My New Book

My New Book

The Back Nine

By

C. Neuroticus Absolutus

Wow! I’ve done it again. Published another book on Amazon.com. The Back Nine is a sequel to Kill Me Once Again and features the main characters from Kill Me Once Again. When you spend a year writing a book, the characters become your best friends, or enemies. But you should have killed off the enemies if you really didn’t like them—unless you’re Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and your favorite bad guy is the über-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, the Professor Moriarty.

It takes a lot of time to create a character, to put a grin or a scowl on his/her face. It takes a lot of time and love to describe the sweetness of your female character’s personality, or conversely her bitchiness and the coarse physicality of her emotions. You didn’t give birth to your protagonist just to make him a dull everyman wannabe. No, you made him physically strong, mentally sharp, with an indomitable spirit.

You can’t just dump these characters into some array of bits and bytes on a flash drive where they’ll never see the light of day again. They still have enough life in them for another performance, another peek from loyal fans worldwide (I’m certain), to bring another tear or smile into their lives.

You see, a sequel is really born from the author’s inability to say goodbye to characters from his past—characters that are still alive and well in his brain and fingertips as a few loving keystrokes brings them to life once again.

So it is with The Back Nine. I couldn’t say good-bye to Major Scott Wilson, Detective Bubba Rogers, Director of the FBI Computer Operations Center Walter Ellis, motherly Mary O’Donnell and the vivacious Dr. Sunny Baker and I hope you agree and join me in unravelling the mystery in the thriller The Back Nine.

See ya in Myrtle Beach.

Good Intentions

By

C. Neuroticus Absolutus

My desire to complete The Back Nine, my Work In Progress, by the end of fall was well intentioned. But grand designs collapse under the weight of the volumes of To-Do lists my wife - good woman that she is -  dreams up daily. I suspect that someday I'll get even by making her a character in one of my novels. Just kidding. Really!

I certainly am closer to reaching my goal of getting The Back Nine published but not quite yet. I have an edited (many times) total of 91,325 words. I did manage to get it under 90,000 words at one point. However, that was before I found two glaring mistakes that required considerable rewrite. My timeline had been constructed by a complete idiot. (What's the use of being anything at all if you're not at the top of your game, ergo, a complete idiot.)

The second problem I encountered is not so easy to admit. Not if I wish to maintain my wits. To wit: I was a half-wit. There! I've said it! In attempting to construct a plot worthy of an Edgar award, I outwitted myself. Salvaging my draft from the Recycle Bin (one of many such acts), correction of my unwitting stupidity required no less than three rewrites. My wife, love of my life, was witness to my cries of defeat in which, I suspect, she took great pleasure.

I take pleasure in announcing that I am ready to attempt translation of the manuscript to Mobipocket Creator and then to html. Whether these translations are accurate or not, a complete reading of the manuscript is again necessary to identify errors and purge them. I'm sure my bride will be there to hold my head and my hand.

With the holidays upon us, I will be lucky to find time to complete any more of this. Any incompatibility between programs will bring me to my knees, my head extended, tears in  my eyes, awaiting the fall of the editorial axe.

One additional project (besides Christmas and New Years) that remains before year's end is to get up all the multicolored, almost-microscopic glitters that have suddenly appeared on all my clothes, my hair, my dog, the furniture and the carpets throughout the house.

Perhaps the best I can do at this one remaining point in my sanity is to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and the Happiest of New Years!

Oh, and have a White Christmas!

Work in Progress Update

By

C. Neuroticus Absolutus

I last reported that I had 70,000 or so words already written and could do 1,000 words a day for the next 20 days and I would be close to finishing my WIP The Back Nine. Well, a thousand words a day is perfectly achievable if you can lock all the doors, unplug all electronic distractions and keep your wife off your computer. It seems that Spider Solitaire is addictive. Hmmmm. Anyway, I managed to make it to 77,381 words this week and figure I've got another 8,000 to13,000 words yet to go. Not that it matters how long an eBook is. They certainly aren't priced by the word. In this same time frame, I've read James Patterson's Kill Alex Cross, kept up on my emails and posted a couple of blogs.As any writer will attest, we go through periods of production and then periods of not so much production and hope to achieve some positive balance at some point. I'm still hoping.

Work in progress

Seventy-thousand words awaiting another twenty-thousand or so and closure of this action thriller eBook with a working title THE BACK NINE, an obvious reference to a the back nine holes on a golf course where the story begins. That's about 20-days worth of work for me. I write everyday, weekends included, and write about a thousand words each day. That's unedited, of course. I like to edit the entire book at one  time. And re-edit as often as I feel necessary. Gives me an idea of flow and continuity. Also, that's when I finalize formatting for acceptance as an eBook. Then I'll add a cover and a table of contents, acknowledgments, and copyright info. The end is a great place to include references to my previous works as well as a picture of the author. Then, after I upload it all to Smashwords and Amazon.com, I can sit back and shout, "Author! Author!" and glow in my accomplishment for a second or two. Not much time for self-aggrandizement. Have to market! market! market! and move on to writing the next book, already germinating in the back of my well-fertilized mind. Anyway, I plan to have The Back Nine available this fall, and I believe that's a reasonable target.

Works in Progress

Works in progress are the author's dreams, still not on paper or stored in a computer memory or even in a cloud somewhere in cyberspace. But the dreams of getting another book published is one of the main forces that drive a writer to sit down each day and add a few more days to the lives of the characters. My first two books, Home Again and Kill Me Once Again are already available on Amazon.com and from Smashwords eBook distributors. My current work-in-progress has a working title of The Back Nine, a reference to a murder on a golf course. I am about two-thirds of the way through the book. After that is a major editing to verify format and storyline continuity. Run spell check a dozen times and ...

a writer's life, works in progress, WIP, Home Again, Kill Me Once Again, The Back Nine, editing