What next?

It's been two weeks since In the Hands of Children first became available for sale. What have I been doing since then? Kicking back and basking in my accomplishment? I wish!

First, I've been doing some marketing and promotion for the book. I suck at marketing and freely admit to it. So far, the extent of my marketing efforts have been to email my friends and relatives, post about the book in this blog and on Facebook and Twitter, and sending queries to some book bloggers asking if they want to review In the Hands of Children. I know this isn't enough because to date, I can count the number of sales on my fingers. :-(

I've also been working on the idea for my next novel. Whenever I come up with an idea, I jot it down in a notebook. After In the Hands of Children was published, I went through the notebook to figure out what I wanted to write next. Some ideas were no longer interesting to me, and others didn't have enough substance to become a novel. (I will likely turn the latter into short stories in the future.) In the end, two ideas stood out. I spent a few days outlining each one. In the process, one came forward as the story I want to write next. I now need to flesh out the outline and figure out the answers to some plot problems that I ran into.

I have hopes that my next novel will be better than anything I've written so far. The story has the potential, and with two novels under my belt, I should be a better writer now than before I started my first book. We'll see, and as always, I plan to keep you updated on my progress with novel #3.