William Sattelmeyer Writer
I began my writing career in college, writing and producing documentaries, screenplays, and plays — including the first adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for the stage — and my career film writing credits include regional Emmies and major awards at international film & video festivals.
I’ve co-authored a textbook on multimedia, self-published two novels, and created a children’s book about an orphaned lamb. You’ll find one of my short stories published in ‘Die Laughing,’ a humorous mystery anthology, several more can be found on the Reedsy Blog, and the opening to cozy mystery ‘Murder Most Ghostly’ made the shortlist at the 2023 Stockholm Writers Festival First Five Pages contest.
Coming soon: a Cozy Mystery series set on England’s canal system. First in the Narrowboat Murder novels:
“Tag, You’re Dead”
Narrowboats on an English canal
Lily Charles had no idea what she was doing anymore. She’d lost her job, her confidence, her creative muse, her fiancé... and maybe her mind. She had fled Silicon Valley for England and bought Calla Lily, her custom 7-foot-wide, 60-foot-long narrowboat to live in and travel on the canals that cut across the British countryside. To what? Paint landscapes? Hope to find a reason to design again? Believe in herself?
But two weeks into a cruise up her first canal, she was now a prime murder suspect, and until the Macclesfield police found enough evidence to arrest the actual killer, she was going nowhere. Her narrowboat home was now a crime scene.
It was as disheartening as she thought life could get. Until she also became a suspect in the murder of three other village residents. Are the deaths tied to the appearance of graffiti on local shops and bridges over the canal and on Lily’s narrowboat? With the detectives in the local constabulary in the city of Macclesfield too busy to speedily solve the crimes in the village an hour’s travel south, Lily knows she has to discover the killer herself, or she’ll never be able to find her creative spark again... or keep from becoming the killer’s next victim.
Lily’s narrowboat “Calla Lily”
Previously published & available for sale:
No one expected Earth to be destroyed by panda bears in a fit of pique. On the other hand, the panda-like Dahk’t Melanti who crashed their starship in ancient China hadn’t expected their rescue to take 2,000 years while they were hunted for their pelts and displayed in zoos.
Unfortunately for the survivors’ descendants, a pawful of annoying humans stands in the way of their successful interstellar recovery.
As for the humans, former cop Charlene “Charlie” Masters thought a career as a veterinarian would be less likely to get her shot, while allowing her more time to write. Instead, she’s stalked by paranoid, egocentric SF author Richard Allison who claims aliens killed his dog.
Then Charlie’s clinic is shot up by lying, beer drinking, bacon-loving extraterrestrial pandas who learned English from watching Netflix, and her sister is kidnapped and tortured for discovering the aliens are about to destroy civilization as we know it.
Now Charlie and Allison have less than forty-eight hours to save the world—without Starfleet, deep-core drillers, or the Force.
But, fortunately, they’re science fiction writers.
Who better to save the planet?
AMAZON REVIEW
Best Book Ever!
Astronaut and aerospace engineer Robert “Pitch” Black barely survived the crash of Space Force Shuttle Endeavor. The U.S. Space Program didn’t. Three years later, Pitch still has to confront the memory and the fear whenever he lands an aircraft.
Dreams of a return to the moon and colonizing the planets are dead. An aging Russian/European-run International Space Station and a few hundred communication and reconnaissance satellites are now all that is left of man’s bold conquest of space. Until a pair of long-dormant space-based weapons platforms come alive and prove they are capable of raining destruction down on any spot on the planet. Their first target: the space station, which begins falling toward a fiery reentry with eight surviving cosmonauts on board… including U.S. astronaut Angela Carnaby, the woman Pitch had lost when Endeavor’s crash had crushed his leg and his spirit. Their second target: Paris.
A prototype spacecraft developed by Pitch’s aerospace research company, T2GIF (Things That Go Incredibly Fast), isn’t capable of reaching the space station, but no other country is close to being able to rescue the doomed crew. Pitch is the astronauts’ only hope, and he has to find a way to reach them before both the U.S. and China respond to the threat of destruction of Paris and other major cities by nuking everything in low earth orbit. But even his jury-rigged reentry vehicle can’t rescue everyone in time. Two must stay behind on the de-orbiting station, and ISS Commander Carnaby demands to be one of them.
AMAZON REVIEW:
With clever winks to the great SF of the past, Sattelmeyer has written a many layered adventure story set in the aerospace world of the 21st century. Combining the space race of the new millennium with current geopolitical intrigue, the story follows Robert "Pitch" Black on an adventure around the world and through the stratosphere. With history and science based on fact, he has built a story of intrigue and action that keeps the reader at the edge of their seat.
