fiction

Imagine a story about Melody Baker, an unemployed woman living in New York City. She has a PhD, huge student debt, and no professional job prospects. Deborah Ann Woll speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons). (Picture Debra Ann Woll playing her in the movie version. She’d be perfect in the role.) Out of desperation she applies for a research assistant position upstate—and finds herself smack dab in the middle of a political campaign run by cynical operators, eccentric aristocrats, and absurdly horrible partisans and hangers-on, all scheming to elect an unwilling but convenient old-money recluse who has these quaint ideas about integrity, compassion, and justice....

My new book. So this happened this week. The book (as in my book) is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. (Other ebook platforms to come later.) I’ve actually been in something of a state about this all month. And last month, too. As a classic Type B personality, I tend not to show it. I didn’t even see it, myself. Not very observant of me, was it? I’m not very good at touting myself....

This blog has been too quiet. I’ve been typing words elsewhere. This changes now. So a couple of years ago I wrote my first novel It was intended to be a comedic political satire. Many of my readers liked it. Some didn’t. One or two just didn’t get it. As I learned from one of my editors, comedy is a matter of taste (or lack thereof). I had no perspective on the text, and life at that moment was getting a bit too interesting, so I put the manuscript into the metaphorical drawer for a while, shifted gears, and wrote a science fiction adventure (which is another story—more on that soon)....

I thought I’d document what non-blog writing projects I have been working on sporadically this past year, where they stand now, and where they might be going. Please forgive me, my one and only reader, for using acronyms—they reference working titles only, for my own use. The final titles, which for me always come last, are TBD. Fiction writing RTFT—A scifi/fantasy/comedy that I started four days ago, this is an adaptation of a very silly farcical screenplay about aliens visiting Earth I wrote back when computers still had floppy drives (with the floppy disks that were truly floppy)....

Now that I’m writing again, I’ve started thinking about the things I wrote before. Last night, that took be down into the (water-damaged) basement to see what I could find. I wasn’t quite sure what was there, because over the years I’ve lived in at least twenty-four different places, and when you’re moving that much, boxes of stuff become these sealed nodes of wonders and troubles, with old bills and old love letters and old photos and old magazines and old what-the-hell-did-I-keep-that-for kinds of stuff, and after enough moves you really just stop looking in them because it’s so much easier to drag them along from place to place, knowing only that there might be something in there you might want…someday, but not today....