After an email like the monster I sent last week, I feel like I should pull back this week and send you something shorter. It's like I think you're still hung over from overindulging in words, and giving you more words now might make your head hurt.

We'll see if that happens. I don't have a long email in mind, but I'm clearly not in charge of how long they become. I have a muse even for emails, and it turns out she's really verbose.

After the conference and book festival in Vegas (see the link above if you don't know what I'm talking about), I've been trying very hard over the past few days to relax. I'm not particularly good at it. I keep getting stressed out over all I have to do, and I have to remind myself that NO, I don't actually HAVE to do any of it ... let alone right now, today. My head's just over-full with ideas from the conference, is all. It's hard to remember that I have a full year to implement them before I go back in 2025.

Still, I have to keep telling myself to deliberately slack off. When it feels like I have too much to do and I'm woefully behind, I make a point to go practice my guitar or play with my dog.

Which dog? This dog:

(We named him Rico, by the way. Technically it's short for "Ricardo Montalban" because after watching Gilmore Girls, I decided I wanted my next dog to have a complete human name like the Gilmores' "Paul Anka." Unlike Paul Anka, however, we usually don't call him by his full name. Regardless, he's still not responding appropriately when I clench my fists and yell "KHAAAAAAAN!")

I haven't started a new book yet after publishing Suicide Flats, though I really want to. This week is too nuts, and the next two weeks will be too busy. I'll be back at writing in early December ... and of course, I'll keep you updated.

To keep myself busy without stressing too much, I've been tackling things that are maximally exciting or fun to me. For example, "creating more paperbacks" became a lot more fun after my first experience hand-selling books in Vegas. The more paperbacks I have, the more I can hand-sell at future events. So I did a few of those this week.

​One of my newly-made paperbacks was for Suicide Flats, which is available now despite my not having it available in time for the ebook launch.

Another was the Winter Break paperback -- a book I haven't told you much about yet, but will very soon. Winter Break comes out on December 26th (over winter break. Get it?). If you'd like to know more or pre-order the Winter Break ebook, you can do that here.

Creating the Winter Break paperback was a lot of fun and let me flex a few of my "taking my time, making pretty books" muscles. It's a YA suspense thriller that, like most YA, is equally riveting for adult readers. I wrote it specifically for my 16-year-old daughter because at the time she was reading books like Five Total Strangers and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder.

(Incidentally, the third Good Girl's book is amazing and really uncomfortable at the same time. I kept asking myself, "Is it okay that I like this? I mean ... there's definitely some questionable shit happening, but it's justified ... right?" It was both clever and diabolical at the same time. Would definitely recommend.)

Anyway, my goal was to write something in those books' vein so my daughter would be able to read something by her dad. I'll share that story later.

There's a lot of other stuff going on too, but it's all minutia and/or not strictly important right now and/or stuff I could tell you all about but that you wouldn't care about one iota. So because I said I'd try to keep this email short, I'll skip it and let you rest while I rest.

Happy reading,
JT

P.S: Are you one of those adult readers who like books that are technically meant for teens? I am, from Harry Potter to His Dark Materials. If you're feeling a tiny bit extroverted, reply and let me know!