Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 45

One and Two Days After

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas. It was pretty good here, though it seemed like an incredibly long day because the kids got up so early. Presents were unwrapped, then it was outside to dig out the van we couldn't get into the driveway the night before.

We went up to Enid on Christmas Eve to visit my parents. Going up there wasn't too bad, but coming back was a real nightmare. It turns out it was the biggest snowfall on record in central Oklahoma. The wind was blowing at 60 mph, too. Ther...

You find what you look for

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and I’m enjoying it a lot. I mentioned it to another teacher at school the other day and she said she’d tried reading it twice and couldn’t get into it. Then she added that at the time, other teachers were “passing it around like crack cocaine” and that kind of turned her off. (We’ll ignore, for now, the fact she likes the Twilight books.) I asked myself why teachers would be passing the book around like...

Various bits of writing updates

I will not complain about my students in this post. I swear it. Instead, I will talk about various writing projects. First up, The Prometheus Syndrome. I thought this was slated for an April 2010 release from Bad Moon Books. Thanks to the economy, however, it's been pushed back to September of 2011. This means I probably won't have any books released in 2010, and only had the limited edition novella in 2009. I am not thrilled about this. However, on the upside, John Carey is working on the co...

Too many projects!

I have a ton of stuff I need to do. The media is going nuts over werewolves, so I'm looking for ways ot get my Werewolf Saga into the hands of someone who can do something good with it. Have you heard? Yeah, yeah, New Moon leads the box office, but next year we have the remake of The Wolf-Man, and they're remaking The Howling (probably a really BAD idea), and there are new werewolf story lines in existing paranormal TV shows, and a new series about werewolves coming soon. I need an agent and ...

Give the Gift of Lycanthropy 2009

For centuries wolves have been hunted, persecuted, and reviled by many as monsters. They have been hunted to near extinction in several countries, including the mainland United States. On the other extreme, people have often taken wolves or wolf hybrids and tried to domesticate them, only to realize they can’t really care for a large pet. Somebody needed to step up and help educate the public about the true nature of the wolf, and provide a home for those cast-off hybrids that are neither...

New Moon

This post has nothing to do with the second in that horrible tween vampire series. I just thought it'd be fun to throw that in the subject line.

It was a pretty busy week. I've been editing on Ghost Sickness as much as I can, which is not enough. No work on Nadia's Children, and that sucks, as I stopped in the middle of a big scene.

I finally made some changes to my Web site, going back to utilizing the Godaddy.com hosting I've been paying for all along, but including my Wordpress blog. Anyway,...

One of those rare days

It was mostly a good day at school. Yeah, I have to write two referrals -- one for the girl who couldn't keep the bird to herself while my sub was there on Friday, and one for the guy who was throwing a tennis ball at my severed head while I was on hall duty this afternoon. And I had to chew some AP butt over missing work. But overall it was still a good day. Why? I'll tell ya.

First, I finally, finally, finally found an activity that got my English IV class involved in the literary analysis e...

Work, work, work!

So. No werewolves have prowled since the day after Red Dirt. Nope. I have a major scene going on, but haven't had time to finish it. Two people are about to die. And it'll be shown live on a Web cam. Eventually. Well, there ya go.

I spent most of the weekend grading a monstrous stack of papers. Hopefully that load will be cut down beginning this week. On Saturday morning I was "trained" on how to use these electronic clickers. Basically, I can create an assignment or quiz and students answer v...

Red Dirt Book Festival Roundup

Want to meet some fantastic people? Visit any of the Pioneer Library System libraries. They hosted the fourth bi-annual Red Dirt Book Festival yesterday and today, and I'm here to tell ya, they are some of the most helpful, enthusiastic, book-lovin' people you'll ever meet. This was my third time to attend the festival -- second as a guest -- and I mean it, they go all out for the authors and the readers. They put us up in the Hilton Hotel in Shawnee, provided tickets to the meals, had a shut...

Come visit me in Harvest Hill

I got news today that Graveside Tales' newest anthology Harvest Hill is now available for purchase. The book includes my new story "Hungry is the Night" written specifically for this book. Like my story "The God of Discord", this one involves a monster I first wrote about in about 1990 or '91 for a novel called The Living Dark, something I've messed with rewriting off and on ever since. But I digress. Like all stories in this anthology, mine takes place in the little town of Harvest Hill, Ten...