“THE END” IS JUST THE BEGINNING

In a previous blog, I mentioned that I had a new work-in-progress (WIP) with a tentative title of The Shangri-La Raiders. I thought the title might not stick. But it has. My publisher, Severn River, decided the new book would be a nice follow-on to When Heroes Flew. Thus, the “official” title of the WIP is When Heroes Flew: The Shangri-La Raiders.

It will be published next summer, but you can pre-order it now. The manuscript, in fact, is already completed. But before I ship it off to Severn River Publishers, my beta-readers (first readers) will pore over it and tell me how to make it better. Then the manuscript will go to Severn River where their editors will take a close look at the story and try to make it even stronger.

That’s standard procedure for getting a manuscript to its published state. It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s not something that happens right after an author types THE END. THE END is just the beginning of a lot more work.

When Heroes Flew: The Shangri-La Raiders will be similar to the original novel in that it will detail an American bombing mission—this time the Jimmy Doolittle Raid on Japan—where things went unimaginably wrong, yet somehow the aviators were able to pull it off.

There are a lot of details I learned about the Doolittle Raid that I had no idea of before I began researching the tale. Those “details” make for an utterly fascinating drama.

I hope if you enjoyed When Heroes Flew, you’ll put When Heroes Flew: The Shangri-La Raiders on you list of “must reads.”