We have lift-off on my seventh novel

I’ve been remiss by waiting so long to post about the state of my seventh novel, If at First You Succeed. Actually, being remiss is kind of a perpetual state of being for me these days. It’s a busy time. But the good news is, I’m deep into writing the manuscript for my seventh novel. I’ve been working on it reasonably steadily since February. If at First You Succeed is now about half-written. I’m up over 50,000 words. So far so good (I think). The novel deals with a central issue in most of our lives. It’s about finding happiness and fulfillment and doing what our heart tell us to do, even if the head has other ideas. I think it’s an issue many struggle with, particularly as it relates to our careers. People often simply fall into their first job and discover that they’re actually pretty good at it. By all of the standard measures of success, they’re doing very well. They get promoted. They get raises. They’re headhunted by other companies. And before they know it, fifteen or twenty years have passed and they’re well entrenched in what seems to have become their career.

Here’s the tricky part, even though they’re very good at their job (or in the case of my narrator, the very best in the world), they don’t wake up on a Monday morning entranced by the idea of going to work for another week. So this is a funny (I hope) novel that wrestles with the idea that even though you may be very good at what you do, maybe even the best, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what you’re meant to do.

The current thinking of my publisher, McClelland & Stewart, is that it will hit bookstores in the late summer or early fall of 2019. And yes, there is a reason for the golf ball graphic. Now I must get back at it…