Too Long in Coming on this

I've had a lot on my plate lately, hence the lack of an update (even though I'd vowed to post more often). My emotional and mental health have been shaky, due to some abrupt changes taking place in my life (Nothing I'll go into detail recounting, as it's personal and nothing you dear readers need to worry about). But the writing life has been nothing if not busy.

- "Write What You Know (and You Know More Than You Realize)" could not have gone better. The folks at the Wilmington Memorial Library could not have been a warmer or more engaging crowd. I only wish I could have come up with slightly more material than what I thought would fill my slot, but we filled the time with good conversation, which is what I'd hoped for. I want my talks, wherever I give them, to be more of a guided dialogue, as it were, since I feel a bit self-conscious going on about my craft and I want to be the sort whom my listener can find resonance with, sharing ideas and realizations they may have had but barely dared express. One of these days, I'll post the notes I made for this evening, as I had some good material there that I'd love to share with all of you.

- Guising Night, Book Two in the Dreamer of Providence series, has been released by Off the Beaten Path Press, and I think it's shaping up to be a bigger book than the first. I'd planned this as a Halloween treat last year, and then hoped for it to be a late Walpurgis Nacht treat, but life had a lot of interesting plans for us on the production end of things, But, as it came out the week before my birthday, I offer it to you as a reverse birthday treat: Halloween is my favorite holiday, and Lovecraft is one of my favorite writers, so consider this tale of a shy writer and his spirited Irish colleen on the spookiest night of the year as my gift to you all.

- I've also sold another tale, to be released sometime later this summer (All release dates projected): If you've been following the weird tale of the writer who claimed she's copyrighted the word "Cocky", and you're annoyed by this person's hubris, you are not alone. My friend Erin Crocker, whom I met through FunDead Publications, and with whom I share four of their tables of Contents, decided to launch a rebuttal of sorts, in her anthology "Cocky Tales". The one stipulation for this anthology, beyond the tale being between 1K to 5K words, was that you had to use the word "Cocky" in the title. I wanted to help out with this, as I'd followed the news, and all of it made me cringe hard enough to desire taking a whack at this nonsense through the thing I do best. But for the life of me, I couldn't come up with a story premise that I liked, even with the submission deadline looming up before me.

And then I went shopping with my mum, and as we stood in the entryway of the store, sorting through our bags, my gaze happened to catch on some gumball machines, one containing little figurines of zombies, and next to it, one containing figurines of mermaids. Naturally, my strange little mind latched onto this and got to thinking: "Zombies and mermaids... Mermaids and zombies... Mermaids fighting zombies. Why are mermaids fighting zombies, and what are zombies doing in the mermaid cove anyway??" (If you've ever wondered what my writing thought process entails and where I get my ideas, this is a good for-instance...) I immediately got the mental image of a cocky merman and his mermaid back to back fighting zombies. I had to write that story the minute I got home. Which I did, scribbling down an 1,800 word fantasy-horror piece in one day, typing it up the next day, editing the third day, and sending it out the fourth, with a day to spare before the submission window closed. To my amazement, Erin loved it enough to include it in her anthology. I'll post more information on the release when it becomes available.

- Works in progress at the moment include typing up the story involving a half-Deep One and some weird fans at a Lovecraft convention. I'm also shuffling between a few other projects, including a tale involving the back story on a Lovecraftian grimoire that has appeared in one of my tales already, the "Book of the Ways" by Rh'as-awl-Aliq, a disciple if not a direct student of our old friend Abdul Al-Hazarad (Why yes, that's a riff from the name of a Batman villain. It may have been intentional...) and the present whereabouts of one of the last known copies of the fearsome little book. A hotshot collector of antiquities and a priest sent by the Vatican to locate the book before it falls into unsuspecting hands will be involved (and yes, elements of it came from me getting annoyed with the cliche "suppressed by the Vatican" trope one finds in some thrillers, as I'm writing this for an editor who feels the same way about this trope: that it's overdone unless one is willing to Do Your Homework and Avoid Lazy Writing). Also, I may be returning to my science fiction roots and I'm setting the groundwork for a novel that I hope reads like literary fiction from a future that involves androids that easily pass for humans. I can't say more as I've only got a premise and a few characters jotted down.