'Fracking Justice' finally gets back into the queue

WATKINS GLEN, New York - After cleaning my office this past week and doing everything possible to avoid getting back to working on the draft of Fracking Justice (the sequel to The Fracking War), I ran across the cartoon at the right on Facebook today.

How could I not dive back into Fracking Justice after seeing that?

For the record, writers are generally not all that self-confident about their writing. If they do exude self-confidence, it's usually an act.

That said, after rereading the first section of Fracking Justice, I'm self-confident enough (or just acting) to say that it will be done sometime this summer. Reading just the first part of the book (of five sections) makes me wonder if I should title it Fracking Injustice.

For the novel writers and would-be novel writers reading this, I have a warning about writing a sequel: It's freakin' hard.

Why?

Just as in writing a news article, you cannot assume that a reader has read the previous book. So all that hard character development has to be recreated. Then, of course, there has to be some new characters created, a few old ones made to disappear, and entire fictional communities made whole again.

Like I said, freakin' hard.

But in the end, justice will be served, hot and cold. Fracking Justice, that is.