I've been busy. I found out about my cover art for Ghost Medicine and it is amazingly good news. I hope to be able to put a cover image here and on the website soon, and talk about the perfect-match artist who's doing the work.
Meanwhile, I've been revising Bird, the second book my agent sold to my editor, but I've been working slower than usual on it because I'm spending a lot of time restructuring it in my head.
All this takes such a long time. Everyone said that going in. I wrote Ghost Medicine in 2004, and got an agent right away for it. She and I worked on it for quite a while and it sold a year ago in 2006 at auction in a two-book deal that included Bird, which I wrote in 2005. In April, I flew out to New York to meet everyone at the publishing house and get to work with my editor. The edits weren't major, and we finished them in October. I'm really happy with what we did. Now I'm waiting for the rest of the stuff to happen... the stuff that I don't have much of a hand in.
And I kind of miss conversing with my editor now that the final version is complete. She helped me become a better writer, and through her work I learned to see things that I just didn't recognize before. And she always seemed to find the perfect word to place in the perfect spot that matched my style and what I was trying to say.
I hope she enjoys working with Bird , because it is so different from Ghost Medicine . Bird is a darker story, set in the 1880s (a lot of research went into this). It is also told in a first-person account, so the voice and idioms used have an 1880s "accent." One of the things I researched for Bird was news reporting in the 1880s, because I use some newspaper accounts and descriptions of actual events in the story. I had to trim down that style a bit, though, because news writing in the 1880s was so convoluted and drawn-out. You'll see. But I don't want to give away too much of the plot, except to say that Bird takes place in California and tells a story of revenge and murder, addiction and cruelty, and accounts for the cost of believing in lies.
