If I lived closer to Houston proper, I’d probably be at Murder By the Book at least once a week. MBTB is a fantastic bookstore that specializes in crime fiction and murder mysteries. They bring in authors for signing events on a regular basis; in fact, there’s hardly a day goes by when they don’t have someone there. Big name authors, too.
But it’s a 45-minute drive and the weekday events start at 6:30, which means going into the city during rush hour, which isn’t my favorite thing to do. But I make exceptions from time to time, and when I heard that Amber Benson, who I met at NECON last year, would be here to promote her fine novel, The Witches of Echo Park, I made the trip. This was the last stop of her whirlwind tour and she was a bit punchy by the time 6:30 roll around, but it was good to catch up with her. She read the book’s opening chapter, and then did a Q&A with the audience.
Someone asked if she was part of a critique group, and I was fascinated by her answer. She works with a group of creative people dubbed the Shamers. They all work together in the same place at the same time, each doing his or her own thing. But if someone notices that someone else is spending too much time on Twitter, they call that person out. On the flip side, if someone hits a wall, he or she asks advice from those assembled. So, not a critique group, per se, but a support group and a peer pressure group, shaming each other into working. I like that idea.
I turned in the short story I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks to Tesseracts Nineteen, a couple of weeks ahead of deadline. The theme for the anthology is superheroes and I kind of played fast and loose with that concept, so they’ll either love it for being so creative or hate it for completely missing the mark, I figure. I quite like the way it turned out. It took me a while to capture the tone that I discovered halfway through the first draft. Irreverent, in a way.
As one window opens, a door closes, or so they don’t say: after submitting this one, I got a rejection letter from another market. Ah, well. So it goes.
Now it’s on to the novella, which will be the longest piece of fiction I’ve written in quite some time. I feel like I’m about to enter a cavern with a candlestick and a handful of matches.
