rlfj: Blog

The fun and games move to North Carolina. There’s trouble at Watson Manor. Enjoy!

I was recently informed of an error in Chapter 3. From ursus32: “One makes tents of canvas. One checks the hood doing a canvass.” Good point. Fixed.

For those who purchased the story (thank you!) I made a few slight changes to one of the paragraphs in Chapter 5. At the end of the story, after I have all the fixes and edits updated, I will upload the edited version to bookapy. You will then be able to download the final version.

Amusing incident the other day - our youngest daughter sent me a text. “Vikings - can you send a PDF or word doc so I can read on my computer at work and people will think I’m working?” Glad to see she’s working hard. I sent her a pdf.

More trouble on the East Coast for the Watson family, the FBI, and various local police forces. Enjoy!

We take break from the Watson family. Instead, we focus on a crime on Long Island. Is there a connection? We’ll just have to find out. Special thanks to grynslvr2, an experienced police officer, for information on police and FBI procedures. I can’t do this without expert editors. Many thanks to all of them over the years.

I’ve had a number of readers over the years ask if I live in the South. Several of my stories have taken place in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, or other southern locales. Quick answer - no. I have lived in either New Jersey (4 years) or upstate New York (42 years). I was born in northern Maryland, which is south of the Mason-Dixon Line, though only by about twenty miles. Still, they had to draw the line somewhere. I lived there for my first 17 years, and we visit my family several times a year. When I was living at home, we always vacationed in the south, and I have traveled there frequently since then. Still, much of my supposed expertise is the result of a diligent usage of Google and Wikipedia. It’s amazing the amount of information you can find on the Internet.

Anyway, Chapter 3 is up. Enjoy!

In Chapter 2, I commented on the fact that ADUs, auxiliary dwelling units, don’t do well in sales. This is 100% true. I sold modular and manufactured homes for 35 years and pretty much every year I would get middle-aged couples coming in and asking about them. Most of our manufacturers had designs for them, but in all that time, I never sold one, and I sold millions of dollars of homes otherwise. The reasons are the same as I mentioned. The designs are brilliant, but the average zoning or building code simply won’t allow multiple residences on the same property. Likewise, whenever I would ask the buyers interested in a granny pod if they had discussed it yet with the grandparent involved, they would often say that they were just checking out options. When I called them back, if they answered at all, I would get a sheepish response that Granny wasn’t interested and had told them to mind their own business.

Jack Watson is a successful novelist, with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children. So why is a madman chasing him, and what will happen when they meet?

This is the start of a new story, The Novelist. It is longer than my last one, but still not one of the mammoth stories I’ve written in the past. Not sure if or when I will be doing one of those again, but you never know. A Fresh Start took me three years to write, which would take me into my seventies.

My publishing schedule will be the same as always, a chapter every Tuesday and Friday. Enjoy!