The ideas keep coming, lots of them discarded, but I'm writing again. I'm going to put the books I've written on Amazon, and I'm looking into their "print on demand" option. If I can handle the costs, I'll do that, which'll put my books on paper.
Del and Kenan are now on a ship off Novy Kruz, around the 80,000 word point, heading for the blowoff, if I can keep all the pieces moving right. They're about to take down one bad guy. I still trying to figure why they're not taking down the big bad guy too. I had a reason when I started this part, but I've forgotten what it was.
The book I'm working on now involves Andi and Elliott. They're meeting up after a ten year hiatus. He's a nice fellow, and Andi is a nice girl who wasn't nice in her teen years. She was her brother's personal sex toy from the time she was twelve, and he started renting her out when she was fourteen. When she was sixteen and a half she trafficked, sold off like a cow with her friend Janie, for a life hooking in Amsterdam and Berlin -- from where they could be sold off to any other destination. It's a pretty nasty background.
This demands a lot of character development. Andi's a nice, pretty, intelligent girl, who was led wrong from an early date. She carries an enormous guilt over those teenage years, both for what she did and for the loss of Janie. On a bad day, her self worth is dipping into negatives. When she escapes from her training house, which she doesn't realize was Elliott's doing, she enlists in the Army, trains as a combat medic, and goes to Afghanistan. She reenlists, trains as a practical nurse, and goes back to the 'Stan. When she's discharged, she goes to New Mexico and trains as a registered nurse. So she's actually made something of herself, trying to put the sins of her youth behind her. Still, she doesn't date, lives a solitary life with her cat in her old student apartment. She's now scared to death of sex and by extension men.
Elliott isn't scared of sex. He's scared for Andi. He was the one who bought out her contract. He had expected to take care of her and assist her in getting her life on track. Instead, she ran off, effectively dropped off the face of the earth. He had thought she was dead, and he had mourned her for ten years, throwing himself into his own work as a micromechanical engineer working in the field of gene surgery. I'm at that point in development now. I'm hoping it will all come together in the end without too much reliance on coincidence, deux ex machina, or space aliens.
