Marginally connected to that, I’m aux anges with the set-up of a KVM switch between my two machines, so that I can now write in Scrivener on the mac and still do everything else on the linux box WITH ONLY ONE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD. This makes my life so much easier.

Anyway, that’s my January update. I’ll now go back to shoveling snow.

Oh, wait, before I forget: I didn’t do a best of my reads of 2016 (sorry, I was swamped), but you guys will have to read Kirby Crow’s Malachite. Trust me on this. It is easily the best thing I read in 2016.

Remember me telling you about the Bluewater Bay universe? Yeah that. (I seem to be saying that a lot.)

When to Hold Them, my first Bluewater Bay story (and no.9 in the series) is now up for pre-order on the Riptide Publishing website. Release date is August 17th.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement, I recently signed a contract for another Bluewater Bay novel, scheduled for late 2016. This, since it has a deadline I really, really need to keep, is the book I’m mainly working on right now. Which isn’t to say the muse doesn’t occasionally feed me Tom/Matti tidbits, mind you. Or even pieces of the next Bengt/Alex story, which, damn, muse, stop trying to write all the books at once.
So, yeah, I’m slowly trying to let go of Xavier and Doran and getting to know Jack and Mark. Now you know what I’m up to these days.

Getting into the heads of new characters is like putting on new shoes. No matter how often you’ve seen them in the window or even handled them before, when you first slip in, they feel stiff and weird and alien. It takes a few miles of walking in them before they’re comfortable.

Same with characters. Even though these two have popped up in the previous book, writing them as POV characters is different. I have to consciously think about which way they would think/feel, and what they would do. It’s like a naggy tag in the neck of your shirt. Not actively painful, but ‘there’ in a way that’s distracting. It makes for slooow writing. Over the years I’ve learned to just write it anyway. That’s what rewrites are for; by which time the characters have become a second skin. Can’t wait for the feeling.

As for the Bluewater Bay novel, I wrote synopsis and blurb last weekend, and finished the cover art request, so that one’s out of my hands until the dev edits come back.

That leaves me free to work on Black Box. I started writing that one around Christmas, but fizzled out after only a few hundred words. The plot outline I had was just not working. The beginning bored me to tears. And if it bores me, it’s going to bore you, which is not acceptable. I’d been more or less idly kicking that one around in my head for the past few weeks, the muse feeding me stingy little bits and one-liners that ever so slightly shifted the characterization of both protags. Today I sat down to redo the outline. I threw index cards around like confetti, rearranged them in elaborate mosaics, scribbled here, scratched out there–in short, I made an inspiring creative mess of things, and I’m much happier with what I have now. I should be able to do at least the first few chapters, before I run into a couple of looser points that need to be tied down still. We’ll see.

The Bluewater Bay novel is out to betas. Which, since it’s due at the end of the year, is a huge weight off my chest.

And, while I’m waiting for the lines for Santuario II to come back, I started plotting another Santuario novel. It’s not, strictly speaking Santuario III yet, as it has a different main couple, and Alex and Bengt appear without carrying a POV. But it does deal with one of the open plot points of the first book. So, a spin-off? Tie-in? I’ll call it 2.5 aka Black Box for now. The muse couldn’t care less. She just really wants to write this one. One of the MCs is trans. We’re both pretty excited about that, since it touches ground close to home. I worked out a decent plot skeleton today, and will start a first research wave tomorrow. Wish me luck.