I’ve been a bit quiet here on the blog — and with good reason; if you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I participate in the various NaNoWriMo writing events that come along during the year, and the most recent one (April) just ended. These month-long excuses to write have always been high points on my calendar, and usually wind up generating another novel in one of my series.
That was definitely true this time around, though total disclosure: Bewitched sprang into being in late February, and I honestly couldn’t keep myself bottled up until April. So I split the difference and started work on it in March; nearly 100,000 words later, another Sean Colbeth story is (literally) in the books. I’m going through the first draft now and doing that correct-the-grievous-grammar-mistakes edit before I hand it off to my initial beta readers; often, I find it to be a valuable process to do this initial revision while the entire story is still fresh and top of mind.
This latest book for Sean digs a bit into his backstory, revealing some of the motivations that made him an Olympic star and, later, renowned investigator. Most of those threads have been present in the back of my mind as I’ve written his prior appearances, so it was fun to pull a particular one from the skein and see where it led. Honestly, it got a bit darker than I expected, but in the end, I feel like we come out on the other side knowing quite a bit more about Chief Colbeth.
I didn’t expect how draining the experience would be, though. Enough that I think Sean is going to take a brief vacation before I tackle the next story in the series; which is good, considering Vasily has been impatiently awaiting my return. Seems he’s got something he wants me to look into out there in Rancho Linda…