April 18, 2005
I'm recovering from some sort of mild stomach flu that mostly put me on the couch on Sunday. About 85% today, although I'm pretending to be 100% in hopes that reality will catch up. Wrote a book review this morning--David Skibbins' "Eight of Swords." It's his first novel. It won the Malice Domestic First Traditional Mystery Novel Contest and there's been some question as to whether it belongs in that category. I would have questioned it myself, but the novel rocks no matter what the category criticisms might be. I was mildly surprised when I was writing the review just how much I liked it. Assured voice, interesting, quirky, complex character, decent plot, etc. Hope to read his second one when it comes out next year.

Contract negotiations with Llewellyn and their new imprint, Midnight Ink, continue. The latest twist here is my agent has offered them Serpent's Kiss with the possibility of a two-book contract. My gut feeling is if they liked The Devil's Pitchfork they'll love Serpent's Kiss, because Serpent is significantly better, and I thought Pitchfork was very good. This whole process does tend to drag on, though. Of course, after years of beating my head against the wall of publishing and finally making my living as a writer I tend to take it as it comes and not get too excited about any of it until the check clears. There's also a lot of work and hurdles between signing the contract and publishing the book. Some of it's fun, like checking out the cover art and proofing galleys. Some of it, like editing, has its ups and downs. I actually liked the editing process for Dirty Deeds until the p.s. part (or similar initials), where my publisher decided to get testy about some of the profanity. Rather than my probably excessive use of the F word, because the book is set against the backdrop of a TV evangelist, they were concerned about the use of God! and Jesus Christ! and things of that nature. What eventually happened was my editor said she would take them one at a time and make arguments for them. In other words, I turned the whole mess over to her.

Anyway, back to work. I've got some work on The Journal I edit to do, and I should start on a draft of an article about marketing, and I really need to track down an expert on vaccines and...

Best,
Mark Terry