Chocolate City Justice

With the book launch of Jambalaya Justice barely over, I finally had some time over the break to work on Chocolate City Justice. My publisher recently contacted me about a possible July release day, to time it to coordinate with the PSWA writer's conference, a conference in Las Vegas I try to attend every year.

The deadline was a little short, so I suggested a release date later in the year, but the question did bring working on the novel back into my focus again. I mainly worked on retooling the outline, something I'm still in the process of doing.

When I write, I do an initial outline. I then start writing, and after several chapters I realize it's missing something, whether it's one of the secondary plot lines, a supporting character, a scene, whatever it is, I go back and modify the outline.

Right now, I have the initial outline and about 30,000 words written, but I've had to change the outline and in doing that realized a few issues that have to be resolved. So I've stopped the forward progress of actually writing the novel to tinker with the outline and make the story better.

This is a process I'll do several times before the book is ready to go to my publisher. So while it won't be ready in July, it should be ready before the end of 2012.

In between the writing and the retooling the outline, I'll continue to promote Jambalaya Justice and Gumbo Justice until I can announce the release of the third in the series.