Lost in the Battle: A Status Update

First off, I’d like to apologize to my slowly but ever-growing fan base who consistently read my blogs. The content has been sparse, to say the least, lately. I am hoping that will change once I become a little less busy.

Problem is, I like to keep myself busy. I thought I would give everyone an update on what I’ve been working on lately and what’s coming down the pipe.

First off, I’m still teaching courses at Writers’ Village University. We are currently halfway through my Writing and the Hero’s Journey course. It is not an easy course and we lost a few members in the beginning due to attrition, but a large group are hanging on and performing superbly well.

I’ve also finally got the green light on the manuscript I finished way back in February for the sequel to Dream with Little Angels. A book called Close to the Broken Hearted, my editor wants to send it to the copy editor next month so I have until the end of September to do one final pass on it before giving it up. I’m trying to do fifty pages a day, which seems to be working out okay. One of the main things I’m doing is getting rid of unneeded dialog attribution. I’m also reading it aloud, and checking the rhythm of the sentences, making sure they fall nicely together. I’m willing to bet, once I’m done, I could go through it another two or three times and continue to find things wrong with it. That’s the problem with books. There comes a time when you just have to say, “Okay, I’m done with it.”

My editor also wants me to supply reading group questions for the book like we did with the first one. I enjoy writing those, so that shouldn’t be a problem. He wants fifteen.

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people about the first book (thank you very much) and really, the only consistently negative thing I’ve heard about it was my inconsistencies in my understanding of the Baptist faith, particularly Southern Baptists. So, I decided to do something about that. I called a pastor at a Baptist church in Alabama and talked with him for about a half hour, asking every question I could think of. Now, not only will the new book have its religion right, my editor is going to reprint Dream with Little Angels, updating the few things it took to bring the facts into place. Did I mention I loved my publisher? It turned out to not actually take a lot of changes. Mainly maybe ten two word substitutions and three or four two or three sentence replacements.

I’m also working on a third book that my agent thinks she’ll have no problem selling (probably to Kensington). This is the start of a new series and involves a DEA agent and his family and takes place in Seattle. Being only a two hour drive from Seattle, I should have much less researching to do to get my agriculture and wild animal and other facts straight. I’ll be heading down south for a few camera safaris to get things right. I’m also working with two police officers and a DEA agent to make sure all my police work actually works.

Funny story: it took fifteen calls to Alabama to finally find a Baptist pastor who would actually talk to me and answer some questions for my book. It took two calls, the second being straight to DEA headquarters in Quantico, to find an agent willing to discuss things like what sort of guns the agents carry and what caliber of bullets will pierce their body armor. I find that strange. My first DEA call was odd, too. I am pretty sure the person on the other end of the phone spent most of it thinking I had a meth lab set up somewhere.

This DEA story has the first hundred and fifty pages written along with an eighty page proposal. The proposal is too long, and the pages are in need of polishing, so I plan on working on that next. I only need to send out fifty pages from the beginning of the book, but it would be nice if the outline was down to about forty. Hopefully that won’t be a problem. It’s going to be a long book. I’d like to have about a 145,000 words to run with, but my agent (having read what I’ve written so far) cut me off at 120,000.

The other book I’m working on (and this one is simply at the research stage so far, although a lot of the story elements are floating around in my head, is a non-series historical fiction that takes place in the 10th and 11th century in India and Tibet. It’s the story of how Buddhism was rejuvenated in Tibet after it had crumbled and morality had sank. All this was accomplished by a great Buddhist pandit named Atisha. This is the true, factual background upon which the rest of the story will be written. I’m excited about this project because it’s so different from anything else I’ve done. There’s also a wealth of documented history for me to draw on. I am thinking this will also be a thick book. Probably around 120,000 words or even more if my agent and editor let me turn into Ken Follet for a day.

I have two other things pretty much ready to go. One is a zombie book I wrote about eight years back that needs a new pass on. The other is a Buddhist YA book called Darkstone. You’ll find covers for these books in my Coming Soon section. I’m not certain how “soon” they’ll be coming, though. My priorities don’t have them very high on my list.

There. That, in a nutshell, brings you up to date with what I’ve been and am working on. Like I said, I enjoy keeping busy.

How about you? What are you doing these days?

Michael out.

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