Blogging Toward Bethlehem

Y ou'd think I'd have a better handle on this blog thing by now. And I might, if it weren't that I have stuff to do and my computer is giving me hassles. The stuff to do includes a difficult illustration, and trying to get paid by a publisher, and dealing with heat, and the bloody cat wants to play catch. Sounds like your basic life, doesn't it? A magazine I have sold a couple of stories to seem to be folding, which is never something I like to hear. It's not as if that hasn't happened to me (or scads of other writers) before. I can count at least ten markets I've submitted/sold to over the years that have gone belly-up. Actually, the number is probably more like 20. I suppose I sound grumpy but I'm really not. It's Father's Day, and although I haven't actually seen my  daughter in about 4 years, we keep in touch. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and that's a long way from North Carolina. Plus she is busy with her career, and has just moved int

R eally, I did. Four days ago I sold a short story, one that I had put a lot of work into. It was originally written in 2019, and got some nice personal responses from a few magazines, including Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . (Gratifying, but neither  bought it.) However, it has sold, to an anthology. More details later. I can't even reveal the title just yet. I also sold a novel, to Readict: An End to Housework , which is more or less mainstream with some speculative elements. I wrote the book ahem cough  years ago, and have occasionally revisited the manuscript to update it. Housework  was definitely experimental. What actually kicked it off was my reading of Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That, plus the underground comics of Dave Sheridan and Fred Schrier. The novel (mine, not  Solzhenitsyn's) has three interlude sections that were originally meant to be drawn, like a graphic novel. But it would have taken me too long to do that, so I ended

T his time out, I’m going to try something a little different. I’m going to describe, to the best of my ability, how I intend to go about producing the cover art for my first self-published book,  Before Baker Street  – a collection of stories starring Sherlock Holmes as a teenager. It was great fun writing these, and several of them have been published, here and there. After I finished a couple I began toying with the idea of collecting them into one volume. My wife, Grace, suggested  Before Baker Street  as the title, because I couldn’t come up with a good one. I doubt I could come up with anything better, so I’m going with it.   Inevitably, given that I’m also an illustrator and have created several covers for books I’ve written, I started thinking about cover art. The time period is the 1880s, so that means a period piece. Looking at the content of the stories, I have Sherlock encountering a few people who are well-known historical or fictional personages, including Tommy Stubbins.

Y es, I said another.  That's because grace and I were diagnosed with Covid earlier this year. Shortly after that we received monoclonal antibody infusions, and did the social isolating thing. We were okay. But this past week or so I have felt poorly, and wasn't sure if I had picked up Covid somewhere. Grace was a bit under the weather as well, but I was running a slight temperature, had very little appetite, and was suffering recurring headaches. So I hied myself off to get a test yesterday, June 1 -- and today it came back negative. Something of a relief. But I was very low-energy for a few days and have fallen a bit behind in my work. Tomorrow I'll have to start writing my latest cozy mystery, after telling my client that I was a bit behind. Also to that end, I didn't get a blog post done on Sunday -- except in a way. What happened was, I did a guest blog post for my friend Stoney de Geyter, talking about my ghostwriting experiences. And here is the link . So I actua