I think wherever you are in the world, the weather has been unusual this spring. Fifty-two feet of snow has fallen in the Sierra Mountains of California. The atmospheric rivers have been busy. I have a leak (it’s turned off) in my landscaping system that I can wait to fix for at least a month which is one of the few upsides to all this rain. I was reading a story about the projected profits of Vail resorts (about forty ski resorts worldwide) and they mentioned that their earnings would be down as their three Lake Tahoe area resorts had to close because of too much snow some days while their eastern twenty-eight resorts vacillated between being too warm for snow and too cold to ski.
In a little more than two weeks, my fourteenth book in the Jill Quint series launches. MINT DEATH is set in Washington, DC. I name my books at the start of writing them as it makes the book feel real to me. So ‘mint’ when I named the book referred to the US Mint. However, shortly after I came up with the name and the cover was completed by my cover artist, I discovered that the US Mint makes coins, while the Bureau of Printing of Engraving makes currency. Whoops, I had to go back and change that in the first fourteen pages.
Next month, I’m publishing a dog memoir. I have always had dogs in my life. My houses have dog doors and fenced yards so that even when I was working fourteen hour days, my dog(s) at the time could take care of business and chase squirrels at will. I frequently dog sit a three year old dog named Joey who plays quite well with my dog, Daniel. Last summer, during one of the times I was dog sitting Joey, I got the idea to entertain his parents with a letter from camp. Camp is my house and I’m the camp operator that he mentions in his letters. I’ve tried to keep it in the voice of an eight-year-old boy. It’s titled EAT, PLAY, POOP: LETTERS FROM CAMP TO MY PARENTS. It’s dog humor and Joey is very much alive throughout the book. I have over fifty letters and pictures of what he’s done during his day at camp. It’s quite a departure from my usual mystery books.
After these two books launch, I’ll start work on my Urban Fantasy series featuring a physician character much like Jill Quint who is contending with strange illnesses in her Emergency Room as she discovers her magical powers. Having worked thirty-five plus years in the medical field, it’s my favorite setting to write into my books.
Cheers,
Alec