It's been too long...

 For some reason, I just wound up here again.  I just reread the previous posts and that's when it hit me that it has been a little over four years since I last added anything here.  The last thing I was discussing was my books.  My Stillwater group now stands at 15 books with four other WIP's.  No, I haven't made a whole lot of progress in the last couple years.  I'm a tad low on steam generation...as in I've pretty much run out of...

I mentioned previously how I was working on the book where Ash's wife mistakes his long, lost brother for him and plants a liplock on him.  I had a lot of fun with that book.  You'll recall that I mentioned that Ash had triplet sons.  Well, the question was raised after Jason walked into the diner that...what if...there was another brother floating around out there.  So, that book wound up with Jason, hailing from Charleston, SC showing up via his recent stint at LVPD.  After some searching, Brian turns up from Warwick, RI.  He, too, was in law enforcement as a Rhode Island State Trooper.  Like I said, I had fun  with that one.  Ash, as I've indicated before is my comic relief to a certain extent.  He will always be the imp of the group.  Jason has been nicknamed "Sober Sam" because of his more serious demeanor.  Brian is the middle of the road brother in temperment.

The book where the brothers meet wound up being Brian's story.  My imagination really ran wild with that one.  A good portion of the book was the exposure and capture of his stalker.  Lots of twists and turns in that one.  

I was actually surprised that it turned out to be Brian's book since he wasn't the first new character introduced.  Jason's book is the 15th in the series and starts out with a sad event--the death of a beloved character from the other books.  I'll miss Sara Sue.  She was a pistol!  Take heart, though.  She was in her 80's and lived a somewhat fulfilling life.  She never married.  She lost her fiance to the VietNam war.

 Let me jump to my crash survivors now...  The book that was previously stuck at 64 pages is now up to 71 pages.  I made a lot of progress in the last two years...NOT!  I looked at the file date on it and I haven't added to it in a year.  While that book takes place 10 years down the road from the previous one in this series, I couldn't seem to muster much enthusiasm for adding to it.  Because of that, I started a fifth WIP that takes place about another 10 years further on.  I needed to bring in new blood so decided to start writing about the kids that grew up on the mountain while still incorporating the existing characters.  That one hummed along for a bit but then slowed down because I realized that I needed to figure out what the tension factor was going to be in the plot.  It's been a number of months since I added to that one.  I'm still thinking, apparently.

My writing isn't the all-consuming force that it once was.  Maybe that's why I seem to have run out of steam.  I still go through the finished books two to three times a year.  I've got files set up that I can dump into a text-to-speech reader that allows me to listen to them.  I wind up making tweaks here and there as I listen to them.  I find that it has been a big help to load the WIP's into the reader, as well.  It helps me fix awkward sentence structure or can also indicate where I need to elaborate on something.  It's also the poor man's audiobook!  Think I'll load one now--it's been several months since I listened to them.