So I’ve finally fin­ished the revi­sions on Ele­men­tal Assas­sin #4 and shipped those off to my edi­tor. If she likes them, the book will move on to the copy edi­tor. I’m just glad that it’s off my desk — for now anyway!

Still, no title or firm release date for book 4 (or for book 5 either), but those should be com­ing soon. I’ll post those here on the blog as soon as I get them.

The release date on Web of Lies is draw­ing ever closer — May 25. To whet read­ers’ appetites, I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of free Ele­men­tal Assas­sin short sto­ries — Web of Death and Web of Deceit.

Web of Death takes place in between the events of Spider’s Bite and Web of Lies and focuses on what hap­pens when Gin gets some unex­pected vis­i­tors one night.

Web of Deceit is another pre­quel story about Gin’s first solo job as the Spi­der when she was a teenager and is told from Fletcher Lane’s point of view.

There are no major spoil­ers in either one of the sto­ries, and both of them can be found on the Excerpts page, along with Spider’s Bar­gain, the first free short story that I wrote. I just thought writ­ing the sto­ries would be some­thing fun and cool that I could do for read­ers, since I’ve got­ten such great response to Spider’s Bite. I hope every­one enjoys the free sto­ries and can check out Web of Lies when it comes out as well.

Happy read­ing!

There have been a whole lot of remakes lately, and one of the lat­est is the new Clash of the Titans movie. It hasn’t got­ten fan­tas­tic reviews, but part of me still wants to see it.

Why? Because every time we had a movie day when I was in school, we watched one of three movies — The Princess Bride, The Nev­erend­ing Story, or, you guessed it, Clash of the Titans. So I have a cer­tain nos­tal­gic fond­ness for Harry Ham­lin, stop motion ani­ma­tion, and a golden owl. Incon­ceiv­able, isn’t it?

I think this is part of the rea­son why remakes are so pop­u­lar these days. You have folks like me who have fond mem­o­ries of the orig­i­nal TV show or movie — a built-in audi­ence who will go to the the­ater and tune in to see the remake. Easy money, in other words.

Some­times, the remakes are bet­ter; some­times, they’re worse. And some­times, the orig­i­nal should just be left alone. I hear there’s a Karate Kid remake com­ing out this sum­mer. I’m sorry, Jackie Chan, but you are no Mr. Miyagi.

There are some other remakes in the works too — The A-Team movie, of course, along with Hawaii Five-O and The Rock­ford Files. I’ll watch all three of these because I’m a sucker for a good action movie or a cool detec­tive show. And yeah, I’ll prob­a­bly go see the new Karate Kid too. Who knows? Maybe the vil­lains will still be the guys from Cobra Kai. We shall see …

What about you guys? Which remakes are you look­ing for­ward to this year? Share in the comments.

Appar­ently, there’s a new trailer out for The A-Team movie. Enjoy the action good­ness!

In between snack­ing on choco­late bun­nies over the Easter week­end, I also started work­ing on the revi­sions for Ele­men­tal Assas­sin #4. My edi­tor really enjoyed what I did with the book, so the revi­sions were fairly light.

There’s no title yet and no firm release date for book 4, although from what I’ve been told so far, it looks like the book will come out in spring 2011 — per­haps May — with book 5 to come out later in the fall — per­haps Octo­ber. We shall see …

In the mean­time, my edi­tor asked me to write a brief descrip­tion of the book to help the folks at Pocket come up with the back cover copy. Here’s what I sent her, so con­sider this a lit­tle teaser about the sto­ry­line. Note: This con­tains a few minor spoil­ers, so con­sider your­self warned.

An assas­sin has come to Ash­land to mur­der me. The irony is that I’m a killer myself – Gin Blanco, the renowned assas­sin known as the Spi­der. I’ve had a tar­get on my back ever since I declared war on Mab Mon­roe, the ruth­less head of the Ash­land under­world. Mab wants me dead in the worst kind of way, which is why she’d hired Elek­tra LaFleur to come to town and exter­mi­nate me – and the other assas­sin just might be able to do it. LaFleur is just as ruth­less as I am and has elec­tri­cal ele­men­tal magic that’s the equal of my own Ice and Stone power. 

Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is the fact that Mab’s kid­napped an inno­cent young girl who’s a friend of a friend. Find­ing her is pri­or­ity num­ber one. Sur­viv­ing is a close sec­ond, though. Good thing I’ve got sexy busi­ness­man Owen Grayson on my side, along with Detec­tive Bria Coolidge. The only prob­lem is that Bria doesn’t real­ize that I’m her long-lost big sis­ter, Genevieve Snow. And what my baby sis­ter doesn’t know just may get us both killed …

Sounds pretty good, huh?