Last week I finished my 11th book overall, THE GIRL FROM DIANA PARK, book 3 in the Damian Green series. Damian assists his friend Natalie Severino with an abducted child cold case, and will this be the book where Hermione is finally reunited with her parents? It's available for pre-order now: click here and will be released November 5, 2018. When I finished the book, I celebrated with 2 glasses and wine and 2 bags of Bit of Honey candy from my local Dollar store and a mani/pedi. I'm sure every author has their way of celebrating the end of the book. As I cruised toward the grand finale of my story, I worried in the back of my mind of where the story should end. You don't want to overshoot your mark, so the story ends in boring the reader, but you need to pull together all the loose threads in the grand finale, and I'm anxious about hitting the exact right note for the ending and yet I'm relieved to be coming to the end.
I allow myself a few hours of brain rest than I go back at writing. When I was struggling to write this book, I began my 12th book back in April. I stopped writing it after 874 words, as I realized it was an excuse for not working on my assignment of the moment – THE GIRL FROM DIANA PARK. Now I've gone back to my 12th book and begun work as I do with every new book. I start by naming the new story. When I wrote those words several months ago, I saved the text under the name ITALY STORY, an uninspiring name for a novel. I know many authors wait until a book is done to title it, or the publisher chooses the name, or they publish the book under different names in the United States and the United Kingdom, and I'll admit I don't get that. JK Rowling had different names for her books, and frankly, I would have bought them if the title was Harry Potter book 5.
So the name for book 9 in the Jill Quint, MD series, is SICILIAN MURDER. I'm working on the cover which is easy for the books in this series as all of my covers reflect where the person is going to die, and my guy is going to die on Mount Edna in Sicily. I also Googled the title and checked it on Amazon to make sure there wasn't already a book by that name and surprisingly, SICILIAN MURDER wasn't taken. It's not that I'm prohibited from taking the name, but I hate to add to reader confusion. There are a few titles that are similar, and they're related to the mafia, but this story will have no connection to organized crime. At least I'm not planning on a connection, but I never know where a story will take me until I write the words!
In a few weeks, I'll do another blog post including the cover reveal for this next work in progress.
Cheers,
Alec