Here’s a map of Florida drawn by my friend David Hazouri for my book Fearsome Creatures of Florida.

I started this past summer working on three books. For a while, I worked on all three at once—an hour or two per day on each one. One of them is a book of “literary tours” of Florida that I’m editing for University Press of Florida. It’s not your typical tour guide. Instead of the usual descriptions of travel stops, the “tour” features original poetry, essays, stories, and comics that take place in particular locations around the state. It’s a unique approach that will offer new ways of looking at Florida through the creative minds of the state’s many talented writers. I’m drawing from works previously published in Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, the literary journal I founded at the University of South Florida twenty years ago. That book is expected to be published in 2027. Stay tuned.

I also worked on two novels, one for adults and one for middle graders. The adult book is a dark and mysterious novel about Elvis Presley’s time in Florida while he was filming Follow That Dream in 1961. I began this novel years ago, set it aside, rediscovered it in my files (as I talk about here), and have been working toward a final draft. Midway through the summer, though, I paused the adult novel to focus all my attention on a new middle grade novel.

Here’s Elvis at Weeki Wachee Springs. He went there to visit the mermaids.

The middle grade novel is one I actually started a long time ago. With WONDERS OF SHADOW KEY coming out next spring, I decided to return to it and get it finished.

Hmm, how much do I reveal? This is an uncomfortable decision for many writers. Some writers don’t like to talk about their work at all until it’s complete (and some don’t like to talk about it even then!). The reasons aren’t just superstitious. When you talk about your work, you inevitably reduce it to sound bites. That not only minimizes the work, it take some of the magic away. Writing for me is a process of discovery. I only have vague notions about what the characters will do and say until I actually write scenes on the page. That’s part of the joy of writing. So if you talk about a work-in-progress too much, the joy of discovery loses its effect. When someone asks me what one of my books is about, I want to tell them just to read the whole thing and see for themselves! Because what a book is “about” is really in the mind of the reader.

So what is this new middle grade novel about, you might ask, because you’re insistent like that.Well, despite what I just said, I can tell you a few things. That’s mainly because the book is very far along, and I’m hoping to finish a final draft this fall. The working title is ALEX KRAFT AND THE BUBBLEWORLD. The plot begins with a middle school guy named Alex Kraft taking a shortcut to school. He doesn’t know it yet, but the shortcut takes him through a portal into a “bubble world” that looks almost exactly like his school with one big difference: the school bully named Trevor Womple, who has been harassing Alex all year, is suddenly nice. In fact, he wants a hug.

Screenshot from the live feed of my scriptorium, where monks transcribe my words into a manuscript. Despite his name–Wilhelmus the Wild–he really has fantastic penmanship.

That freaks out Alex more than anything. And it’s only the beginning. Who made the bubble world? Why is it there? In turns out that there are secrets about his own world that he never imagined, a world that includes dreamlords, a secret laboratory of illusions on an isolated island, a Dream Council under a glacier in Labrador, and a villain trying to free himself from the Deep Earth Quarry, a prison for the “very worst.”

After many years of drafting, last week I finished what I think of as the semifinal draft. Now summer is over, and I’m back to teaching my wonderful creative writing students at the University of South Florida. I’ll take a couple of weeks off to let the draft settle, and then I’ll get back to it.

I’m so close! Wish me luck!

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