A Line Drawn in Concrete, I don’t always enjoy a book, but I understand why it is so highly rated. One-sentence premise: “Every few weeks, a killer stalks the women of Tokyo, and the police catch him.” And just for the record, I’m a big fan of Japanese manga — both in book form (with translations by Kazumi Oda) and on screen (e.g., The Tokyo Trial, Tokyo Sonata, and Akira). So when my editor asked if I’d like to contribute a short story to a new volume being put together by a Japanese publisher (no link available), I agreed. Now I know that many will say “A short story is great, but a novel would be so much better!” — but I’m willing to risk trying something new. After all, some of my favorite series were first chapters of novels, and they turned out great (e.g., the Fevre books by Ben Aaronovitch and the novels by David Weber). So my submission for this collection was “The Last of the Great Killers.” Here’s the teaser (warning: some spoilers): I suppose I should say a few words about what the book is about. Let’s see. It’s set in 2012. It’s an original piece — not based on a manga (though a couple of characters are Japanese). It takes place in western Japan, though not any town, country, or peninsula. There’s a killer who targets women of a certain age, then leaves her dead with a message written on a wall in her blood. A team of expert detectives use forensic evidence to help them solve the murders. That’s it. If that sounds interesting to you, perhaps you’ll consider helping me celebrate the success of my first publishing deal. Just one caveat — I would not enjoy receiving hate mail (or hate comments) as a result of a wrong vote (or in the event I somehow manage to lose). If you enjoyed the book, please vote for it. No one can argue that I haven’t been busy in the last couple of years. Yes, busy for me but not for all the people around me. My daughter graduated from university, my stepson graduated from high school and has begun the college application process, my husband left his job to enter full-time ministry in our church, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and is in the midst of chemo, my stepbrother retired from a long career at an IT company in another country and entered the final years of his career in his first love — teaching, and a number of other things as well. All this happened in about two years. Life certainly is unpredictable in ways we never thought it could be — but there is one thing that’s certain: Life will not be boring. (If I seem to talk in a “more interesting” manner than usual, please realize that this is just a case of getting caught up on reading and movies that I really should have read or watched a long time ago.) When the semester ended, I made a decision to take some time off from blogging. This was, I think, a wise decision, in large part because what little time I had for reading was used to reading books I had written about earlier and to watching films that deserved some time in the spotlight. (I’m actually thinking of starting an anthology of these writings and film analyses, though there’s no timeline for when that would happen.) So today, I want to talk about what seems to be a good thing: not publishing a book while you’re working on a new one. As I mentioned in my last post, this is what has brought me back to blogging. I had wanted to write something that could either be standalone or serve as a book-end to a series of posts. For me, there are two main reasons for writing posts that are linked (i.e., one is a precursor to the other or both build upon a theme of the other or both are loosely or deeply related to the other). One is that if I only post standalone, there will be gaps between posts. The other is that I only need to write one post, and I have done so in the past. So today, I’ll talk about an idea that might be linked to a new book (or maybe a new post) that I have in mind. In my last post, I talked about why I do not plan ahead. Here’s a sample of some of the reasons: I did not know about the new series at the beginning of it. While that may sound odd, it’s true, and it’s the same for all the other shows and books that have come out in the past few years. While it’s true that I’ve never liked watching things on a schedule, the truth is that sometimes watching a show when it first airs is better, and if you like a book and get into a good groove, you don’t want to break that. The only really compelling reason not to plan ahead (in my opinion) is that there’s no point in planning ahead if the thing you’re planning doesn’t make it. You can’t write a novel in a month if you haven’t written anything else since the first grade, and you can’t write a song in a month if you have never played a musical instrument, and you can’t write a good story in a month if you’ve never sat down and put words to paper or typed on a keyboard. Perhaps the best example of this is watching a movie or TV show for the first time on DVD or Blu-ray or streaming. I think that you can make the point that you can watch your favorites anytime, but I would argue that watching them on DVD or streaming is a more fulfilling experience. There are a number of reasons for this, including, but not limited to: DVDs don’t give you the same sense of discovery that you get from watching a new show with the rest of the world, since there is no “first-run” for DVDs. DVDs and streaming are perfect for the binge-watching concept that television was created for in the first place. As I’ve said before, I’ve been through the writing and editing process, and it is simply more of an investment to buy something in paper format than it is to watch or listen to it. And maybe the most important reason — I don’t want to have a collection of DVDs of books that I wish I had written so I can prove to myself that I should have written them instead of spending so much time doing other things (like reading fiction). It would be like getting a college degree from YouTube instead of getting an actual college degree. It just doesn’t make sense. So while I write and edit and sometimes even write drafts, it is unlikely that I will start a new book until I have finished at least one book-length project. If it takes a while to finish a book-length project, there are a few possible reasons (or excuses) for it: The book took longer to write or produce than expected. I got into writing a book, thought that I would write all of it in three months, and got out of the habit. The writing of the first draft ended up taking more time than I anticipated, and so I had to stop and think about how I would end the book. As a result, it became clear that the book would need additional work. And here’s a reason I’ve never mentioned before: When my wife and I were dating, we went through an exercise where we picked a book from the shelf and spent a day or a week reading it. For me, that’s how The Hunger Games came about (I had been reading since I was in the fourth grade and was already a fan of science fiction — I was just waiting for something different). For my wife, it was a more unlikely candidate: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I don’t think she would have read the book if it wasn’t for that exercise. I can also talk about how I spent my time writing. A friend of mine told me about a great website that I can’t recall right now, but it gave you time in the day that you could then fill with anything you wanted to do that made you happy. Well, back in 2005, I made a calendar like that and was able to do fun things throughout the day instead of having to do the same things (if not the same activities) over and over again. So for