Summer slowdown

The three or four of you who regularly read my blog might be wondering what I've been up to lately.  It certainly hasn't been blogging, although I'll point out that this is the 60th published post of the year (I posted 76 times in 2013) and we're just barely halfway through.

Work has been pretty busy lately, and I'm still dealing with the aftermath of a ruptured disc, so there hasn't been a lot of extra time for blogging.

Another factor is that I just haven't been able to get very excited about writing commentary lately.  The Supreme Court, with its naked partisanship and wrong direction, has gotten me down.

But the biggest factor by far is that I've been spending time on another writing project.  A few years ago, I developed a concept for a novel.  Within the last year, I've managed to advance the project well beyond the concept stage, to the point at which the entire novel is outlined and I've made substantial progress on the actual writing.  In fact, I'm at the point at which I feel comfortable making it public that I am writing.

That's a big step.  I've started many books over the last twenty years, but few of them advanced beyond the basic idea, mostly because I quickly lost interest.  This one has been different, as I've remained engaged with the idea for a long time, and I'm ready to see it through.

I've been enjoying the creative process, too.  That means I'm going to take some time off from blogging, more or less--I might pop in from time to time if the mood strike--so I can finish this book in 2014.  I'm only about a third of the way done, but I've hit my stride, and if I can devote enough time to it, it should be ready to shop to publishers at the end of the summer.  A more realistic goal might be the end of the year, though.

So, what's it about?  That's a closely guarded secret.  It's a thriller, sort of in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth's masterful The Day of the Jackal (and I hope it will be that good), with police procedural elements, a nonlinear story, and some local color.  The story is spun up as a "what if" from a true-life event that happened while I was living in Charlotte, although the details have been changed significantly.  And no, I don't have a title for it yet.