It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas?

I know, I know--it's July and the high is predicted to be in the eighties here today. But I'm already getting that Christmas feeling. Why? Because I started a new Shalan story yesterday. It's a prequel set around the first Christmas that Harry and Dee had together, the one where he proposed. Spoiler alert--she says yes.

Plans are for this to be a short story at the moment. Who knows? It may grow into a novella. It will involve a case, though it will not have Harry's buddy Otis because, as you probably know if you've read my books, Harry and Dee fell in love in Louisville, Kentucky. He had gone there for seminary but dropped out when he found what he loved doing--detective work. She was there working on her master's degree. Harry's partner in crime will be his boss, the owner of the McCain detective agency, Lucas McCain. Lucas, older than Harry but still not completely darkened by his work, is Harry's mentor in the gumshoe business. In this story we'll see the origins of many of the ideals that Harry holds dear--and even some of his rules.

Karen Gillan, best known to
nerds as Amy Pond in
DOCTOR WHO, is the
woman I picture playing Dee
in a movie. I love her humor and
also how fierce she can be.  Plus,
she's just stunning. (beyouthful.net)

It's tentatively entitled "Harry and the Redheaded Angel" and plans are for it to come out in mid-november for free exclusively to members of my mailing list. It will go on sale to the public around Thanksgiving. This is going to be ebook only, though it may appear on paper in a collection someday. Unlike Marvel Studios, I don't have this stuff planned out through 2020 and beyond.

If you don't want to wait until Thanksgiving to get more Harry and Dee, never fear. In The Shadow, Shalan Adventure #3, will be available in paperback and for ebook in the fall. My target is to have it out by October 1, though it may be a little earlier than that. This book takes a darker turn than the first two. Harry and Dee, at the request of Harry's best friend Otis, a Parkersburg Police detective, go in search for a teen that may have run away. Her name is Jenn Bezaleel and Harry learns pretty quickly that running away from her seriously perverted family may be the smartest thing she could have ever done. Dee can't help much because she's quite pregnant with their first baby, Emma Grace, who was (sort of) introduced in the epilogue of Kisses and Lies. I won't say more for fear of too many spoilers. I don't say this often about my own writing, but I think it's really good. I believe people will either love it or hate it, though, because it's pretty heavy stuff.

I'm looking for a couple more beta readers for this book. If you have time to sit down and read it in the next week or two and are willing to be honest with me, please get in touch. Let me emphasize that I need this to be done in a timely manner. I'm on the, albeit self-imposed, clock. I need to get final edits done by the end of summer. So please only contact me if you honestly have the time to read for me soon.

Stuff I Learned While Editing My Third Book

I'm getting set to head to Tamarack in the morning, so, though you can't tell it, I'm writing this on Friday. One of the joys of summer is time to get writing work done. This week, I've made some changes to both Harsh Prey and Kisses and Lies. No changes to the storylines or anything. For Harsh Prey, I updated the cover and back cover as well as fixing an alarming number of errors, proofreading and otherwise. It now has crazy stuff, like headers and page numbers and all the words are (I hope) spelled correctly. Kisses and Lies had but one typo that I could find and the cover was already amazing, so that didn't change, though I did change the back cover to include the blurb and a short bio. Both books now take up a lot less room, too. I changed both to single spaced, which did a couple things. First, it made the footprint of each book a lot smaller, which is pretty environmentally friendly. Second, it saved pretty heavily on print costs and I'll be able to pass the savings along to buyers.

But while I wasn't working on that stuff, I finally started this week with editing and revising Shalan #3, In the Shadow (Available around beginning of October). This process has taught me a few things. Here they are, in no particular order:

I like editing on paper instead of the computer. I've never done that since the olden days when I had no choice but to write and edit on paper. Since I got a word processor program for my sexy new Commodore 64, which came complete with a dot matrix printer and no hard drive, I've done all my editing right on the computer screen. This time, however, I accidentally started doing it on paper. I say accidentally because I never would have done it if I hadn't printed out a copy so my medical consultant, the real Dr. Mathur (that will make sense when you read the book) could make corrections when I butchered the medical scenes. I went through her comments and made corrections and then, before I knew it, I was editing the whole thing on paper. I found myself moving around in the text checking continuity and tweaking the storyline in ways that would be downright difficult to do on the computer. So I think it's paper editing for me from now on.

I've come a long way as a writer. Since I did an edit of HP immediately before ITS, I realize that, while I think the first book was good, I feel like the newest book is exponentially more engaging. Part of that is because I've had three books now to flesh out Harry, Dee, and Otis, making them more three-dimensional as time has gone by, but I think it's also about just honing my voice as a writer. I hope you'll agree.

I tend to be my worst critic. That's not really news, especially to my Pepper Potts, aka Maria Delgado. She and I were texting about the new book and I said something positive about it and, even through text, I could tell she was pleasantly shocked that it wasn't another critical statement about myself.

Speaking of Pepper and Dr. Mathur, this book, more than any other, reminds me that I can't do this alone. Poonam came all the way from Hershey, Pennsylvania to work with me on the medical scenes in this story. Without her, those scenes simply wouldn't have rung true. Maria reads every version of every book and, though she doesn't do a lot of editorial work, she is my own personal cheerleader. Her support is unwavering and it means the world to me.

I can make myself cry. When I wrote the first draft of this book, it was a dark time for me. The story goes into some really tragic and scary places within human nature, But I never cried. This time, though, as I reread after having put the story away for a couple months, one scene in particular brought a tear to my eye. Harry and Dee are just as real to me as if they were flesh and bone real and when a heartbreaking thing happens to them, it breaks my heart too. Yes, I made them up and I could have written them any way I wanted. But most writers will tell you that, no, I really couldn't have. It really doesn't work that way.

And finally, I discovered--okay, I really just confirmed something I already suspected--that I would love to do this stuff full time. It's summer. I could be outside. I could be traveling. I could be making money teaching summer school. What am I doing? I'm going to bed early and getting up every day and either writing, editing, or marketing. And I'm happy as a clam. I really, really hope I don't have to wait another 8 or 9 years to get to do this all the time. But I guess that's up to the book buying public.

So there they are. Six things I learned this week. That's a lot of stuff considering I only started Monday. So what did you learn this week?