What with the exigencies of parenting and having a day job and everything, I haven’t been producing fresh wordage at the prodigious rate I did while I was in Los Angeles. I haven’t slacked off entirely, though. I did a thousand-word essay on Wednesday, which will appear under a byline not my own to serve as publicity/extra material for a novel that also doesn’t bear my name. (I thought, being pseudonymous, that I wouldn’t have to do any publicity for this particular project. But, alas.)
Last night I did another 1200 words on the novel-in-progress, which I also can’t tell you about (yet), but which will, in fact, have my name on it. I think. I actually just this very morning signed and sent off the contracts for that book, which means I may be able to announce it in the next few weeks. (It’s one of three books eventually coming out from me — under my name! — that I can’t announce yet, and the need for discretion is eating me like a hungry hungry monkey.)
Speaking of books by other people: I read an old Lawrence Block paperback, Grifter’s Game (AKA Mona), which I loved, though the “hey daddy-o” old-school hipster lingo rather dated it. Nice con man/killer story though. Also enjoyed Enge’s World Fantasy nominee Blood of Ambrose. He does some wonderfully weird sword-and-sorcery. Tried a James Ellroy novel and bounced off it because the narrator was so aggressively unpleasant — and I like aggressively unpleasant narrators, usually! Not really reading anything just at the moment, therefore, though I dipped into Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice a bit, prompted to browse through it after recommending it to a friend recently. Time to hit the library again. Maybe I’ll read the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay — love the show, so it’d be nice to see what inspired it.
In story news — I still sometimes read stories — I loved Rachel Swirsky’s “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window”. It’s got a wonderful structure and cool weird magic. Also liked K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia” in the same publication. It’s got all that good K.J. Parker stuff — but with actual magic!
In poetry news: My poem “Ghost” is up at Cast Macabre for your listening pleasure.
I’ve always been amazed by what goes on under pseudonyms in the world o’ writing. I consider it a goal to have future historians as confused as possible as to who I was. The goal of course would be to get these theoretical scholars interested with a proper corpus, as opposed to being That Guy who published That One Story.