Off to the Editor

A lot has happened in the world since I last wrote a blog but there are two reasons why I’ve been silent for so long. The first was my wife had a total knee replacement and she needed 100% of my time while she recovered. Having had two of these operations myself I know the debilitating state your left in. Both physically and psychologically. You need a lot of support that first couple of months. The second thing was getting the book’s manuscript ready for my editor.

Where Things Are

I want to update everyone on where I am with my novel Legends of the End. The book is finished and now I’m doing my edit. The novel is written in two parts so I’m almost at the end of part one. Part one is much longer than part two. The end of part one is complicated because there are so many issues coming to a head all at once. I took a few weeks off to help my wife in her recovery from a knee replacement. That took my full attention. She is doing very well and my focus is swinging back to this book. I do have an editor waiting for this manuscript. Richard Thomas has agreed to work with me. He edited my first novel and the fact he is excited to work together again is a great encouragement.

Editing & Rewriting

I’m back from vacation and finished with all the reentry issues you seem to have after being gone awhile. Things like slogging through three thousand emails! Patti and I went back to Block Island for about two and a half weeks of peace. Block Island is thirteen miles off Rhode Island’s coast so it is surrounded by the ocean. Block Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic to the east. Mostly it is cool and breezy there. We stay at a hotel called the Atlantic Inn. It’s like stepping back into time. No TVs in the rooms. No air conditioning so you keep the windows open and get a lot of that wonderful sea air. It’s as close as I can get to taking Patti camping.

Book Update

I want to let everyone know where I am with the second Robin Randle story. I struggled to get to the finish-line on this novel. Lots of reasons. I knew what had to happen in the end but I didn’t understand the how of  how things got there. It took me awhile to sort that […]

Where do ideas come from?

So where do ideas come from? I don’t think that is the question. Ideas are everywhere. All you have to do is get out of your home, get off your phone and look at what’s going on around you. Keep a notebook with you and write things down. I find there are way more ideas than time to develop them. What I wonder about is all the stuff that comes after the idea. Suddenly you are writing about people that never existed that you sometimes put in real places and sometimes made up places. The book I’m writing now takes place on Block Island. As I write I need to step inside the world I’m creating. I have to feel the air, smell the air, touch the world my characters are living in. That means reading about the place, gathering facts, maps, histories and anything else that might matter. I make a lot of notes, flag pages in books and basically devote a shelf in the library to all the topics involved in the story I’m writing.