I wrote my first words of fiction of the month of November this morning. Nearly 1000 of them. I saw a call for submissions for a themed anthology and it struck a chord with me. I have this trunk story from 1982 that I’ve never done anything with because I thought it was hopelessly derivative. I’m ripping it to shreds and using the leftover parts to construct something new. The setting and some of the description will be salvaged, but the rest of the plot will be completely original and the main character will gain some depth—in the original he’s just a paper-thin, invisible narrator. The original story was about 3500 words but I think this rendition will be shorter. I have a fairly clear idea of how it’s going to turn out, which means that I should get the first draft done this week.
I received the galley proofs of my The Blue Religion story yesterday, so I spent the afternoon reviewing those. I read through the story three or four times, and I caught something new each time. The biggest glitch was in nested quotes, where double quotes were sometimes used within double quotes, and sometimes there was one single quote and one double quote. Found about six instances like that, and one place where a letter had been shifted so that “materializes in” became “materialize sin,” with the break at the end of a line so I almost missed it.
I also received my semi-annual earning statement regarding The Road to the Dark Tower. The book is still selling at a steady rate. A handful of audio book sales, too—I like those because the royalty rate is higher.
I finished Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith yesterday. It’s the fifth or sixth Arkady Renko novel (the first was Gorky Park). Smith’s writing skills are phenomenal. Stay tuned for my full review at Onyx, probably later this week. I’m reading through the stories in Peter Straub’s 5 Stories one at a time. I’m expecting a copy of Duma Key in the next day or so, so I didn’t want to start a new novel with that one on the way. The first two stories are reprints from Conjunctions, and they aren’t my favorite Straub stories. I’m rereading Donald, Duck!, which is funny and irreverent.
