almost done with another!

I'm coming to the final pages of my epidemic thriller, a long novel that probably will see publication in December. It has been a lot of fun to write, and I've learned a lot about communicable diseases, none of it comforting. I hope to turn some of that research into blog posts over the next few months so you can be frightened by it too. ;)

Next comes a short break to catch up on reading. (Well, no, that was a lie. I never catch up on reading and certainly can't in less than a week!) And then by mid-August, I'll be revising the stand-alone post-apoc novel that's coming out in September.

I'm losing count, but I think this is the fifteenth full novel I can claim to have written. Two petered out at about 200 pages before I learned an outline was not optional for me. My first novel existed in paper form only for years, and I eventually lost it. On the computer, I have one that was drafted in 2011, and two that are new this year; all three need a revision before anyone else can see them. And eleven are published (two under a pen name), so I think that comes to fifteen full novels and two first halves. (Those partials, I'm sure, are lost to the reality of changing computer tech, but I sense that is no great loss.) I have also written well over 100 short stories, most of them ~5,000 words, a non-fiction book, and more articles for magazines and newspapers than I can remember. It feels like a lot but at the same time not enough. I wasted some years when I had given up on the NY publishing industry, and now I know I could have been writing two books a year anyway. Ah well, I didn't have a crystal ball back then, I'm sorry to say.

Which brings me back to my recurring feeling of gratitude. Thank you, Amazon, for the technology of ereaders and for giving me the right to publish and to find an audience! It's fun to connect with readers who like my kind of stories. I write the sorts of books I enjoy and wish there were more of. There aren't...so I write them!