Too Many Books

So I’ve been sick the last few days. Nothing serious, but enough to get me to the doctor’s who tells me there’s something going around. I tell her that on top of the sniffling and sneezing and coughing and tearing eyes, my right elbow and forearm really have been hurting for the past few weeks. Tendonitis, she says, and asks, “What have you been doing lately?”

Writing, I say.

Ah. She says, that explains it.

It’s true. I’ve been spending between six and ten hours a day at the computer. In bed yesterday and debating on taking Theraflu or antihistamines, or both, I suddenly realized I was working on eight books at the same time. This is seriously taxing my ADD.

Eight, you ask.

Yes.

How did that happen?

I have no idea.

My crime novel Thirst is out, but I spend at least an hour a day hyping it on Goodreads, Amazon, Book Bubs and other websites designed to promote ebooks.

Dope is the sequel to Thirst. Colin Marsh investigates why so many addicts are suddenly overdosing. Bikers, politicians, dealers and hit men… I’ve just started writing it and I’m not totally sure where it’s going. I know I like the characters. They’ve got legs; I always enjoy it when characters get a life of their own. That happens with books.

Two novels just came back from the copy editors.

Lurid Tales, Desperate People will be going out to agents within a week or so. It deals with the repercussions of a woman’s half-million-dollar elective surgeries on her neighbors. What happens when mousy Marcia returns a transformed woman after a month in India’s best plastic surgery hospital? By the way, it’s funny. Really. I wrote it and sometimes I laugh aloud when I reread it…

Montparnasse will also be going to the agents soon. This is the story of a young American couple honeymooning in Paris in 1919, when the Montparnasse neighborhood was the epicenter of Western culture. Modigliani, Renoir, Cocteau, Brancusi, and opium addiction. And Landru, France’s first documented serial killer is lurking in the shadows.

L’Amérique  is the first book in a trilogy about a French family’s decision to move to America in the mid-1950s. That one is finished too and needs only a last read-over.

The First Few Years is the working title of the second book in the trilogy. I have about 200 pages written.

The Few and the Fortunate—IVS Volunteers from Asia to the Andes. This is a book I was commissioned to write about International Volunteer Services, the precursor to the Peace Corp. More than 100 former IVS volunteers contributed stories about their years in the field. Anyone interested in development issue should read this. It’s at the designers and should be out within a month or two.   

Lastly, I am going to do a revival of one of my earlier books, The IFO Report. I figure if Auntie Mame and Cabaret can be revived every few years, why not a book?

And of course there are a couple of ideas percolating. I try to stay away from those. 

Eight is enough.