D-Day

I’m lucky. There’s been a wait of less than a year between submission of my second book to the publisher and the publication date. Still, one does get impatient until finally the day arrives. And today it has. It's D-Day! October 1 is the official publication date of Smasher. (Let’s ignore the fact that Amazon.com has been merrily selling it for the past fortnight.) Let’s hit the beach (or maybe ramble a bit).

I received Mystery Scene Magazine yesterday. Idly leafing through it, I came across a review of Smasher. I hadn’t expected it till the next issue. Anyway, it says, “Raffel is writing from the heart.” I think that’s good, especially coming from reviewer extraordinaire Oline Cogdill.

Today The Big Thrill wrote, “Keith Raffel's new thriller, Smasher, has the feel of an Alfred Hitchcock movie--a normal guy beset by mysterious conspiracies.” (Read the whole article here.) There's nobody I'd rather be compared to than to Hitchcock. (Thanks to the article's author, Mark Terry, who wrote the Derek Stillwater series.)

I leave in 12 days for Columbus, Ohio for two events and then I’m busing to the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Indianapolis where I have two more. On October 20 we kick things off in a big way at my hometown bookstore, Kepler’s. Two weeks later I’m partnering up with Chicago mystery maven Libby Fischer Hellmann for nine appearances both in SoCal and the Bay Area. (Complete schedule here.)

Today, too, is significant because I will be sending my agent the final manuscript of my next opus in a few hours. And in a couple of months, the road show for Smasher will be over, who knows what will have happened to that opus, and I'll be starting another one. As Joni Mitchell wrote and Judy Collins sang, “And the seasons they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time.”