The AARP Life@50+ Book Fair in Boston was an absolute joy — nice weather, nice people, and great food. I also drove down to Newport, Rhode Island and saw some incredible mansions, where the wealthy lived during the Gilded Age, including the Vanderbilt’s. The interesting thing was these mansions were referred to as “summer cottages”. I guarantee that we would all like to live the summer months in these thirty to forty thousand square foot “cottages”.

Once again, as with the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, over eighty percent of readers who lined up for copies of my book were women. In Los Angeles, they were younger, mostly college students and up into the 30+ age group. In Boston, however, they were older, which makes sense since it was an AARP event. And like the LA group, they all said they loved reading suspense/thriller novels. I need to change my opinion on the demographics of my reading audience — I thought it would be mainly men interested in this type of novel. It’s obvious that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There were two other authors at the signing area with me, and we all signed seventy-five copies of our books in less than forty minutes. I was the last author signing, probably because I spent too much time talking. The main question that was asked of me was how long it took to write the book. I told them there’s a lot of work that actually goes into writing a story. The first thing I create is a storyline, where I lay out the flow of the story from start to finish; this takes about a month or two. Then I write the actual manuscript, which takes about six months. It’s the editing process, though, that takes the longest. For Unrelenting Nightmare, it took me over five months to refine the story until I was happy with it. But I have to admit, when I submitted the manuscript for review, the editor recommended additional changes for me to consider, which took an additional two months to implement. So the total length of time it took me to write the book was about fifteen months, spread over a two-year period. The extended spread time is because I started writing another manuscript. I did this because I wanted to have a fresh look at Unrelenting Nightmare before I started editing it. Each author has a method they use to write a book, but this is the process that works for me.

Anyway, the Boston event was fun, and I plan on attending another AARP book fair in San Diego later this year. I will post information on the event in my Upcoming Events section when I get details of the time and date.