It's been over a year since I finished Three Tales By the Bay and I haven't had a lot of time to write.

I took on a contract that was very intense and had a one hour commute to the job site each way, so not only didn't I have time to write, I also got fat! Financially it did well, but I'm glad its over.

One interesting thing that came of it was that I drove by the Iron Point light rail-station in Folsom almost everyday. That light-rail station is the one Luz used to take Cody to the hospital (Three Tales By the Bay). The first couple of days I went by it I kind of teared up for my hurt characters. A few weeks later I drove over on my lunch break and wandered around the little station half expecting them to show up. They didn't.

I've been working on the short story collection a little. I still have a long way to go on it, but I might be able to get it done in early 2018 if things go well. I started out doing short stories and was looking forward to getting back to it, but I'm finding that I don't get as attached to the characters and I kind of miss the novel format. So, when this one is done, I'll go back to a longer format, either another novel, or maybe something structured like a mini-series.

I've been exploring new ways to market my books. I won't put a huge push on until the third book is complete and I have my own delivery platform fully working. There are so many books available now that it's very difficult to get noticed. The new platform is meant to help with that and also solve a problem my youngest son has been having finding non-depressing, interesting books without having to slog through 500 not so nice ones.

He actually wrote his own filter to run on Calibri just to reduce the amount of foul language he had to wade through. Hearing him talk about it reminded me of how down hearted I used to get blundering around inside Block Buster back when that was a thing. I've looked around and haven't found any well functioning bookstores that only have great stuff in them. I don't know if I can do better. It takes a ton of work to put these things together and maintain them, and there are reasons most platforms try to carry everything. But I'm hoping I can put up something that will at least be useful to a few folks out there.