Saturday afternoon I finished reading through In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, marking locations to improve the text. Most of the edits were for typos, improving odd sentence structure, and fixing name problems. By that I mean where I used people’s names too much in dialogue. Also, I found one embarrassing error in a name, where I changed it very early on in the writing but somehow missed one place. The MS Word search and replace feature tells me that was the only straggler.

I finished typing the edits yesterday afternoon. I’ll print it today and set it aside for a couple of weeks. Actually, I’m not sure how long that will be. The editor I e-mailed three chapters and a synopsis to said he was sending the chapters to “readers,” and they would “get back to me in a few weeks.” While I’m reconciled that I will probably self-publish this, I’m willing to delay a little to let that run its course.

Meanwhile, I have to be writing. So yesterday I switched back to my non-fiction work-in-progress, The Candy Store Generation”. I added 400 words to it last night, coming close to finishing Chapter 5, Boomer Corporations. I still have research to do on that, to plug a hole reserved for it about 1/4 of the way into the chapter. But the words are almost done.

I haven’t been thinking of TCSG for over a month, and I’ve actually forgotten where I was in it. I know I’m shooting for 40,000 words, and that I’m at 32,800 now, implying another 7,200 to go. But that word count is a target only. I’m thinking the book may fall short of that and be at a logical concluding point.

I’d really like to get this done and published in time to perhaps ride the coattails of the current election cycle. Not that I think it will be a huge seller or have an impact on the election, but while people’s attention is on politics, it probably has a better chance at success.

Depending on how the research goes, I should be able to have it done in a month or less. I can then take up to a month to edit it, and try to have it published by mid-July. That’s later than I hoped, but it’s doable. I would then try to have FTSP out a couple of weeks later, still well within baseball season.

My plans are then to work on two short stories. One will be in my Danny Tompkins series, on teenage grief. It will probably be the last one. The other will be the first of what could become a series, but which might be a singleton. It will be an espionage story set in Cranston, RI (my hometown), with the heroine having the name of a classmate of mine, with her permission. I’ve written the first two paragraphs of this, and have been plotting it in my mind.

I don’t know where this will lead. If I like the way it turns out, I could turn it into a series, having this female CIA operative go to various places I have been overseas. That would be a way to use these experiences in my writing, something I’ve been wondering how to do.

After that, assuming I’m not brain-dead, I have a choice between three or four projects. I had been thinking about working on another novel, an espionage one, tentatively titled China Tour. I also see a possibility of working on more volumes in the Documenting America brand. I started a little research on what could be a Civil War edition of that. Given that we are at the sesquicentennial of that conflict, the timing is good.

However, I may just go ahead and write a sequel to FTSP. My friend Gary, who was a beta reader, said, “The ending says a lot but leaves much unsaid as well.  That’s a perfect setup for a sequel.” As I wrote in the past, I hadn’t really thought about that, and didn’t consciously write the end to launch a sequel. But I’ve looked at it, and he’s right. When I wrote out, in manuscript, all the loose ends, I came up with more than enough to make a similar length novel. The penultimate scene near the end has come to mine—indeed, I’ve had trouble getting it out of my mind. Even a potential title has reared up.

So that’s where I may be going. No shortage of work. And to think, back in 2000, I just wanted to tell a single story. Now it’s a snowball running downhill.