A funny thing happened on the way to the next stand alone novel.

Remember that book I was working on, the family saga set in Belle Epoque Paris, World War I Picardy, and World War II Paris?

That book is not the book you will be reading in 2017.

The research was fascinating, the idea worked beautifully on paper– and the characters just wouldn’t come out and play. They felt a bit like cardboard cut-outs, flat and one-dimensional. I could move them around from place to place, but they wouldn’t DO much when they got there. It was all great in theory, not so great in practice.

But, in the meantime (because you know this has a happy ending, right?), I found myself drawn back to an idea that had been bouncing around in the back of my brain for a while, a Gilded Age scandal involving a murder/suicide in a grand mansion on the Hudson. The papers are all gleefully reporting on the love triangle that caused the tragedy– but do they really know what happened? Or are all the smug spectators getting it completely backwards and upside down?

These characters? They’re only to eager to jump onto the page.

So the short version is that I may be tucked away in my writing cave for a bit this winter, because while the story may have changed, the deadline hasn’t. I’ll have more news for you about the new book once I’m a bit farther along.

Right now the working title is the clever and inventive “Stand Alone #4” or SA #4 for short. My college roommate, who generally knows more about my plots and characters than I do, has been calling this one “Gilded Age Gone Girl“, but, somehow, the acronym GAGG just didn’t seem entirely salubrious.

Stand Alone #4, still to be titled, will, with luck and good writing vibes, be coming your way as scheduled in the summer of 2017. More soon!