Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog, page 11

TFOB Schedule Is Live

Now, I’m getting excited.

The schedule has been published for the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books, so now I can tell you exactly where and when you can find me if you happen to be in Tucson on Saturday, March 4th.

From 10:00a – 1:00p, I’ll be in the Indie Author Tent halfway down the University of Arizona mall. For those of you familiar with the area, it’s the patch of green grass between Bear Down Gym and the Modern Languages Building. There are a number of other authors who will be there with me at the same time, so it should be a wonderfully lively experience for those who might swing by.

I’ll have a limited number of hardcopy editions for two of my books available for purchase — Bygones and Downhill — as well as information on how to get your hands on paperback or Kindle editions if those are more to your liking. I’m also planning on posting about my experience in realtime, so if you can’t be in Tucson, you can live vicariously through my Facebook or Mastodon pages.

Hope to see you there!

TFOB Take Two

I wrote last year about wanting to someday participate in the Tucson Festival of Books, the annual festival held on campus at the University of Arizona each March. My wife and I have spent countless hours wandering the venues or listening to various panels on topics we might not normally have been interested in; I can’t tell you how many new authors we discovered as part of that process, or what it was like to see some of my favorites up close and personal.

I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of the Outlander series until Diana Gabaldon spoke at the Festival; her talk was so amazing, and her love for her characters so palpable I tracked down everything that was in print to that point and spent a few months binging. We were also fortunate enough to see Deborah Harkness just after the final book in her All Souls trilogy was published; I even had a chance to meet a childhood idol of mine — Katherine Paterson — when she was on tour for her memoir.

This year, a partial dream has come true: I was selected to appear as an independent author at this year’s Festival. While I’m not going to be speaking on a panel, I will be in one of the main pavilions, talking about my latest works. It’s insanely exciting and represents a next step for me in this journey as writer; I have absolutely no idea if anyone will actually swing by and visit, but even if they don’t, just being there, talking with other indie authors as an author will be an amazing experience all by itself. (Yes, I will have books with me that can be signed — once I have a link to the exact time and location, I’ll update my website with the information on how you can find me.)

In other news, I’m about halfway through writing the next novel in the Sean Colbeth Investigates series — far enough along that I’ve added a page for the book to the site. I’m still not sure I am going to stick with the working title I selected… but it’s been growing on me. This one has been interesting to write — yes, I know I say that about all of them, but honestly, each of my novels feels just as much like a new adventure to me as a writer as it (hopefully) does for you as the reader. One of my fears is to repeat myself, or to take a shortcut that diminishes the impact of the plot; and, of course, there is always the tiny little commentary on society I try to weave into each story, too. Keeping all of that fresh and exciting can be difficult, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit to loving the challenge.

I’ll continue to post updates as I finish writing Buried during the course of February; after that are some edits to Focus to get it ready for publication… and then Camp NaNo is on the horizon! I’ve still not decided if it will be the next Sean novel, a Vasily novel or finishing the work I started on my urban fantasy mystery last November. I have a few weeks to decide (and the balance of a novel to write), so stay tuned.

Jazz, Aircraft and Supermarkets

It’s funny how memories work.

My wife and I took a quick trip out to see our friends in California this past weekend, and as we boarded our Southwest flight to Orange County, my eyes caught the small metal plate that held the model number of the aircraft; if you’ve ever flown with Southwest, you’ll know that their fleet is exclusively made up of Boeing 737 jets, allowing them some efficiencies of scale in the maintenance department.

Seeing that particular number emblazoned on the metal that morning, though, had me suddenly thinking about the summer I spent the month of August with my aunt and uncle at their home just outside of Seattle. I wasn’t quite a teenager, but it was my very first trip away from home — and my very first cross-country flight (an experience that merits its own future blog post). Uncle John was an engineer with Boeing, so I was lucky enough to get a tour of their plant in Everett, Washington, where the then-brand new Boeing 767 was just starting to roll off the assembly line. Up to that point, the only manufacturing plants I’d ever toured had been a textile maker in Biddeford and a shoe factory in central Maine; as intriguing as those operations had been, they paled in comparison to the buzz of activity in those massive hangars where jets are built. My uncle pointed out each stage of the construction to me with the intricate detail only an engineer could provide; I came away from the experience with a fine appreciation for both systems engineering and operations management — and a desire to never do either, given how complicated they seemed to be.

Oddly, though, it wasn’t that trip to Boeing that popped into my head this past weekend. The memory that came to me out of the blue was one of going grocery shopping with my Aunt Jane — a unique experience, but only perhaps for a kid from a small suburb in Maine. I forget the specifics now, but what I do recall was that she was still feeding a somewhat full house, for in addition to their guest (me), two of my three cousins were still living at home while they finished up their college degrees. That meant it wasn’t a trivial exercise keeping the pantry stocked.

I was no stranger to the grocery run, for my mother tended to bring us with her on the weekly excursion to our local supermarket. But that was where the similarities ended, for while we tended to hit a single store the next town over, Aunt Jane had a complicated route that involved four different supermarkets. Setting aside for the moment that there were multiple chains within easy driving distance of their home, I was floored by the amount of effort she put into crossing items off of her grocery list. Seattle-area traffic was far worse than anything I’d seen in Boston, but Aunt Jane seemed quite adept at zig-zagging through Bellevue in her pursuit of the lowest prices on ground beef.

Thinking of Aunt Jane always brings me back to Uncle John, though, and his love for jazz. I’d never really experienced that art form until he introduced it to me; whenever we went anywhere in his Volkswagen pickup, he immediately tuned to the local all-jazz radio station and cranked the volume so the music could be heard above the rumbling of the diesel engine. He’d tell me about the artists we were listening to — Coltrane, Fitzgerald, Armstrong — though it would be many years and one Intro to Jazz class in college before I truly understood much of what we’d discussed. Still, while I may not have known who I was listening to at the time, I loved what I was hearing and went out of my way to find more of it when I returned to Maine; that proved to be pretty difficult during the pop-infused 1980s, but ultimately I discovered our local public radio station went to an all-jazz format during the overnight hours.

I’ve often thought about that summer and the amazing cultural experience it turned out to be; I have no doubt that some of the interesting adventures I had while visiting have percolated into aspects of my writing. One of these days I will have to return to Seattle if for no other reason than to see how much it has changed since I was there last. I’m not sure I would recognize it, especially given I’d seen it through the eyes of a nascent teenager. Still, it would be fun to hike up to (what’s left of) the Carbon Glacier again, and wander through the Pike Place Market with all of its fabulous wares. Or ride to the top of the Space Needle to get that one-of-a-kind view of downtown Seattle, framed by the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other.

Someday.

Rainy Day Hobbies

It’s an unusually dreary day here in Arizona as I write this; we’re getting the remnants of the storms that have been ravishing California for a bit, and while I welcome the temporary shift from bright, sunny days to gray skies and drizzle, I find myself already looking forward to when the sun will appear once more. More days than I care to remember in Maine were like this — days when the biting wind and driving rain would force you inside, helplessly watching the grass in the yard grow ever taller. Obviously such weather is an awesome excuse to pick up a good book and settle in next to a flickering fire with a cup of coffee close at hand; I might do that later today myself after I’ve finished writing another chapter in Buried — or I might binge a few movies this afternoon.

So many choices.

Rainy weather was also a marvelous excuse for me to sneak off to the basement with my father to work on our model railroad empire; I’ve talked about my time spent among miniature steam engines before, but on days like today, memories of puttering along laying track or chasing an electrical short always bubble to the top. I still joke with my father that his work is never done on his layout(s); each time I visit I find that the current iteration has undergone extensive renovations, including often subtle changes to the electronics underpinning everything.

We unfortunately don’t have basements here in Arizona — well, that’s not entirely true, but they are exceedingly rare, and definitely not present in the corner I live in. That’s made it quite hard for me to find space to indulge in that particular hobby; in our first house, my wife was rather open to the small N-scale layout I was building sitting in a corner of our living room, which was great until we added a cat to the mix. I corrected that in our second house by adding what the builder called a “hobby room” behind the kitchen; essentially we took a piece out of the garage to extend the laundry area, and it was absolute perfection. I made pretty decent progress on that same N-scale layout in that space, including crafting the mountains and rivers the track wound through.

Making mountains out of newspaper and plaster!

Situations change, though, and we moved once again, this time to an older house that didn’t have such appointments. For a long time, the N-scale layout sat in our master bedroom, but it wasn’t really the right spot for that kind of activity. I mean, who wants to try and sleep next to freshly painted rocks? I knew I didn’t, and I was reasonably sure my long suffering wife was of the same opinion. The longer it sat there in the corner, the more I realized I needed to do something different — and then made the huge mistake of donating the layout (sans track and rolling stock) to a fundraising yardsale.

It was the right decision at the time, and still is, but when the pandemic hit I realized I missed even the opportunity of re-creating those calm, peaceful moments I had working in the basement with my father. I shifted into other ways to do that, of course; between my writing and putting together plastic models of my favorite science fiction shows, there is enough of an outlet for me to decompress from the stresses of the day. But I can’t deny that I miss seeing my tiny trains go up and down the mountains I built, and through the small town that never quite got completed.

The N-scale still makes an appearance at Christmas.

I’ve tinkered with upscaling to the trains that could run in my backyard; it’s nearly big enough to house the layout I’ve designed in my head, but would require some significant changes to our landscaping to accomplish. I’ve also tried being a virtual model railroader, creating my fictional towns and routes in clever software that can give you the perspective of an engineer driving the train, but it’s not quite the same. So, for now, I’m down to pulling out my Christmas train each December and enjoying watching it chugging around in circles beneath my tree.

I could see this in the back yard…

This is an infectious hobby, though. My friend in California — the swim coach that helps ensure Sean and Vasily are doing appropriate workouts in the pool — has his own fond memories of trains beneath the Christmas tree. That’s led to the pair of us trekking to a hobby store in Southern California that specializes in model railroading whenever we get the chance; for the last two years, he’s come close to adding a small train to his Christmas display he builds on a piano each year, or to upgrading the train around his tree to something not controlled by batteries. I thought he’d tipped over the edge this past year, actually, but reason prevailed (and the physics of their condo). I find it funny, though, that I tend to be the one who buys items whenever we visit; me, the guy who has no space at all to do anything.

Then again, you can never have too many BNSF box cars… right?

I know writing has moved beyond being a hobby for me at this point, so I wonder if I my wife would mind me taking a part of the garage for the layout? I don’t know where we’d park the car — our HOA has some strict rules surround that — but the thought of what I could do in that space is somewhat intoxicating. On the other hand, maybe we don’t need the dining room any longer…

Status Update

I thought I would take a moment to bring you up to date on what’s going on in my universe, writing wise. While 2022 was an extremely productive year for me, the fruits of those labors have not quite yet hit the market; Focus, Bewitched and Requiem are all slated for release in 2023 (check my Publication Order page for exact dates so you can mark your calendar). I’m just wrapping up with my beta readers for Focus, so that is just about ready to be put to bed. Bewitched has already gone through the beta readers and is just waiting for a final edit; as I mentioned somewhere along the line, I wrote Duality and Bewitched back to back before realizing I’d left myself enough space to sneak in another story; unlike with Pariah, though, I managed to hold off publishing them out of sequence, which overall helps to improve the through line for Sean and Vasily’s relationship.

Somehow, I managed to write four books in 2022; technically, I suppose it was actually three and a half, for I put the first lines of Duality onto paper in the waning days of 2021. Still, that was a pace that I’m not sure I will be able to repeat in 2023; I am expecting to be able to write at least three this year, though, and my latest work is already well under way.

The next Sean Colbeth novel has been started!

I’ve tentatively titled this latest one Buried but I’m not entirely convinced it will stick. Usually I select a title as a way to maintain the theme of the story while I work on it, and while this name fits perfectly, it just feels… not quite right. Several other variations on my theme have already popped into my head as I’ve worked on this manuscript, but none have managed to knock Buried out of the running. At least, not yet.

Buried is a Sean Colbeth novel, set a few weeks after the events of Bewitched. July tends to be pretty hot back in Maine if the weather systems are just right, which helps to add to the sticky mess Sean finds himself in; he’s got a vengeful former suspect taking him to court, a state-level board of inquiry looking into his actions during Bewitched and a girlfriend who might suddenly not be after he makes a serious misstep in their relationship. Finding a body in one of the small stores along Route One is almost a relief, save for the fact it’s yet another suspicious death on his watch.

I like to have my characters grow with each novel — in addition to creating intriguing mysteries that will keep you turning the pages — and Buried is shaping up to be a good chance to get to know a few more of them a bit better. Suzanne has always had a backstory, of course, but that is also true of Caitlyn, the ace intake officer Sean relies on to keep the day-to-day operations at the police station running smoothly. We may even see some love blooming for a new character that joins Sean as Assistant Chief at the beginning of Bewitched; while I want to be intentionally vague so as not to spoil anything, I will say it’s a character we meet for the first time in Duality, someone I thought would be a nice addition to the team in Windeport (and not a direct Vasily clone/replacement). Feel free to guess who it might be in the comments section, though I make no promises that I will reveal the correct answer until after the book comes out.

Beyond Buried, I have two more books planned for 2023, one each for Sean and Vasily. I’ve not decided the order in which I will write them, but suspect I will probably continue on with Sean as I did last year and do two stories back to back. Vas will make a significant appearance in the next Sean book anyway, much like he did in Downhill, and I’m also tentatively thinking it will take place at the holidays again. I’m a sucker for snow — or for traveling someplace exotic to get away from it.

I’ll continue to post updates here as my plans evolve.

Writing Playlists

I was intrigued a few weeks ago by a viral post on Mastodon where writers posted what they were listening to as they tackled their most recent work. As you might expect, the responses were as varied as the genres represented, but one thing was the same across all of them: soundtracks had been selected purposefully to help the writer set the proper atmosphere before they set proverbial pen to paper. Honestly, I’d never really given my own process that much thought — at least, not until I began paging through the responses I was seeing, for the further down I got the more I realized that subconsciously or not, I did have a method to musical writing madness.

Much like my main characters, I am a huge fan of Contemporary Jazz and a regular listener of Watercolors on SirusXM. That station — or a playlist of favorite tracks I’ve purchased from listening over the years when I’m forced to be offline — plays as a sort of underscore to my daily life, always there in the background, helping to keep the mood upbeat and positive. Oddly, it also helps me with the tempo of my dialogue, ensuring it’s snappy, witty and just long enough to make it feel like two (or three) people are having an actual conversation. I’m not entirely sure I can explain how I make it work; I guess it’s just a bit of my own personal writing magic.

Smooth Jazz isn’t the best genre when things get emotional, though. When the mood calls for serious angst, the highs and lows of love or even deep depression, I lean on some of my favorite artists that have been in my collection for years. One of my absolute favorites is the amazing Mary Chapin Carpenter; whatever feeling I’m looking for, I know that somewhere in her catalog is a perfect song that encapsulates it. For example, Something Tamed, Something Wild perfectly captured Sean’s frame of mind in the upcoming Bewitched, a story where he finds himself facing personal questions about love and life and the road not taken; when I was writing Vasily’s family in Requiem, strains of The Long Way Home were always playing in the background.

Vasily’s heartbreak over Sean had several tracks, including Trisha Yearwood’s Everybody Knows and There Goes My Baby, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Almost Home and The Age of Miracles and The Way I Feel. Rosanne Cash was in there too with Burn Down This Town, depending on where poor Vas was in his manic cycle. Willie Nelson gets an honorable mention here for Maria (Shut Up And Kiss Me), which was the perfect soundtrack of the reunion scene between Vasily and Alejandro in Anaheim. I’m not sure that was what Willie intended, of course, but the sentiment certainly was spot on for me. (Vas tells me he agrees, too.)

Tense scenes in all of my books are written to cinematic soundtracks, in keeping with their grand scope and the expansive sets they usually have; Genesis Countdown from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the most recent entry, helping me focus on the Pyrrhic aspects of the finale for Sean and Vasily. Bird of Prey Decloaks from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock worked in a similar vein for the denouement in Bewitched, when a win for the good guys comes at with a heavy cost.

Oddly, when Sean drives around Windeport, I always have Off to Work from The Incredibles playing in the back of my head. I’m not sure why — Sean is not even closely modeled on Bob Par — but think it has more to do with the mid-century motifs in that piece as those do fit Sean to a T. Vas has driving music, too: Glider, Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 from The Thomas Crown Affair. This one is harder to explain other than it fits my image of him tooling around Southern California in that sports car of his — it’s also bright, airy and completely like his personality now that he has Alejandro in his life.

Reading back through this post, I’m starting to wonder if I should create a YouTube playlist and share it out — I imagine it might be rather eclectic. Do you have music that helps you guide your activities? Share below and I’ll highlight some of them in a future post.

2022: Year In Review

My first novel, Blindsided, was released in November of 2020 — right in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Written a year earlier — also during the pandemic — I’d spent months tweaking it as a way to defer the decision of whether to actually publish it. While I knew the environment was competitive, I was also reasonably certain readers were ready for the world I had created and finally decided to put it out in time for Christmas. Those first few months were a bit of a nail biter, though; Ephram Cotte has a minuscule advertising budget, so getting the word out will always be a challenge. That people found me at all was amazing; that they bought anything was just brilliant.

A bit more than two years and nine books later, I can see the beginnings of a true audience forming. This past year was one of my most productive, with four books being released; while I like that release cadence, it’s a pace that I’m not sure I can maintain while simultaneously keeping up the quality of each story. Have no fear, though, for three books are already on the schedule for 2023.

I spent a lot of time with Sean and Vasily in 2022, both writing new content (Duality, Focus, Bewitched and Requiem were all completed this year) as well as putting the finishing touches on items that were released. In many cases, I wrote two books back-to-back for each character; while it made it easier for me to keep the voice consistent, I did discover that it wound up being harder to shift between them when the time came. I’m not certain how that affects what I do moving forward as I can’t conceive of trying to write two different novels at the same time.

(I don’t know if I should admit that the characters often fight in the back of my mind as to who gets my attention — and the next novel. I know they don’t exist outside of my little universe, but as I’ve said in the past, they feel like real people to me which often means I feel guilty for leaving one or the other on the sidelines.)

2022 also saw me expand my website and begin a more thoughtful approach to social media; blog posts became more regular, and where possible, I tried to interact with readers more directly. There was some level of trepidation the first time I received a note in Facebook Messenger, but the conversation was engaging and enlightening much as though we were two readers who’d bumped into each other at the library. I’m building on that going into 2023, getting more comfortable connecting over Facebook Live (or Twitch or YouTube) after the success of my Virtual Release Party for Duality.

One thing that 2022 proved to me was that I could find the right balance between writing and the rest of my life. As much as I enjoy getting down into the weeds of the Windeport Universe, it wouldn’t be healthy for me to focus on that to the exclusion everything else. It also proved to me that it was important to take a break from writing from time to time in order to recharge the creativity I rely on for crafting my stories. Not writing for a month felt a bit like torture, honestly, but in the end I find myself in a far better position to tackle the next story in Sean’s journey.

I am looking forward to 2023 and the stories it will bring. I don’t know all of them yet, but do have a solid sense of where my characters are going (and how I want them to get there). I’m glad you’ve been on this journey with me and hope you’ll continue to tag along.

As a Professional Nerd, it pains me to admit that I am still learning the ins and outs of the technology that runs my website. Part of that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people were getting notified of new posts to my blog; silly me assumed it was far more obvious than it actually was to subscribe. On top of that, I appear to have neglected the sizable number of people who signed up for my newsletter list — and then never heard from me. My deepest apologies at what was benign neglect; I’ve rejiggered things to make it simple to sign up for both, and will begin a regular newsletter starting in January.

If you want to immediately add yourself to the blog notifications list, use this box below to do so. I try to update twice a week, so that hopefully won’t overwhelm your inbox too much.

Type your email…

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Subscribing this way is the best option, for recent changes on several social media platforms have made it more difficult for my posts to be published there automatically.

Remembering Patsy

In a past life, I was the IT manager for an independent insurance agency that had offices all over Maine. As it was the late 1990s, the tech available to us for connecting disparate locations was somewhat limited and (unsurprisingly) unstable; successfully running the operations of a such a far-flung organization over the internet was something that fell to my successor, for such an ability only become a reality a few years later — and long after I’d relocated to Arizona. Still, as short a part of my career as my time was with that firm, it remains one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had as an IT professional.

Much of that was due to the incredible people who worked there; although a somewhat large organization, it always felt like a close knit family despite the distances between the various offices. I’ve wondered in the years since if the improvements we’ve seen in tech — video conferencing, instant messaging — would have enhanced that sense.

Two recent events have me reminiscing about that period in my life. The first was happenstance, or perhaps a direct result of a writer’s incessant need to get the details right on actual locations that appear in their work. If you’ve picked up a copy of Duality, you’ll know that there are a few scenes that take place in Portland, including the library on the campus of the University of Southern Maine. While visiting family this past October, I took a quick side trip to ensure that the campus layout was as I had recalled from a prior excursion — there may be more visits coming in Sean’s future, after all — and in the process, drove past the current location of my former employer. That they had relocated to a building directly across the street from where I had worked seemed like the closing of some sort of cosmic circle; it snagged my attention enough that I drove past it again a few days later, caught up in memories of a younger me just beginning to find his career footing.

Thus primed, I had those thoughts top of mind as I went about doing my Christmas cards this year, especially when I came to the one for my former colleague, Patsy. She’d been the CFO of the firm when I was there, and had retired to Florida less than six months before I took a position in Tucson. We’d worked together to transition the organization to the new agency management system I’d been brought on board to implement, and got to know her fairly well. Originally from Northern Maine, she had that dry wit the region is known for, and a heart overflowing with compassion that infected anyone who spent more than ten minutes with her. Writing a quick note in her card each year always brought a smile to my face; I have so many fond stories about Patsy — of her amazing kindness, her sharp business acumen or that flaky back of hers that threatened to derail her dreams of endless rounds of golf during her golden years.

Perhaps last year’s card from Patsy was something of an omen, for when it arrived, she’d scrawled in that flowing script of hers, “I’m still alive!” At the time, I’d chuckled mightily at the sentiment as I’d heard her low voice in my head, deadpanning the sentence in that droll way unique to my colleague. I’m not sure I ever made it to the friend level with Patsy — we didn’t work together long enough — but I like to think I was on the way there when it was interrupted by both of us moving to opposite parts of the country.

So when the envelope from Florida arrived this year, I wasn’t truly prepared for what I found tucked inside. The new owners of Patsy’s place had quite kindly returned my card with a note attached, gently letting me know that my former colleague had passed earlier this year. It was a gesture Pasty herself would have done, for she’d never liked leaving loose ends. The two of us hadn’t seen each other in years and yet suddenly knowing that there would be no chance to reconnect again felt final in a visceral way that’s hard to explain. And yet, I am more certain than ever that Patsy had a huge impact on me, both professionally and personally. I’m not sure I ever recognized just how significant it was until it was clear I could no longer tell her.

I’ve kept the card on my writing desk since it arrived. Part of me knows that when I move it off the desk, it’s a subtle acknowledgment that life has once more moved on, with or without my consent; a tiny part hopes that keeping it there on the faux wood grain surface will similarly prevent memories of Patsy from receding into my own memory. Then again, I don’t think she will, actually; folks like her who make an impact on your life tend to weave themselves throughout it in ways not always obvious. In her case, I see Patsy each time I open Excel and start to crunch a particularly nasty formula.

Here’s hoping that the fairways are wide and the winds gentle on the golf course in heaven.

As a Professional Nerd, it pains me to admit that I am still learning the ins and outs of the technology that runs my website. Part of that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people were getting notified of new posts to my blog; silly me assumed it was far more obvious than it actually was to subscribe. On top of that, I appear to have neglected the sizable number of people who signed up for my newsletter list — and then never heard from me. My deepest apologies at what was benign neglect; I’ve rejiggered things to make it simple to sign up for both, and will begin a regular newsletter starting in January.

If you want to immediately add yourself to the blog notifications list, use this box below to do so. I try to update twice a week, so that hopefully won’t overwhelm your inbox too much.

Type your email…

Subscribe

Subscribing this way is the best option, for recent changes on several social media platforms have made it more difficult for my posts to automatically appear there.

Pensive December

As the year draws to a close, I find that I fall prey to my tendency to review all that I’ve accomplished over the past twelve months and then wonder how much more could have been done. This sense of not quite measuring up has to be a byproduct of my New England upbringing where we were imbued with this notion of always striving to go one step further in whatever it was we were doing. That sense of needing to continue to push yourself has served me well both professionally and privately, but at the end of the year it can easily create a bit of a damper on an otherwise festive holiday season.

Did I do enough? Could I have done more?

Only over the past half-dozen years have I come to understand the answer to both questions is often yes — and that it’s okay that it is. Becoming comfortable with your limitations, and as a consequence, learning how to balance what is truly important in your life, is a journey that I’ve been on for some time. I think it took the COVID pandemic for me to skip ahead to the end and reformat my worldview. I’ve found this new perspective I’ve gained has been invaluable, and know it has bled into the characters I write; there’s no question I shifted the storyline for Vasily’s personal life as a direct result of spending more time with my family. I also deepened Sean’s relationship with Suzanne a bit faster than planned, for no one — no one — should go through life without knowing love.

Speaking of Sean, I’ve been quite excited with the reaction to his latest novel, Duality. It garnered the most preorders I’ve ever had, and has remained strong going into the holiday weekend. My readers over on Kindle Unlimited also appear to have been waiting for it to drop, which makes me very, very, very happy. Thank you to all who have embraced this latest chapter in Sean Colbeth’s life; his next novel, Bewitched, will be out in 2023, and I’ve already begun work on the sixth book to feature the police chief. If you’d like to come celebrate the release of Duality with me, I had to move the Facebook Live event to December 27; there’s plenty of (virtual) room, so stop by if you can. (I’m told you don’t have to be a Facebook user in order to attend.)

I have two more post before the end of the year, so I’ll save my year-in-review retrospective for them. Until then, I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season.

As a Professional Nerd, it pains me to admit that I am still learning the ins and outs of the technology that runs my website. Part of that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people were getting notified of new posts to my blog; silly me assumed it was far more obvious than it actually was to subscribe. On top of that, I appear to have neglected the sizable number of people who signed up for my newsletter list — and then never heard from me. My deepest apologies at what was benign neglect; I’ve rejiggered things to make it simple to sign up for both, and will begin a regular newsletter starting in January.

If you want to immediately add yourself to the blog notifications list, use this box below to do so. I try to update twice a week, so that hopefully won’t overwhelm your inbox too much.

Type your email…

Subscribe

Subscribing this way is the best option, for recent changes on several social media platforms have made it more difficult for my posts to automatically appear there.

Duality Tidbits: Five

We’re just days away now from the release of Duality. Here are some final thoughts, presented in a Q&A format…

Does anyone die?

Duh. It’s a murder mystery.

Yes, yes – I meant do any of the main characters die?

I wouldn’t be a very good author if I told you that, now would I? But I should point out that this book is written from Sean’s first-person perspective. That might be a bit of a clue…

Yikes! Then that means–

I’m going to stop you right there and point you toward my list of books in both series. As I’m not currently into crafting ghost stories, this should give you some comfort.

Does Sean get to drive the Camaro?

Not in this book. (hint, hint)

Will we ever get to learn more about Deidre?

You had to bring up Sean’s fiancé, didn’t you? The short answer is, yes. The long answer… will span this book and Bewitched.

Sean spends a ton of time in the water. Why is he still training the way he does?

That is a fascinating question. I’ve spent a fair amount of time consulting with my experts on this (and yes, I do have some), and the simple response is that many high caliber athletes continue to enjoy the endorphins that result from putting in a good workout long after their true competitive days are behind them. In Sean’s case, he also uses his time in the pool to both decompress and cogitate on whatever case he’s currently working. He knows he’s never going to the Olympics again, but those training habits were formed when he was very young; now, it’s just part of who he is. (It also allows him to go head-to-head with Vasily at the national meets, something we’ve not seen in one of my novels… yet.)

I can’t believe Sean didn’t know who Harry Potter was.

I feel like I should emphasize that during his peak competitive years (roughly from age 13 to his 20s), Sean’s day consisted of getting up, going to the pool, going to class, going back to the pool, going to the gym, doing homework, and then trying to sleep. Whatever free time he did have was spent helping out in his parent’s pharmacy; thankfully clerking behind the soda fountain helped keep Sean from being completely socially awkward. (Suzanne has, of course, pulled him even further out of his shell, completing the process that Charlie’s kids began years earlier.)

All right, that’s enough for now. Please be sure to RSVP for the Facebook Live Book Release or get your copy of Duality reserved today.