The Art of Heart is the new title for book three (originally announced as “A Fall from Heaven”) and follows The Perfect Gift, picking up the story one year later.

This is definitely the best book of the series. It’s engaging, insightful, and has plenty of adventure, romance, breathtakingly beautiful and impressive moments, and of course all the plot twists typical of this series. It’s also over 100 pages longer than the first two.

From my perspective, what I’ll remember is how darn long it took to write! I’ve had the basic storyline written out in my head for years, and much of the detail written down well, for years, just not as many, but it still took writing day and night for months to let everything finally settle into place.

It was interesting to notice how the plot took on a life of its own, and how events often turned out differently than planned – and how that always turned out better than my outline. It was also interesting to notice how the characters would say things, as I typed out the dialog, that I had never thought of before, and how they came up with some pretty good ideas!

Now that I’ve finished, I’m trying to put the same dedication into getting all caught up on grading my students’ papers. They turned in a major paper on Tuesday and I’ve been recording an average of 8 minutes of commentary on each one which I email them so they can take it into consideration for the next revision. It’s a good system, but time consuming, taking an average of half an hour per paper, which adds up fast!

As I get all caught up there, I need to learn how to play again. I’ve been planning to go watch The Bourne Legacy for over a week now, but every time it’s time to go, I keep deciding to stay and keep working. Until late tonight when I finally broke away. It was good! And as it ended with the shot of the Philippines ocean, I couldn’t help but think how nice it would be to away on my endless round the world trip already. If someone offered my $120k for my house right now, I’d take it and leave the country by January.

Anyway. Bed time. I need my rest so I can get up and grade all day again tomorrow.

Last year, my first Christmas book, Courage, Love and the Meaning of Christmas, reached as high as #412 in books on Amazon.com, which is the top one-fifth of one percent of all books. Not bad! Its sequel also reached the top 1% of books.

Well this year in 2012, I’m hoping not just for a repeat, but to do even better, partly because I’m writing furiously to finish the third and final book in the series. I’ve been working on it off and on for three years now, and for the past many weeks, that means often writing from dawn till well after dark.

I’m hoping to finish this week. It’s coming along well, but there’s still plenty of work left, so we’ll see. I’ll announce it on ChristmasNovels.com and Facebook.com/ChristmasNovels when it comes out, and I’ll eventually let you know here how it goes!

…if you’d like to help me give away all the old inventory, it’s yours for the taking.

Just let me know how many copies you want, then drop by and pick them up. Give them away to your family, friends, coworkers, and strangers at the mall. Keep one for yourself.

No strings attached. You’ll be helping me clear out space in my basement and spread the word about the new books.

If you’re not local, then you can order as many books as you want from Free Christmas Books.com, but it’ll cost you just about enough to cover S&H.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

P.S. Now that I have concluded my experiment to find out which of you are ingenius marketers, I will add a copy of the stamp I had made for the inside cover of the book. Thanks Antone and Joe for your input!