After some feedback from Ingrid Emerick at Girl Friday Productions , I rewote the opening chapters of Impala. The book is ready for editing, and my wife, Lindsay put together some sample covers.

This is an old-fashioned thriller/suspense that starts out a little like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, with a guy who’s not quite sure who is after him or why. I spent a couple of days writing and polishing a query letter for an agent, and that came out well enough to earn me an immediate rejection. I may put this up on Inkshares , which is like Kickstarter for books, but I’m not sure yet whether that will be a good fit. They seem to lean pretty heavily toward Sci-Fi and Fantasy, which this is definitely not.

Thanks to Bryan Cyr at Everything Noir for posting a review of my book!

I finished the first draft of a new book a couple of weeks ago. That means I have a lot of work ahead. My wife, Lindsay , has already started making comps for the cover.

I’ve been reading Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex , in which Plato shows up in 21st century America to promote his books and engage in Platonic dialog with contemporary American thinkers, writers, researchers and technologists.

In one of the early chapters, the woman who is escorting Plato through Google headquarters (the Googleplex) mentions to a friend that she has escorted many writers on their book tours, and that “writers are the most insecure people in the world.”

So I wrote this book called Warren Lane, and it should be available for sale in the next week or two. I made the final revisions to the paperback proof copy, and the electronic versions are ready to go. I’m just waiting to review the updated paperback.

The other day, I came across a blog post that said all writers should answer these three questions:

1. Why did you write the book?
2. What do you want readers to get out of it?
3. Why should anyone buy it?

I’ve been a software developer since 1998. I didn’t actually like computers until I started working at Amazon.com back in the days when they sold only books. I got a job in their customer service department after a brief stint of teaching in the Seattle public schools. At the time, Amazon’s customer support was delivered primarily through email. If you had a question, you’d write to orders@amazon.com, and one of the customer reps in Seattle would write back.

Everyone in customer service worked at a Unix terminal, using Emacs as a mail client, and a set of command line tools with names like orderstat and customerstat to track down problems.