Keep Writing

Now that Skinners is available for anyone to acquire and read, there’s an adjustment to be made for me. Writing and publishing a book is a little like giving birth, bringing a new little entity into the world. It’s mine, with all its glories and imperfections, but now it exists on its own. So it’s time to be thinking about what’s next.

I started wondering about a sequel to Skinners almost immediately after it came out. I have several plot ideas, but also many questions. Would I keep the narrative in third person, limited to Eddie’s point of view? Probably that is what would make the most sense, for several reasons. Would readers be interested in a second part? So far, the sales and reviews are good, but it will ultimately come down to whether I think the plot is feasible and whether I can do it justice. Would I forge a stronger connection to the world of Noonay Noo, the present-day naturist park on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Ethel? I introduced Noonay Noo and its characters in the serialized story “Bugs and Bares,” and then connected them to the world of Skinners in the short story I wrote for the Murder in the Nudist Colony collection. It would probably be relatively easy to build in a further link.

Whether I start the Skinners sequel or not, I have an idea for a stand-alone naturist novel set in the contemporary United States (this post is a clue to the plot). Another project is a sequel for The Nude Adventures of Doff de Chonez pa’ su Mecha. Cervantes wrote a sequel to Don Quixote that was published ten years after the original – I may not wait that long (!), but I would like to return to the characters with a change in tone and a variety of episodes that reflects how Cervantes revisited his characters for the second part of Don Quixote’s adventures.

Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned recently about writing is that it helps (for me, anyway) to have several projects going at once, and – even better – to have them all open on the desktop at the same time (thank you, Scrivener). I may sit down to write a paragraph for project A, but something about it will make me think of a next step for project B, and etc. You can’t become a writer as prolific as some of us out there (looking at you, P.Z. Walker and Ted Bun), without plugging away in a rather constant fashion on a daily or almost daily basis.

As we say in Spanish, manos a la obra (hands to the work). May we all continue to be prolific in presenting to the world all those “what ifs” about the benefits of naturism.