James W. Hall's Blog

Thorn and What's Next

I started writing about Thorn over thirty years ago and I still find him a challenge.  He's ornery and unpredictable, and sometimes that makes it hard for me to embrace him fully.  I'm a little ambivalent about him in general and always have been.

On the one hand he's living close to nature and is very observant of the world around him, the spectacular Keys vistas as well as the collection of characters from the harmless oddballs to the sinister and everyone in between.  Those are features that I admire in him and respect the way he navigates a fairly wild collection of people.  After all he's a hermit and basically anti-social, but the requirements of the thrillers is that I must throw a set of people in his way and see how he reacts or interacts with them.    On the other hand he's a bit negative and gloomy about the world he's observing and that gloom sometimes threatens to overwhelm him.

Given all that, I decided about a year ago that it was time to take a break from Thorn.  Maybe for just a year or two, or maybe for longer.  I'm still undecided.

However, in the meantime I've been working on something new.  A new direction, a new set of characters, a new genre.

The new one, which is tentatively titled The Last Bloom, is an international thriller.  The scope is much broader with settings in Africa and Europe as well as Miami.  The character, a young woman, is more outgoing and more worldly than Thorn.  I'm hoping she's complex enough to sustain a series of novels.  She has unusual skills and a complicated family dynamic and a large knowledge of people and places around the world.  She's a traveller, an artist and a keen observer of people.

The Last Bloom centers around the international trade in cacao beans and the business of chocolate.  More on this later.

Now that the website has been updated and is about to be more thoroughly revised, I wanted to resume blogging.

I've been active on Facebook and Twitter in the last couple of years but I've seriously neglected this platform.  That's about to change.

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