Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog, page 19

Pariah is Out!

When things really get going, they get going.

All three editions of Pariah are now available for order; you can find them on Amazon as well as most major retailers (save for the Kindle edition). I can’t believe I’ve got three books out there now – what an amazing year of writing it has been!

The publication date shift messed up my countdown plans, so instead, I’m going to tease a little bit about Vasily for the next few days leading up to the original release date. So, in no particular, here are eleven interesting tidbits about my newest leading character:

1. Vasily is an Olympian

According to his biography, Vasily swam for the United States at the 2008 Olympics, scoring a silver medal in the 400 Butterfly and helping take home a gold in the 4×100 relay. In an unusual twist, though, he swam the Freestyle leg of the relay as his best friend, Sean Colbeth, out-touched him during their final practice to score the Fly leg.

Vasily continues to train as though he were headed to the next Olympics, though now that he’s over thirty, the odds are not in his favor; still, he finds an amazing peace going through the routine he’s had since the age of six, logging an unthinkable number of laps each and every day.

Meet Vasily

Get to know Detective Vasily Korskovach in Pariah.

I’m happy to report that my latest novel, Pariah, will now appear a month earlier than I expected, debuting on July 6, 2021. It’s hard to believe that I wrote the book nearly a year ago; having lived with it rather intensely for the past few weeks while the final edits were completed made it feel more recent.

Vasily is such an interesting character – I can’t wait to share him with everyone! As we get closer to the release date, I’ll do another countdown with little teasers about the story and my newly promoted main character. I hope you’ll join me!

Onward

Photo by Garvin St. Villier on Pexels.com

I put Pariah to bed this morning.

That’s kind of a technical term I’ve picked up from other projects I’ve done over the years; in this case, it means I’ve sent the final manuscript in for publication. Assuming the proofs I see over the next couple of weeks turn out as fabulous as the last two books, it appears I’ll have made the August pre-order deadline with a bit of time to spare. While it will be hard to resist the temptation to take another run and tweak it just a bit more, it’s time to move on and begin to think about the book that will follow it.

As I note in the Afterword on Pariah, Vasily Korsokovach wasn’t originally destined for his own series; as I pen this entry, it turns out he’s got three books on his own now (Pariah, Ditched and Bygones), matching the score with his best friend, Sean Colbeth (who is featured in Blindsided, Outsider and Downhill). Vas is poised to come out on top, though, for as it turns out, I’ve realized I have a gap of time (chronologically) between the events of Outsider and when Vasily returns to Windeport in Ditched — enough of a gap that my writer brain decided it needed to fill it.

Tentatively titled Peril, all things being equal, it will be my June/July project, with a scheduled release around the Christmas holiday. I’m kinda interested in the challenge Peril presents, for I know where I need to land the plane (so to speak) but don’t quite yet have the flight plan established. On top of that, I need to back up a bit in how I portray Vasily, since he’s grown quite a bit by the time he reaches Bygones.

Remind me to write these in order next time…

Outsider On Sale

[image error] Outsider (Book 2)

If you’ve been on the bubble about picking up the Kindle edition of Outsider, it’s currently on sale for a limited time – $0.99 until Friday, the $1.99 for another four days.

Considering book three will be out in August, it might be a great time to expand your library…

TBT: Early Sean and Vasily

The main character of my Sean Colbeth Investigates series has been with me for a long time.

I think the first time he burst into being was back in 2008. I’d been tinkering around the edges of a science fiction novel that didn’t seem to be going where I wanted it to go, and found myself suddenly thinking about the small towns along the rugged Maine coastline. I’d driven through a number of them over the years, but had rarely stopped in any; as with most things, when you live in the middle of paradise, you generally don’t see it for what it is and allow it to fade into the background.

For some reason, this idea of an idealized, amalgamated small fishing village popped into being. I could see clearly how Route One cleaved the center of town, with classic brick buildings on one side of the street, and the Atlantic on the other. And watching over all of it was a swimmer-turned-policeman who seemed to have relationship issues.

Slowly, the sci-fi book wound up getting ignored in favor of my wanting to get to know this town — and this new character. Sean became my guide, unlocking the secrets that, in an early draft of my first book, “were hiding beneath whitewashed picket fences.” Sadly, the fences didn’t make it into Blindsided, but quite a bit did — including his best friend, Vasily Korsokovach, a fellow swimmer who in the original draft was from the midwest and faked a Russian accent to score with the ladies.

Okay, so maybe not everything made it from that early version.

Weather

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

I’ve started work on my latest novel, and the initial chapter opens in the middle of a rainstorm. My poor main character – in this case, one Vasily Korsokovach – is in no way prepared for the deluge and finds himself grumbling about Mother Nature while he attempts to gather clues.

Writing that sequence brought me back to the weekends I’d spent camping as a kid, which in Maine, invariably included more than a few that were essentially wash outs. It got to the point where it would be a given that the family would wind up huddled beneath the tarp hung across the lone picnic table our site might have provided; in later years, when we were fortunate enough to have a tow-behind camper trailer, that mutated into crowding around the small table in the kitchenette, trying to see if it was possible to pick up any radio station that deep in the woods.

We had the best time in those outings, rain notwithstanding. I fell far short of staying at least one night in each state park we had to offer, but did have the chance at least to visit a fair number of them. Some of that knowledge is coming into play as I send Vasily down the rabbit hole of another investigation…

Ramping Up

Photo by Ann Nekr on Pexels.com

I’m nearly halfway though my third pass editing my next book, Pariah.

It’s the first book where Vasily Korsokovach takes center stage and carries the entire story. He’s such a unique character — and so different from my first detective, Sean Colbeth. I’ve had an amazing time seeing the world from his perspective, so much so that he wound up headlining Ditched and will now return a third time in a book that I’m getting ready to start writing in April.

Vas started off life essentially playing second fiddle to Sean — the one-man Greek Chorus there to do the legwork when needed, or to provide an insight that his boss might have missed. But as that first story developed, so too did Vasily; by the end of the book, he’d flown the coop and managed to get himself promoted.

I hadn’t planned a second series, but suddenly, there it was.

Still, the connection between Sean and Vasily is so strong, I can’t keep the two of them apart for long. Downhill represents a reunion of sorts for the two, but you’ll have to wait for a bit before it takes place.

Seasonality

Photo by Denis Linine on Pexels.com

We had a bout of weather here in Arizona this past weekend; since it’s so unusual for us to experience gray, overcast days, when it happens, we tend to pause and relish the change in our otherwise normal routine of endless blue skies full of bright sunshine. This particular storm brought snow to the mountains ringing the city, giving them that unique dusting of white at the highest parts of the peaks we are sometimes treated to.

I’m quite happy to see it from afar, but as I’ve said in prior posts, I don’t miss the endless winters from my New England past. Slogging through the stuff is quite different than standing in my backyard, sipping on a cup of coffee, and appreciating the gentle touch from Mother Nature. The final throes of the season are upon us, which traditionally means we are likely to have one or two more chances at seeing snow before we begin the inevitable march toward the triple-digit temperatures that will hang with us through October.

The snow brings with it a chance to see an unusual color here: green. For with all of that snowmelt, a brief few weeks afterward, the desert blooms in an amazing spectrum of color. Our spring here is completely different than the one I experienced growing up — and one that I have grown to love.

That, As They Say, Is That

…save for writing the final chapter and the epilogue. I’d hoped to get a first draft of Book Five done in January, but it was a busier month than I expected. It’ll sit for a bit while I consider what Book Six will be — and, of course, I need to edit Pariah.

But it feels good to get this in the can.

It’s Been A Busy Week!

My thanks to all of you who were following along during my mini-countdown to the release of Outsider. I had a lot of fun coming up with the tiny snippets about the book and will do something similar I think when Pariah is close to arriving. (Incidentally, you can pre-order Pariah right now on Kindle if you get to the end of Outsider and find yourself wanting more.)

Let me know your thoughts about my little attempt to generate some fun in the comments — or, if you are reading Outsider, share how it’s been going, too. I’m always interested in hearing from my readers.

Now it’s back to the keyboard to put the finishing touches on book five, tentatively titled Downhill; after two novels from Vasily’s point of view, it was interesting to get back into the head of Sean and see how he’s truly been handling the changes in Vas’s life. (Spoiler alert: not as well as he thought.) It also marks a return to Windeport for me, and I’ve found the poor Village has undergone some significant changes since we were last there. It just goes to prove the old Maine adage: when the going gets tough, reinvent.