January 17

Here’s Lynne Hansen’s cover for my new novel, Demonic. The book should be out…well, not any day now, but within a couple of weeks, I’d guess. And it’s cray!

January 15

Yesterday was my beginning-to-end proofread of the new novel, which then went on to my crack team of test readers. I didn’t find that many embarrassing errors. Oh, there were embarrassing errors, mostly of the “character injuries that I simply forgot about” but they’d been caught already and just needed to be fixed. But I didn’t find many NEW embarrassing errors.

I’ll probably share the title, cover and book description on Tuesday.

January 12 (Part II)

And….the new book is finished!

The next step is to do a beginning-to-end read, tightening things up and searching for continuity errors. (I edit as I go, so this isn’t one of those “just get it done and worry about fixing everything later” rough drafts.) Then it’s off to the crack team of proofreaders.

Because this will be self-published, you won’t have to wait very long to read it…

January 12 (Part I)

Yesterday’s goal was not to finish my new novel, but to reach a point where it was unthinkable that I wouldn’t finish it today. I stayed up until 3:00 AM, like a college student frantically finishing up a term paper, and got there. The book should be done well before lunchtime. And then I’m taking a long-ass nap.

January 8

With my last update, I said that the new book should be done “in about a week” and that’s still the case. I’m guessing four to five days until it reaches its dramatic conclusion.

Meanwhile, I now owe six short stories so far in 2023. Fortunately, most of the deadlines are spaced apart: January 20, March 31, April 1, June 30, August 1, September 30. Of course, not only are the March 31/April 1 deadlines one day apart, but Borderlands Boot Camp is March 29-31, and it’s going to require a lot of prep time on my part…so, yeah, I’ll be a bit busy at the end of March.

(Or I could start much sooner. We’ll see how that works out.)

Registration for Borderlands Boot Camp (an intensive writing workshop) is open until January 31. The other instructors are Brian Keene, Mary San Giovanni, Norman Prentiss, Maurice Broaddus, and John Urbancik. More details HERE.

January 5

Just a quick blog post before my appearance on The New Panic Room Radio Show (https://www.blogtalkradio.com/thenewpanicroom/2023/01/06/the-new-panic-room-episode-296).

The new novel is zipping along nicely. Should be done in about a week! It has a finished cover, which also means it has a title, but I’m going to save that until I type “The End.”

I don’t have much else to report, because I’ve been spending all day, every day, working on the novel!

December 30

Hey, tomorrow’s the last day of 2022! Which means that tomorrow’s newsletter will be the last newsletter of 2022!

The short story is “Turn That Frown Upside Down,” and the special feature is a (completely made up) interview with author Kenzie Jennings.

Subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dewPc9

December 27

If I stay on schedule, today I’ll hit the halfway point on my new novel. This one is bats**t inside…which, yes, I suppose describes pretty much all of them, but still…

Last night I finished reading Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation, which filled me with a great desire to watch a bunch of the ’70s movies he writes about. No time for that now, though. I’ve got a novel to write!

December 24

Merry Christmas Eve! I’m usually opposed to book-burning, but if you need to set fire to a few of my books to stay warm, it’s totally fine. If they were autographed copies, I’ll write my name in the ashes.

The new novel is just over one-third done. Things are getting insane! Just kidding…things were insane long before the one-third mark. I’m not sure that I would classify this book as a full-on horror/comedy, but there’s a very strong “WTF?” element to the proceedings.

I’m finally catching up with the third season of Barry. I’d forgotten how GOOD this show is. As funny as any sitcom, but with real stakes.

December 22

I’ve made my writing goal six days out of six since I started the new novel. Right now, I’m planning to sustain that goal for Day #7. But I’m also planning to do a very careful rewrite of the 71 pages I’ve written so far (I start each day by going over the previous day’s work, but today I want to start from the beginning) so we’ll see what happens…

Look! It’s my author copies of Bentley Little’s The Store. No, Bentley Little is not my pseudonym. I wrote the foreword. When Lividian Publications asked me to do this, my initial reaction was “Yes! Yes! Of course!” followed by slack-jawed astonishment that they would’ve asked me to do it. It’s a fantastic presentation of a fantastic novel, and I hope my dorky little foreword doesn’t diminish the glory of this package.