April Newsletter

After a few months of unbroken productivity, it was probably inevitable to have some setbacks. Unfortunately, I had to discard most of my first draft about two weeks before the Macabre Monday contest deadline. There are two types of rough drafts, I’ve learned. The kind that is messy but pretty much tells the story you want to tell, and the kind that no amount of editing can rescue. This draft was the latter. However, Jeff kindly offered to feature my piece on the Macabre Monday site this coming July, so I will either have this story or a reasonable substitute completed by then.

As you might have guessed, my experiments with speeding up my writing process didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. There has to be a balance between writing so fast that none of it is salvageable and writing so slowly that it takes months to complete the first draft of a short story, but I haven’t found it yet. As always, your patience is much appreciated.

I’m probably going to keep my medieval story on the back burner for now. The novella will probably take me a while to complete, and I’d like to have something left to publish while I’m working on it. I’ll probably write other flash fiction pieces and other fun stuff in the meantime as well, but I’m going to focus on the novella once I finish this music themed story. Really, I swear.

What I’m Reading:

• Island of the lost: shipwrecked at the edge of the world, by Joan Druett

  • I’m a sucker for a good survival story, and this one was particularly gripping. What are the odds that there would be two separate shipwrecks on the same remote, uninhabited island during the same time period, and that they were never even aware of each other?

• Out of the wreckage, by Kirk and Selene Yeager

  • Brief but extremely interesting. If you’re interested in true crime and forensics, or have ever wondered how they can figure out so much information from a crime scene that has literally been blown to smithereens, this book is right up your alley. This is an Everand original, so you likely won’t be able to find it elsewhere.

• The ghosts that haunt me: memories of a homicide detective, by Steve Ryan

  • This was an excellent memoir, but as you might expect, some parts were extremely hard to listen to. Particularly the chapters involving children. Absolutely worth reading, but be forewarned. (Also published by Everand)

• A climate of fear, by Fred Vargas (the pen name of French historian Frédérique Audoin Rouzeau)

  • This is an odd and quirky police procedural, and I mean this in the best possible way. The mystery is compelling, but it’s the characters who really stick in your mind. It’s one of the few mysteries I’ve come across where the cops are just as weird as the suspects. And not hypercompetent badasses. It’s actually kind of refreshing.