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.