I started this blog as way to allow the patient and interested reader to follow the construction of my latest book in the Sharon O’Mara Chronicles, Toulouse 4 Death. I didn’t realize that the initial list of dates and benchmarks (real business term – sounds official – so MBA-ish) would be driving me as hard as the story. I set the work in three-two month segments; each segment goal was 20,000 words (the books are intentionally shorter than the usual novel – faster and quicker reads). I’m on target and, as of this morning, I’m at 39,857 words and very happy with the work; it’s clean and sharp. In fact I’m three weeks ahead of schedule, so even better. And yes, given the title, there is a Toulouse Lautrec painting (stolen) that a billionaire wants to give away. Unfortunately there is a group in Argentina that wants an item that was with the painting and are willing to kill to get it back.
Teaser Alert - Here are the first two paragraphs:
“The village was dead.” Alain Dumont said, as he breathed heavily through the plastic oxygen nose prongs hung, like a painting, from his ears. “Mind you, this was not the first village we fought through and destroyed. But it was the first one in Germany. All the frustrations, anger, and need for revenge that had built-up during our advances through eastern France and Luxemburg were now focused on this first German town. It did not escape.”
He heaved again and tried to shake sixty-year old horrific memories off his shoulders. “The village was utterly and completely flattened. Me and my boys walked single file in a track no more than a foot wide; barely room for a dog. The rubble, blasted from the buildings, filled the street. The buildings still smoldered and bodies laid half-in and out of the wreckage. God, those Germans loved their brick, now they were buried under it.” He slowly took another breath. “There were snipers in the church towers, we’d advance a block and take fire from everywhere. Some of my men pushed through the interior walls of the buildings; they dug and blasted their way from house to house. Sometimes it was quicker than waltzing down the center of the street being sniper targets. We lost fewer men that way. If we were lucky we had a tank follow us, they rolled over everything. If a sniper fired, we leveled everything over a foot tall ahead of us; it was an advance of attrition. We left nothing alive. But these villages were full of cellars, some interconnected, many filled with old people who wouldn’t leave. Funny that we didn’t see a lot of younger women and kids, they were gone, we found them later hiding in the tunnels, those damn tunnels were under all this part of Germany. And to be honest, I was glad. Never did like killing women.”
By the way, I want to thank the author Sheldon Siegel for the opening line, he once admitted he started a book with the line “He’s dead . . .” so why not give it a chance.
Part of my drive to complete the required work of this segment is to allow me time to reflect and adjust the manuscript for Elk River that my editor, Dennis DeRose, is completing. He tells me it will be done by July 1. It is 112,000 words. I hope that he has been kind; sometimes it’s hard to fix an edited manuscript if there is too much blood on the pages.
Elk River is the story of a 14 year old boy in the summer of 1956 who tries hard to remain young and innocent while the world around him forces him to grow up. Family challenges, migrant workers, a difficult cherry crop, and the hard times of post-World War II America, all push the young man into adulthood.
I have been promising cover shots of the book, below are two ideas. I would love to read your comments.
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| Two Cover Ideas - Please comment |
More later . . . .
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