And so the proverbial feline has escaped from the satchel. The co-author I referred to in my State of the Fourth Estate post in March has revealed himself: Larry Karp, aka “Dad”.

As he says in that post on the Poisoned Pen Press authors’ blog, I lent him an editorial hand and eye on his non-fiction project last year, and that led directly to our fiction collaboration. Ethically, I can’t review Brun Campbell, The Original Ragtime Kid and its companion CD, Essays in Ragtime: The Music of Brun Campbell. But I can urge you to buy them–there’s more information on the project here, including direct links for purchasing. Buy ’em! And then post reviews.

Word of mouth and online reviews are the best advertising for books and music. Buy, buy, buy! Review, review, review!

[Ahem] Sorry. Let’s move on.

When I wrote that earlier post, our collaboration was still in the hands of the beta readers, and the working title was so new, we weren’t sure it was going to stick. Two months later, we’ve completed our post-beta revisions, and we’re very happy with The RagTime Traveler–both the title and the book itself.

I never expected to write a mystery, and I never expected to collaborate on a book. Writing RTT could have been a horrific experience on both counts, but it turned out very well. Our writing styles meshed nicely–we’re both seat-of-the-pants writers, preferring to plan the first draft no more than a couple of chapters in advance–and the mystery developed quite naturally. Thank God neither of us is a compulsive outliner, or we’d still be fighting over the first draft, instead of watching Draft 4 slide out of the printer.

The RagTime Traveler involves time travel, but it’s not a time travel novel. Nobody’s grandfather is killed, and there are no Time Cops playing deus ex machina.

RTT is a mystery novel. Do you have to accept the reality of time travel to solve the mystery? Nope. All the clues you need are in the present. But it’s a story that couldn’t have been written without involving time travel. That would have been a very different–and IMNSHO, much less interesting–book.

I’ll be saying more about RTT, but I hope I’ve intrigued you. It’s never too early to start that word of mouth advertising.

So what’s next? I’m taking a vacation. It’ll be interesting to see if I still remember how to not write. After all, it’s been more than three years since I spent an entire week not writing.

No writing includes the blog. There won’t be posts next Tuesday and Thursday. There will be cat posts tomorrow and next Friday–I know better than to deprive you of those! The photos are taken, and the posts are written and scheduled.

Mind you, just because I won’t be writing, that doesn’t mean I won’t be working. There’s one last job to be done before we submit RTT to a publisher.

Legend has it that the murderer always returns to the scene
of the crime–and who’s more of a murderer than the author? My co-conspirator and I are off to Sedalia, MO; there’s a murder scene we need to visit.