Well, crickets, it’s been awhile. About 9 months, actually, and no, I was neither gestating nor harboring gestation. Nor was I shuttled off into the witness protection program, nor did I go on a Mormon mission, nor was I involved in a space flight to Mars.
So what happened?
Life. Dammit.
I see by a saved draft that I got exactly five words into my mini-review of entry # 9 of my 31 Horror Flicks In 31 Days experiment. (It was to be on SESSION 9, by the way, a very successful fright flick, one I cannot recommend too highly.) Five whole words. And that sums up the last nine months.
From spending Halloween 2009 in the emergency room as my daughter’s health deteriorated again, to my wife’s surgery in December and surgery again in February, to the meltdown of my original factory-issued cornea, to a severe dry spell and utter loss of confidence in my writing, to a massively increased workload at the day gig . . . well, it’s been a hell of a year, even in only nine months.
Couple this with a weird kind of agoraphobia (there are times that I just can’t bring myself to deal with people, even people I love, and if I don’t watch it, I find that I’ve invented all sorts of reasons to avoid making phone calls, going to gatherings, writing emails . . . and making blog posts) and you have an extended silence.
Really, a lot of it was medical. My daughter’s condition (vastly improved now, by the way) combined with a rather lengthy convalescence period for my wife ate up much of my spare time for a long while, and that’s as should be. Family first. Always.
Then there was mine right eye, which offendeth me, but you’ll forgive my not plucking it out. I’m squeamish. As those who suffer from keratoconus can attest, when one eye goes bonkers, even the repaired one doesn’t feel happy. And my right one has been giving me fits off and on since about the end of March. I have good days, I have bad days, and then I have absolutely wretched, can’t bring myself to see any light days. This has scaled back my reading a great deal, particularly of the online variety. I have to stare at a monitor all day for my paycheck (if only I didn’t like eating) and very often, my eyes are too shot to do much after that.
Throw on top of this a long period where I thought about just hanging it up as a fiction writer. This business will knock you about, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. Well, don’t relax yet (or, conversely, celebrate; yeah, I’m looking at you there in the back). I’m in the ring awhile longer yet. I’ve been revising two novels and laying the groundwork for the next one during this time. I’ve also put together a chapbook collecting my flash stories, called NIBBLED TO DEATH, and that’s due out in the next month or two from Sam’s Dot Publishing. It’s 27 stories in about 13,000 words, so when I say short, I mean it. Epics for the ADD generation is what I’m getting at here.
So that’s where I’ve been. Where am I going?
Well. I have cunning plans (as a favorite muso of mine is fond of saying) and while I hesitate to get too specific here, because man plans and god laughs, here’s what the business dorks call the high level view of things:
After this bout of revising is past, I hope to dive into a light hearted crime novel called SLOW LIGHTNING. There are a couple of short stories that have been yelling at me to be written, including one really nasty one that, as it is shaped in my head right now, would be the darkest thing I’ve ever written. Of course, by the time it charges out of the fingers into the keyboard, it could be a musical comedy. You never know. You write to discover.
Then there is this blog, which I have twice undertaken with the purest of intentions, only to get knocked away. That’s no way to do things, so here goes third time lucky. My general, but flexible, plan is to fire off no fewer than three posts a week, talking about the things I love: books, writing, movies, and dat debbil rock-n-roll. With other tangents and rants assured. The rants may come on Soapbox Sundays, I don’t know, and will likely be wholly offensive much of the time. It’s not a good rant if you don’t make somebody as pissed off as you are.
I’m also firing up the 31 Horror Flicks In 31 Days experiment again in October, because it was a lot of fun last time. And yes, to answer my smart-ass sister, I will take requests. Not on things I’ve already watched and blabbed on (for instance, no repeat of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, but then why would anyone want one from me) but otherwise, I’ll do my best.
Let’s see, what else?
Personal stuff: looks like I’m going to go finish my degree. There’s that. Uh, fell in love with the northeast United States again this summer and would love to resettle there before I kick off, that also. Almost giddy with anticipation of football season (I regard my love of sports as an ineradicable character defect, and I’ve learned to stop fighting it, but I won’t disagree with anyone who says spectator sports are stupid as hell.) Reading Graham Greene and Charles Bukowski at the moment, which makes my head want to explode, but of the two, Greene is the more deservedly durable writer. Heading off on Friday night to go see a guilty pleasure of mine with my daughter: Asia. I know it’s dumb, I know it, but damn, I could listen to John Wetton sing the phone book.
That’s it for now, I think.
So, here we are again, crickets. Chirp, chirp. We chirp into the dark, you and I.
