At the end of May I received two comments on my blog in response to my post “Instead of a treadmill desk – a jogging trampoline!” I intended to respond but life got in the way. My husband came down with a mystery infection and then had emergency surgery the first week in June. He came home after almost a week in the hospital and had to undergo six weeks of in-home IV treatment, with me playing nurse.
Things are sort of getting back to normal around here. Sort of.
Don hasn’t been back to his office, but he’s off the IV and now going to physical therapy about three times a week. In spite of his pain and fatigue he’s getting some work done (he is a real estate broker), but that means he’s moved into my home office and we are sharing a desk. I bought one of those little devices that hook up two computers to the same monitor and keyboard, so both of our desktop computers are on my roll top desk.
I don’t use my desktop computer much these days—and prior to Don getting sick, I used to put my laptop on the desk’s keyboard drawer when I wasn’t standing on the trampoline typing.
When Don came home from the hospital the trampoline got shoved aside. I’ve just recently set it up again, yet I’m not using it at the level I was before, for one thing Don and I are still sharing the office, and when I write I can’t do it with anyone in the room. This means I often retreat to the living room couch with my laptop, to find solitude necessary for me to write. Fortunately it is swimming weather, so the pool gives me a daily work out.
As for my writing, yesterday I sent my latest book off to the editor—Haunting Danielle. I normally write fiction under my pen name, Anna J. McIntyre and non-fiction under my real name. But Haunting Danielle is a little different from my other McIntyre books, so I was trying to decide if I wanted to publish under my real name—or the pen name I normally use for fiction.
I decided to publish the book under both names. Why? you ask. It will let my McIntyre readers know the book has a slightly different flavor from my other titles under that name, yet like the McIntyre books it is character driven.
One of my greatest marketing failings as an independent author is creating a series that doesn’t neatly fall under a specific genre. I did this with my McIntyre’s Coulson Series—and now I’ve done it again with Haunting Danielle. I’m trying to pin it down–a ghost story, paranormal mystery, with a splash of romance and maybe a bit on the cozy side. There’s no graphic sex in this one—and while many of my readers insist McIntyre romances are on the clean and sweet side, some reviewers claim there is too much graphic sex in my books. Go figure.
Haunting Danielle is the first book in a new series by the same name. Look for its eBook release on September 1, 2014.