Something Wicked is finished!

Well, at least the first submission draft is. Officially sold in March and researched, outlined, written and edited by the end of July. What is that - a little over four months? Whew. I feel like I've just sprinted a mile. It's a bit bigger than Something Rotten too - by around fifty pages. How I managed to turn Shakespeare's longest play (Hamlet) into a 200 page manuscript and his shortest tragedy (Macbeth) into 250 manuscript pages is a mystery perhaps not even Horatio could solve.

I also beat my own self-imposed deadline of the end of August. Why push it? Well, not to brown-nose - although the nerd in me does enjoy turning in papers early - but instead to give me more time on the Brooklyn Nine rewrite. A bit of work there, as it's going from nine different first-person voices to a consistent third person narration. I'm also reworking the overall story arc so that there is an overall story arc. (This will make more sense when you can read it. And I certainly hope it makes more sense to me before that.)

Along with the first draft of Something Wicked, I also sent editor Liz a pitch for Horatio Wilkes mystery #3: Something Foolish. This one would be based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, if you hadn't already guessed - from Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (Although I had a suggestion from another editor at ALA to call it What the Puck?) Kind of tricky to take a comedy and make it a tragedy, but I have a plan. In many ways Midsummer would be the perfect follow up to where Wicked leaves off, but we'll see. If it's not Midsummer, it will probably be Julius Caesar (Horatio on a college visit to a frat house - think "toga party") or The Tempest (Horatio as an intern at a Disney-esque theme park). That's assuming they want a third book at all!

Here's hoping. I do so love writing these, and Shakespeare does have a few more plays left . . .