Deadline

Has an ominous ring to it, doesn't it? If the ghosts, vampires, and ghouls in this world ever decided to start their own telephone network, that would probably be the name they would give it.

Roja has been my main focus for a while now, and as much as I love it, I'm getting anxious to move on. Earlier this week, I popped a fresh sheet of paper on my clip board and started the opening for 'The Red Man Burning.' The prologue's been written for a while now, though it might have been lost a couple of computer crashes ago. I like the story, and the more I think about it, the more I want to start pounding it out. I have short stories sitting on people's desks and waiting in slush piles out there in the great abyss, but they aren't books. Roja is a book.

Technically, I'm rewriting Roja and writing a short story called 'Explanations of a Pedivorous Umbrella,' but the way Roja is going, I'm needing to write brand new chapters of it, from scratch. That takes large amounts of creative mana, not leaving enough to give EPU what it needs.

So I'm giving myself a time limit. Roja will be done, cleaned up and spit-polished by the end of this year. In less than four months, my first novel will be ready to leave the nest.

I got an e-mail from Bete Noir about my short story 'Mine.' Seems they 'enjoyed reading it,' but it's not what they're looking for. I had submitted it for their Seven Deadly Sins anthology, under pride, and felt like it was a pretty strong fit. Damn. Moving on.

My daughter's birthday is this week, and I've got her main present already sent. Now I just need to get what she really wants, a big musical keyboard that a friend gave me a while back, out to her.

Still writing, now with a deadline.