Okay, I owe my fans an explanation. The second book in the Jack Winters series has been on the back-burner for a year now. And I have a very good reason – I took a badly needed break from writing. Yup, I set writing aside for a year. My sanity – and my long suffering wife – both needed it.
I’m an 80 per-center. I belong to that group of writers that have to work a day job to pay the bills – and that’s 80% of all writers. So that means getting up early – and I mean crazy early, like 3 and 4 AM, to get in a few hours of writing before leaving for work. I did this for 9 years straight to be exact, and finished 7 full novels.
It was starting to make me a bit crazy, and a bit too much, with a home and a full time job, six kids and three grandkids. No dogs or cats, thankfully. The cat died a few years ago and we’ve never replaced it, and I don’t have time for puppies, as cute and adorable as they can be. (Who’s got time for those?)
To top it off, two of our kids got married last fall, within a month of each other, so it was a bit nuts. I did ask them to consider rescheduling, just to spread the craziness out a bit, but they weren’t listening to Dad on that score. Go figure.
I read a book by a well-known writer on writing a while back, in which he pontificated upon the traits of the successful writer and the necessary commitment that required. And while I agree it takes commitment and hard work, he took it too far. He extolled the virtue of making it the number one, absolute top priority, without which you won’t be successful (according to him). And just to underscore the point, he used as an example another famous writer who missed his son’s funeral – a son who died by suicide in his early twenties – because he was too busy writing.
Yup – he wouldn’t leave his writing long enough to attend his son’s funeral. Kinda sick, eh?
Sorry, but I won’t sacrifice to those gods.
But I will be getting the manuscript to my beta readers next week, once I’ve finished another pass through it. (I don’t want to torture my beta readers any more than necessary.)
So my game plan is to publish the sequel this spring.
Please feel free to drop me a line with any questions, comments, or thoughts on how we can attain peace in the middle-east, cure cancer, encourage Trump to leave office early, or anything else that might be helpful to humanity.
