January 6th

Yesterday I got a third newsletter story done (“Quicksand”), so now I’m set through the February 8th issue. Today I reached the halfway point on my secret screenplay project.

I also got the gas fireplace in the new house to work. I’d messed with it before and couldn’t get it to light, and I wasn’t keen on the idea of blowing up the house, so I didn’t rush to return to the task. But today I was successful! Not as impressive as starting fire by rubbing two sticks together, or with flint and tinder, but nevertheless a decent accomplishment for somebody as incompetent as me.

January 5th

Today’s plans: more work on my secret screenplay project. And maybe another newsletter story.

Each issue of my newsletter has an original piece of flash fiction (short stories under 1000 words), and my goal is always to be a few stories ahead. That never happens. Usually the story is what holds up the newsletter being sent out on time. In November, I got three stories ahead for the first time ever, but that didn’t last.

But yesterday I wrote two of them: “The Frostbite Movie” and “The Man Without Nails.” That covers my January 11th and January 25th newsletters. Let’s see how far ahead I can get…

Welcome To 2022!

We made it to the new year! Well, Betty White didn’t, which is seriously messed up, along the lines of Sue Grafton dying after publishing Book #25 of her 26-volume series. But most of us did!

I’m now settled in my new house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By “settled” I mean that I’m now spending less time each day working on house-related stuff than not working on it. And I got my new driver’s license today after failing the vision test last week. It’s not that my eyes are getting worse. They’re actually getting better. Better to the point where my current glasses prescription (which I hadn’t updated in a while, thanks to the pandemic) wasn’t really working anymore. While I was unpacking, I found an old pair of glasses from about 15 years ago, tried them on, and everything was crystal clear. So I now have the eyeballs of a man in his mid-thirties. Sweet.

I’m hard at work on my secret project, which is starting to feel a lot like “my girlfriend lives in Canada” at this point. I can go ahead and say that I’m writing the screenplay adaptation of one of my books for a major movie studio. But which book? And which studio? I’d thought that I’d be allowed to blab the details by now, but now it’s looking like it’ll be February at the earliest. Sorry.