Well, hello again! I know, I know. It has been more than five weeks since I wrote my last blog entry. I hope you haven’t given up on me. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and I hope that, by the time I’ve told you the story, you will understand. Okay, enough groveling.

So, when last we chatted, I was headed back to The United States to visit my parents, who are just a couple of ticks away from 90. I had concerns about traveling back to the U.S. while the country is still in the throes of a pandemic.

Although I did manage to avoid Covid during that trip, it wasn’t easy. I was shocked to see people walking through stores without masks. Here in Costa Rica, mask wearing inside buildings is universal, and undisputed – except for the occasional U.S. tourists who think they have some kind of personal exemption. The other thing that amazed me was that, even though mask usage is mandatory within airports and airplanes, my experience was that about 15% of the travelers I saw were breaking that federal law with impunity.

One interesting note about that. In the airport here in Costa Rica, as I waited for my flight, a security guard patrolled the gate areas and politely, but firmly, told travelers to put their masks on. I had a three-hour layover in the Houston, Texas airport, during which time I saw hundreds of maskless people, but not one single security person AT ALL, much less one enforcing the federal mandate.

The real reason I have gone dark for more than a month actually occurred on my trip back to Costa Rica. I started writing a new book!

I had the idea for my next book rattling around in my brain for a while and, as our airplane sat on the tarmac, I decided to start typing. Smoke was curling out of my little iPad by the time we were airborne, and the pages were filling up quickly.

Some writers set a target of writing a certain number of words per day. Some writers aim for a chapter a day. I wish I had the control those targets take. For me, when a book has to come out, it’s like an involuntary regurgitation. I write, and write, and write. I hate having to stop writing to get some sleep. I hate having to stop to eat. I am not a fun person to be around when a book is coming out, because I can’t focus on anything else. (My dear Carmen, I apologize sincerely for this.) Even taking an hour to walk the beach seems like an imposition on my need to write. When Carmen can ply me away from the keyboard to take that walk, I often spend the entire time bouncing possible plot lines off  of her. The help is immense.

Part of the reason that this is my style is because when I begin writing a book, I know exactly how it’s going to start. I have a good idea, albeit rough, about how it’s going to end. What I know nothing about is how it will get from that starting point to the conclusion. I don’t write outlines. I don’t even begin a book with more than two or three characters in mind. I just let the story write itself.

The journey is often unexpected, even surprising to me. For example, in the book I am currently writing a romantic relationship develops where I had no idea it was going to happen! It began as a joke between two characters, then developed into a cute little side-plot that had nothing to do with the main story. By the end of the book, this chance meeting turns out to be a main plot-line of the story! When I began writing the book, I had no idea the relationship would even exist!

It has taken me five weeks of obsessive writing to complete the first draft of this new book. It is just a first draft, and is by no means ready for publication. But, at least, I now know what the story is, and how it gets from the beginning to the end. The next step is to go back through the entire book several times to massage and refine the writing and behaviors of characters. With my style of writing, a character often ends up morphing into something entirely different than what I imagined when we are first introduced to them. So, I have to go back to that introduction, and make some changes that better fit their eventual personalities.

Then, when I have written what I think is a pretty good book, it is placed in the hands of an editor, and I’m told about all the things I did wrong. Two or three rounds of changes come after that before the book will finally be ready for publication.

Two characters return to this new book from my most recently published thriller, Murdered For Nothing. Homicide detective Dave Walters is now with the FBI, and television reporter David Lincoln has moved from the TV station Rochester, New York to a cable news outlet in New York City. Their histories in Murdered are important to the story line in the upcoming book, so make sure to read that first installment now. That way, you’ll be ready for the new book when it arrives!