One year ago Murder For Me reached number 5 on Amazon’s best seller list in its genre during Cyber-Monday. It was a great day for me.

Of course, that list is fluid and constantly changing. I’ve moved on to the next book and my next surge of promotion probably won’t occur until the sequel’s out.

Writing With China On My Mind

As you know from my prior blog, it’s been harder writing since we returned from China. I can’t get it out of my mind.

But as I began writing today after work, this quote appeared on one of the social media pages I check regularly (of course I should never check while I’m writing); nevertheless:

You never know what you will learn ’til you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed. Anita Brookner

That happened rather dramatically for me yesterday as I worked on chapter 21. I was writing dialogue and an important character that (frankly) I don’t think I’ve developed adequately was elevated to a new, higher and multi-dimensional level that I hadn’t expected.

It’s funny, but characters tend to do that as you write them. They become alive and do and say completely unexpected things. Yesterday, I thought it was the best chapter I have yet written. Of course, passages about which I feel that way usually look totally different when I go to rewrite them. I’ll have to see then if I still feel that it’s good.

City Boy Goes Camping

My wife and I went tent camping over Thanksgiving at Goliad State Park. It was a test camp so two people who are completely inexperienced at camping could find out what we don’t know before we spend New Year’s Eve in a tent a Death Valley.

I discovered that despite my prior, self-proclaimed prowess, I was completely incompetent at starting a fire. A good thing to know before Death Valley. That was a bad surprise.

There were good ones, too. At 3:30 am when I woke up and went outside the tent, the stars were brighter than I’ve seen since I was a kid. I marveled at what I never see in Houston, and a little sad about it, too. Later that night a growling coyote came close to the tent. An owl woke me up hooting. The owl’s voice was like nothing I had ever imagined. It didn’t sound like it does on television.

Writing and Author Talk Podcast

I do a weekly podcast with Sandy Lawrence and Aimee Ravichandran called Author Talk. You can find it on my Facebook pages as well as other places. Here is the last one with guest Brian Bearden:

You can follow it from my Facebook Author Page at Russell’s Stories if you ‘like’ the page. Now I need to get back to the sequel.

Merry Christmas!