Building a bigger Apple

The book, now seventy percent complete, is going to be a big one. With 90 chapters and a projected 132,000 words, it will trail only The Memory Tree and River Rising among my twenty-two novels.

That's all right with me. As writer Joseph Campbell once said, "If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all."

Annie's Apple, the second installment of the Second Chance series, will also cover a lot of territory. From the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it will pay at least some attention to the major historical events of 1911 and 1912.

Though I still have twenty-six more chapters to write, I have taken care of at least one important matter. Thanks to the timely work of Michelle Argyle, I have a cover. The Melissa Williams Design illustrator finished the novel's Kindle and paperback cover this week and is now working on the audiobook cover.

The book's cover, like its title, is a play on Annie Carpenter, the main protagonist, and the Big Apple, the city she calls her own. The cover features a 1911 drawing by Charles Dana Gibson of Gibson Girl fame. I thought the young woman portrayed in the illustration captured the essence of my Annie, a 20-year-old society reporter and prolific letter writer. Many thanks to the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Division for making the image available.

As reported earlier, I hope to finish the first draft of Annie's Apple in March and publish the book itself in the first half of May.