J.L. Wilson's Blog: Why I'm not here often, page 8

New book alert!

My Robin Hood book is out today!

This is the story of Tucker Frye, a transplanted Southerner who owns a pub with Alan Dale. John Smalley makes an appearance, Guy Gibson is one of the bad guys (or is he?), Marian runs the newspaper, and Richard owns an agribusiness egg factory. Tucker's nephew has gone undercover at the chicken farm to expose the inhumane conditions, and when he turns up dead, Tucker gets involved.

Oh, and did I mention Rob Huntington is in the book, too?

The whole crew you remember from your childhood stories and TV shows are there, but with a bit of twist ... here's the question:

What if Robin really was a hood?

I now have time to write!

Yes, you read that right.

I am retired. Or, very close to it. My last working day is tomorrow (September 28) and after that, I'll actually have time to devote to what I've been wedging in here and there -- my fiction writing.

I have the Endless American Dream series, almost finished (9 of 11 books are written). I have the Celestial Service series started (not published yet). I have 4 more Remembered Classics to submit to my editor. And I plan to re-issue my reincarnation stories.

Yep. I think I'll be busy!

Learning to live with the past

This one is my ghost story. Everybody loves a good ghost story, right?

The heroine is haunted by her late husband, a firefighter who died in a fire after they had a huge argument. As she tries to understand what happened to him, she meets someone else who's trying to understand his late wife.

This book is a story of second chances, of learning to put the past behind us, and learning to step forward. It's hard to move on, hard to make changes. Those kinds of things make us take a look at ourselves and evaluate who we are. It's also about aging and dying with dignity because one of the main characters is an old woman who's trying to do her best to preserve her farm.

This book also allowed me to bring closure to another character from Twistered. Jack found his true love in this story, and I was able to give him a happy ending.

So think about guilt and ... 

Release day is coming up

My Robin Hood book, Woulds, will be releasing in a few weeks. The heroine, Tucker Frye, co-owns a pub with Alan Dale. I'll post information about the book when it releases, but for now, let me share the cover. Note the bloody fingerprint on the beer mug.

My kind of cover ...

The beginning of the end ... so to speak

This was the first book in my "New Human" series, and it's the start of the penultimate trilogy for the series I'm writing now, the Endless American Dream.

I started with a premise: what happens if you have a world where prejudice, inequality, and poverty have been eliminated. Where is the conflict? What happens?

Well, politics happen, of course. There are always people who will jockey for more power. At the heart of this story is a story of inequality and deception, all set on a planet far away with people very like us but ... different.

This is the story of a man who's not quite human and a woman who doesn't fit in society and how they find each other and somehow, become more human because of it.

Here's Human Touch.

Small town, undercover hero who's not so undercover, and a savvy Mom

Sigh.

Once again, one of my favorite books. This was from early in my career and it was so much fun to write. It combined my love of computers, small towns, and sexy FBI agents who are facing issues in their lives.

Nick Baxter goes "undercover" in a small Iowa town. The thing is, everybody in town knows who he is. And the woman he's supposed to be watching knows exactly who he is because she's a computer hacker plus her father is ex-CIA.

Heh.

This has a marvelous cast of characters who went on to star in books of their own. But this is the one that started it -- Brilliant Disguise

Middle book, awesome hero

This is the 2nd in my New Human series. I started the series with Human Touch, in which I introduced these characters. The two main characters in HT are secondary characters here. I continue their story but other characters step in.

This entire 3-book series is the finale of my "Endless American Dream" series, which I am currently writing. These are the descendants of my characters in the Dream books and I had fun figuring out ways to distort their view of "history" -- the history I am currently writing.

Living Proof also introduces Jak Exo, one of the most interesting heroes I've ever written. He's a man with many facets, some of which aren't revealed until the final book, Leap of Faith. I had to be careful what to reveal and what to hide as I wrote this.

Oh, and this book was one of mine that got an RT Book Review (back in the day) and a four-star review. I was pretty happy with that ...

My first book ... revisited

This was one of my first books published -- under a different title.

This started as "Your Saving Grace" and it had the world's worst cover. I mean, it was SO bad. I begged for a different cover and was told "covers don't sell books, the content does" or something to that effect.

I hated trying to pitch this book at conferences. I was so embarrassed by it. In the end, the publisher folded and I got the rights back. I edited it a bit to update the technology used and to remove the scenes the editor wanted me to include.

AND I FINALLY GOT A COVER I LOVE! I am no longer ashamed to be seen with this book at a book signing.

Win!

John Dillinger slept here

Compassion is a re-issue of the third book in my Reincarnation Romance series. The books are standalone, so you don't have to read the others to read this one.

This one is set during the Great Depression. I had a lot of fun writing this because it gave me a chance to chat with my mother about her memories of the Depression and how things were back then.

I tussled with my initial editor on this one a LOT. She questioned every bit of historical fact in here ("they didn't have refrigerators like that then"; "Nylons were too expensive"). It took a great deal of patience for me to go through edit after edit after edit.

Then the company folded and I got the rights back, and BINGO, it was easy to edit!

An odd fact about this book: the main character, Will Taupert, was the main character in one of the first books I wrote. It was pretty awful, a mishmash of the plot, but I took him out of that book and plunked him in this book. And I took bits and pieces of his personality and made L.J. Remarchik, the hero in the Fatal Writer's Conference series.

I guess nothing ever really gets deleted...


http://bit.ly/Compassion_book

Northern Minnesota murder ... very cold

Nathan eyed the Possum Bottom Bowling Alley and Lanes ’O Fun warily. This trip was shaping up to be more interesting than he’d anticipated, although his plans had been pretty damn interesting to start with. They were supposed to be on a trip to the Bahamas where he had hoped to pop the Big Question while he and Margaret were lounging on the beach. His daydreams about his vacation hadn’t included a foray to western Minnesota through sub-zero temperatures in order to talk to a small town lawyer about a deceased uncle’s estate on an Indian reservation.



And so begins an adventure for Nathan Stokes and Margaret Dalton. We first met them in Brilliant Disguise, when Nathan helped Nick Baxter in small town Iowa. Now Nathan and Margaret are in Minnesota, where they find a lawyer dead, frozen to the ground.

Yep, that's really happened. I read about it in a newspaper and thought, "Now, I can use that in a book."

This book is one in which my critique friends helped me test a theory about how easy it would be to kill someone in a crowded casino with a skewer from the shrimp at the buffet.

Shadow of Doubt also introduces Grace Jamison, who is the star of Lie to Me (mentioned in February). This book somewhat sets up Grace's story, or at least provides some context for it.

But really, it's all about Nathan and Margaret -- he's so in love with her, she's so in love with him, and they're so different from each other. I love their dialogue, I love the way they interact, and I love the way they protect each other.

Maybe I should bring them back in another book .... hmm.