Baby Shark Returns With A Vengeance

I await each new appearance of Baby Shark with breathless anticipation, and High Plains Redemption doesn't disappoint. Kristin van Dijk returns with a vengeance, a little older, a little more determined, dangerous as always—and still a crack nine-ball player. This time, Kristin must not only confront politically-connected gangsters and savage hired guns but also the dark shadow her own history casts within her. Taut and unrelenting, with an edge of cool humor and a foundation of essential humanity, High Plains Redemption is a marvelous new chapter in the Baby Shark story.

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The Home Stretch

Last night I finish my third pass on my WIP, which I've now started to call Oblivion of Hummingbirds. My second-place title candidate is Chasing Smoke. Both work on a thematic level, but for now I prefer Hummingbirds, both for its distinctiveness and subtlety.

The third pass wasn't a true new draft, though sections novel saw significant changes. The second draft was far more substantial. Still, I did lots of cleaning up and tidying, tying off loose ends and massaging clues.

All that remains now is for me to get through about a page of random notes: double-check timing here and there, make sure I catch every instance of a character name change, etc. Then I'm going to give the manuscript a complete read through one more time. My plan right now is to send it to my agent Janet on Friday, and I have no reason to think I'll miss. Of course, it might be Friday night, but, hey, my target is twenty-four hours huge! Right?

If I get pinched I know there's a weekend there to finish up, but there's some stuff going on this weekend so Friday is pretty fixed in my mind.

And, of course Janet might come back and say, "Yes, but what about . . . ?" or "I think you need to . . . " :D

In other news, I want to congratulate Robert Fate, whose Baby Shark's Beaumont Blues received a starred review in Library Journal. I had the great privilege of reading an ARC of Beaumont Blues, and it's my feeling that Robert has taken an already great character and made her better. The complex, damaged, yet resilient Kristin van Dijk is a little older and wiser, but no less determined and focused. She now puts her instincts and the skills she developed in Baby Shark to professional use, but her underlying need for justice continues to drive her choices as she and partner Otis Millett search for a missing, and deeply troubled, heiress.

And finally, I'd like to draw your attention to a fascinating interview of Sean Chercover in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Lost Man

This is how out of it I am. I had to get an email from a friend in Chicago (hi, Julia!) to learn that a major national news story right now is the man missing in the mountains of Southern Oregon -- practically my own back yard. How did I miss that? The good news is though his family was missing with him, the mother and their two daughters have been found. Now the search is down to the father, James Kim of San Francisco. I hope he is found soon, and found well. Conditions are not friendly to a man on foot in that area.

I'm distracted by things like working through the edits of lost dog, which are wonderfully thorough and often humbling -- but thank goodness for editors! Day job work has picked up in December, which is exactly upside-down of what usually happens this time of year. I like that, actually, because summer was dead as a doornail and nothing wrong with making up some lost ground in the billable hours department.

And yet, book two, which was once called Death With Dignity and then became Skin and now might be The Five Dead Men, or perhaps just The Dead Men, fills my thoughts. And after writing a sentence like that last one, clearly my thoughts are dangerously discombulated. The shower is especially dangerous. Did I lather, or forget to lather because I was so busy ruminating on whether or not to pull the trigger in chapter twenty-five. Hmmm.

And there's this whole holiday thing. I like pretty lights, and egg nog, and fruit cake, but I'm not real hip on the burdens of expectation that come with the season. I guess if I don't get my ass in gear the cards won't go out. Oy. But the lights did go up on the house this weekend, and they're purty. I like 'em. So does my son, who on Saturday and Sunday night both wanted to go out every ten minutes into the frigid night to look at them. Not that I can blame him.

With all this stuff to do, I admit I cheated a bit last week. I had the chance to read an ARC of Baby Shark's Beaumont Blues by Robert Fate, and I took it! And let me tell you Beaumont Blues kicks some serious ass. Robert Fate has raised the bar and then leaped right over it. If you liked Baby Shark (and if you haven't picked it up, oh it's a must) you will love Beaumont Blues!

So now I'm back to work. On. Um. Whatever it was. Can someone remind me?