clarification, and questions

First, please excuse what may have seemed like an overreaction to Nancy’s kind words about looking forward to the next book in the series. I plead jet lag, and a virus. Second, I did start working on Queen of Swords as soon as Fire Along the Sky was finished — I just haven’t been working on it lately. I’ve got maybe 250 manuscript pages, and I’ll be going back to it relatively soon.

Generally I work on two projects at once. When one bogs down for whatever reason, I can work on the other. For the last two months I’ve been working primarily on Tied to the Tracks because that story has been cooking — which only means that things are flowing well for that story, at this moment. That will change. It always does. Then I’ll go back to New Orleans where Hannah is in a bit of a pickle at this moment. The reason the story bogged down for me is that a few new characters have just showed up, crucial characters to say the least, and I don’t have a handle on them yet. So I hope that puts everybody’s mind at ease.

Thank you all very much for taking the time to give me your reactions to Fire Along the Sky. I really, really appreciate feedback at this stage especially. I hope others will jump in. I’d be really pleased if people felt comfortable giving me specifics — what parts of the story they liked particularly, which characters had their attention, and also what didn’t quite work for whatever reason. I will answer questions, if you have any, where possible. Finally, for those who haven’t read the book and still intend to, I expect there will be some spoilers in the comments to this post, so you might want to stay away.

When I left for Europe I still hadn’t summarized my thoughts about the excursion into writing sex scenes — which I still intend to do. I also read a couple of interesting books while I was gone, which I’ll review in the next few days.