Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog, page 10

Focus Tidbits: One

As we near the release of Focus on May 23, I’m going to continue my time-honored tradition of sprinkling little tidbits out about the story. I really enjoyed writing this story — even more so as it wasn’t one that I had planned on writing. The idea popped up when one of my beta readers pointed out the time jump at the end of Duality and wondered what, exactly, had happened to Sean during those months. (If you’ve not read the most recent book in the Sean Colbeth Investigates series, I won’t spoil anything other than to say our intrepid detective had some enforced downtime on his hands…)

So, ready for some quasi-spoilers?

Vasily has a bit of a crisis of confidence.

I mean, who wouldn’t? His best friend was nearly — oops! You nearly managed to get me to spoil the ending of Duality! let’s just say taking down the suspect at the heart of Duality had repercussions, which leads Vas to question himself.

Polaroid cameras are still popular? Who knew.

…well, apparently the killer Vas is tracking down in Focus did.

Autocorrect makes it hard to spell Manolo Blahnik properly.

Ask Vasily, for he had to key in into his case system. Repeatedly. (The author has never forgiven him for that.) If the name seems familiar, a quick internet search will tell you why.

There’s a hidden elevator at Rosie’s mansion.

I won’t tell you where — you’ll have to read the book for that tidbit. But suffice it to say that the device plays a bit of a role in the events of the story (and explains how our beloved author was able to get to her bedroom during her prior health crises).

A monorail does go through the center of a hotel at Disneyland.

Part of my research for this book required dispatching a friend to confirm this tiny yet salient detail. I re-confirmed it a few months later, along with how strollers can be used to control foot traffic. (Don’t ask.)

Okay, that’s it for now! Be sure to follow me to get additional tidbits as we get closer to the launch.

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Saying Goodbye To TNG

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge fan of Star Trek. I’ve written previously about growing up watching the Original Series in reruns and going to see The Motion Picture with my father; the show and the optimistic future it depicts for humanity has been a touchstone throughout my life, one that I’ve leaned on throughout the years whenever I needed a lift.

It’s hard to describe the level of excitement I had when Star Trek: The Next Generation burst onto the scene back in 1987. Up to that point, the only new content had been the movies featuring the original series cast; while they had been excellent (especially the one with the whales), the idea that the show would be on weekly instead of once every couple of years was incredible. I wasn’t entirely sure what do to with a new crew, though, but it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with them and the new Enterprise, even if it did initially look rather ungainly when compared to the original.

My completed 1:350 model of the starship Enterprise. (Photo: C. Jansmann)

Fast forward to 2023: the final season of Star Trek: Picard has just concluded, and along with it, pretty much all of the character arcs that were begun back in 1987. I won’t spoil anything on the off chance that you haven’t seen the show yet other than to say it was pitch-perfect; the final episode had me both in stitches and in tears… and wanting more. Much more. Until I saw the entire Next Generation cast back together again, I had no idea how much I had missed them; it was like visiting with family members you don’t get to see as often as you would like, but when you do see them again, you pick up right where you left off as though no time had passed at all.

If this is truly the last time we’ll see them together again, I’ll be sad but also incredibly happy to have been on this ride with them; I can’t believe it’s been 36 years since I huddled around the tube television at my parent’s house to watch the dawn of a new era for Star Trek. I can only hope the next 36 years are just as amazing…

Closing Out April

Summer seems to have suddenly appeared on the horizon; in the short space of a month, I’ve gone from wearing my thermal running gear to something far lighter, and ditched the beanie for a sweatband. Back in Maine, it always felt like the dreary rain of Spring would never end; here in Arizona, we get like fifteen minutes of temperate weather before jumping headlong into Summer. I’ve come to appreciate that subtle shift from ice box to pizza oven, but have never really gotten over my surprise at how quickly it happens here in the desert.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other; I’m terribly sorry about that, but it’s been for a good cause. You might remember I began writing the next novel in the Vasily Korsokovach series back in late March with an eye toward getting it completed by the end of April.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Mirage; considering I’ve only got two days left to hit my goal, it looks like work on this one is likely going to bleed over a bit into May. That’s not a bad thing — as my wife is fond of saying, it takes what it takes to get to a properly finished product, and I’m not a fan of rushing just to meet an artificial deadline that I set for myself. I suppose it’s just a little bit like that famous line from Pirates of the Caribbean: my schedule is more like a guideline than an actual rule.

Anyway, it’s been actually quite a fascinating novel to write. And as with most of my stories, when I get to the back third of the book, I tend to find things begin to happen very, very quickly. Occasionally it also means I need to go back and make a few minor tweaks to the beginning to ensure everything sinks up just right; it’s never a good thing to discover my detective is missing a key piece of evidence — which, of course actually means the author overlooked inserting something terribly important in the first third of the book.

I am hoping to get quite a few hours of writing in this weekend. There are a few other things competing for my attention of course, one of them being the second to last home stand for our beloved Arizona softball team. My wife and I have been season-ticket holders for years now, though this particular year has been a hard one for us to actually make many of the games. I have to admit to no small level of guilt over our inability attend, for the team has struggled quite a bit this year; I know having fans in the stands helps to keep them motivated despite the very real possibility they might not make the postseason for the first time in recent memory.

The end of April and beginning of May is always a transitional period for me. As somebody who works in a university campus, that’s always the time when campus clears out for the summer — and ushers in that brief but welcome period when we can park almost anywhere we want. The largest downside, though, is that that without students on campus most of my favorite coffee hang out places are closed for the season, and getting any kind of decent food is problematic. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the quiet solitude of getting the entire campus to ourselves.

Most of us who are full-time staff try to squeeze in our vacations over the summer since it’s the biggest amount of downtime that we get all year. I don’t have a lot planned myself this season, other than going to my usual Star Trek convention in August; I might take a few long weekends here or there and maybe pop in to some places that my wife and I want to get to you while it’s quiet. It’s not the students that evaporate when the heat begins; most of our winter visitors also head back to the far flung reaches of the country once the thermometer threatens to go above 90. I remember my first July here and just how empty the parking lot at my local Safeway was; it’s pretty nice to be able to park right in front of the doors, something we can’t really do between Thanksgiving and Easter.

As the calendar turns to May, that means my next release is on the horizon. I put the finishing touches on Focus a little more than a week ago; save for tweaking the X-Ray entries for the Kindle edition, it’s ready to go across all form factors. I used a slightly different system for preparing for publication and really like how it turned out. The best part is that now everything looks consistent — whether you read me on KDP or hardcover, I finally know for sure you’re seeing the text the way I’d intended it to be read. Let me know what you think when you see it — I’d love any feedback you might provide.

Okay — back to writing Mirage!

Camp NaNo & A New Novel

Just a quick housekeeping note before I get into today’s blog post: it’s Camp NaNo once again, which is another way of announcing I’ve begun writing another book (yay!). That also means that my posts are likely going to be shorter than normal since I’m stretched a bit thin for the next few weeks. On the plus side, though, you’ll have a front row seat to how the writing is going — and maybe a few hints about the content, too. As always, thanks for being a fan and hanging in there with me.

So yes, it’s the first Camp NaNo of the year. As I mentioned in some earlier posts, I’d been dithering over which of my main characters would get the starring role for the next book; after a great deal of internal debate, Vasily wound up winning that argument. I’ll eventually post an updated précis for this new endeavor on my website; even though I already have one, I usually find that I wind up tweaking the description as the book develops, so I’ll likely wait until the plot has settled down a bit more before sharing that with the world. What I will say at this point is that our intrepid Southern California investigator will be tackling an unusual Robin Hood preying on the adult children of the wealthy in Orange County. Set a few months after Requiem, I really like how the story is playing out so far; I’m also delving a bit more into Vas’s growing relationship with Alejandro, leaning into some of the elements I first teased back in Bygones. I love how they have continued to evolve as a couple and can’t wait to see where it goes in this book.

As with past years, if you would like to follow along on my progress writing this new book, you can check out my NaNoWriMo profile. You may need to create an account to view the page; I’ll of course also keep you up to date here on the blog, too.

My first book, Blindsided, is currently being featured in Amazon Prime Reading. If you are a member of Prime and don’t already own a Kindle version of that book, it’s a perfect opportunity to be reminded of how the story got started before Focus hits the shelves next month. I usually scan through my prior books before starting work on a new one; often I pick up on small character traits that have developed more thoroughly as the series has grown. And yes, I do come across sections here and there I would love to adjust slightly, knowing what I now know about these characters. I suppose that is one aspect of publishing that appeals to me the most: once the book has left the barn, it is, as they say, what it is.

As Arizona transitions from March to April, it feels almost as if we are skipping right over Spring; this week alone, we have temps at the beginning of the week in the low 60s, but by next week, we’ll be in the mid-90s. That shift always seems to coincide with the departure of our winter visitors; I don’t blame them for wanting to get to more temperate climates, but wonder if they know what they are missing. The desert in summer is one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, with amazingly subtle variations in brown and green that have taken me years to fully appreciate. We get some incredible monsoonal thunderstorms from July to late September, too, giving us spectacular skies and brilliant overnight light shows. It truly is a site to behold.

Just before settling in to write my latest book, I took some time away from the computer to build a LEGO set my wife had gifted me this past Christmas; the picture of the completed kit headlines this post. I’ve not done one in a while, and found myself recalling the joy of endless hours pouring through the piles of bricks to find just the right one to complete whatever I was building. Finding a home for the finished product will be interesting — I think, though, a spot on my desk at the office is the most likely candidate. Next up: a LEGO re-creation of the classic Atari 2600 Video Computer System. Wish me luck…

You’re Not Here Yet

I was thinking of the Maine Humorist Tim Sample the other day. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s something of an institution where I grew up, keeper of the Downeast traditions and, of course, a consummate storyteller. He has a particular joke about tourists getting lost that I won’t try and retell; I wouldn’t be able to do justice to it, anyway. How the punchline popped into my mind is a story unto itself — a tale of frustration, but one one with a happy ending. It began innocently enough one late weekday afternoon as I tried to exit the parking garage beside my office building.

Since I work at a university, I have to be cognizant of the rhythm and flow of the class schedule or risk being that unlucky trout swimming upstream against the current. My colleagues and I constantly try to time it to be at the coffee shop or the food court at the Student Union during those brief slivers of time when students are actually in class; the same goes for the parking garage, for woe be to the unlucky individual trying to exit campus when classes are changing. After nearly twenty-three years, you’d think I’d have it down pretty solidly, but the period I spent working fully remote during the pandemic seems to have deleted most of that experience from my system. I also feel strongly that our flows in life have yet to fully return to pre-pandemic normalcy — either that or I’m still in denial what we have now is the new normal.

Complicating matters immensely, especially when it comes to exiting the garage, is having to also know the day of the week in question; like some sort of weirdly complicated conspiracy plot, our class schedules vary based on that, too. Eventually I’ll draw out the complete chart on my whiteboard and snap a photo of it just to underscore the insanity, but for now, suffice it to say the deck is generally stacked against me when I exit the building and approach the parking structure each evening.

On that particular day, I trundled up the steps to where my car was parked on the second floor and found that the line to get out of the garage had backed completely up to the floor I was on, and was slowly snaking its way toward the exit gate as though it were Los Angeles traffic snarled by a Dodgers game ending. As careful as I’d been to get to my car during that tiny window of opportunity I knew I had each day, it was clear I was going to begin my commute home with devious challenge of backing out of my parking spot.

Fortunately, a kindly individual allowed me into the line, and I returned the favor a few times in the twenty minutes it took to get out of the structure. It wasn’t until I made it to the gates that I discovered the nature of the issue, that being one of the two arms guarding the exit had failed. Staff from Parking & Transportation were furiously working on whatever had gone awry, while simultaneously waving us through the only functional gate as quickly as the street traffic would allow. I didn’t think much of that fact that the arm was up when I drove through, but assumed the machine had read my little RFID box all the same.

The next morning I discovered it hadn’t. And that’s what brings me back to Tim Sample.

Pulling up to the entrance gate is normally something I do on automatic; I know about where the car has to stop in order for the RFID gizmo to be picked up by the machine, and how long I need to pause before the arm starts to go up. When the gate failed to do anything the next morning, I frowned and wondered if the system had gone on the fritz. Glancing over at the small screen on the device — the one I normally ignored since the gate always opened for me — I felt myself frowning at the gobbledygook of an error message that was displaying. Waiting a few more seconds to see if it would clear netted me nothing more than a car impatiently waiting behind me; I became that person and had to back out of the lane and pull around to another, working the assumption that it wasn’t me, it was the system.

When the second gate showed the same error, I bowed to defeat and took a paper ticket so I could actually get into the garage and begin my day. Over lunch, I called Parking and explained what had happened and became even more nervous when they had to put me on hold. All sorts of oddball thoughts began to ping pong through my brain: had the payroll deduction for my pass somehow stopped working? Did I get bounced from the garage for some reason and missed the email? I’d nearly convinced myself that my entire job had been cancelled without my knowledge when the clerk came back on the line.

“What time did you exit the garage yesterday?” they asked.

“About four,” I replied. “Actually, it was well after that. One of the gates was broken, so there was quite a line to exit.”

The long pause at the other end of the phone seemed significant. “There was a down gate?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Techs were working on it, and they waved us through the other one.”

“Was that gate open?”

“Yes,” I replied again, thinking back to how the arm hadn’t been going down between cars. I’d assumed it was because they were trying to clear the clogged traffic, but in that moment, started to wonder if it, too, had been offline.

There was another long pause. “Well,” the clerk said. “There’s your problem. The system never registered your departure last night; you haven’t left yet, so it’s impossible for you to enter again.”

And that was when I heard Tim Sample in my head, delivering the punchline for his joke; in his story, the tourists are trying to find their way back off an island but are convinced they never crossed a bridge to arrive there in the first place. That leads to Tim’s droll answer to their dilemma: “Well, there’s your problem. You ain’t here yet.”

Through some tech trickery, the clerk managed to reset my status and I was able to exit that afternoon without incident. But now each time I see the arm go up, I think of that joke and smile just a little at how life can sometimes throw you in the most unexpected ways.

Approaching April

I’m in the beginning stages of planning my next book, the one I will begin crafting in April. This stage is always the most interesting, especially when multiple ideas vie for supremacy (as they often do).

I haven’t quite decided which idea will win, something that’s quite unusual for me this late in the game; oddly, I’ve also not entirely settled on who will be getting the next starring role. My original plan after finishing Buried was to visit with Vasily again, but as I’ve re-read the final chapters of Buried, I feel the strange pull from several threads I left dangling there and a deep desire to see where they will lead. It was a tough case for Sean, complicated by even tougher personal issues that unexpectedly cropped up for him. While I naturally had a sense of where his character was going when I started writing that book, the actual path turned out to be far more interesting than I expected; leaving him hanging feels a bit nasty, both for him and for me as the writer.

To paraphrase Tom Jones, it wouldn’t be all that unusual for me to write two Sean Colbeth books back-to-back; over the past six books, that’s actually been how I’ve operated. I’d planned on going back to alternating characters just so they continued to feel fresh to me, but now, as I stare at the winnowing days of March, I’m not so sure any longer. 

I still have a few more days to decide.

As I consider what do to do, one decision that has already been made is to add some bonus content for folks who purchase my next book. I’m still in the early stages of carving that space out on this site — and writing said bonus content — but look for information on how to access it at the end of Focus when it comes out in May. I’m somewhat excited at the idea, and I hope you’ll enjoy something a little different set within my Windeport universe.

Heroic Side Quest

I’m not going to surprise you by revealing my characters get their affinity for comic book superheroes directly from me. I didn’t originally intend for that to bubble up as I was writing; at least, not until that box holding a costume his cousin had created for Sean to wear to the village Halloween party showed up on the front seat of his SUV in Blindsided. Part of the fun of that sequence was getting to explore how little Sean understood of pop culture, and just how worldly his best friend, Vasily, turns out to be. And it also allowed me to create a pretty cool way for Suzanne and Sean to meet; if you’ve not yet read Blindsided, it will be something of a spoiler to say anything more on that front — and perhaps even more of a spoiler to hint that his Chat Noir costume will continue to pop up moving forward.

Chat is the latest in a long line of superheroes I’ve come to appreciate over the years, though it was pure luck I stumbled onto him. I happened to be curled up on the couch in misery on a rare sick day, surfing Netflix for anything to fill the hours while I waited for the cold medicine to work its magic. Their suggestion algorithm — already primed by my extensive viewing of Disney animation and anything science fiction-related — happened to suggest Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir as something I might like, and intrigued, I clicked into the show. The smiling feline-themed superhero who had been on the title card for the show turned out to be one-half of a superhero duo — a pair of Parisian teenagers who are granted magical jewels that are the source of their crime-fighting superpowers. There were the usual trappings of the genre, including secret identities and the tricky love square that can develop as a result; throw in compelling writing and stunning CGI animation, and I was hooked. By the time my wife returned from work that evening, I’d binged all of the first season and had nearly finished the second.

When I first discovered comics, Spider-Man immediately appealed to me for he was the first character that made being smart seem kind of cool. Like the detectives I would find later in mystery section of my library, Spidey had this ability to logically puzzle out what was going on below him as he swung over the streets of New York; that he had the same sort of teenager problems I did when he wasn’t wearing the mask, while fictional, made him totally relatable to a budding geek. All these years later, Chat and his civilian alter ego speak to me on a similar level; and, like any good story in that genre, Chat has a classically complex backstory with an insanely messed up personal life that includes an overbearing father (who also just happens to be the key villain in the series).

What’s not to like about that?

Pre-pandemic, I discovered that the studio producing Miraculous, Zag Animation, had a home base in Santa Monica, California. That in itself isn’t unusual, given the depth and breadth of the entertainment industry in Southern California; after all, the Walt Disney Company was literally just a few miles up the street in Burbank from their location (though likely an hour’s drive in the terrific traffic). What was unique, though, was that Zag had opened a small retail store in the first floor of their building. Naturally, on one of my next visits to my friends in SoCal, I managed to sweet talk them into driving up to Los Angeles to visit this Mecca to all things Miraculous.

On a weekend.

A sunny, summer Saturday California weekend.

What could go wrong?

Zag Animation and the Zag Store in 2019. Most definitely not open to the public.

Naturally, traffic was intense, and finding a parking spot anywhere in that beachfront town was a trial that I won’t soon forget. Neither, it seems, the expressions of mirth on my friend’s face when we finally reached the door to the store — and discovered it wasn’t open to the public save for specific dates that were listed in advance on Instagram. My horror at dragging my friends up to Los Angeles was equal to the embarrassment of being reduced to pressing my face to the glass of the doors — and snapping a zillion photos of what I could see.

Say what…?

Fast forward to this year: while planning a long weekend in SoCal where a charity 8K run was the featured event, the way my flights worked out I found myself with an unexpectedly open Friday. My friend and I began to think about touristy spots in Los Angeles we’d yet to visit, and while putting together the list, I thought about my massive failure back in 2019. A quick web search brought a surprise: not only had the Zag Store survived the pandemic, it was now open by appointment — and they had most of that particular Friday still available.

Loath as I was to ask my friends to make the trek a second time, I threw caution to the wind and included it in my list of places to visit while out there for the weekend. They agreed, the appointment was made, and my inner thirteen-year-old started to count down the days until my visit. As it happens, that weekend turned out to be the beginning of a weather pattern that ultimately would dump yards (yards, not feet) of snow in the mountains outside of Los Angeles; as we pulled into a parking spot in Santa Monica, the rain had been more-or-less alternating between a downpour and… a downpour… for the entire drive up to the city.

It was still there – the Zag Store in 2023. A bit soggy, but still there!

Still, a warm smile greeted us as we knocked on the door; it was pulled open and inside the three of us trundled. The space was a bit smaller than I expected, but fully loaded with all sorts of cool merchandise from the show. While it’s true that most of the items are available on their website, there were a number of insanely wild collectables that could only be found at the store; they even had some prototypes for gear they were considering adding to the catalog — and asked our trio for feedback on them while we were there.

They seem shorter in person…

I didn’t purchase quite as much as I expected — okay, who am I kidding? I walked out with a large bag filled with items from the show and a conscience guilty enough that I called my wife back in Tucson to preemptively apologize. Fortunately, she’s well aware of my slight obsession with this show and had planned accordingly.

A very cool, extremely organized experience. Sadly, no adult sizes in the Chat Noir costume section.

We still managed to spend nearly a half-hour in the store; the clerk was very personable and insanely knowledgable about the series.

I will only admit to purchasing the Chat coffee mug.

All too soon, though, it was time to move on to the next part of our day. I’m so glad we had a chance to get inside this time around; we did note the for sale sign on the building, and openly wondered to the clerk if Zag was moving out of Santa Monica. She let us know that they would be staying in the city — but at another location. And that the move was still more than year into the future. If that’s the case, I may just have to swing through again — presuming my friends are up for another round of Los Angeles traffic.

Quite the Day

The moment arrived! My table at the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. (Photo: C. Jansmann)

And just like that, it was over.

After all of the excitement (and, frankly significant amounts of angst), when the day finally came it actually whizzed by at warp speed. I felt as though I’d just unpacked everything when a helpful volunteer from the Festival gently tapped me on the shoulder to let me know my time was up. I was having so much fun I absolutely hated to have to relinquish my spot, but fair is fair; besides, there was an entire next shift of Indie Authors scheduled right behind me, and I was certain they were just as eager to meet readers as I had been.

Author’s view during a quiet moment. There weren’t many of those! (Photo: C. Jansmann)

Our tent happened to be just outside one of the main venues for the Festival — something I’d not realized when I’d done my walk through on Friday. That meant we had rather significant waves of people washing over us when each session finished. I think — but can’t confirm — that the legendary J.A. Jance was the first speaker, a happy coincidence for a budding mystery author such as myself.

The weather was just as fantastic as it had been forecasted to be; that, in turn, led to an enormous crowd just as the Festival began to crank up at 9:30 this morning. Weaving my way through people with my boxes of books was more exciting than I’d anticipated, but I managed to get to my tent without spilling any of them (or my coffee). I had a few moments while I placed my materials to get to know the authors who were seated on either side of me; both, as it turned out, had written memoirs that I am planning on purchasing.

I discovered Patricia Grayhall — who hailed from Vancouver — had written a compelling work chronicling her early years as a gay physician in the 1960s and 70s; those were dark decades for both women and the LGBTQ+ community, and I look forward to reading Making the Rounds to discover how she surmounted those challenges to become the incredible person I met today.

Robin Hemley had flown in from Brooklyn, New York, and had written one of the most interesting concepts I had ever heard. His memoir, Oblivion: An After Autobiography, was designed to answer that age old question: where do writers go when they die? Not wanting to spoil it for myself, I didn’t ask what the answer was, but if the book is anything like our conversation over the few hours we had together, I’m sure it will be extremely enlightening and enjoyable.

Not being entirely sure what sort of experience to expect, I was pleasantly surprised by how many people dropped by my part of the table. Readers are always fun to talk to, especially when you have a chance to introduce them to new characters. I don’t know how many new fans I scored today, but I did hand out a ton of cards with my website on them — and sold a few books, too. To a person, everyone that took a moment to chat were genuinely interested in both me as an author and what I had written; just having those sorts of interactions alone made the entire exercise worth the effort.

Hopefully this will be an option again next year. If so, I look forward to applying again!

Meeting New Friends

I picked up my credentials for the Tucson Festival of Books this morning; as I made my way through the tents that were rising along the mall at the University of Arizona Mall, I found it rather hard to tamp down the excitement over being a part of the event. It’s a small part, for sure, but I am going to truly enjoy every moment of being out there meeting readers and my fellow authors.

The weather looks like it might exactly what the Tucson Chamber of Commerce would have wanted: sunny and mid-70s with the sort of deep blue, cloudless sky my relatives back east are currently longing for. (I can see the confusion on your face. Yes, I am wearing a hat and a winter jacket in the photo — in my defense, it was barely over 50 here in Tucson today. For those of us who have lived here a while, that’s considered cold.)

It’s exactly the sort of weather you want when you are interested in perusing the amazing panoply of books that will be on offer, an unhurried temperate atmosphere that almost begs you to poke your head into just one more tent to see if there’s something you’ve overlooked. I’m not sure how many presenting authors I’ll be able to get to myself, but that is also a huge draw; the venues where they speak tend to be of the intimate variety, allowing for casual conversation between writers and their fans.

Tomorrow will be amazing. I cannot wait to meet new friends and talk about my books! If you are planning to attend, be sure to visit me in tent 252 Saturday between 10 and 1. I’ll be the guy in the corner with a goofy smile relishing the experience.

Buried Focus?

It’s a busy week for me.

We had relatives visiting this past weekend — including a niece who ran a half marathon through one half of our beautiful Saguaro National Park — and next weekend, I’m off to California to run in a charity 8K. That necessarily means I’m squeezing five days of my day job into three, while also trying to continue moving forward on novels that are in various stages of completion. I feel a bit like a circus jugglers, albeit one that may have a few too many oranges in the air at the moment.

Being busy isn’t an unusual thing for me. In my IT field, I tend to have to juggle multiple priorities all competing for my attention; over the years, I’ve become better able to gauge how long certain activities are going to take, and as a consequence, adjust where I can to try and meet those intractable deadlines. I try to keep to an informal set of deadlines for my writing, too; partly that’s to ensure I continue to provide fresh content to my readers, but it’s also incredibly motivating to work toward a particular release date.

I’m cognizant of just how much time I can allocate to writing, so having realistic deadlines helps me adjust my own expectations in terms of what I can honestly produce each year for my various series. Since I’m not a formulaic writer — and I’m obsessed with creating quality stories that you can sink your teeth into — it probably takes me longer than authors in other genres to complete each new novel.

That being said, so far this has been a very productive year. I just completed the first draft of Buried this week, book six in the Sean Colbeth Investigates series. I’ll set that aside for a bit and then begin the process of editing later this summer; the story turned out differently than I expected but I really like the direction it took. Sean has been growing quite a bit over his last few books, and this one took him another step further; it also is the first book where he really is fully operating on his own without the ability to lean on Vasily. We learn quite a bit about one of the secondary characters in this story, too — and perhaps more than we wanted to about Suzanne, Sean’s girlfriend. (And that’s all I’m going to say on that for now.)

Focus is now the (ahem) focus of my attention for the next few weeks. With a planned May release date, there is work to be done incorporating suggestions from my beta readers and then completing the final edit of the manuscript. I’d originally thought I could move the release date up a bit, but my schedule just doesn’t seem able to accommodate that. However, I think it will be worth the wait — this next chapter in Vasily’s life was a fun story to write, even if it did include a maniacal serial killer (was that a spoiler?).

My next furious period of writing will come in April during Camp NaNoWriMo. I’ve got two possible ideas in contention, one of which is completing the mystery novel I started back in November based in part on Mesoamerican mythology. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I put it aside after writing just a little over half of the story; at the time, I wasn’t certain that I liked what I had created, but now, a few months removed, when I re-read the manuscript I’m finding myself intrigued enough to want to dive back in. Like I said last year, I love Sean and Vasily, but there is this strange ache in my writer’s soul to create a third series that will stand side-by-side with my original heroes. If I don’t go that route, I have another Vasily story in the back of my head that is just begging to be written.

I’m a bit more than a week out from my appearance at the Tucson Festival of Books. My excitement for being selected has given way — partly — to intense preparation required for such an event, including ensuring I have materials available for anyone who swings by for a visit. While I have absolutely no idea what to expect, I am genuinely looking forward to meeting readers in person and getting the chance to interact. The event is one of my favorites (and has been for a long time), so I hope if you are in Tucson, you’ll have a chance to experience one of the premier book festivals in the country.

Be sure to say “hi” if you happen to be close to the Indie Author Pavilion on Saturday between, say, 10 and 1. I’ll be the guy sitting there with a goofy smile trying to absorb the moment…