Perhaps the best thing to do, here at the outset, it to review some recent events. Hold on a second while I double check some dates… Okay, got it!

On 4 February, Craig Hart revealed to his VIP Readers Group, that a seventh book in the Shelby Alexander Thriller series was being written, and that for this installment he had invited a co-author, a guy he’d worked successfully with in the past of the very popular SpyCo Espionage Novellas, his good pal, S.J. Varengo, or as I like to call him, “me.”

Two days later Craig revealed the cover, designed by the mighty David F. Berens, at which point it started to feel pretty real. Here’s what the cover looks like, in case this is your first day out of your coma, (and if so, welcome back, for cryin’ out loud!)

Now, I say it “started to feel pretty real,” but for Craig and me it had been feeling real for some time by then.

When all of this cover revealing and early silence breaking stuff was going on the book was not yet finished, but we were cooking. The work was fun and easy, much as it had been during the many of SpyCo sessions. We were aware that this book was special, and we liked where we were going with it.

But in our corporate works and in our solo stuff, neither of us ever knows from one minute to the next exactly where the story is going to take us. In fact we are lucky if we keep up with it sometimes. Being seat-of-the-pants authors has been a badge of pride for us, and Reborn was no exception.

On 10 February, I broke the news to my readers in a blog post. Because many of my readers are also fan’s of Craig’s many already knew and were like, “Wow, way to get the scoop, there, cub reporter!” (My readers pick on me all the time).

On Valentine’s Day, of all days, Craig sent me the completed first draft, telling me the final chapters had taken an emotional toll on him. When I read them I saw why.

In a cruel twist of fate fun little situation, my wife and I got to watch our twin five-year-old nieces on Saturday and Sunday, so I didn’t really start working on my rewrites and edits until Sunday night, and on that day I got all the way through chapter two.

This obviously doesn’t sound impressive, but in my defense, there’s a prologue, so it was kind of like three.

Oh and chapter two contained my most major rewrite of the entire book, so maybe you might want to back off, you rotten barf-faces!

[At this point, please imagine the sound of one of those nifty space-aged hypodermics that go “pssshhht” indicating I’ve been sedated]

Sorry. Where was I? Ah, yes.

I made it through the rest of the book and handed it off to Craig yesterday. While I was finishing up, he was asking if anyone wanted to take a look at an advance copy, and perhaps, if they liked it, write a review. Not that they have to, mind you. I need to stress that, lest word gets back to the Amazon gestapo that we’re trading books for reviews. It’s nothing of the sort! Couldn’t be further from the truth! (Is that good enough, legal department?)

From the looks of it, I guess they’ll have to get back to us.

And tonight, this very night, 19 February 2020, Craig let me know he’d finished his revisions as well, meaning it was now just about ready to send out to our advance readers, as well as all of the other fun stuff you get to do as you’re moving toward release day, like giving away Book #1, Serenity, as well as deep discounts on the other five volumes, and writing this blog post to tell you the book is, for all intents and purposes, DONE! FINISHED! COMPLETE! [insert synonym here.]

Now comes the hardest part, for me anyway, and that’s counting down to release day.

But I have good news!

You will have to wait a little longer to read Book #7, but you don’t have to wait to secure your copy, thanks to the miracle know a the Amazon pre-order. And to encourage you to do just that, Craig created this snappy graphic, which I am cleverly converting to an actual link the the pre-sale page:

And while you’re doing that, if you don’t already have books 1-6… well, I don’t really have words. I mean, people! One of them is free and the others are what we call in the business, (and of course by “business” I mean the industry), “dirt cheap.” [Memo to me: find out if dirt is actually cheap.]

So that pretty much catches us up. I have a few more pre-release posts planned and… HEY! Who cringed? I definitely saw one of you cringe.

Okay, I’m just going to have a quiet moment. You guys should go read about Shelby! Believe me, when you do you will be almost as happy as Craig Hart is to be finished with the writing of this amazing project. How happy is he? SEE FOR YOURSELF!!