Trotting the Globe Aboard The Globe

Please indulge me as I do a little boasting . . . to strut my stuff, as it were, for a moment.  On this blog we’ve covered everything from photography tips to travel.  We’ve done movie and book reviews.  We’ve drooled over gourmet food and fine wines.  We’ve had a chuckle or two over the occasional humor piece.  We’ve been keeping up to date on the crisis this country faces in aviation safety and the deterioration of the air traffic control system.

But, while fun and informative, these are not the primary reason for this blog—they’re just the bait I use to get you to spread the word about and perhaps buy my current mystery novel and to consider purchasing my upcoming action thrillers—the Ian Drake series.

So, it is with great pride and considerable relief that I can finally announce that, for all practical purposes, the first draft of my mystery thriller The Globe is finally coming to an end.  Less than half a chapter to go, and that’ll get knocked out by probably Saturday evening, if not sooner.

It’s been a long, hard journey on this one, and it is by far the most difficult and complex tale I’ve yet woven.  It’ll probably take another month to complete my initial rewrites and editing, and then it goes out to my beta readers for additional review, suggestions, and corrections.

After that, it’s off to my agent Henry, who will get first shot at seeing if he wants to represent this piece and find a publisher for it.

In its current, almost finished form, The Globe stands at 84,984 words spread out over thirty-seven chapters covering 405 manuscript pages.  Hopefully that word count will get knocked down a bit to around the 75,000 range, or a little shorter, after I tighten up the prose and the story a bit.

After The Globe is shipped out to New York, I begin the rewrites of my three Ian Drake novels for publication on both the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook later this year.  This series was written back in the 1990s, and book two had at one point three studios considering it for movie treatment.  Alas, that’s a long, sad tale that we’ve already covered in A Tale of Woe and Misfortune Like No Other.  At any rate, you can look for the Ian Drake series to start trickling out in the next several few months.

And what is the Ian Drake series?  Ian Drake is a globe-trotting aircraft sabotage investigator working for the U.S. Government in the immediate wake of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and during the early rise in global terrorism.  He travels to exotic and exciting destinations, from the Swiss Alps and Egypt in his first adventure, An On Time Departure, to Sydney, Australia in And the Games Begin.  This second story in the series, And the Games Begin, is the tale nearly optioned by Hollywood.

The third novel in the series is Grand Slam, a pulse-pounding thriller that takes you from the Arizona desert, to a maximum security prison in Alabama, to U.S. airbases in England and Italy, to a tantalizing chase through Turkey.  Grand Slam culminates in a heart-stopping tale of death that finds Ian Drake aboard a luxury cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea—a ship caring not only the rich and famous, but also a very deadly secret cargo that will leave the U.S. military no choice but to sink the ship with all aboard, or risk a new and devastating war in the Middle East.

If action is your escape, you’ll love this upcoming series.