I’ve had a fairly productive writing period these past few weeks. Can’t remember the last time when I’ve had so many firm commitments, along with the usual on-spec writing. I turned in a four-story mini-collection of reprints that will appear sometime in 2015. Also my X-files story to Jonathan Maberry. Then, finally, a story for the Book 38 horror anthology.
About the latter: I was invited to pick from a list of the world’s most abandoned and haunted places and submit a 2500-story. I chose the Willard Asylum in upstate NY and wrote a story featuring a brother-sister duo who’ve featured in a few of my previous tales. After my research, including watching a few videos taken by urban explorers, it took a while to get the story in sequence, even though I always had a fairly good idea of how it was going to go. I pulled it apart and put it back together again several times, but I finally got there in the end, and I turned that story in over the weekend. 2500 words is quite brief, but I find the exercise in winnowing a 3200 word first draft down to the cut-off refreshing. Everything must go! My writing becomes much more direct and entire sentences and paragraphs that don’t contribute to the story get lopped.
Book 38 launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign this week. As these things go, there are a number of rewards if you help fund the project, which already has a commitment from a publisher, as I understand it, and will be released be released in trade paperback and eBook format on May 1st, 2015. Among the other authors in the anthology are the following names, some of which you’ll probably recognize: Craig Spector, Rich Chizmar, Tim Waggoner, John Urbancik, Gary McMahon, Charles Day, and a host of others.
I’ve done a bunch of book review recently. Can’t remember when I last posted a list:
- The Job by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
- 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga
- World Gone By by Denins Lehane
- The Martini Shot by George Pelecanos
- Amnesia by Peter Carey
I have one more to do this week, then it’s on to the next project, which is a continuation of a story that was begun by someone else and will be completed by two others. I also got a couple of stories back into circulation over the weekend, something I’ve been lax about of late. I think I have about 10 out there in the submission-sphere at the moment.
Tonight is the end for Sons of Anarchy. Always a sad moment when a series ends after so many years, and I’ve been following it since near the beginning. It’s had an interesting arc. At first, the fascination was with Jax because he appeared to be a good man trying to do the right thing in a culture that made that kind of behavior difficult. He despised some of the things his step-father did and tried to get a compass bearing on what his father wanted for the motorcycle club. He failed, and in doing so he turned into everything he hated about Clay Morrow. Worse, though, he was betrayed by his mother, who has sent him on a collision course with Mayhem. She’s never been a terribly good influence, but her rash act at the end of the previous season, and the lies she and Juice told to cover that up, sent SAMCRO and Jax on a mission of vengeance for all the wrong reasons against all the wrong people. It’s not Shakespearean so much as Greek mythological. Patricides, matricides and just about every other “icide” you can imagine.
Season 5 (or 5a, if you insist) of Haven came to an end last week, too. They shot 26 episodes back to back (to back…), but are splitting the output into two batches of 13. Apparently there are contractual benefits to calling it a single season. For example, the actors can’t renegotiate a better deal in the middle! It’s been a wild ride, with a significant expansion of the mythology, and just when it seemed like there might be a calm moment for the troubled community, Duke let loose an epidemic of new Troubles and Vince & Dave stumbled onto something in the woods. William Shatner will be on four episodes in 2015. My theory is that he will play Mara’s father.
Looks like CBS got the use of a prison set and decided to make the most of it on Sunday night. First, The Mentalist had its “Orange is the New Lisbon” episode (my name for it, not theirs), and then the CSI team investigated a body found in a prison laundry. And then an interesting development at the end of Castle. Looks like Rick will have to strike out on his own in 2015, at least from an investigative point of view.
