The arduous task of editing a book continues. For those who don’t know my book-creating process, I do a rough draft, followed by sessions of editing. The final edit will be a Read-Out-Loud session with my wife. We alternate reading a scene or chapter out loud, catching all kinds of crazy stuff. Then, I clean up all the things we found and publish the book. Looking at my schedule, I could have the editing done by the end of the week, but this weekend is scheduled for a family event. This means that the ROL will not happen next weekend. That pushes the ROL to the 21st and 22nd, and the publish date will be the Monday after (if there are not too many things to clean up). Expect RUSTY’s memories to be available on the 23rd of December. Probably late at night on the 22nd, to be exact.

What’s next?

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m working on a cozy mystery series under a pen name (Elliot Droit). I finished the first book, but I need to complete four more books to complete the first set. At that point, I’ll test out Ads to see how the series performs and probably start on the next Daphne book, which is tentatively titled Shadows in the Bloodline. After that, everything is in the air.

There are a few possibilities. If the Q Mysteries take off, I’ll be writing five more for that series. Fortunately, those books are only 50k words long, so I can write one a month. If the Q mysteries don’t do well, I may recalibrate my plans and write something dark. I have a mystery series in mind that has a character that I have already fleshed out. I also have a stand-alone or possibly a trilogy for which I have extensive notes and ideas. If I do it as a stand-alone, it’ll be a door-stopper. I still have a lot of thinking to do on that story before I can wrap up the outline. So, the book is still in the “Maybe” column.