Much has happened since last we spoke. None of it particularly groundbreaking - I moved, which was about the biggest thing, into a different apartment.
It's a gorgeous day in the City of Roses, and I just spent the last hour sitting on my lovely balcony and writing.
What am I currently working on? It's the NANO that I started and then abandoned last year. It's really fun to write. It's an absurd story about ...well, you'll just have to see, won't you? If I ever get it finished. I'm almost to 20,000 words, so that's good progress.
Essentially, my obsessive admiration of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett is paying off with this story, and I think anyone who reads it will recognize that sort of bizarre humor infused all over this story.
I'm having a bit of a conundrum right now. The Shooter Vanished is stalled, but not for any good reason. I was in San Diego several months ago and spoke with a close friend of the family who suggested that I should consider turning it into a screenplay. My brother studied screenwriting in college, so I'm going to borrow some books from him on how to write a screenplay. If it seems like The Shooter Vanished will work better as a screenplay than as a novel, then I'll do that.
The conundrum, which is not a big deal, probably, is this. I have three novels in progress, all of which have a slightly different feel to them. The one I'm working on now (tentatively titled "Three Bikes and a Broomstick") is primarily a satire. Shooter Vanished is a serious sci-fi murder mystery. The other one is also probably going to be more serious than funny. All of them have to do with alternate universes and skewed realities, so that connects them. But if I publish a funny book first, and then publish a serious book, are the fans of my funny book going to be thrown by the fact that not all of my books are going to be funny? Likewise, if I publish a serious book first, and then a funny one...
These are silly questions, probably. I have to actually get one of these finished before I can think about establishing a "style" or an "identity" as an author. And then there are people like Neil Gaiman, who has written both serious and funny stuff (well, at least one funny thing - Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchett), and seems to be doing just fine.
Just things that rattle around in my brain, I suppose. The important thing right now is finishing something, which is harder than it sounds.
