What I'm working on (April, 2009)...

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So... I know you all are WAY too polite to ask me point-blank what I've been doing with myself in the 10 or so weeks since I was laid off (ugh...), so I figured I'd take stock and give a report.

Besides working on chapters for my Kamp Kommander novel, I've been working hard to develop and grow my short story chops. Writing short stories requires a very different set of skills than long form, and I've worked on novels so long that I neglected building these muscles properly.

The good news, however, is that freeing myself (or, more accuratrly, being freed from) the tyranical chains of my job seems to have opened up a floodgate of ideas, many of which have been completed since February.

Since leaving CheckFree, I've completed the following stories:

• "Aeternal" - a story set in a distant future, where the undead rule the living through the remnants of the long-forgotten Church.
• "Blood Bowl" - The saga of a small-town hero who challenges the vampire bowling prince of Henderson, Oklahoma to an epic duel.
• "Ghost Light" - An aged actor and his son travel to Stratford, Connecticut to visit the theater that made - and will end - his life.
• "Railriders" - Another tale of the future. A story about freedom and what we must sometimes sacrifice for it.
• "The Shoe Factory" - A deep-space miner and tug pilot beams his consciousness out into space to save his own life. But who - or what - will pick up the signal?

With any luck, I'll find markets for all these stories very soon, and you'll be seeing them in a magazine or literature web site very soon. If anyone wants to recommend a market, please email me at the address at the top of the right-hand column.

I've also got about 11,000 words done of a novella, titled "Tatterface", a story set in the same world as Blood Magic and Nights of Sin. Kirin, my protagonist from those books (I can't really call her a "hero"), appears as a "guest star" in the story. Hopefully I'll be done with that one soon, but for now, it's proving to be a bit of a problem child.

Hope everyone out there is happy and well, and remember:

Before all else: write!!!


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