One other thing I should mention is that I am going to try to post to this blog more regularly, probably on Sundays. My goal will be to publish every Sunday.

I might not have much to say, but I can always publish progress reports, if nothing else. And as much else as I can find to post about.

I keep piling more and more on my plate. As well as the projects I mentioned last week, I have decided on an additional, and rather ambitious, project to boost my audience.

I call it 15 in 15, when I call it anything at all. My plan is to publish a short story, novelette, or novella a month from October 2016 until December 2017, which means publishing 15 stories in a span of 15 months. This will allow me to build my audience on independent publishing sites by presenting more of my finished works. It will let me clear some things off my hard drive, many of which have been there for too long.

And it will give me the chance to write more short stories. I consider writing short stories to be the area I am weakest in, and this will give me some valuable practice.

As for the content of the stories, those will depend. They aren't all going to be mystery stories. At least one is a fantasy story. This means I also can broaden my horizons and write and publish stories that are outside of my chosen genre.

It's an ambitious plan. I hope to look back on it in December, 2017, and see a successful endeavor.

So what am I working on at the moment?

My main project is the third Charlie Rowe novel, Old Wounds, which is getting close to the end of the first draft. I have also done some work on the first chapter of an as yet untitle slasher-themed novel I thought of some time ago, and I am also ghost writing a story for a client.

When I get this done, I have some other projects to work on. In fact, I have quite a few potential future projects.

I am also considering methods of securing sufficient income that I can devote all of my attention to writing. In other words, I am thinking about a Patreon account. I will let you know more as I decide more.

On top of that, I want to post more regularly here. I am going to try to writie and publish once a week. We'll see how that goes.

I recently finished a novel by an English writer. The hero was an archeoligist, and the novel struck me as a better-written version of The Da Vinci Code. (Of course, wriiting something better than The Da Vinci Code isn't hard, in my opinion.)

One of the biggest problems with this novel, and my parents, who also read the book, agreed with me, is that the writer kept referring, over and over, to a particular physical trait of a particular character. The woman question was a major character, a colleague and apparent romantic interest of the hero, and, as I recall, an officer in the Italian Carabinieri.

She was also well-endowed. There is, of course, nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the author kept mentioning it, with frequent references to the character's "capacious bosom," as one example of the words he used to describge her.

After her introductory description, he never talked about her black hair, or her eyes, or, for example, a strong jaw. Just her bust, over and over.

You can probably see what is wrong with this idea. It's definitely okay to refer to a trait such as a big bust in the initial character description, and even to refer to it if it becomes  plot relevant (for example, two characters are about to have sex,) but not over and over.

Doing so just makes a writer look sleazy and unprofessional. I know it's a problem I've wrestled with, one that beta-readers have commented on many times, and now I try to take pains not to dwell on such things, unless appropriate to do so.

It is a good example of one of the many things to consider when writing a novel.