Summertime and the writing is a bit up and down

A warm week and I'm still running edits on my fishdude tale: I now have a working title that has shaped up to final title level. If it seems like I've taken this slowly, it has everything to do with my day job eating more of my time and energy, Barbecue season has launched, and this means barbecue stuff for me to bag up. But those three-foot long bamboo skewers meant for toasting smores look like they could double as vampire protection...

The pre-order for Erin Crocker's "Cocky Tales", which I discussed at length in my previous entry, goes live this week! You can here her talk more about it on this lovely live video, in which she's wearing *THE* most awesome hat for summer, ever (Erin, where did you find that cool thing??).

I've also been tinkering with a few ideas for tiny shorts: I've got a fantasy story involving wee monsters in a library, that I'm penning (pencilling?? as I use pencils to draft my MSS) to submit to a children's ezine. And a random throwaway joke involving undead hens. I have no idea how that got into the conversation (maybe just a case of Conversation with a Horror Author), but my mother asked me, "Has anyone ever written a story like that?" I honestly couldn't tell her yes or no, but I regard "originality" as a canard that begs refutation. You can copyright the presentation of a plot, but you can't really copyright a concept (tell that to the weird woman who tried to sue James Cameron and the Wachowskis for supposedly "stealing" the concept of a robot revolt. No word on whether or not the estate of Karel Capek - he who invented the word "robot" in the first place - put the legal bite on her. I doubt they would, or if her work even crossed their path). I won't say I'm taking a break from horror fiction, but after some emotional set-backs I've had, I've decided that some lighter works might do the trick to boost my spirits.