I hope everyone is planning a safe, quiet, and healthy Thanksgiving holiday this year. This year Thanksgiving is also my birthday, and I’ve hit an age range where I like to keep quiet about the actual number. My family is having a gathering of fewer than five people all within my coronavirus bubble, so we have few worries about the virus.
Forensic Murder launched successfully, and so far, the reviews have been good. Whew! It’s scary every time I launch a new book out into the universe. I like the story, but will anyone else? I know I have been disappointed by the latest novel from a famous author, and in the past four months, I can think of two top ten bestsellers that I didn’t finish reading because I was not fond of the story.
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and it’s a world-wide effort to write that great novel you thought you might have had inside you. You are supposed to write 1,667 words each day in the month to finish with a 50K word novel. Of course, that word count is too short for a mystery novel. I’m behind the daily word count, having only reached 22K, but I will finish the story before Christmas.
My NaNoWriMo project is EMBERS OF MURDER, book 12 in the Jill Quint, MD Forensic Pathologist series. As you may know, I live in California, and every summer to fall, the State catches on fire. We had many days this past summer where the air was worse than Beijing, the international standard for lousy air. That got me thinking about writing a novel featuring an arsonist. The above book cover hopefully tells the story of the book's premise.
EMBERS OF MURDER will be released February 2, 2021, and it’s available for pre-order now for $2 before it goes up to its regular price of $4.99 on January 25, 2021.
Meanwhile, I’m reading a wide range of paranormal mystery books for pleasure and research, trying to get an idea of where I want to go with a future paranormal series mystery. At present, I haven’t figured out what kind of paranormal character I want and how they got their magical powers. A friend suggested a transportation mage. She finds driving places to be an annoying waste of time, and it wouldn’t it be cool to transport yourself somewhere like The Transporter on the Enterprise for you Trekkie fans out there. I like that idea, but I’m not sure that’s going to be my magical skill. First, I must finish EMBERS OF MURDER.
Stay safe and healthy and for those in the U.S., I hope you have a blessed Thanksgiving,
Alec