Blackjack: Dead or Alive is almost done

Almost done, ladies and gents. We're in the edits and I'm giving me another month or two until it's DONE and published.

Just a year late.

I've been pushing it of late, hoping to match the release dates of Villain and Wayward, but it's starting to look like end of May, early June.

The good news is that his sucker is more of the fun Blackjack we all fell in love with in book one, and less of the mopey wuss from book two. Wayward was something he had to go through, and I make no apologies. Dale wouldn't have made it to here without the craziness of book two. In most movies, they fast forward through the part where the anti-hero has to look at himself critically, and admit that he has flaws to overcome. It's usually a quick shot of Matt Damon staring into the horizon dramatically. I wanted the exploration, though, to see where he was going to lead us in the stumbling next steps after a hard fall. As you saw in the initial sequence of Wayward, sometimes we have to hit rock bottom before we can gather our feet beneath us, and in Blackjack's case, it took a mind prison where he had few if any inhibitions for him to see how far he had fallen.

The next step is what this book is about. What do we do when we realize that we're flawed humans, and the hard work to seek redemption is ahead of us. I love how Blackjack confronts his fate in this book. I'd love to think that faced with a similar hard path that I'd have his balls, and his courage.

Blackjack is still Blackjack, though, and no journey with our lovable villain is ever without it's twists and turns...