I've made it past 50,000 words in my next Civil War horror novel!

The still-untitled sequel to A Fine Likeness is coming along nicely. Today I passed the 50,000 word mark. I anticipate it will end up being about 90,000 words. My goal is to get the first draft done by my birthday on August 16. That's doable if I write 1,000 words a weekday and don't get stuck. If I do get stuck, oh well, that's an important part of the process and a writer shouldn't fret about it. I can always work on other projects.

For those of you who have read A Fine Likeness, you'll see many of the characters who survived the last novel. There are also some new characters, such as Allen Addison, the naval officer you only met through letters, and Bill Treadway, a Confederate cavalryman in Price's defeated army, who makes one last gamble with the forces of Chaos to win the war.

Much of the action takes place on the USS Essex, pictured above. I just wrote a scene where the ship's crew, under Addison's command, teams up with some deserters from the First Kansas Colored Volunteers to fight a band of bushwhackers. When Addison investigates their camp he find these rebel guerrillas are more than what they seem. . .