Still sitting on Grimgrack and Surfer On The Drift. Haven't looked at either MS in months. Horrors abound in any unpublish(-ed)(-able) novel.
Happily, I'm inching forward on plotting out the next big thing, at one time or another tagged 'Zumwalt,' 'Tranch,' and now, 'Dorian.'
For some reason, everything I write takes place in eastern Washington. Even Exit is kind of stateless but if you asked me where Monty lived before his unfortunate interaction with a homemade worm-getter, somewhere within spitting distance of Prosser wouldn't sound outlandish.
Since I can't write science fiction and arguably shouldn't write crime fiction, 'Dorian' is a happy genre mishmash of both, borrowing on 2001's monolith, some Star Trek "Mirror, Mirror" tropes, stirred together with a myriad of 'what-if's' stemming from Ken Griffey, Jr. abandoning the Mariners for the Reds back in 2000.
All that's left to do is to write it and actually slapdash a logical culmination of all the plotlines before typing out a single solitary sentence. The Underpants Gnomes part of the creative process is always stimulating and far and away beats those moments of performing an autopsy on one's creative aspirations, i.e., more or less what I've been doing since last autumn.
Reading-wise, even though I'm too old for them, I can't shake the graphic novel habit. I re-read some Brautigan, have only 15 Jonathan Kellerman novels to go!, and somehow, even after 30-months, still haven't cracked open The Complete Works of Primo Levi. But I did finish DFW's Everything And More and can happily report I retain not a single solitary lick of college-level math.
