From the crater

As expected, the past week mostly sucked. There's been a lot of turmoil and frustration, which has a funny way of translating itself into dreams and the music in my head. I keep dreaming about the same two people -neither of whom I've seen in ages.

This is all pretty much normal for the time of year, but I'm glad July is just over the horizon. The future always looks more promising than the present, even when it's the apocalypse. In the spirit of hopefulness, I sent off another five queries for my book this afternoon.

This, actually, was funded by my father --who slipped a couple of bucks in with a birthday card this time around. It covered the postage. Gracias, Dad.

The new book, which I am not going to talk about until I have a working story, is going okay. I'm taking it slowly and allowing a lot of free writing, but without much revision just yet. I want to get to the ending before I start slicing and dicing.

As for my other work... right now, the Cartersville stories work best as a collection of short stories and maybe a novella. I've got about ten of them, I think, which can stand alone and could probably use a punch up to get a little creepier. It's a fun place for me to visit, but a full-blown novel feels artificial at this point. I sent the first four off a few weeks back to Weird Tales in hopes at least one of them would attract some attention. So far, nothing...

I also sent a note to RELIX magazine. I'm headed to ALL GOOD in a couple of weeks. I almost wrote a story for them about it last time, but then they green lit the thing after the fact --not really sharp on their part. So, we're trying again.

Call this the silver lining of a life of regular failure: at least, I'm failing at something as opposed to succeeding at nothing.