Building a bigger Apple

The book, now seventy percent complete, is going to be a big one. With 90 chapters and a projected 132,000 words, it will trail only The Memory Tree and River Rising among my twenty-two novels.

That's all right with me. As writer Joseph Cambell once said, "If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all."

Annie's Apple, the second installment of the Second Chance series, will also cover a lot of territory. From the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to the sinking of the RMS Titanic , it will pay at least some attention to the major historical events of 1911 and 1912.

Though I still have twenty-six more chapters to write, I have taken care of at least one important matter. Thanks to the timely work of Michelle Argyle, I have a cover. The Melissa Williams Design illustrator finished the novel's Kindle and paperback cover this week and is now working on the audiobook cover.

The book's cover, like its title, is a play on Annie Carpenter, the main protagonist, and the Big Apple, the city she calls her own. The cover features a 1911 drawing by Charles Dana Gibson of Gibson Girl fame. I thought the young woman portrayed in the illustration captured the essence of my Annie, a 20-year-old society reporter and prolific letter writer. Many thanks to the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Division for making the image available.

As reported earlier, I hope to finish the first draft of Annie's Apple in March and publish the book itself in the first half of May.