Reading for a living...a bibliophile's dream...

I'm interrupting my saga of ridiculous book cover stories because...well, because I can.  :-D  One of the attractions of blogging is the fact that there is no one looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do.

Today, I'm mailing in the edited galleys of Strangers (coming in October, preorderable now--buy early and often...), so it's time to turn my attention to Faye's next adventure. 

This is the unglamorous part of writing fiction for a living.  You do not produce a book a year by sitting around and eating bonbons.  You finish one job, then you start another.

Anyway...the new book is nameless, but I know that it will be set in the Keys, because I love the idea and my agent loves the idea and my editor loves the idea.  So that was an easy decision.

I'm currently in the phase of book development that I call "reading for a living."  I have crawled all over the web for information, rumor, and innuendo that might be useful for this book.  Now, I've assembled a stack of books that I believe will give me a good grasp of the history and culture of my setting.  When you write the kind of books I do, you've gotta know this stuff.

So for the next few days, I'm diving into an archaeology paper reporting on work done in the Keys in the 1970s. A history of the building of the railroad to Key West in 1912. A Keys history book aimed at tourists. A memoir of a black man who dived on a slave ship sunk in a great storm in the 1700s. And, my favorite, a tome called X MARKS THE SPOT: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF PIRACY.

Gawd, I love my work...