Beyond the Pool of Stars

I spotted this the other day. A whole slew of copies of my new book ready to be released. Not to the general public yet, alas, but to reviewers. These are advanced reading copies, or ARCs. It won’t be on bookstore shelves until the fall.

It’s so nice to have a new book just about ready to appear in print!

I’m preparing to dive back into another pass on its sequel at the same time I’m performing rather intense revisions on my new series for Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s. Much as I love the temporary title I’ve been using, I’m not sure it really works anymore, at least for the first book in the sequence. In other news, I finally watched the last two episodes of the Daredevil TV show. I found the writing of very high caliber almost all of the time, and the acting was definitely top notch. It was just an all-around extremely well-executed product. I wish one important arc in the next to last episode didn’t resolve in one character’s death, a moment that seemed almost stereotypical, but what are you going to do. Also, the violence was so pronounced my wife had a hard time watching it with me. Her job can be a little traumatic, so she understandably doesn’t like to see trauma enacted on the screen, which is the chief reason I’ve never shown her Justified, my personal pick for the best written show on television in the last decade or so.

The family and I have returned from London and Paris and there are some interesting stories to tell about our times, but I’ll wait until I have ready access to the photos. I still haven’t seen the new Mad Max, or several other new movies that are garnering strong reviews. I suppose the one that interests me the most is Inside Out, although I hear both from my in-laws and Lou Anders that Spy is surprisingly funny, so maybe it’s worth a look… although a rental will probably serve.

We started watching I, Claudius with my oldest teenager the other day while youngest teenager is away at summer camp. She’s a little too young for it yet. I haven’t seen it in decades, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up. My copy comes courtesy of E.E. Knight, who passed on his to mine when he upgraded to Blu-Ray.

That’s really about it. It was wonderful to be able to take the kids to Europe. Now I’m back to the usual things — paying bills, figuring out which things in the house need to be fixed first, getting child 1 ready for college (well, the college part is new!), writing. A lot of people think this writing thing is glamorous, but mostly I’m just sitting in front of a glowing screen typing, or staring off into space in between typing, or doing house chores. I’ll tell you what, though, I know how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living.