Years ago…I mean eons ago, when I was in grade school…I used to change what I was going to do with my life from day to day. One day it would be a fireman, the next an archeologist, the next a soldier. It wasn’t until I got into high school that I started dabbling with the idea of being a writer. Why? I realized that being a writer allowed me to live all of those other lives vicariously. As I look back through my 21 books, I have been a small-town pastor, a gunslinger, a 15-year-old girl, a terrorist, a prince of Israel, a professor (well, no surprises there), and well, you get the idea.
I’ve turned the corner on Tesla’s Ghost, my novel about Nikola Tesla and his assistant that leads up to possibly solving global warming…or perhaps to an alien invasion. The book is with beta readers as we speak, and I hope to get it back soon. My next project is entitled The Key of Solomon and involves witchcraft, Egypt, the Library of Alexandria, Coptic Christianity and a bunch more stuff. It’s a sequel to Salome’s Charger and book two in Celeste’s and my Foundation series. And if it works, it promises to open a major can of worms that will make each and every book in the future more exciting than the one before.
But right now, I am writing out possible storylines and doing research. What do I know about Coptic Christianity, other than it dates all the way back to the Apostles? And what do I know about the Library of Alexandria, other than it existed for 2,300 years, held 400,000 books from throughout the world and was first burned during the Roman Civil War in 43 B.C.? Well, that’s what research is for.
All those years ago, when I was thinking about being a fireman or archeologist, I could have studied one of those and become really good at saving people from fires or digging pots out of the ground. But instead I chose a life where I constantly learn each time I decide to write a book. And I am glad I did.
The Great Adventure 