Time flies when you’re having fun. (Even when you’re not, the corollary says, but that doesn’t apply to me.) I had been hoping to make The Big Announcement about my next book by now, but I’m still waiting on the finalized cover to do so. Some of you may have already heard about it via other channels, but the full scoop is yet to come. Soon, I hope. Very soon.
[Of course, less than half an hour after this posted, I received the final cover image in my INBOX. Stay tuned for an update!]
My wife and I got our second booster shots last Saturday. Feeling somewhat emboldened (but still masking), I visited a new local bookstore, Village Books, for the first time. The shop owner recognized my name from Facebook and took a selfie with me, the first time I’ve done that in years! I was in the vicinity of the store because I’d sold a book on eBay and it turned out the buyer was someone who lives in the same community so I met up with him at a coffee shop to deliver it in person rather than send it five miles by media mail. We ended up chatting for well over an hour, the first time I’ve had a lengthy conversation with someone in person other than my wife since I can’t remember when.
I’ve had a good run on short story acceptances lately. The biggest one is my second acceptance to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for a Benjamin Kane story called “His Father’s Son.” Ben also makes appearances in the forthcoming stories “Kane’s Theory” in Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote, which comes out in May and in “Kane’s Alibi” in The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, due out in July.
Yesterday, I was notified that my cop story “Something Strange” will be in the Land of 10,000 Crimes anthology for Bouchercon 2022, which is in September. I have a demented story called “Date Night” in the anthology Picnic in the Graveyard from Cemetery Gates Media due out in May and a noir story called “Double Play” in the forthcoming anthology Summer Bludgeon from Unsettling Reads. My sci-fi noir caper “The Lagrange Point” will be in Fans Are Buried Tales from Crazy 8 Press, which I think will be out in November. I have a few others in the pipeline — you can check out what’s coming at my Fiction page.
On the non-fiction side, my essay “New England Adjacent” appeared in Mystery Readers Journal Volume 38, No. 1, Spring 2022, the first of two issues on the theme of New England Mysteries. My interview with Stephen King & Richard Chizmar about Gwendy’s Final Task ended up at Fangoria in February.
Brian Keene and I were interviewed for the Writers on Wax podcast. The host, Joshua Marsella, lost power just as we were getting ready to finish and we thought the whole conversation had been lost. However, Zoom saved it all. We did return a few days later to do the wrap-up. It was fun talking about the influence of music on writing, with a focus on Dissonant Harmonies. Video can be found on YouTube and the audio-only version on Apple Podcasts.
Recent movies: I finally made it through The Power of the Dog, although I have to say it was a bit of a slog. We watched two Ryan Reynolds films, Free Guy and The Adam Project, both of which were delightful in different ways. As a longtime reader of Haruki Murakami, I was looking forward to Drive My Car since I first learned about it. It was quite good, as was Licorice Pizza, which also introduced me to the musical group Haim.
What’s not to love about a Michael Caine caper movie? For some reason I missed King of Thieves when it first came out, but it was entertaining. We saw Shanghai Noon when it first came out on video (probably on VHS) but we watched it again, following up with Shanghai Knights, which we hadn’t seen before. We got a big kick out of the interactions between Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. There has been talk of a third film for ages, but it’s hard to imagine Chan having the energy for all that action twenty years later.
I read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile many years ago, possibly more than once because I had a clear and vivid memory of whodunit and how. I probably saw the 1978 movie, although I have little memory of it. The new Kenneth Branagh adaptation brought those scenes to life. It also added a non-Christie backstory to Poirot that was interesting. Reportedly a third film is in the works, based on a lesser-known work and set in post-war Vienna, which doesn’t match up with any Christie novel I’m familiar with.
I watched the Norwegian series Borderliner (terrible title), which reminded me of A Simple Plan in that it deals with people who come upon something valuable and then proceed to make one bad decision after another. Archive 81 was a trippy, fascinating “found footage” series that ends with a cliffhanger but then the series was canceled so, hmm.
I really liked From on Epix. It owes a lot to Lost (so much so that I expected the characters to stumble upon a Dharma station at some point). Since it’s on a non-network channel, the level of gore and language adds to the show’s “reality.” They really went all-in, though, in expecting a second season. I’d definitely be there for that. I also watched Suspicion, about a group of strangers who are supposedly being framed for a kidnapping. Lots of intrigue, although it got a little muddled and preachy toward the end. I’m also working my way through a re-watch of The Shield–I’m up to the middle of season 3.
Most recent read: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, about an artificial friend and her human companion. Some books are guilty of information dumps–this one is the opposite. The near-future situation isn’t explained at all and readers are expected to keep up. Young characters are either “lifted” or not, and we don’t discover what that means until late in the book. Quite fascinating.
Currently reading: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, about a woman who gets stranded on one of the Galápagos Islands at the beginning of the pandemic. The island is effectively shut down (even the hotel where she had a reservation), she doesn’t speak Spanish and isn’t an experienced traveler. She was supposed to go with her boyfriend, but he’s a medical resident who couldn’t leave NY in the face of a growing onslaught of coronavirus patients. I’m pretty sure this is the first Picoult novel I’ve read and I’m enjoying it.
