Behold!
Another dispatch has arrived!
Hello all, and thank you for reading my latest Dispatch, wherein I don’t talk about a whole lot, but I am willing to spend a few words doing it.
In publication news, my short story “Trying to Stay Dead” will be aired sometime this fall in Tales to Terrify, a podcast of nifty horror fiction. I don’t know the exact date yet, but I will be sure to let the world know when I find out. This story is a reprint of a story that was first published with Pseudpod in 2011. I think it’s a good story, and I loved playing around with tense and point of view in this one. If you love philosophy and zombies and philosophical zombies, you’ll love this one.
The writing continues apace. I haven’t made as much progress in revising And the Devil Will Drag You Under as I’d hoped I would, but I’ve set a new deadline of August 31. Hopefully I’ll hit that one. If I don’t meet this deadline, why, I’ll set a new one and hopefully meet that one.
I’ve also been making notes on a new novel, Witness to the Scourge. This one started as a short story which turned into a novella, and is now doomed to be a novel. Did I mention it before here? I don’t remember. If I did, I apologize for the repeat information, and if I did not, well, now you know something new about my writing life.
In other news, last weekend I attended BayCon, and it was probably the best science fiction convention I’ve been to in years. I posted an entry on my blog about it. One highlight I didn’t mention in the post was my meeting with Arley Sorg, a writer/editor/interviewer/agent/etc., who seems to know everyone in the field (including several of my friends), and whom everyone (including several of my friends) seems to know, but whom I’ve never actually met. Though we both agreed it was possible we’d met in passing at some point at FOGCon when that was going on. We talked about writing, about cons, about publishing, about how to best come up with comps — titles of books similar to the one you’ve just written — when querying agents, and so on. We spoke for over an hour, and he invited me to lunch but I had promised my friend that I would attend his reading.
All in all, I had a blast at BayCon. 10+, no notes, would do again.
As always, thank you for reading this far. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay sane.
Richard