I’m still making changes. The new cover for Fear Killer is now here. The e-book edition is available now. The paperback with the new cover should be available in a couple days – e-book and paperback→→
While I’m working mostly on a new mystery featuring Detective Martha Newton from Fear Killer, I plan to devote one hour a week to Windhaven- a sailing survival adventure. It will be raw with minimal editing, but you should get the jist of it. Sorry, no vampires, witches or other supernatural shenanigans are involved. Comments, positive and negative, will be welcomed.
Windhaven
Chapter 1
Heart racing, eyes staring, barely breathing Noah Wells stared at his cell phone. “What the hell have I done?” he asked himself, his boat, and the universe in general. He carefully set the phone down and leaned back in the settee of his thirty-eight foot sailboat home.
For a moment he stared blankly at a photo of a fifty foot sailboat in full race rig, the one he’d sailed on in the Bermuda race. A good sized boat, but seventy feet was a much bigger good-sized boat. Did he really want to spend months on a boat that size with seven other crew as it raced around the world in a maybe not officially sanctioned race?
“Hell yes.” He studied his laptop on the opposite side of the table, his office. “I think.”
He thought about deadlines, would the publisher of his novels wait six more months for the new book he was working on? He had a couple articles planned, but nobody was waiting for them. His car and boat were paid for, but the slip rent would still need to be paid. Mail, phone, cable, taxes, credit card, a few goodbyes? He had forty-eight hours to deal with them before he had to be on a plane to Rhode Island. Could he do it? Did he still want to do it? “Hell yea,” he said, and got to work.
Thirty-six hours later of phone calls, emails, errands, and handshakes, hugs, and cheek kisses goodbye, Noah dropped his sea bag by the companionway ladder and let out a deep sigh. Tomorrow morning he’d catch a flight to the East coast and two later be a sea for five… six… seven months. Now he had nothing to do but wait. He wondered if they’d have any jazz on the boat. Just in case, he knew where to go instead of… waiting.
Twenty minutes later Noah walked into Jubby’s Jazz Joint, a low key bar with jazz and blues every night on a small stage in the back. Thursday night a small crowd, he sat at the bar.
“Noah,” Jubby himself, a thin African American with a long face and a wide perpetual smile greeted him. “Don’t usually see you in the middle of the week. Run out of words?”
“Came in for my free going-away gift beer.”
Jubby set a bottle of Coor’s in front of him. “Goin’ away? Where to?”
“Around the world.”
“Sailing?”
“Not my boat. A seventy foot foot, full on racing sailboat, racing nonstop around the world.”
“Whoa, that’s a lot of water.”
“About thirty thousand some miles of it.” Noah took a long sip from the bottle then looked at himself in the bar mirror. He’d been thinking and talking about the race since the phone call the day before, but now, seeing himself in the mirror it really hit home what he was about to do.
Jubby leaned his elbows on the bar and looked Noah in the eye. “You sure you want to do this? You scared?”
“Yeah, a little. But more excited. It’s a hell of an adventure.”
A woman came in and sat on a stool two down from Noah. He’d been single for all his forty-four years, a few long term relationships, but he liked his writing/sailing life too much to inflict it on any woman who wasn’t as independent as him. So he checked her out with no guilt.
Pretty, blond, a tiny bit fluffy. She turned to him and smiled.
@ formatting right for the print edition. Available at most e-book stores.
awhile ago. If you missed it you can get it from 
contemporary vampire thrillers – 
