Greetings from Merrit Island!

Man, you guys should have seen the sunset we had over here. We were eating some salmon en papillote (wrapped in paper, lol) that my sister and I threw together and someone looked out the window - mind blown.

I always use this annual week-long getaway to get some work done. There's beach and sun and pool, but by 11 o'clock, midnight, I'm the only mouse stirring in the house we rent, and I always bring my laptop. Last year was a disaster, 7 days/0 pages, but this year I'm doing pretty good so far. It helps that I have the story fully broken down, where last year I was having a huge crisis of confidence, post-B2, and unsure about what I had for B3.

This year is different; I'm rocking along with the Alec POV and plan on finishing his entire arc by the time we head back to Miami.

I want to take a minute to thank G.R.R. Martin for inspiring me to do a split POV story. Reading the first book in his series blew my mind and sent me on this journey. Another story that had a huge influence was House of Cards, the recent Netflix edition. Watching Spacey chew that script was another paradigm shift for me, making me revisit the entire project. In any case, those are the two main inspirations to IO.

Moving forward, I'm writing the thing in consecutive order, each POV at a time, then I'll go back and interlace the whole thing. I just broke 700 Word pages, and I figure another 300 until I'm done - it'll be a good 2k Kindle pages when all is said and done. I have a full outline to keep me organized, but I'm finding so much more in each character that I didn't have before. This is one of the reasons we pulled it. Sure, it wasn't working as a serialized story, but also, I was discovering a lot about the characters that I wanted to go back and implement from the beginning.

For example, I never realized how important Mistral's father, and his legacy, were going to be to her character arc until I wrote it. Now I'm forced to go back and do some rewriting to backtrack a lot of cool things I've found out about her.

Going through this process makes me respect comic book writers so much more. They're operating on a small piece of the whole, and have to have a level of organization and discipline that I failed to have in my first serialized attempt. If I try it next time, I'll write the whole thing, THEN publish.

As far as when? It's a long term project, let's be realistic. I'm going to retain the previous two editors, and go with the same exact process, so don't expect IO to be done any time soon. I'll keep you up to date with my comings and goings, but I fully expect my next book (B4) to be done before IO ever sees a publication date.

Wait, did he say...WHAT DID HE SAY????

Yes, B4 is going to be next. It's the least I can do for you guys, who have waited so patiently while I fumbled with B3. I have the storyline ready for breakdown, and when Josh finishes editing B3 (and I'm done writing IO) we'll get hard at work making it happen.

So B4 is next, and I really want to get back into my April/May release slot. Damn...I said I wasn't going to talk about dates. It's probably not realistic to expect it so soon. Maybe the June/July thing works better.

Anyways, I have the following ideas for the title of B4:

Blackjack Messiah
Blackjack The Cult
Blackjack Lightbringer

One of the major realizations that I've come to while working on Blackjack is that the Lightbringers will be a major arc, but it won't be the end. So why wait? Let's get that arc started!

Cheers from the Sun and stay safe!