I’m about to embark on a year-long sabbatical from my university position, that being Professor of Mathematics at the University of Detroit Mercy. No teaching. No UDM service (unless I feel like it, but I probably won’t). I do have a few math research ideas I’ll probably investigate, but those will garner merely a sliver of the total processor time in my brain. I’m a writer now.

I’m currently typing up the edits that make the fourth draft of Crying Call. Should take me a day or two. At that point, my first two books will be exactly where I want them structurally, with all the right feels in the right places, and they’ll be stylistically how I want them as well. And then I’ll have just two more edits left for each of them.

I edit a lot.

The first of those edits is the “read-aloud.” That’s where I’ll literally read it in my voice to find places where the language just doesn’t flow correctly. I don’t expect my books will ever sound like James Joyce, but they should at least be easy to read aloud. This is partly because people often hear a book in their own voice when they read it silently. It’s also because I might want to have an audio version made at some point.

The second and final edit remaining is of course the copy editing. Becka will probably do that for me if I self-publish. I’m toying with the idea of chapter heading illustrations featuring two cards, the numbers of which correspond to the chapter, but instead of the usual four card suits, I might replace the symbols with something relevant to the story or chapter or whatever. For example, if Chapter 7 has a baseball scene, the top of the chapter might have a picture of a playing card “the seven of baseballs.” I don’t know … just a thought.

Querying hell is nearly over. I still have a dozen or so queries out that I don’t expect to hear anything back from, ever. Many agents just ghost you if they aren’t interested, which is RUDE, but they don’t realize so because it’s standard in their industry. I just shake my head over it, and wonder what’s wrong with them. Maybe they had bad parents or something.

There are three small presses that I haven’t heard back from yet, so who knows about them. And there’s one last agent who turned down Crying Call, but now has Blood Game in her slush pile. I was astounded when I didn’t get an offer from her because she’s an advocate for many of the underrepresented demographics in my books, so I had to give her a last chance. We’ll see.

But odds are I’ll be self-publishing, and I’m thinking February 2025 for Blood Game, and August 2025 for Crying Call. The third book, tentatively “Drawing Dead,” would be February 2026, and book four, tentatively “Fearful Symmetry,” August 2026. I’m halfway through outlining/researching Book 3, and only have loose ideas so far for Book 4, so I need to get jamming on those this month.

And finally, the arduous process of moving Becka up from Ohio has delayed our joint project, a spicy romance/thriller novel, but I hope we get back to that soon. It’s fun teasing and tormenting our main character, who we’re putting through the ringer, so to speak.

So lots going on here, and I’m really enjoying it.