Current Work
Dear Earl,
How is your work on Order 17 coming along?
Yours
Edd
Dear Edd,
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. Order 17, the book I worked on for nearly two years, has been temporarily shelved. Some writers might use that term for a book that will come out at a later date, but I’ve never gone back to a shelved book and finished it. In other words, Order 17 has been round-filed. It rarely happens that I start a book and fail to finish it. I don’t think it’s happened to me in the last twenty years, at least not that I can recall. I won’t bore anybody with why I’m not finishing Order 17 or what went wrong with it. It’s the nature of the business that at times large swaths of a writer’s life are literally thrown away. As my mother would say, “Tough tittie.”
The good news is I’m two-thirds of the way through the first draft of a Thomas Black mystery, a book I’m very excited about. I’m going to write mysteries only for a while. My thinking is that the country and the world is in bad shape and things seem to be getting worse every day. Fewer people are reading. The Internet and other new gadgets have blotted up a lot of free time that was formerly spent reading fiction. No fiction author I know of is immune to this. Thus, I’m writing a Thomas Black and plan to write two or three more in quick succession. If I can work things out with the new publisher, I will try to bring out a new book more often than one book per year, which has been the industry standard for years, and my habit. More on this later.
ee
