Meerkat Blues

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Grimgrack

Two days in is a little early to celebrate the beginning of a new novel, but what the heck. For the time being - mostly as a way to goose productivity - I'll post a paragraph.

Amber Gerberding was standing right against him, all liquor breath and liquor delivery and half-lidded eyes, her small but solid bosom pressed flush into his left arm, telling him about a school assembly gone half-wrong, and the word, the magic word, still good five-years-on, the definitive way to completely control at least one person on the planet.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

That Thing You Used To Do

Right out of the gate, 2017, I didn't halt Lucid getting renewed for another three-month KDP Select term. The only hot sales action during the initial KDP term came courtesy of spending a week on Awesomegang's promotion site. A half-dozen people wading through the weekly cattle call nabbed the book, but there is still only a single Amazon review. No reviews yet for The Lipless Gods on Smashwords or Amazon although a co-worker swears he read it and reviewed it.

I didn't mean to take a hiatus. Late summer I banged out another novel - Exit The Skin Palace - but my main reviewer didn't get around to reading it in a timely fashion and the delay spun me off into a non-writing orbit. In the phantom zone, I even stopped reading books. From September through early January I read over 200 graphic novels, but as an adult, does it really count as reading if there are pictures?

At this time, I have to go back through Exit, make sure it's solid, and then probably hit up my cover artist and get to cracking. There could be sequels to Exit, but before that I have to crack the code on Colfax, a vampire/science fiction/social commentary novel that would probably be best accomplished in the mode of Brautigan.

Mostly, I've been drawing. Doodling. I know artists, good artists, great artists, and would never count myself among their number. I doodled through college, slung voluminous amounts of ink into the margins of notebooks to stay awake through lectures. Right now, it helps me feel creative, keeps the engine warm so when it comes time to actually write I won't be starting cold.

I still consider myself a political agnostic. I didn't feel a particular way about Obama, I don't feel a particular swaying to-or-fro for Trump. In the latter case though, he's easy to doodle; so is his cast of supporting characters. That's all it comes down to for me. I'm looking forward to getting more interested in my own cast and letting the pencil and the ink pens chill.