I have a short story called “Adrift” coming up in the anthology Hard Old Spot, which editor Mike Heffernan (A Dark and Deadly Valley) is publishing through his new Hard Ticket Press next year. The story is an ode of sorts to the place where I grew up—or, rather, more of a dirge, since most of my roots to the place are gone. I don’t anticipate ever going back there again.
The new short story I’m working on (it’s up to 2700 words after today’s work, but I spent quite a bit of time going through the old version of the story to snip out details I wanted to keep) is set in the paper mill where my father worked for 45 years and where I worked for several years as a teenager/young adult. When I was young, it was by far the major employer of the town. Everyone worked there.
As a student, it was a place to make money: over $15 an hour, and that was something like 25 years ago. The work was hard, hard, hard, but I put up with it because it meant I had lots of cash for university. Working there was also good incentive to get an education so I wouldn’t end up lugging logs and shoveling wood pulp for the rest of my life.
CBC News is reporting today that the mill will be permanently closed in the first quarter of 2008. I can’t help but feel sad, because it feels like another nail in the coffin of a region that doesn’t have much else going for it economically. Maybe some other company will swoop in and rescue the mill, but if it’s not making money I doubt that will happen. It seems strange that I should be immersed in the 1980s world of the groundwood department of the mill when news of its closure emerges.
Anyone watch Criminal Minds last night? The episode started with a Clive Barker epigraph. Pretty cool.
I started reading Duma Key last night. The book comes out in January but the publisher delivered an ARC to me yesterday. It’s a first person narrative about a guy who suffered serious injuries when a huge crane demolished his truck. He loses an arm, has crushed leg and hip bones, and a contracoup head injury that affects his memory in strange ways. He moves from Minnesota to Florida for a change of life after his wife divorces him. I’m only about 50 pages in, but so far it has a wonderful Bag of Bones feeling to it, though the stories are unlike.
