Writing Update

We're back to school, and summer has officially been shot in the head, leaving nothing but a smoldering corpse and stains on the carpet. And humidity. I had some plans/hopes for the summer, writing-wise, and in most ways I've done well.

Plan 1: I wanted to write two novels. Maybe that sounds crazy. I didn't do it; I wrote one novel. Of course, I had a specific project in mind, but instead I wrote a totally new one. But it was fun, so who cares. I do hope to knock out the other project soon. The one I finished is a supernatural thingee about revenge from beyond the grave. But not in a cheezy way. Also, it has dragons. The one I didn't finish, well, I barely even started on it. I've been kicking it around for several months and made some progress on the planning end, but not much on the finishing end.

On the upside, I did pull out an idea I had a couple years ago for a middle-grade fiction story about baseball cards and polish that off. I was asked to contribute to an anthology on Dad-writers. Here's hoping they like it.

Plan 2: I've been working on this story series for about a year. I hoped to finish it over the summer. I made a lot of progress. I'm on (I think) the final story. It's a post-apocalyptic/race war series. I've been sending some of them out. It's a little tricky because they tend to be longer -- one of my goals was to write 'long stories' of more than 5000 words. Here's hoping someone picks a few of them up.

So, even though I didn't completely finish the one series, I actually started and completed another series. These are shorter, funnier, more off the cuff stories. Several have already come out on Fried Chicken & Coffee's website. I packaged them up and sent them off as a collection. So here's hoping there, too.

I also just started working on a stageplay I've been sitting on for a long time -- ever since we moved into our current house. The husband of the woman who lived here before us committed suicide in the master bathroom, and yet the woman stayed here for another 5 years or so. I've published a series of poems about this called "The Man Who Killed Himself in My Bathroom". No idea how it's going to turn out. So far, it seems pretty straight-forward.

So in the next week or two I plan to finish the play, finish the story-series, and get going on the novel. That will wrap it up for my summer plans. Somewhere in there, I'd like to write some poetry.