Hi, all,

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted anything here. Life’s gotten in the way of a lot of things, including my writing and publishing.

Well, at least in the way of my publishing. I have been writing. I have a handful of things done, including 2 sequels to THE INN, my most and best reviewed book to date.

THE INN is a 37K word novella that I wrote early on in my “career.” I’ve told this story on the blog before, but I wrote it after reading William Malmborg’s TEXT MESSAGE. In that book, a girl gets separated from her little sister, who she’s supposed to be minding, at the mall. When she starts getting texts from her sister’s phone, it quickly becomes obvious that someone not only has her sister’s phone, they also have her sister. And they’re threatening to harm the younger girl unless the older (college-aged) sister performs certain “tasks.” Most of these tasks are either embarrassing or sexual in nature. And it goes on from there.

I thought I could write something similar, in a semi-public place. I came up with THE INN, where a high school band takes a trip to a music festival in Alabama and stays in an inn where someone is “watching” them. The fear (more of a discomfort) comes from lying in bed at any number of hotels or inns where there is a smoke detector on the ceiling and often a little red or green light flashes. I thought, could that little red light indicate some sort of camera going on and off?

And it went from there.

After I’d written it, I felt like there was more story to tell. There was the antagonist’s story — how did he get like that? And at the end, there is…well, I really don’t want to say, but that part of the story needed to be told too.

And so I wrote another novella. This one came out at about 30K, shorter than I’d hoped. And a character came to life in that one, someone else who I wanted to explore. So I had a new antagonist, and I revisited my protagonist from THE INN, figuring out a way to bring these two together.

That third story came out to be over 60K words! In other words, an actual novel-length work!

Then I put them both on the back burner. I wasn’t in a position to put the time in to do the publishing part right, so I left them stew. I hadn’t looked at them for a while.

Until last weekend. I started rereading and re-editing both of them. They surprisingly don’t need much editing. They seem pretty clean to me. But they also grabbed me. After all this time, I didn’t really remember everything that happened in both stories. So I had to read them all. And I was impressed, if I do say so myself…which of course I have to, since no one else has read them.

I think they’re ready. As I approach retirement, I am going to concentrate on getting these two works out into the world. Editing, covers, formatting…I’ll be moving forward with both of them. I don’t have titles yet, but I’m sure I can figure something out.

Just wanted to get that off my chest, so to speak. Watch for them going forward.