This is the first book of The Q Mysteries series. I have set up a tentative book progress widget on the right so you can track my progress. Today (Sunday, 10/13/2024) was a website setup day, and hoo boy, setting up a new website is just as crazy as it has ever been. I already have a hosting company, so at least I didn’t have to deal with that. But I did have to spend hours coming up with a pen name. I whittled that down to a list that didn’t have other author names on the web. I then removed any names that didn’t have a .com domain available. Finally, I ran out and bought the domain name, deployed a WordPress site to it. The official email address is [email protected].
The Q Mysteries
Enough with the techno-mumbo-jumbo. On to the books!
I normally write sci-fi under my real name, Frank DeCaire. However, I wanted to try my hand at cozy mysteries, so I had to come up with a pen name to ensure Amazon could separate my books by genre. My first series is about a young guy (in his 20s) who is a programmer/technology guy that gets sucked into the world of solving crimes. His best bud, Finlay, is from a rich family. Finlay’s dad is the CEO of a robot factory, and Finlay comes upon a robot dog that his dad’s company was researching when the project got scrapped. The dog is extremely real-looking. The theme of this series is that nobody knows the dog is a robot, except for Q (the protagonist) and Finlay. Q is short for Quentin.
I don’t have a mailing list yet (but I’ll set one up by the time I publish the first book). I have a tentative release date of mid-November. The rough draft is on schedule to be completed by the end of October or the first week of November. I have to request a book cover (now that I settled on a pen name, I can get that going). I also have a story idea for the second book, so I might do two covers at once.
My long-term plan for this series is to write five books. That’ll be the minimum. If it does well, I’ll extend it. I can write a 60k-word rough draft in less than a month, so technically, once I get a cadence going, I should be able to drop a new book every month.
Ah, what about the setting? Very important.
The series is set in Draper, Utah. Most of the theme will be murders that happen on the trails. To be honest, the trails around my neck of the woods are very safe (other than that little Ted Bundy thing… LOL). While the stories are fictional, I’ll stick to the most accurate information I can. Like the names of the trails, the local police (but with fictional characters), the Suncrest neighborhood, and probably parts of the valley where Draper is located.
Well, back to my writing…