Just a quick winter update on multiple fronts. That picture at the top is from a little weekend getaway that Heidi and I took to the Nye Beach area of Newport, Oregon. We stayed in the fantastic Slyvia Beach Hotel, where every room is themed after a different author. I took the picture on the beach below the Yaquina Lighthouse. It’s actually my camera sticking together a couple of shots, but I still thought it came out well. It’s pretty small on the blog, but you can click the image for a larger version. Bonus points for spotting the seagull.
Health in the Carter household has been up and down, as is often the case in the winter with all the viruses lurking about, but we soldier on. Most of our Saturdays lately have been taken up by the kids’ basketball games. I just finished The Ghost Who Said Goodbye, the second of the Myron Vale series. It’s scheduled to go to my intrepid copy editor in a few weeks, with an expected publication date of late March or early April. As things firm up, I’ll post more info — a cover, a book description, etc. And, of course, I encourage my readers to sign up for my mailing list. I always let my most dedicated fans know first when my books are available for purchase, and I seldom email otherwise.
And yes, I’ve already started the next Garrison Gage book. It’s early goings, but I’m feeling really good about it — always fun to return to Gage’s world. He’s practically like family now. I took a bit of time to build a “Gage Bible” for myself, an encyclopedia about the characters, Barnacle Bluffs, and other info I can now use as a reference. I’d been using scattered notes until now, but since I’m working on the fourth book, with plans for many more, I figured it was worth a little extra effort to put together a resource I can turn to a little more easily.
Speaking of Gage, I also took the time to hire another copy editor to go over The Gray and Guilty Sea one more time, and I’ve implemented those changes in both the ebook and print editions. There weren’t a lot of errors, but a few people still complained, so it was worth it to me to make one more pass — especially, as I said, because the series continues to do very well. I appreciate all of your wonderful emails! Thank you! Making the The Gray and Guilty Sea free as an ebook was one of the smartest things I did. It’s gone so well, in fact, that I decided to leave it free for at least a few more months.
Oh, and for you folks who live within driving distance of Western Oregon University (the day job part of my life) I’m teaching a course on writing and publishing this coming spring. I’ll have more about that in a week or two, so I’m just leaving this as a bit of a tease, but I plan to teach the kind of course I desperately wished I had as an undergraduate — full of all the practical, nuts and bolts things you need to know to write for a commercial audience today, including all kinds of stuff about the business side of being a writer. More on that soon.
I’ll leave this post with a shot from a recent hike I took with fellow writer Mike Totten on the Little North Santiam River Trail. We never get the kind of snow hitting the East coast right now, but it’s still been unseasonably warm winter — rainy, yes, very rainy, but not all that cold.
