Saturday, November 03, 2012

What's next? Good question . . .


Once upon a time, when I finished one book I could choose to take some time off or move on to the next idea. I generally chose the latter, part because there was nearly always one waiting. Because I'm me, and more than a little single minded (the less kind might call me OCD, others obsessive, and still others a woman who wants to justify her lousy housekeeping), I nearly always finish what I start. In all I have six books and one collection of short stories. To be honest with you, I didn't realize that until just now. I've been telling people there were four. I obviously can't count.

The list is as follows (in the order they were written)--
1)Fassen Files  Smashwords and Amazon
2) Witness Tree
3) Troubled Waters
4)Willow's Blood (sequel to TW)
5) The Daylight Here
6) The Way of Things(A fairy tale for dog lovers)
7) Sing Amazon  Smashwords Barnes and Noble and other ebook sites, including Sony and Itunes.


As I was looking for something to put in the back of Fassen Files as a teaser for the next book, I settled on the Troubled Waters excerpt because I THINK I'd like to work on it next. However it's going to require a fair amount of editing as the technology I based it on is now (amazingly enough) obscure. People are relating to one another differently than they did in '07 (facebook, texting, etc). For the not--initiated, TW is about a network security specialist who has just started worked in a civilian capacity for the FBI. When her younger sister, Sophie, is murdered by a serial killer she met online, Sevin Waters fights back the only way she knows how. The problem? No one can figure out how the guy is getting in or out of young women's homes undetected. And then there's the sandalwood dust and the mysterious books . . .  Although I had to seek the expertise of more than one IT guy/gal and even had input from a former white hatter, this book was a lot of fun to write and I would not mind spending more time with it. The fact that it has a sequel makes it all the more appealing.

However I'm a little torn between TW and The Daylight Here, which I've described as my first grown up book (with a supernatural twist, of course). Again, for those of you who haven't been reading here for the last few years--The Daylight Here is about a middle aged woman named Hannah who's confessed to her husband that she's had an affair and chooses to stay and make her marriage work. Unfortunately her obsessive ex-lover decides that if he can't have her, nobody can. And further more, he wants to make sure that everyone she loves pays for her choice. The race to stop him from accomplishing this is complicated by Hannah's murder. Yep. Hannah is a ghost and is hundreds of miles away from her family and must get there and somehow warn her children.  

Frankly, this is a creepy story that strikes close to home. While I've never had an affair, I see exactly how it happens. Love is complicated and human beings, even the best of them, are fallible. It was a big jump forward for me to go from writing about single twenty-somethings to married-with-family forty-somethings. While it might not be as "safe" or as uncomplicated a topic as Troubled Waters, it may be a better demonstration of my skill as a writer.


So there you go, now you know (almost) as much as I do. Decisions, decisions . . .

2 comments:

Scotty said...

I'll read whatever you decide to put out next :-)

Hal Johnson said...

Me too.