Springing Forward

Damn, I've been busy writing lately. That's good. Very good.

Back in March and April I felt off track. I was writing, but it wasn't clicking the way I like it to, and I wasn't finishing things. Everything felt like an uphill march in the snow with the wind in my face. And I wasn't alone. At least two of my writer friends commented to me back around that time (independent of each other) that they were in the doldrums too. Of course, there was another writer friend of mine who was chugging away on his book full-steam ahead, making us all look bad. But by the end of April things had turned around for me. Sometimes it's only a matter of slogging through enough scutwork to build up some momentum.

Because May was a pretty darn good month writing wise, and June is looking bright.

I'm 30,000 words into the second draft of my second novel. It's infinitely better than the first draft and I love the direction it's going.

I got a story synopsis in on deadline (literally, on the deadline) for a very cool anthology featuring a classic character. Then I got word that it was approved and to go ahead with the story.

I wrote a new short story for another anthology, submitted it, and the editor liked and accepted it. That's particularly pleasing because it's a piece of crime fiction, and I haven't written a lot of crime fiction. I like it, and I want to do more. Plus, the editor of this anthology has genuine expertise in the field of criminology, so passing muster with him makes it that much sweeter. I'll be posting more about this one as soon as the editor says it's okay.

To top it all off, I finished proofreading Resurrection House. It's always cool to read your work in print. Reading stories in pages has a distinctly different feel than reading them in manuscript. For me, the final litmus test for whether or not a story really works is if I still like it when I read it in pages or in a printed book. So I'm glad to say, everything in Resurrection House works. Admittedly, I might see a few things I'd do differently now, especially with a book like Resurrection House, which includes a range of work from my first published short story up to the present. But seeing those things is part of the fun, so I leave them be. There were relatively few corrections to be made (Note: Fingers crossed that publisher and designer agree with my definition of "relatively few"). To the best of my knowledge everything is now in and the book is heading toward publication. Exciting.

It's a cliche, but it's true: It can be hard to see the forest for the trees.

For writers that happens when we get deep into projects, and we focus on all the bits and pieces and details, the characters, plots, pacing, and prose, and forget that even when the trees all start to look the same, we're still making progress. (I spent two weeks rewriting Chapter 1 of my novel, but that work had to be done, that chapter had to be right for everything else to fall into place.) Then after awhile we can lift up our heads, look back at what we've been doing, and say, "Damn, I've been busy writing lately."

With a little luck, I'll be saying that again come sometime in July.

Resurrection House

Over the weekend Joe Morey, publisher at Dark Regions Press, sent me the first proofs of Resurrection House. The book is coming together beautifully. Dave Barnett has done an elegant job in designing it, and Jason Whitley's illustrations strike the perfect mood for each story. It's exciting in a unique way to be holding these proofs and going back over these stories. Looking at it now, I think it's a terrific mix of my horror writings. The deluxe limited hardcover edition (which will include two stories not found in the other editions) and the limited hardcover edition are now available for preorder at Horror Mall. Details on the paperback will follow. Awhile back, I promised to post the final cover and table of contents, so here they are.

Mooncat Jack

Trick

Gray Gulls Gyre

Refugees

Resurrection House

The Feeding Things

Last Stand of Black Danny O'Barry

The Tale of the Spanish Prisoner

Vicious Swimmers

Five Points

Swamp Hoppers (deluxe hardcover edition only)
Derelict (deluxe hardcover edition only)

Terminator V. Robot Monster

Caught Terminator Salvation tonight, courtesy of my pal CJ Henderson, movie reviewer and author extraordinaire. Not sure exactly what I think of it yet. So, I'll keep this brief for now and relatively spoiler free. As an action movie, it's tremendous, but as science fiction...well, I'll only say that it has about as much real science in it as Robot Monster. In fact, the whole thing has a sort of Robot Monster feel to it.

Let me explain.

Robot Monster is a much-maligned gem of a B-movie. Often bandied about as a rival to Plan 9 From Outer Space for worst movie ever, it is in actuality only deeply misunderstood. Robot Monster is a clever, science fiction retelling of The Wizard of Oz as if imagined by a fevered 12 year old. Terminator Salvation has that vibe. There are moments of genius in it, but overall the whole thing feels like something a 12 year old might cook up after having seen Terminator and wondering what the war with the machines might look like.

The Terminator franchise has officially become fantasy.

Is that good or bad? How the hell should I know?

All I can say is that there's a giant terminator with a gun for a head, and it shoots terminator motorcycles out of its legs, and it's the coolest damn killer robot ever. Ever.

The Final Files

About twenty-four hours ago I uploaded the final story files and illustrations for Resurrection House. Everything's now in the hands of the publisher and designer, and the book should be listed on Dark Regions' website shortly. This feels very, very good. Later this week, I will post the final table of contents. In the meantime, here's a look at the not-quite-final cover:

BAF2: Just Plain Bad

Bad-Ass Faeries 2: Just Plain Bad has been out for about year now. Recently it garnered the 2009 Eppie Award for Best Anthology. A new edition is due soon from Mundania Press, along with a new edition of the first volume in this series, Bad-Ass Faeries. The books are still garnering new fans and picking up attention, and rumblings have sounded about a third book. People have really responded well to the "back-to-their-roots" faeries that appear in each anthology. Being part of this series has been great. Not only has it inspired me to stretch myself as a writer, but it has connected me with a lot of new readers. One brave soul has even undertaken to review all of BAF 2 on her blog...one story at a time. Here's a link to her comments on "Way of the Bone," the first story in the book.

Behold, the Power of Writing!

Last week was a rough week. Nothing spectacularly awful, but one of those weeks when not enough goes right, too much goes wrong, and way too much simply doesn't go at all. Annoying. Frustrating. And, to some extent, demoralizing. A real beat down of a week.

But these things have a way of turning around in the most unexpected ways.

Awhile back my friend Russ asked me to read his novel Finders Keepers. He's been working on it for a long time, gone through at least a few drafts I know of, and has had some very promising interest from some good-sized publishers. He's also got a website dedicated to it. When he asked me to read it, he was closing in on finishing the first draft of his second novel and planning to polish FK afterwards. Lately Russ and I have gotten into the habit of hanging out to talk about writing about once a month, and he thought I might give him some feedback before he tackled what he plans to be his final draft.

As long as I've known Russ, this was actually the first of his writing I was going to read. I get nervous when people ask for my feedback. I like doing it, but too often over the years I've found myself in the uncomfortable position of telling people things they obviously didn't want to hear. Not that I'm some wunderkind. It's only ever my opinion as a reader and writer and I take pains to be tactful, but a lot of writers, it turns out, are rather...well, thin skinned.

Shocking. I know.

Thing is, Russ ain't one of them. As I soon learned, Russ is a genuine journeyman who knows the devil isn't in the details, it's in editing and rewriting the details. So when we got together for a beer last week, Finders Keepers came up. After I finished telling him how wonderful, deep, and engaging his characters are, how crisp and lively his dialogue is, and how flat-out cool and original some of his ideas are, I got around to a few...structural items...that had bothered me as a reader. Then, somewhere along the line (Don't ask me exactly when, because we were drinking; writers are always drinking, it seems. Shocking. I know.)... but at some point, I blurted out that I thought he might want to cut the first, oh, 150 pages or so of his novel and start it much later than he had.

Then I hid behind my pint of Guinness and held my breath. And waited.

That's when Russ said, "You know, I was sort of thinking that, too." Or words to that affect. (Again, drinking.)

After I decided he wasn't trying to lure me out from behind my Guiness for a quick ninja blow to my larynx (trade secret: all writers have ninja powers), I cautiously set my glass down. We then spent about an hour and a half hashing through what he'd written, what he'd intended, how it had read to me, how he'd edited it in the past, and what he might do with it for the final draft.

The whole evening left me really energized about writing. We writers work alone too much. Sometimes we really need that little push from someone who reminds us to listen to our instincts. And sometimes we need to be reminded that writing is about going out on a limb even if that only means being honest when someone asks for feedback.

So, two days later Russ sent me a rough draft of his new first chapter. And it rocks.

Then the same day my Domino Lady author copies showed up in the mail and Jason Whitley sent me the last piece of art for my upcoming story collection, Resurrection House. And it creeped the hell out of me. Jason is that good.

And that downtrodden, sickly feeling that'd been nagging me all week simply... went away. Behold, the power of writing!

Compliments of the Domino Lady

I was only passing familiar with the Domino Lady until a couple of years back. That's when pulpmaster Ron Fortier asked me if I might be interested in writing a story about her for an anthology he was compiling. A pulp heroine who originally appeared in a mere handful of stories, Domino Lady's mystique (and, perhaps, physique) has saved her from being lost to the ages. Because Ron is an old friend and a terrific pulp writer and everything about the project sounded cool, I jumped on board. I did my research, and penned a 15,000 word novella, "The Devil, You Know." Aftwerward, as is not uncommon with live projects, the Domino Lady book began to evolve. For awhile it seemed like the book might even be on the ropes, but thanks to Ron's tireless efforts to keep it alive, it landed at Moonstone Books, where the scope of the anthology grew beyond it's original plan. A very satisfying twist, indeed.

Moonstone is arguably the finest publisher of new pulp fiction and comics working today. They've published a lengthy list of comics and prose anthologies featuring the Phantom, the Spider, Zorro, Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and many other classic characters. And they've done it with style and respect for the origins of those characters. Editor Lori Gentile quickly took the Domino Lady up a notch, expanded the scope of the project, lined up pulp-style illustrations and some more contributors, and brought everything to completion for what may be the best pulp anthology I've yet been published in.

My story appears there alongside the work of my friends and terrific writers, Ron Fortier, CJ Henderson, and Martin Powell, as well as comics great, Chuck Dixon. I've read a lot of Chuck Dixon comics over the years; he's one of the industry's sharpest writers and its reigning master of action and adventure stories. Mr. Dixon's run on Batman and Detective Comics is one of my favorite eras for the Dark Knight, and that's only scratching the surface of his body of work. So, it's extremely cool to share pages with him.

So, my thanks to Ron for bringing me into the fold on this book, and to Joe Gentile and Lori G. at Moonstone for seeing the potential in Domino Lady and for being so great to work with through editing and production.

For more info on the book, Moonstone has the full details and Jazma Online has an interview with me done during production.

As for the Domino Lady, aka Ellen Patrick, she's a wealthy socialite whose father was murdered when he tried to clean up corruption in the local government. Ellen, donning a trademark, black-and-white outfit and domino mask, sets out to strike back at the rich, powerful, and evil, by stealing their wealth and exposing their crimes, carrying on her father's work in spirit if not in practice. So, of course, in my story, she gets wrapped up with a group of powerful Satanists who hold places of power in the state government, and much mayhem and danger ensues.