The horribly-performed, off-key flutophone parody of “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic” has been stuck in my head all day, and if I have to suffer with that knowledge, I refuse to suffer alone.

In spite of that mind-numbing handicap, I enjoyed a walk downtown in the 79-degree sunshine and a delicious Mud Street Cafe veggie burger (plus a huge warm chocolate-chip cookie for dessert).

And there in my old place at the bar, I wrote several paragraphs of outline for a fourth book in the “People of the Water” Cycle. The narrator I settled on surprised the heck out of me, as did the source of the major conflict in the developing story. There are still a lot of holes in the plot, as I’m sure there probably were for people who read the original trilogy!

The story-in-progress may turn out to be a false start or a terrible mistake due to that awful earworm-of-a-song, but for the moment it feels very right, taking up five years after the third book left off, in the year 2020.

In the meantime, book sales have been slow-to-fair, although literally thousands have downloaded at least the first book free on the Kindle membership program at Amazon. And if they read the fine print during the first 90 day publication, they got all three books free.

Seriously, somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 downloads.