I recently saw this article: “65 Immortal Brian Eno Quotes for His 65th Birthday.” Usually I avoid Internet lists with so many elements (one great advantage of print is that editors cut lists like this down to the essentials), but Eno has always been an interesting guy, so I skimmed this one, and found this quote:

“One of my mottoes is that if you want to get unusual results, work fast and work cheap, because there’s more of a chance that you’ll get somewhere that nobody else did.”

Well, “cheap” doesn’t mean much in writing, but “fast” certainly does. And this is how I wrote my two novels, working fast and without much of a plan. I won’t say I got somewhere that nobody else did, but I did get to some places that were not heavily populated. 🙂

I’ve been thinking about starting a new story, but I didn’t want to begin until the Jan Sleet mysteries were done. But now they are, so it’s time.

I don’t have a title for the whole thing, but the first part is called “Arrival.” It begins with Jan Sleet’s father, who we haven’t seen since A Sane Woman (before she was even born).

And her mother will appear also (that much I do know).

Oh, and yes, the title of this post is a line from Les Miserables. How did you know?