Dear Readers,

I finished the first week of the semester. One down. 15 more to go. Come Friday afternoon, I felt like I’d been beaten with a baseball bat while being run over by a bus. I’m afraid my fall a few weeks back did more damage to my (already damaged) spine that I’d first feared. But I’ll endure, I guess, as there really isn’t another option.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of disaster movies. The cheesier the better. I could watch Twister on an endless loop. The Towering Inferno is, in my opinion, the best disaster movie ever. Not to mention, as a retired firefighter, I appreciate how it is a stirring call to not let profit margin outweigh fire safety standards. I also enjoy reading books about disasters, both natural and man-made. That said, disaster fiction can, at times, be difficult to come by. And by that, I mean novels about actual disasters from history, not novels about disasters that might happen in the future. (Though those can be good too.)

My novel that is currently making the publisher rounds is set during World War Two. The novel I’m writing now is set during the Civil War. After that, I have a World War One novel in the mental hopper. Once those are done, I’d like to write a historical novel about some great disaster somewhere. The problem is that I can’t figure out which one to use. All that I know is that it would necessarily involve fire. The reason is because the other novels all have some aspect of historical fire protection in them. They are not part of a series and, in fact, are entirely self contained, but they all touch on the fire service. With that in mind, I’ll end up finding some major fire (probably not in the United States, but we’ll see) and writing about it.

I’m sure it will be a hot topic. And I hope the book isn’t disastrous.

Get it?

L.H.