one more draft…

“This can’t be right,” I mumble, just as uselessly. But there it is. In flat monochrome.

“Is that the-” Behind me, Officer Reynolds catches himself. “Are those bodies?”

There, on the bottom of one of the feeds half-covered by the heatmap: a collection of grey bodies piled against the closed doors. I crush the desire to power off the computer. It’s way too late.

“Officer Reynolds,” the Interpol man says with a small tremble in his voice. “Please-”

“Fix it!” Suddenly the big officer is crushing my shoulders in his hands. “Turn it back on! Now!”

“Officer Reynolds!” Gerent’s voice is thin and squeaky now. “Stop!”

“Dad!”

I try to turn to Patrick just as Reynolds shoves me toward the screen and the desk stabs me in the chest. The steel edge catches me just below the sternum, sucking the wind from my lungs.

“Hurry up, you fat pig! Fix it!”

a good review has appeared on amazon.com, and while there are some downsides, the reviewer goes so far as to compare elements of my style to Glen Cook, which is is clearly an enormous ego boost, thank you very much!

so, here i am again, at the top of the rollercoaster. a common misconception of my zodiac sign, libra, is the belief that we are balanced and stable individuals.

pfiffle.

being a libra, at least for me, is being always in search of equilibirium. as a result, i’m never quite there. case in point: my previous post. saddling myself with the familiar weight of self-pity, i bemoaned the fact that the store i was hoping to have a booksigning at was going out of business. a few days later i discover this review (which, in fact, was posted the day before the book store news) and voila, validation once more.

what i have learned, however, is that the rollercoaster costs extra. what that means is…well, honestly, i don’t know what that means; it just sounded clever.

what i do know, though, is the experience with the bookstore would have been something to knock me out of the game, some years ago. i would’ve taken it as a sign or some other foolishness, and buried my head back in work and self-pity. now, though, what i most took away from that discovery (once i got past the moment, of course; i’m human) was the fact that i’d let the unimportant things clutter my view and fill my days.

i am never so bloody busy that i can’t spend five minutes writing, nor am i so busy that i can’t make a call to a store and set up a signing, particularly one with a manager who was so clearly willing to help. i made this happen, as much by what i didn’t do as what i did.

so there’s the lesson: stop wasting time.

when i’m on my game, i feel like i could write without stopping until i breathe my last breath and not get all the stories out of my head. when i’m not on my game, i have sheaf after sheaf, drawer after drawer, and file after file of story ideas scrawled down to keep me busy. (of course, i’m the first to admit not all those ideas are worth sharing, but you get the point) either way, i’m an idiot for stopping.

so, i started again, and you’ll see more of it here very soon.

so, i’m trying to square myself back into regular activity, though it hasn’t been readily visible, here. i’ve been back on the ‘5 minute rule’, but not online because it’s mostly what i squeeze in before i fall asleep each night, but, again, you can’t see any evidence here.

so i finally dragged myself out from under the weight of the everyday and tried to get my first book signing underway at a local bookstore. i’d gotten good feedback from the store back in April and then i’d dropped off the radar, much like here, for nearly six weeks. so, i emailed the manager this morning to see if she was still interested (and if she didn’t spurn me for going AWOL), and she emailed me back to say she wished she could, but the store is being closed this coming sunday. seriously.

ha. ha. ha.

this is not helping.

no real excuse for the lack of content recently. we’ve all got jobs and families and all those things. i’ll just say i’m gearing up to get back into the swing of things soon.

this weekend i received a review over at Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews. a number of items didn’t work for Dark Wolf, but again, this is all about seeing the positive and negative, and I’m thankful for the honest commentary and the clarity around what didn’t work and why.

and they very well would have been the death of me if not for my wife, who finally told me to stop tweaking and start sending. even so, i had the selfish gall to give her a bit of an attitude about this being the only chance i really had with each of these agents, so the letter has to be perfect, researched, fine-tuned, etc., and various agents have various preferences for queries and how hard it is to get everything summarized and effective and clear and…

i know, i know, talk about childish. i don’t deserve her.

thank you, mary, more than i can say.

so, it’s been more a week and a half since i wrote anything vaguely creative, but last night i jumped back on the wagon, solely due to a friend who asked after the work i’d been doing. i’d previously been telling him how important it’s been for me to write for even a mere five minutes, and how it’s kept me going for the past several years.

well, when he asked yesterday, i was forced to admit i’d failed in that practice recently. he understood the pressures of office work and house re-siding work, etc., but it galled me to say that i couldn’t scrape together even five bleeding minutes to put pencil to paper. later that day, i made a pinkie-promise (which was new to me but is, i think, the result of his having children and me not) to do my five minutes that night.

but it almost happened again. mary was asleep, i had turned off the downstairs lights and computer, locked the doors, brushed my teeth, and was headed for bed when i realized i still had not written. yes, i was tired; yes, it was late (for me); yes, i had a thousand un-creative things spinning in my feeble brain; no, i didn’t have any clear ideas. fortunately, i remembered the promise and so what? wasn’t that the point? to do it anyway?

so i trumped back downstairs and did it anyway. and the ‘it’ in this case, went from five minutes to a half hour, and looks like the first several paragraphs of Book 2. i think i’m back on track.

to my friend, i give thanks.

yes, it’s been quiet here. don’t get me started. anyway, hit a bright spot in my email last night, when i received the Kirkus Discoveries Newsletter for May, and there, at the top of the list, was Witness!

the review is the same as I listed elsewhere, but now it’s out on their site, all official-like!

Check it out!