What Am I Working On?

The cover for my next book.
Click on it to see it at a larger size.

Hey guys. I just wanted to post a little update sharing what I'm working on right now. My oldest son started to really enjoy reading this year. Since then he's turned 8. I started buying all kinds of books for him. I read some of the books too. They were fun! It made me really want to write a book for kids my son's age. These books are called chapter books. I'm setting out to make mine about 10,000 words long with nice short zippy 500 word chapters. So that's 20 chapters. I'm also going to be doing a bunch of illustrations for it. That will be really fun. So far I've only sketched out one illustration. I've written the first 7 chapters and you can actually read those here on Wattpad.

Here's what the book is about:

Barnabas and his friend Jeff made a great snowman but the next morning it was gone! From the huge round footprints in the ground it looks like something unbelievable happened. The crimes get worse and affect Barnabas's father. Now Barnabas has no choice but to solve this mystery or his innocent father will be in a lot of trouble.

This grade school chapter book is full of laughs, adventure, mystery, and magic. It's great for intermediate readers ages 7 and up but adults will love it too! A great story to read to kids or to give to children who have started reading longer books.

So that's what I'm up to! After I finish it I'm going to revise a full length Science Fiction novel I wrote a long time ago. It's been through like 5 revisions but I tucked it away for years. Recently I started re-reading it. I was surprised to see that it's really good! I think with some chapters getting erased and some tweaking to fix the flow and plot it's going to be an amazing read. I think I set the wrong expectations for myself and the beta readers about the story. I touted it as a SciFi adventure. In fact it's a family drama dealing with the theme of a recession set in space mostly about the main character learning that family is more important than work and money. The recession we went through back in 2008 inspired this novel and I'm excited to dust it off and revise it and then get it in the hands of beta readers again and eventually get it published. I hated my names for it, but first it was titled "The Trading Family." Then I named it "Recession." Now I've come up with the title I'm going to stick with. It will be called "We're Moving to Space." I can't wait to dig into it again. But first I have to finish this chapter book. Well I better get back to it! Thanks for stopping by!