“The Chicken Proje...