I had such a good time knocking out 7,000 words in my new book, Big Lake Ranger, on Sunday that I did the same thing again yesterday! That puts me at over 34,000 words, and with a couple more days like that, I will be well past the halfway mark. I never know exactly what the word count is going to be on a book until I get done, but the last five books in the Big Lake series have averaged 83,700 words, plus or minus a few.
Speaking of books, yesterday afternoon a package arrived from Amazon with copies of the printed edition of Ka-Bar Karma, the 10th book in my John Lee Quarrels mystery series. As long as I’ve been at this, it’s still a thrill every time I hold a new book with my name on the cover. It’s just my little bit of vanity, I guess.
Yesterday I was chatting online with my friend Frank Butterfield, a bestselling author who lives just a few miles up the road from me in Daytona Beach. He mentioned that he had gotten a lot of rain at his place on Sunday, while we had one brief shower here in Edgewater that only lasted for maybe two minutes at the most.
As I have said before, we seem to be in a little desert here. It can be pouring rain a mile or two up or down US Highway 1 in both directions, and we won’t get anything at our place. Or if we do, it’s just a brief shower that is gone within a minute or two. We see storms coming in on the weather map, and they split and go around us most of the time. Just a few minutes after I wrote that, Mother Nature decided to make a liar out of me and the sky opened up and we had a downpour. It didn’t last all that long, but it definitely wasn’t the light shower we get so often.
I think the last bit of summer is finally letting go of its grip on us because while it’s going to be in the mid-80s again today, tomorrow is only supposed to be 80 degrees and cooling down from there, with mid-70s predicted for the weekend. We are heading into the best time of year here on Florida’s Central Coast, and we are looking forward to getting our kayaks and the pontoon boat wet soon.
And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs and things we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. My pal Linda Sand sent this one. I don think she shops at Publix like we do.
Thought For The Day – Ain’t it funny how many hundreds of thousands of soldiers we can recruit with nerve. But we just can’t find one politician in a million with backbone. – Will Rogers
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!