Today I submitted Welch Avenue Wizards for publication. It is the fourth novel in the G&B Detective Agency Series. A lot of people have been asking me when the next one was coming out, and I didn’t know. But it seemed like I was writing a lot, just nothing was getting there. It felt like a long time between Where the Hell is Angie and Welch Avenue Wizards. So I counted on my fingers and figured it out that the first three came out over a period of eight months. It took nine months from Angie until Welch Avenue Wizards was ready for publication. So I pondered a bit about why, and I realized that I actually wrote two novels during that period of time. I wrote Case of the Cold Case as well. So mystery solved. I’m not slowing down in my old age. That’s nice to know

I’m sure that people are going to start asking about Cold Case. Well, yes it is almost ready to publish. I still have to go through it one more time to check for errors that have slipped past us, but it is that close, one read away. I even have a cover for it, which is usually the very last obstacle for me. I’ll sit on it for a while though. I’ll let people read Welch Avenue Wizards first. In the meantime, I’m writing Case of the Femme Fatal, number six. And it is close to first draft, so I’m kind of excited about that. The important thing here is that my readers, and I appreciate my readers a lot, won’t have to wait nine months for the next one. Happy reading, and enjoy the Welch Avenue Wizards.

Sunday afternoon and we just finished going through the proof of Welch Avenue Wizards, and I think it is a good book. Going through the proof is one of the last things we do before it gets published and released to sell.

After we published Case of the Missing Tucker we started a process where Denise reads the whole book out loud to me. Three reasons for that: The first one is that it forces her to concentrate on each word. She catches a lot of errors doing that, many more than we were catching before we started reading it out loud. The second is that it lets us hear how the story flows. There is a big difference between listening to the flow when she reads it out loud and just looking at it on paper. This one flows well. The third is that I get to listen to it, to hear if it sounds like a good book or not. I can sit back, stare out the window, disassociate myself from the written word, and listen to it. It has to sound good to read well. Welch Avenue Wizards passed all three tests.

If you look at the picture you will see a bunch of little tags flagging pages in the book. Those are mistakes. But they are just little things, a letter capitalized that shouldn’t be, a comma instead of a period, missing quotation marks. That’s what we find when Denise reads it out loud instead of just going over it visually. All and all, that is actually a pretty clean book. Probably the cleanest thus far at this point. It won’t take much to fix those errors.

We also have just a few things that need to be tweaked on the cover. The synopsis and the author bio on the back cover doesn’t look just right. It will take a little time, but it is not a huge undertaking. Like I said, a little tweaking should take care of it. Then it should be ready to publish. Stay patient another week or two.