Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog

There aren’t a ton of overlaps between my day job and my secret life as an author, but the one that seems to tie them inexorably to each other is the work that goes into maintaining my website. I’ve probably selected a path that is atypical for most authors in that the solution I chose a number of years ago is a balance between being hosted in the cloud and having full control over the actual content there; my reasoning at the time was that websites are kind of my thing (hence wanting full control) but I had no desire to actually maintain the hardware to run them (hence the hosting). For the most part that has worked out quite nicely, though every now and again I run up against some sort of oddity that requires me to don my Tech Nerd hat.

Case in point: somewhere along the line last spring, I lost access to the open source image library my blog often uses. It wasn’t a big deal as I have plenty of my own photos to use, but the convenience of finding an image that “fit” whatever article I was writing instead of hunting through my own files was pretty nice. Then, maybe in mid-summer, I began to see an error when crafting these posts; it was incredibly generic, though, and after a number of fruitless web searches, I had absolutely no idea what was causing it to appear. Posting content didn’t seem to be affected, so like a terrible end user, I kept on grooving.

Okay: in fairness the techie inside my brain was paying attention and worried that the message was some sort of canary in a coal mine. And, as it turns out, said canary was right on the money, for in August I suddenly lost the ability to share my posts across all of my social media platforms. That impacted me far more than anything else, so I dove back into everything again and pulled back far more layers of the onion than ever before. The culprit appeared to be a base module in my website, one responsible for both preventing spam but also was keeper of the statistics; that the reports on web traffic suddenly all slipped to zero around the same time felt like a clue even my fictional detectives might not have missed.

And yet, armed with such knowledge I still had no idea how to fix the problem. Endless searches across the web resulted in answers ranging from delete your entire website and start over to jettison that tool and buy ours for the low, low monthly fee of $x per year. None of them seemed right, especially to someone used to looking through error logs and not predisposed to assume the initial error is actually what’s going on. I’ve written plenty of code in my years as a software developer, enough to have suffered a multitude of self-inflicted bugs that have long since made me paranoid and suspicious.

So, back to the logs I went, hunting for what I presumed would be hiding there: much like Vasily scouring the financials from a suspect, I scrolled endlessly looking for some sort of anomaly that, on first blush, might seem innocuous. This past weekend, that review finally paid off when I discovered my troubles started about when this module updated last spring; each successive increase in problems coincided with another update, almost as though the features in the package were somehow slowly becoming incompatible with my website.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how can that happen?

That’s a great question, and the answer lies in how a developer might handle what we think of as legacy applications. In my case, the software running my website is so-called backwards compatible to several older versions of server operating software. Unfortunately — or, at least as far as I can divine without decompiling the code in question — this module that is integrated into my website is making use of newer features in newer versions of that server operating system, one that, as it turns out, I was not running.

At least, not until late Sunday afternoon. Once I tracked down how to request the upgrade from my hosting company, it took another few minutes to reset a few authentication tokens and just like that… no more errors. Not only that, both the open source image library and my ability to post to social media also magically returned. From what I can tell, it seems my willingness to allow the website software to automatically keep itself up-to-date ran up against the hosting company’s policy of deferring to the client on such things. Is that a bad thing? Probably not, though it also tells me I need to be more vigilant when the website software proudly informs me it’s now running the latest and greatest whatever.

Oddly, that is so not how I do things in my day job; we try extremely hard not to upset the applecart with any of our updates, nor do we embrace enhanced features until we are sure all of users can, well, use them. Some of that is just policy I’ve developed from years of being in this business, but the rest is a healthy understanding of what a mistake can do to a client. I feel fortunate that I was able to troubleshoot my personal website, but I am keenly aware not all authors are comfortable in that space. I’m sure that’s why there are hosting solutions out there that require far less technical expertise, but the tradeoff is a severe lack of flexibility. Maybe it’s worth it to some, but for me, for now, I’ll stick it out with what I have currently.

At least, until the next thing breaks.

It’s kind of ingrained into me now to be up to my eyeballs in writing during the month of November. While NaNoWriMo may no longer exist, the patterns I developed when it was in full swing continue to this day, though I have to admit, the accountability the little word counter their website offered during the various writing periods was quite the inducement for moving forward. My current writing tool of choice — Scrivener — offers something similar, though I don’t often dig deeper into the more granular stats it keeps. The one time I did, I was moderately surprised to find out weekends were the days when I wrote the most; makes sense, I suppose, given how I’m working this whole novelist thing around my actual daytime gig.

November has also long been the dominion for my original character, Sean Colbeth. Only on one occasion did I not work on a novel for his series during this part of the calendar; that was a two years ago when I wrote the initial part of Reflection in the Shadows. Since then, I’ve reverted to form and generally find myself deeply enmeshed in whatever adventure Sean manages to get himself mixed up in; as the calendar closes in on Thanksgiving, I’m close to a third of the way through Aftermath and on track to have it done by year end. In past years I’ve often started working on the “November Project” in mid-to-late October, sneaking in a few weeks of bonus work; this year, due to a bunch of traveling — mostly around those pesky half marathons I’ve been running — I was forced to start pretty much on November 1. That’s not a bad thing, but my inner writer feels guilty about not being further along.

I also feel the most in tune with Sean during November; some of that has to do with the fact his first novel, Blindsided, pretty much takes place then. But the larger part has to do with my own feelings about Maine, and how, for many years, I spent the two weeks around Halloween visiting with family back there. My sense of how the state exists during that not-quite-completed transition from summer to fall to winter is quite vivid, right down to the chilly breeze that can slice through any amount of fabric you care to wear. The trees are often bare but the grass is sometimes still green, though it could crackle beneath your step if an overnight freeze had occurred. It’s a season of contradictions, rife with nefarious possibilities that just seem perfectly suited for my detective to tackle — especially with the promise of a year-end redemption waiting in the wings.

Sean, obviously, senses all of this thanks to his author, but oddly, has a different view of it. To him, Fall represents the beginning of his reprieve from the mass of tourists invading his small village; it’s the gateway to a quieter period more in harmony with the town he grew up in. Having Windeport become a cruise ship destination upended some of that, of course, but like any good Mainer, Sean has adapted and endured.

Events in Aftermath see Sean working a case in Florida, and as he moves from one scene to the next, I can feel how he’s constantly comparing the places he encounters down there to his home back in Maine. It pulls him in ways I didn’t expect, leading me to think that it might be next to impossible to get him to ever leave Windeport behind. For short periods? Not an issue. Permanently? Probably never going to happen.

I mean, I could force the issue, of course, but I feel strongly he would fight me — and then find a way to work his way back to Windeport. Which, in the end, makes perfect sense.

I’m ecstatic to announce that I’ve been selected to participate in the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books Indie Author Experience, taking place March 14 & 15, 2026. As competitive as the selection process is, getting a spot in the tent is a huge honor and one that I am humbled to be able to accept once more. This time out, I’ll be there for Reflection in the Shadows — and my time is on Sunday, March 15, from 10 to 1. Mark your calendars now, and I can’t wait to see you!

Where has the year gone? Just like that, the release date for my latest novel, Belie, is right around the corner — and you know what that means! Time for some teaser tidbits that may or may not include spoilers. (You’ve been warned.)

First and foremost, of course, a little self promotion: if you’ve not already preordered your copy of the book, there’s still time! Use these links for the version you want:

Kindle

$3.99

Delivered directly from Amazon

Order Kindle

My favorite Version

Hardcover

$37.27

Save when you purchase this through Bookshop.org – and support your local bookseller, too!

HardcoverPaperback

$17.70

Also available through Bookshop.org

Paperback

All editions will be downloaded and/or shipped starting on November 18, 2025. (Full disclosure: I get a tiny affiliate cut if you happen to use the above links for Bookshop.org.) For those of you interested in an Audible version of Belie, that will appear about a week after the Kindle version is released.

Okay, now down to business! Per usual, these tidbits will be presented like the kind of Q&A I do on my podcasts — and yes, there will be new episodes of that in the new year, so be sure to subscribe.

Belie is an unique title for a novel.

If you’ve been a fan for a while, you probably have already seen or heard my explanation for how I name my books, namely that the title is significant to the plot, though not always in the most obvious of ways. This novel is no exception, for while there is a direct connection the crime that drives this story, how it relates to the many threads I began weaving back in Blindsided is equally as critical. Sean has several moments of reckoning in Belie, many of them rather painful — and with repercussions that will radiate out into future stories.

I’m starting to worry that might be why the next Sean Colbeth novel is titled Aftermath.

Yes, that title is equally as significant. And that is all you are getting out of me right now.

The central case in Belie revolves around a mass shooting. That seems like an unusual starting point for Sean.

Part of the genesis for this story came from an extremely tragic event that befell a Maine community the year before I began writing Belie. Having lived and worked in that portion of the state, the unbelievable loss of life in spot I knew well affected me far more than I expected; like most people, I continued to be horrified there seems to be no answer as to how we stop this epidemic of gun violence. The only tool I have is my writing, and as I’ve made no secret of my tendency to sneak social commentary into my stories, crafting a tale that might focus a bit more attention on the situation felt like the right move. Belie therefore starts out quite dark as Sean tries to process the insanity he is forced to deal with; for me, as an author, it was a difficult experience that took more out of me than I expected.

Sounds like it was tough to write.

It was. Enough so that I took almost a full year off from Sean before starting Aftermath.

The blurb notes that Sean does some sort of off-the-books investigation. That doesn’t seem like him?

I had an extremely interesting email conversation with a reader about this very point after Solitude was released. The honest answer here is that, frankly, Sean hasn’t truly been himself since Suzanne dropped out of his life for a week in Vengeance; losing his position as Police Chief with Windeport seems to have compounded the issue and affected his sense of self, enough that he actually begins acting slightly out of character.

Will he recover?

Absolutely — and that’s not really a spoiler, for all of us have periods where we wrestle with who we are and where we happen to be in life. Sean is no different, though it might take a book or two for him to get there (given how slowly time passes in my universe).

Wait – aren’t these stories contemporary?

Yes. But before you ask how that answer contradicts my prior one, you should know I’ve inverted the laws of physics such that while the time period stays consistent with current events, my characters aren’t aging as fast. Think of it as my version of the fountain of youth. I’ve made a few exceptions though; while I obliquely reference the current political climate in the United States, I have chosen to ignore the entire COVID pandemic.

You hinted earlier that Sean wasn’t happy working for the State Police.

Solitude didn’t cover this directly, but if you read between the lines in that critical final chapter of Vengeance, Sean shows the first vestiges of doubt when he accepts the offer to run the Major Crimes unit. All of those feelings come to full bloom during the course of Belie, though how he resolves them won’t become apparent until Aftermath. All I can say is: fasten your seatbelts. This is going to be a bumpy ride.

Okay, that’s it for now! Just in case you missed it at the top, here are those links again for preordering your copy of Belie.

Kindle

$3.99

Delivered directly from Amazon

Order Kindle

My favorite Version

Hardcover

$37.27

Save when you purchase this through Bookshop.org – and support your local bookseller, too!

HardcoverPaperback

$17.70

Also available through Bookshop.org

Paperback

At the risk of paraphrasing a classic song from the late 1970s, I’m back in Arizona after a whirlwind long weekend running through various parks at Walt Disney World.  I’m still a bit tired – it will take a few more days to recover from putting that many miles on my body – but the afterglow of managing to complete the coast-to-coast challenge will remain far longer.  I know that there are far more seasoned runners out there who regularly run back-to-back long-distance races; for me, the thought of doing two half-marathons less than six weeks apart had me more than a little panicked, enough, perhaps, that I followed the training guidelines nearly to the letter.  I’m glad I did as it helped to know, psychologically, that I could complete the distance comfortably.  My times are good for a first timer but could be better; now I’ve got motivation to keep training so I can improve for the next one (whenever that might be).  I kind of made the mistake of thinking I’d do this challenge in 2025 then check that box off my bucket list with no desire to do another; as it turns out, I’m incredibly annoyed that I didn’t try for another slot in the Disneyland Half Marathon this coming January, especially because it is likely to be the last race out there until their theme park expansion is complete.

Lesson learned.

I asked my wife as we were wrapping up the weekend if either of us had even vaguely imagined we’d be participating in runDisney events when we first visited the parks as a couple two-plus decades ago; she had a bit more of an inkling that she might want to do one, mostly because she is the original runner in our family and already knew about what Disney offered.  These days, any planned trip to Florida revolves around the race calendar and whether we can swing the expense to do that plus visit the parks.  I’m not sure even if I had managed to snag a spot in the Disneyland Half next year, we could’ve made the economics work to get back to Orlando, honestly.  And that’s fine – there are plenty of amazing opportunities here in Tucson and out where our friends live in California to rack up some miles, so I’m not worried about continuing this journey.  

As you might imagine, I did some sleuthing while I was wandering across Walt Disney World; with Vasily’s wedding coming up in the next book, I’ve been thinking (and, frankly, overthinking) exactly how that will all come together.  Planning this blessed event is stressing me out almost as much as my own wedding did, which probably sounds weird until you consider just how real these characters are to me.  Vas took a long, winding road to the love of his life and it just feels right that I make it as perfect as I can.  Having it take place there at Disney feels perfect given his love of the place, but I will be brutally frank here for a moment: some of the more recent legislative initiatives aimed directly at the LGTBQ+ community in Florida have given me great pause.  

Do I truly want to feature a location that on its face appears hostile to people like Vasily and Alejandro?  That’s a tough question to grapple with if I want to be honest in how Vas would react to such a situation.  I know Disney ultimately pushed back on what Florida was doing, though they wound up paying a heavy price for doing so; they are not the villains in this particular chapter of history.  And I am also well aware that the Florida legislature does not speak for all Floridians – especially those who live in the densely populated areas in and around Orlando.  I know this is a world of my creation, but I do have rules and one of them is trying to be as realistic as possible in how I portray current events; while I made a conscious decision to ignore COVID, I’ve not shied away from other aspects of what has happened in this country over the last eight years and how that affects both Sean and Vasily.  

I think where I have landed is to keep the wedding at WDW as planned; there will be ramifications to that, of course, which will be integral to the story I’ve begun to plot out.  My work on that novel won’t begin until I’ve completed work on the current Sean Colbeth manuscript, so some details are likely to change a bit before I get there.  I’m still planning on [redacted] to take place when [redacted], though I’ve not quite decided how that might take place.*   That assumes, of course, that I don’t sidetrack myself with the sequel to Reflection in the Shadows; I’ve got a fair amount of work into that already, but set it aside so I could use my traditional November writing window for Sean.

At least, that’s the plan.

* yes, I intentionally blanked out spoilers.

As I write this entry, I’m wrapping up some final items at work and preparing to jump on a plane so I can complete the back half of the coast-to-coast challenge I blogged about a few weeks ago.  It’s a bit hard for me to accept that the Fall has zipped by as fast as it has; when I got back from the Disneyland portion of the challenge, October felt like it was (literally) months away.  Now it’s here and all of those same worries that my preparation for running 19+ miles over three days are woefully inadequate are hitting me hard – again.  There is some hope there, though: my wife and I ran the annual A-Mountain 4-miler prior to departing Tucson, and despite it literally being straight up for a mile (and, of course, straight down for the same distance) both of us are still moving pretty well; maybe, just maybe, all of our weeks of preparation are going to pay off. 

We haven’t been to Disney World during this part of the calendar in a number of years; in fact, I was so unsure of the last time we munched our way around Epcot’s World Showcase during the Food and Wine Festival, I had to dig through my photo library to turn up evidence that it was, in fact, 2017.  Somewhat ironically, I ran across a water tumbler I bought for the race weekend we attended that year while searching for a favorite coffee; seeing the smiling Mickey Mouse in a cooking apron emblazoned across the side of the tumbler brought my own smile and an additional flood of memories from that last trip.  Our dear friends from California had joined us for that sojourn, and their youngest – now in fifth grade – was at that time barely at the minimum height on many of the attractions.  Still, we had an amazing trip together and often talk about doing it again.  With schedules and the ever-higher costs associated with getting from here to there, though, I’m not certain when we’ll pull that together; fortunately, that hasn’t stopped us from being frequent visitors in SoCal, with as many of those trips including a day at Disneyland as our respective wallets can handle.

If you’ve never experienced the Food and Wine Festival, it truly is something to behold.  It’s also not something for those trying to keep their waistline in check, for the breadth and depth of things to sample are about as tempting as anything can get.  Each of the country pavilions has something themed to their area of the globe; I’ve seen it take a full day to work from Mexico to Canada, slowly sampling exotic dishes elegantly paired with wine you can’t easily get elsewhere.  And that’s just the eating part!  We’ve never had the time to go to any of the cooking classes offered, or one of the many, many wine tastings hosted by people far more in the know about such things than I am.  Partly that’s because our attendance at the Food and Wine has always coincided with a running event, forcing hard choices about how we spend our days; once I’m fully retired, I hope to be able to get there as a true food tourist, spending the entire week diving deeply into all that is offered.  (My wife would likely need to intervene, however, for one of the booths is all chocolate, all the time – a deadly spot for someone like me.)

Back in 2017, we did manage to sign up for one special activity, though.  We had an adult night out riding the monorail around Disney’s Seven Seas Lagoon, stopping at each of the major resorts it served for a particular portion of our meal.  Cocktails were at the Contemporary; appetizers, at the tropical paradise that is the Polynesian Resort.  Dinner was at the incredibly elegant Grand Floridian, followed by dessert on a balcony back at the Contemporary watching the fireworks above the Magic Kingdom.  The evening was incredibly spectacular, even if someone stole our seats at the very end.   I’ve been tinkering with this being something Vas and Alex do as part of their wedding festivities, but I can’t quite decide; while Vas would completely get into it, I suspect Alex would prefer other, quieter ways to celebrate their nuptials.  We’ll see who wins that argument in a few months.

Once the out of office message goes on my email, my brain will shift over to the worries that always accompany the start of any vacation trip.  Thankfully, I’m spending it with my level-headed wife who will (unfortunately) have to constantly remind me to relax and enjoy the moment.  I’ve tried harder to do that these past few years; maybe I’ll surprise her this time out and be super chill while we wait to board our flight and ignore my fears that our bags won’t make an appearance at the other end.

Here’s hoping…

I spent part of this past weekend putting the finishing touches on Belie, due out in a few weeks.  Most of this effort was spent tweaking the cover art and then scanning the manuscript for any last-minute, egregious errors that might come back to haunt me later in the series.  I have long lived in fear of accidentally doing x in a prior novel, only to claim yactually happened; so far, I’ve thankfully managed to avoid that particular misstep – but only because I obsess the way I do over ensuring my continuity remains intact.

This novel is the eight in the Sean Colbeth Investigates series.  I am still coming to terms with the fact that I’ve gotten this far, and that the character remains popular.  Belie, oddly, represents something of a turning point for Sean, too; it’s the first major case he’s taken on since transitioning to his new role with the State Police, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, we wind up with a front row seat as he struggles with the adjustment.  There are significant differences between being the Police Chief of a small waterfront village and a statewide commander of a crime taskforce, differences that at the end of the day have my detective wondering what the heck he was thinking when he took the job in the first place.  Will it grow on him?  Will he grow to like it and subsequently thrive?  I think both of those questions remain open by the end of the novel, forcing me to address them in his next novel.  Due out in 2026, the tentatively titled Aftermath has a lot to deal with in that regard; many of the decisions Sean has made in the past eight novels start to catch up to him, and not all of them are positive.

Before you think I’m heading down a path of breaking Sean in some way, let me hasten to assuage those fears; Sean has always been Sean, and is not a candidate for becoming one of those detectives that is haunted by prior acts.  I do see him as completely human, though, albeit one who often still fails to grasp the reality existing outside of his investigator bubble.  Every action Sean has taken over the course of the series put him on a path that I only vaguely saw all the way back in Blindsided.  Threads that were always there are now being tugged, leading to more questions that might have difficult answers.  And that’s just in his personal life; throw in a good mystery on top of that and you can see that I have the beginnings of an excellent stew I can’t wait to share with you next year.

Getting the band back together was also a priority for this next novel; it’s been a while since Vas assisted with an investigation, so it’s been fun to write scenes for the duo again.  Sean does make something of a cameo in the next Vasily Korsokovach book, Silenced, but it’s confined to just a few chapters; in Aftermath, the two are once more joined at the hip, though with the added benefit of both having had to work without the other for some time now.  I miss the witty repartee between them; in the new novel, that feels even more on point given the personal issues Sean is dealing with when we finally see him again.  

What are those, you ask?

Well, for starters Sean decides to drive to Florida to make peace with his estranged father.  If you have been playing along at home, you might have a good sense of how well that went – and what fallout might result from the visit.  And while you already know Sean is struggling with his new role as Commander, Major Crimes, you might not realize that all is not completely well between him and Suzanne; when we last saw them in Solitude, the proverbial hatchet had been buried, but events in Belie conspire to open old wounds that Sean is ill-prepared to deal with.  How he gets through that is as much a part of the plot of Belie as the murder – and sets up rather nicely what is yet to come in Aftermath.

2026 is going to be a fun year. 

I had another chance to take the train out to see my friends in California recently; unlike the last time I visited, this trip was very much spur of the moment and (by necessity) needed to be low budget, so I booked a standard Coach ticket for the roundtrip.  I admit to having had some trepidation about that arrangement, since my most recent trips had been with sleeping accommodations; once you’ve experienced all of the perks of traveling in that fashion, it’s hard to ignore those working their way through the three-course dinner two cars in front of you while you stare out across the darkening landscape wondering what might have been.  As it turned out, I was pretty comfy in those wide, reclining seats they offer in Coach — and, in fact, I had quite a bit more room to get up and move around than I’d had in the small Roommette.  Still, the chair didn’t recline to a complete bed, and stepping over the person on the aisle to make a midnight run to the restroom was more interesting than it should have been, but all in all, I had a pleasant experience that I would be willing to repeat again in the future.  

A view of the grand windows in the waiting room at Los Angeles Union Station

There’s something incredibly magical about traveling that way, too.  The boarding process on Amtrak is relatively low key when compared to the crowd-the-gate-so-I-can-get-my-carryon-into-the-overhead-compartment competition I often witness when flying back East to see my family.  Perhaps it’s the more stately manner in which the train pulls up to the station that gets the better angels to appear, or maybe the echoes of a bygone era give people a moment to reflect on the fact that travel once used to be a fun adventure we looked forward to embarking on.  Whatever it is, I found myself completely relaxed and ready to start my long weekend when I stepped off the platform in Los Angeles — and, conversely, more than a little sad when I found myself back there just a few short days later to return home.  

Another view of the waiting room at Los Angeles Union Station

Traveling the rails is not something I was able to do much of while growing up back East.  Passenger rail didn’t return to Southern Maine until long after I’d moved to Arizona; while I’d taken the subway around Boston quite a bit, the T is not quite the same as a full-blown passenger train with all of the trimmings.  I know for certain that’s why I had a passenger train as a central component to the plot in Requiem; Vasily booked a room on the Sunset Limited nearly two years before I actually did, so I had quite the bout of jealousy.  He was fortunate enough to get the upgraded sleeper, the sort of cozy little room that you often see in the movies set during the Golden Age of passenger rail, something I’ve not had the budget for myself.  (Perhaps — and this is just a thought — this sort of profligate spending on the part of the Rancho Linda Police Department might be a contributing factor to their ongoing budget crisis. Someone should talk to them about that.)  Since I’ve cleverly stationed Alejandro’s mother in Tucson, I suspect we’ll get more chances to see Vasily traveling in that manner in the future, especially now that I’ve done it a few times myself and have more of a sense of the sights, sounds and even smells that go along with the experience.  Having the chance to finally walk around Union Station in Los Angeles in person increased my appreciation for what used to go into such structures, and why they were so important to the towns and cities they served; seeing how many people still rely on rail to get around gave me hope that someday, maybe, we’ll once more have as robust a system as other countries.

One can hope.

I’ve talked a few times now about how dark the Sean Colbeth novel, Belie, is.  Much of that comes from the horrific nature of the crime that anchors the plot, that being the mass shooting of patrons at a local pizzeria in a small mill town.  It took me a long time to convince myself that I could write such a scene, let alone delve into the psychological morass of what might have led to it occurring in the first place.  More than once as I wrote that novel I felt like Sean and I had merged personalities, for each time I sent him back into that scene, I could sense our mutual reluctance to face it again.  I would never have believed something I wrote could have traumatic aftereffects, but it has literally taken me nearly a year (and two books without Sean as the primary protagonist) to feel mentally ready to work with him as a main character again.

And what a mess I get to work with!

When I saw him last, he’d joined Vasily in Orlando to help (in a minor way) on a case tying back to one in Rancho Linda; Silenced picks up just a few days after the ending of Belie, which meant Sean was still very much trying to pick up the pieces of both his professional career and his private life.  Vas senses something is off about his best friend, but the pressures of the case don’t allow him much time to deal with it – which is another way of saying that I, as the author, punted everything to the next Sean novel.  Now, as I begin to pull together the threads of what will become the ninth book in that series, I can kind of think I did myself a favor; as much as I love Vasily and his propensity for helping Sean, we really need to see how this all works out from Sean’s point of view.

There are other threads that I need to tug on in this book, too.  With Sean in Florida for a bit, I’ll have an official chance for him to finally get some sort of closure with his father – or, if I’m feeling particularly wild, maybe instead craft a wider tear in that relationship.  So much is open ended on that, even for me; looking back at how Sean was treated in Blindsided – namely, that his father threw him out of his apartment for the perception of being romantically involved with Vasily – there is stuff to mine there, hints about the kind of man Sean’s father is (or has become since the death of his wife).  It also gives me another wonderful opportunity to paint in more color for the background of my character, adding flavor to an already complicated individual who continues to find ways to surprise me.

Then there is Suzanne.  I won’t go into much at this point on her since there are significant events in Beliethat reshape the contours of her relationship with Sean that I don’t want to spoil; suffice it to say, Sean is flying solo when we see him in Orlando with Vasily, though not without a ton of baggage and a heart that is beginning to think love doesn’t exist for a person like him.  It does, of course, especially since I’m the sort of author that always gravitates toward a happy ending, but it might take a bit more turmoil before we get there.  Turmoil that might involve a new character that appears in Silenced, one that makes no secret of their romantic interest in our former Olympic Swimmer.

And what about his job?  Nearly from the beginning of the series, I’ve had this sense that though Sean is very good at what he does as an investigator, he chafes at being micromanaged.  Things went downhill with his position in Windeport when he was unable to read the political tea leaves properly – or willing to accommodate the Village Council in ways that felt patently unreasonable, unethical or immoral.  That meant there were plenty of warning bells going off when I allowed him to accept the position with the Maine State Police; the first case in Solitude went fairly well, but there he was on his own working a murder on an isolated island.  Belie forces him to work within the constrictions of the organization while under the very public scrutiny mass shootings generally receive.  He does his thing, of course, and it’s not much of a spoiler for me to say the case resolves satisfactorily – for everyone but Sean.

Which lands him in Florida.  On leave.  

Sounds like a tantalizing start, don’t you think?

My cupboard of story ideas is overflowing, but selecting just the right mix of ingredients for this next story has been rather hard.  I think I’ve got the proportions just right and am now prepping to begin writing in October.  Stay tuned!

Also in October: I’ve decided to release a snippet of my next Vasily Korsokovach book sometime during the month.  If you are a newsletter subscriber, be on the lookout for a special email containing the link; after you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

Unlike any of my characters, I am not an athlete.

Yes, I swam competitively for a few years when I was a teenager, and I did flirt with both soccer and baseball at earlier points in my life.  But somewhere along the way, I wound up taking the fork in the road that had me spending more time as a service-oriented volunteer instead of spending hours in the pool to shave off a few seconds from my best time.  While there is a part of me that lives vicariously through my fictious Olympians, that was just never the path I was ever destined to take.

I continue to swim for fitness reasons, though, for my career is sufficiently stressful enough to need some sort of outlet that can help to balance out everything.  It’s sort of hard to describe the Zen-like aspect of watching the tiles glide by beneath you as you work your way from one end of the pool to the other; when I was an age-group swimmer, I often thought of it as monotonous and boring.  Now, like both Sean and Vasily, I find it has become part of the ritual of getting to that blissful meditative state that can shake loose whatever it is that is currently of concern.

My wife has long been a runner.  Her grace as she glides over the pavement has always brought a special smile to my face, for it is truly something special to behold.  When she suggested I join her for an outing – extolling the very virtues I espouse over swimming — I repeatedly demurred; the fear that a swimmer such as myself could never cover the same distance on land was real, and one that I didn’t overcome until the mid-2000s.  

What changed, you asked?  In short, Disneyland.  

Paula signed up for a 5K hosted by the Happiest Place on Earth and as I cheered her on, I realized the race looked like a ton of fun.  Organized as only Disney can, they had music and characters and theming that elevated the simple act of running to something else entirely.  Having the racecourse plotted through the parks was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

So, I began to run.  Slowly at first, then increasing both speed and distance until I found what was my comfort zone.  Paula encouraged me to register with her for a three-run series hosted by a local organization here in Tucson, partly so we could run together but also so I could experience what it was like to navigate a course with a bunch of other people at the same time.  That proved to be especially prudent, for I’d had no idea the sort of dynamics required when sharing the road with a crowd; by the time I finally arrived in Walt Disney World in 2017 to run my first Disney race, I felt like I was ready to tackle whatever I faced.  The two of us had a great time in Orlando, and soon, other runDisney races appeared on our schedule; I even began contemplating tackling the half-marathon distance – and, perhaps, qualifying for the special Coast-to-Coast award if I did a half in both Anaheim and Orlando.  Things were looking spectacular as we wrapped up another 10K at Walt Disney World in January 2020.

And then, COVID hit.

The world shut down, and with it, our next race in 2021 at WDW.  During that first year, the pools I normally used also remained closed, so running became the only way for me to try and decompress from the incredible events we were forced to live through.  Those early morning runs allowed me to keep enough of an even keel to deal with the insanity of trying to keep a top ten business school functioning technologically while working out of my living room.  They also allowed me to hang on to the dream that I might yet run that half at Disney – someday, perhaps, when the world reopened.  

Which of course it did.

Fast forward to this past weekend; after years of effort and twenty-two weeks of focused training, I completed my first ever half at Disneyland during their Halloween runDisney weekend.  And just to emphasize how all-in I’ve become on this running thing, I ran the 5K and 10K as well – which, according to the spiffy t-shirt I received, winds up being slightly more than 19 miles in total over three days.  Toss in a few days wandering the park and, yes, there are parts of me that I didn’t know could even be sore – but I’ve also never been happier at hitting a personal goal.  (It wasn’t particularly fast, mind you, but I did clock in at 2:30 on the half.  Not bad for a first timer.)

I’m not done, of course.  I’m getting ready for the back half of that goal now, that being running the same three distances in Orlando later in October.  The Wine and Dine Weekend was one of the first ones Paula and I raced together years ago, so there is something wonderfully poetic about it being the coda for this leg of my running journey.  I learned quite a bit during my first outing in Anaheim, but also know Florida is a different critter.  I’ll have to lean into my training and, as the race announcers told us last weekend, be at peace with whatever pace I muster.  That sounds like great advice no matter the sport. 

The back half of the summer months tend to be when I take the lion’s share of my vacation time; with school out and the students away, it tends to be the quietest time to slip out from behind my desk and indulge in a tiny bit of self-care.  Giving myself permission to take time off has been a work in progress for most of my professional career; having grown up in New England, I have this strange, nearly Puritanical streak that often makes me feel guilty for being away from the office – which has led to this crazy problem of getting to the end of each year with nearly too much vacation time to roll over into the next year.  

This is the first summer where I deliberately scheduled more time off than normal; the result has been this strange sense of peace going into the start of our Fall semester, something I’ve not felt for some time.  It also gave me a chance fully recover from the tendonitis that sprouted back in June; while I would have preferred to have spent the summer toiling away at one of my many writing projects, the forced downtime allowed me to continue to refine the stories I am planning on telling, though I still don’t consider myself that sort of planner.

One result of all of this rumination is that an idea I’d been toying with has become a central touchstone for the sequel I’m writing to Reflection in the Shadows.  I won’t spoil too much from that novel when I divulge that one of the main characters, Ocelot, works on behalf of an ancient Mesoamerican deity; while I don’t delve into that too much in the first book, I touch on the notion that there were other deities in the pantheon and that not all of them had humanity’s best interests in mind.  I’d originally come to that point to underscore the ultimate climax of the first novel, but when I began working on the sequel, I started to wonder if the gods were actually motivated by self-interest.  And if they were, what would be important enough for a deity to (literally) move heaven and earth to get what they want?

It was too tantalizing not to address.  So I did.

The results have been unexpectedly interesting to me as a writer; while the core of the story remains a traditional police procedural mystery, this ability for me to sprinkle in a little bit of fantasy opens the door to go in some really cool directions.  I’m only about a third of the way into this manuscript so more details to follow, but the plan remains to have this wrapped up by the end of September so I can begin work on my next Sean Colbeth novel in November.  That novel has been gestating long enough that it’s nearly ready for college, frankly, so I’m quite ready to begin getting those words into the word processor.