Damn you, Max Von Sydow

Surfer On The Drift is done in as much as any first draft is ever set in stone. It's the second book in a series about a 12-year-old boy ghost.  I haven't corrupted the series with an official title. 'Montgomery Strahl, Boy Ghost' or 'The Skeleton Key Books' seem applicable.  

Monty's story isn't a well-planned out beast.  It's not a trilogy. There's no final act I know of lingering out there.  

Similar to the way some authors age their characters (Connelly, Silva, etc.), Monty is locked into a slow-moving purgatory of sorts. His friends are getting older, have gone through puberty, are getting close to high school graduation and college, and he's always going to be a kid.  

It makes for good internal tension.  Monty is an odd-ghost-out, capable of considerable feats - many of them violent - and it makes him an outsider to the rest of the dead.  And what solace he can find with the living is thin gruel. Thinning all the time as peers move closer to adulthood, or in the case of his parents, replacing their dead first-born with more children.

But I'm not writing about the kid to beat him up.  I think I'm writing about Monty because he can make the dead move, and get entangled in some fairly gross plotlines.  If I were in middle-school, I'd want to read about a dead kid that can get away with all kinds of shit while at the same time, saving lives, or arguably, saving all of humankind.    

So now, in a little over a year, I've pounded out Exit The Skin Palace, Grimgrak, and Surfer On The Drift.  

Currently, my little fingers are crossed, waiting to hear back from one literary agent about Exit, and also, waiting to see the fate of my PitchWars submission.  

I don't do social media, and self-promotion very well.  The highlights of my Facebook are usually sharing the exploits of Buckley the Highland Cow. The rest of the time, I can't help but share or retweet the latest dark skies courtesy Mercy For Animals, The Light Movement, or Animal Equality.  For this likely fatal inability to play "nice", I blame the everlasting influence of Max Von Sydow's human-shunning artist in Hannah and Her Sisters.     

I'm terrified of lifting the lid on Grimgrak.  I'm near the brink of losing objectivity on Surfer.  I could start to rope together my hodgepodge Sylvia Plath/vampire/sci-fi idea, but with three novels already in the hopper, and two of them not quite all the way fit for human consumption, the prospect of a fourth offspring is somewhat chilling.  But still, what the hell else am I going to do at 2:00 AM except write or maybe watch this on an endless loop?    

(Artwork (c) Jenny Dayton)