Pat in the hot seat: Color me addle-pated. I knew I had a blog coming up at the end of the month. Apparently I don’t recognize the 25th as the end of the month. Or didn’t realize that the month of September has disappeared so amazingly fast!
So after all the nicely researched blogs from the other wenches, I’m throwing a fast ball at you. If you aren’t on Facebook, you probably haven’t seen my lovely marketing guy’s posts about my newest release from the Family Genius Mystery series—Cyber Genius. It’s on pre-order now but will be released next week. Excerpts and pretty pics and order buttons on my website. If you haven’t read any of the series, the earlier books are marked free or on sale, so give them a look (the website won’t show sale prices, sorry but here’s Evil Genius for free on Amazon!)
The only thing historical about these is that they were conceived after 9/11, and I set them in 2011 with an imaginary presidential election approaching. Let me tell you a secret about writers—we cheat. I chose 2011 instead of the years after 9/11/01 because the technology changed so drastically in the ten years between. Try to remember a time before everyone carried a smart phone, when a thumb drive was brand new and fascinating tech… Do you have any idea what computer hackers could do then? I haven’t a clue.
The first book was originally drafted with the old tech, but when it came time to write the whole series, I cracked. The idea of researching when every new piece of technology came along and when my family of poor but very savvy characters would have acquired them was just a hurdle I couldn’t face. The political situations I wanted my heroine to handle were almost the same then as now, so it didn’t hurt the story to bring it forward. And who remembers history from almost fifteen years ago anyway? I don’t think kids study it in school, which is a shame.
So I guess I can claim the Family Genius Mysteries are current history. Does that work? As usual for me, the books are more about the characters than anything else, so if you enjoy character-driven novels with a touch of romance, try one free. Or do you have a to-be-read stack as huge as mine? E-books make it so easy to accumulate new novels to test—some day. Go ahead, tell me how big your stack is!