It was a dark and -

So there's this Harvey. Drops in uninvited, and won't take the hint and get the hell out. Now true, he did give us some notice that he was coming. But, honestly? He's the sort of jerk who's so unreliable that notice isn't really much help. We can't keep him out, can't tell him to stay away, and even if we leave to avoid him there's a risk he'll break in and trash our place. Hell, he might even show up early to catch us while we're packing the car or delay his arrival so we waste time out of town and end up exiled, unable to come back to our home until who knows when.

I'm finishing this on Friday, the Friday after the huge rainstorm that hit Houston so bad that the damage is being counted in billions. I started writing it the previous Friday, hoping the power would stay on. It did, and for the first day or so when the hurricane became a tropical storm and hit Houston with endless water and wind, things were okay. My friends and I passed texts around to say who had the lights off in their neighborhoods and everyone swapped videos of rivers that have street signs barely sticking out of them and the roofs of cars that can almost be seen under their surface. It rained, hard and fast, then it would stop long enough for me to take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Of course, we had to walk in the middle of the street because a lot of the sidewalks were either caked in mud or under water, and we could only walk so far before we hit places where the streets themselves were submerged. Then we would head back in before it started pouring again. At night, during the quiet moments, there were frogs all over the neighborhood, singing. At home, with the storm locked outside but raging, it felt like all the real disaster was a comfortable distance away.

That was it through Sunday. On Monday evening as I was forcing Diamond to tend to her business in the backyard even though the sky was pouring water on her head, Claudia yelled that she needed me. I got in to see that the ceiling was leaking in the library, less than three feet from her desk, where her computer is. We got buckets and plastic bags under the leak, which was coming down in multiple streams. While we were trying to come up with a long-term plan, we noticed the sheet rock was sagging.

The whole piece fell down within twenty minutes, all in a mess of insulation, cardboard backing for the sheet rock, and the nails that had been holding it up. We got a tarp under the buckets, and watched a part of our house fall apart while trying to make peace with the fact that we couldn't do anything to stop it.

Eventually the rain stopped for a while. I stayed up that night to make sure it didn't get worse. I'm not sure what I would have done if it had.

Cabin fever is a real thing. Claudia and I were cooped up in the house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday, when I was able to drive around and find one of our favorite Mexican restaurants open. But on that Monday night, we had been crammed together the whole time, both worrying. You would think it would be a perfect time to binge watch Game of Thrones, or do anything else that eats up time, but it wasn't. We gave each other space, both of us feeling tense and anxious. Sad fact is, I couldn't even write, especially after the leaks made the ceiling fall in. I was too locked in the moment to go anywhere else in my head, even though a trip elsewhere would have been just the thing at that time.

The next day we heard that the national guard had been called out, and on those moments when I got out of the house I started seeing and hearing helicopters. There was water built up along the edges of the streets around my house, but not covering them. I had slept during the morning, and I stayed up again the next night, insisting that Claudia get some rest. Of course it was raining that night, and the ceiling started leaking where our kitchen meets our living room. I got some plastic tubs under it, cursed, and tried to keep an eye on it to make sure I caught any leaking water. There was still water leaking into the first set of tubs in the library.

At around one in the morning, there was another wet, tearing sound and another piece of my house hit the floor hard enough that I was sure it was going to wake Claudia up. At that point I just said fuck it, made sure the buckets were still catching the old and new streams of water, and started on the mess. I put on latex gloves, because my hands began to itch not long after picking up the huge piles of insulation from the first collapse, and scooped handfuls of wet gunk into a trash bag. I took the larger pieces of what used to be my ceiling and put them in a cardboard box. (trash pick up had not happened, naturally) I got out my old ka-bar knife and cut the pieces of sheetrock that were broken off but still hanging from the cardboard backing at the edges of the hole. While I was doing at this I would pause every once in a while to look up through the hole that was the size of a car door. I could see the slats of my roof.

That's where we stand now, except that I noticed a slow leak in the damned garage too, some night when I was walking around the house. The rain is gone for now, and Claudia hit the ground running as soon as it did. We've already filed an insurance claim, had FEMA come out, and now we're just waiting on the roofer, who understandably is a tad busy right now.

Now I've got a moment to sit still and really think. My workplace opened up on Thursday, and and during those disorganized two days we got some hint of the real mess. Some of my friends and co-workers got out in their trucks and boats during the worst of it and rescued people who were trapped in their houses or up on their roofs. Despite, or maybe because of, all the crap that I needed to keep an eye on at home, when I read their posts and saw their pictures I really wanted to get out there, to ride out there on the cold, black water and help all the people who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am. During the storm there would be occasional photos of flooded houses and rescues by jeep or boat. The official death toll has risen, and I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Pieces of overpasses have collapsed, and at one place so much water washed over one of the highways that the concrete barriers along its sides were pushed perpendicular to the line of traffic, forming an above-ground river channel.

So what's next? Start fixing. Though we've got some ugly damage, Claudia and I still have a roof over our heads. Other people are still in shelters, some are throwing out all of their furniture because their house was flooded, and others have to go hunting for wherever their cars were washed away to. Gas prices are going up, and there's a curfew on. But we're alive, and we're moving on.

As for me, I'm still writing.

Regulation ghosts

There's a well-known series of books about vampires that I once started to read. I picked up the first book, read a powerful, graphic opening, and then about five pages into the meat of the story, closed the book. I haven't picked it up since, and that was over ten years ago.

That book, and that second scene where I was first introduced to the hero of the story, has stayed in my head all this time. Because I think I can make a point that can help other people who just might be picking up a pen for the first time, I'm going to explain why.

As I tend to do, I'm not going to specify the series. If you've read it, you'll recognize it. It happens to be one of my wife's favorites, so it's yet another subject for us to have lively discussions about. We've had quite a few.

It's set during the cold war, and the opening shows a very unconventional autopsy that ends in shootings and an explosion. This sets a top-secret Soviet program back years of progress. The second scene shows a young man reporting for his first day of work as the person in charge of a British project that opposes the other one that we just read about. Inside a room accessed by a secret door, our hero meets a ghost. Instead of rattling chains or demanding that his son avenge his murder, this spectre gives our hero a short report on the events in the first scene. This patriotic spook passes on military intelligence.

Disclaimer: you already know that every word of this is my opinion. This is my word, not the word, and it's sure as hell not the last word. This is a word about what I choose to write words about. Horror.

What's wrong with a ghost doing its part for queen and country? Nothing. It shows nobility and a willingness for self-sacrifice. But it also shows a connected, enlightened empathy, a willingness to look out for the little guy. It also shows an intelligent involvement in the present. This ghost is not an old, dusty record player endlessly spinning the same scratched vinyl disc. More's the pity.

Despite having vampires as the main antagonists of the series, the series isn't horror. It's science fiction. There's an understandable rhyme and reason to the universe, clear cause and effect, and some ghosts have our back.

You know, maybe it's that last point in particular which explains why I don't think I'll ever pick that book up again. I like horror, and part, I believe, of a good horror story is our inability to truly grasp the parts of the universe that are trying to drown us in its bathtub. Borrowing/Butchering a quote, the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, and when we can see an expression of love from a ghost, we feel we know it, even if there are facets of its existence that we can't possibly grasp. It smacks too much of Casper, and cheesy Lifetime movies where the tragic but plucky heroine is constantly getting scared out of her wits by the spook in her new house, which – surprise! Was only trying to warn her that the cardboard-cutout handsome guy she's seeing is the asshole who ghostified the house's prior tenant.

You know, if I never achieve anything else lasting as a writer, if I can only get 'ghostified' in the dictionary, my life will have meaning.

I've covered a bit of this before, so let me try to rephrase it while contributing something new. I'm going to label this set of words the rules for ghosts. These points are what I keep in my head when I sit down to write a ghost story that I want to scare people with, and not just because these guidelines would produce a story that I would probably enjoy reading. I think each of these points pushes a button in people's minds. I think they dig under the floorboards and get inside the spaces between the walls.

1. A ghost did something unusual during its mortal life. Though it's rarely explained why this matters, it's important because millions of people die every year, but they don't all come back. So our ghost has to have been remarkable in some way. It developed an obsession, it became consumed with greed, it died a painful death, or it lived a life so empty that just reading about it makes us worry that we haven't done enough with our own lives. There will be no ghosts of milquetoast accountants who died in their sleep or of mediocre soccer moms who passed peacefully, surrounded by loving family members. Normal doesn't make a ghost.

2. A ghost does not have a wide range of responses to stimuli. A haunt can be subtle or obvious, though our story is more effective if it at least starts off subtle. But it won't break dishes in the kitchen one day, file a lawsuit at the county clerk's office the next, and finish off the week by possessing the lady next door so it can sit down with the new owner of its house and hammer out a twenty-page contract agreeing to co-inhabit the house on a time sharing basis. A ghost is emotion and energy, like lightning finding the shortest path to the ground.

3. A ghost has a limited range of focus. The internal logic on this is sketchy, but in all the stories the shades are fixed to something, some remnant of their past (more on that below). A haunted house, hotel, car, toy, or town. Even a person can be haunted. A ghost might be mobile, but not randomly so. It's tied to a person, place, or thing. A spectral afterlife is an old-fashioned marriage where the options for divorce are extremely limited.

4. Because it was once a living person but is now dead, a ghost is tied to the past. This reflects the symbolism of what a fictional ghost is to a reader, old memories or feelings that won't stay buried. In a haunted house, radios play commercials for companies that went under twenty years ago, a bottle of soft drink sweetened with high fructose corn syrup tastes like the good old stuff that was made with real sugar, and a tattered old dress smells fresh and clean with just a hint of a forgotten lover's perfume. But it's all a phantom. Spend a night in a house that once burned down and you'll wake up in a moldy ruin. Join that gracious host for a week of feasting, and you'll starve to death. Show up on a dock to meet that lover who once got away, and sooner or later your body will wash up on shore. The past belongs to the dead, not the living.

6. A ghost can't experience personal growth, including learning new facts, or keeping up with changing events. This is a matching point to the previous one. The possibility of change, of molding the future, belongs to the living and not the dead. Those who have died but are sticking around are stuck with what they had when they were once alive, body, mind, and spirit. A ghost of someone who died in the service of MI-6 would whisper, scream, and write, 'Blake is a traitor' long after the man himself was dead and buried. They're always playing the same game of chess, one where the moves are announced but the pieces never advance. A person who freezes to death comes back as a ghost who will never be warm. The shade of a person who died feeling betrayed will never forgive. Never.

Hey, remind me to read something with a happy ending when I'm done here, okay?

Another A-kon has come and gone. This year it was held in Fort Worth, but there were familiar faces and familiar shenanigans. The day before the con started, some knucklehead decided to play Bruce Lee and kick open a pair of double doors at the hotel. The doors were expensive.

I wrote Bruce Lee in the above paragraph, but the person who told me about it actually cited Jet Li. Uh oh, can't I learn new names, or references? Am I stuck in the past? Maybe I am.

Because I'm still writing.

Why we're all liars

Are you fucking kidding me?

Imagine this. I wait outside the front of my house for the postal carrier, pretending to trim the trees. When he or she comes by I say, “Hey, be careful. My neighbor is letting his dog wander loose, and it's a mean one.”

Or, I go down to the grocery store and stand by the entrance while I pretend to text my wife and ask what kind of cheese she wants me to get. When a customer with either darker skin or wearing some kind of religious clothing clears the checkout line I go up to the manager and say, “Excuse me, but that person just pulled some steaks out from underneath their coat.”

Or, I drive down to Brownsville, at the Mexican border, and I run around yelling, “The Mexicans are coming! The Mexicans are coming! Their tanks will be here in fifteen minutes!”

Or, I take a bus to Boston, Massachusetts, and run up and down the streets yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming! They're worried about Trump taking power and they're going to invade!”

Now at what point did your disbelief give you pause?

A few days ago a man named Edgar Maddison Welch scared the hell out of some people and could have gotten those people and himself killed. The details are few and far between right now, but what's generally agreed on is this: He read some writings online that claimed a certain pizzeria was just a front that masked child abuse. He believed those writings strongly enough to arm himself and go down there. He fired his weapon inside the business, and later he was arrested.

Now, we haven't heard directly from him (and if he or his lawyer have any sense at all, we won't), but a couple of facts stand out.

1. He didn't go in shooting, wasn't focused on killing every adult in the building.
2. One phrase keeps being used over and over again, in quotes. Self-investigate. Again, we haven't heard from Welch's lawyers (by now he should have some), but whoever they are they haven't come forward to denounce this quote as false, and every time it's repeated it digs this man's grave a little deeper. A very specific grave.

Now I've stated my assumptions first. If any of them turn out to be false, then my conclusion is invalid for Mr Welch, but my point is still going to be valid.

I don't think he is a fanatic. We've seen a lot of fanatics lately, in this country and others, and they go in with guns blazing, intent on racking up as high a body count as they can. Blood is the goal for fanatics because as far as they're concerned they're the ones god chose to whip the whole world into shape, and when you're having that intimate a tea party with your spook of choice, blood is the only drink you serve.

So if he isn't a fanatic, what is he?

Naïve. A naïve fool.

If you just got an incredulous look on your face, please understand my terms. There's no pain or damage that a fanatic can inflict that a fool can't match. Anyone can inflict pain and shed blood. You. Me. Anyone.

Again, how did he wind up where he is now? He read a story online, something along the lines of the bait stories that leap out at you while you're waiting in line at the grocery store, and he went in there ready to shoot. If you claim he isn't a fool, show me what scale he used to judge that all the people in there were part of that conspiracy, and that's why he didn't mind driving them into a panic. Show me where he studied the architecture of the building to be sure that whatever point he fired that weapon at didn't have a brick wall or metal pipes or something else solid enough to shatter the round and send fragments into the crowd. You fire a rifle inside, you're gambling with your own life and with other's lives. He's a damn fool.

Go back to those example I gave you above. Some of them I think most of us would fall for, but they get progressively ridiculous. Now add a fact to each case. In the first, I've been feuding with my neighbor because his dog has been doing his business on my lawn. Second, I'm wearing a tee shirt that says 'God bless the KKK.' Third, I've set up a little stand by the side of the road, and it has a big banner that says, 'Anti-tank rockets, $500 dollars apiece.' Fourth, if anyone stops to listen to me explain my claim, I tell them that in order to get the whole story they'll need to buy my book, and I just happen to have a few copies with me. In other words, in each case I have a reason to lie that benefits me personally. Now does that fact give you pause, even in those cases that seemed straightforward?

Then put your pause function on speed-dial, because you're going to be using it. Everyone has a reason to lie. Why? It's fun to lie. Why the hell do you think I want to make my living doing it? Why do you think damn near everyone does it, every single day of their lives? It's free, it gets the liar some attention, and it's easy. Now I'm not talking about the simple lies that make a person's day easier. 'Damn, honey. I meant to unload the dishwasher but I forgot.' 'Honey, you know I would never forget your birthday. I had reservations for dinner but the boss says I have to work late.' Those are lies of convenience. They're a quick shot of bullshit to cover up mistakes, and so, we benefit from telling them. But the person who first claimed that J. Edgar Hoover liked long dresses and frilly undies? That friend of yours and mine who swears that their cousin's neighbor once popped her poodle in the microwave to dry it off? They get that moment when we fall for it, and that shared magic when a good story finds an audience. Storytelling is magical, and magic can be worked with truth or bullshit. That's the power of magic.

But please don't start believing in spirits to the point of handing over money to Madame Zelocka, who claims she has an urgent message from your-long departed Uncle Phil. Believe in fairies if you want to, but not to the point of hateful words for someone who doesn't. Don't be so ready to believe that hundreds of people can consciously work together to keep a secret, a secret that's spread all over the web. If you do, you're a fool. Not evil, but a fool.

Enough with the blogging. Let me get back to telling lies that I'll get paid for.

Back to writing.

To hell with you. I am the exception.

Coming toward the end of another year. Not the best one, true. But who knows what the future holds? Not me, says the flea.

Another Halloween has come and gone, which in itself should have prodded me to write. This year I played with an interpretation of Krampus, cuddly Santa's uglier, meaner big brother, as my costume. It still needs some tweaking, but I got a lot of comments on how cool it was, and one of the best complements you can get that special day of the year. 'Trick or trea –.' That's the golden moment when someone a third of your height looks up at you and forgets that the secret code phrase ends with a plea for goodies. That's when they look up at you and maybe see what you're trying to show them; the dark, special magic that our ancestors once wove by sharing stories over campfires. I might have inspired a budding young storyteller this October night. Or one of America's future serial killers. I take no responsibility either way.

Of course we also had the annual turkey massacre, which my wife and I celebrated with our traditional pasta. Let me sum it up thusly: Yum.

This entry's title needs some backstory. I haven't gone to many conventions lately, a trend I plan on breaking, soon. But there were a few I used to go to quite regularly, always finding some good panels where I could ask questions of people who have fought, and won, the same fight I'm in right now. The student learns from the master, so it is written.

Yet inevitably the master says or does something that makes the student yell, “Are you f---ing kidding me?” Or at least, that's what sometimes happens.

Was at a con once upon a time, went to a panel, someone asked a question. So far so good. Now I don't know if this lady, sitting among the other writers on the panel, who answered that question and most of the other questions just didn't get enough sleep the night before, if someone ran over her dog the day before she came to the con, or if she was just constipated. But that day her answers were the most condescending, pedantic, shallow, shovelful of crap I had ever heard at that con or any other gathering where the point was supposed to be to enlighten. Not only were we all told to not mind when our stories were rejected, we all had to parrot a neat little phrase back at this woman, like good, obedient schoolchildren. I am not the exception. Repeat after me, I am not the exception.

She was annoyed, because often when she edited for anthologies, people would send her stories that exceeded the requested word count, or were in a genre other than the one asked for. She was really upset when one of the attendees asked what the hell the traditional phrase, 'not what we're looking for at this time' meant, venting some of the frustration that builds up when your story doesn't make the cut and all you get is a vague, one-sentence reason on your e-mailed rejection slip and you can't get any useful information out of it. Just move on and send it somewhere else, was her answer. It's just rejection. It's nothing personal.

Let me tell you this, you reading these words I don't know where and I don't know when. You are the fucking exception, from the atoms that make up that very tip top fraction of your highest hair to that spark inside that you might call your soul. You are the cog in the machine that decides, you know what, today I'll see what happens if I start spinning in this other direction, and to hell with the machine. You are the crazy one who dreams. When someone tells you that you aren't, laugh at them, give them a single-finger salute, or if you have one handy, feel free to throw a bucket of warm piss on them. They've earned it.

Did she have a point? She had a piece of a point, I'll give her that. The woman is sharp, and knows her stuff. Does she know more than me? Oh hell yes. That doesn't mean that she had the right answer, or that if she did, that she provided it. 

Her point, her whole point, was about her, and her ego. The point she should have had, because she was addressing a bunch of frustrated people who had shelled out money to be in that room, was to not let that aching, enduring sting of rejection be the deciding factor. To take that rage and despair that always pops back up and channel it into hunting down another agent, or open anthology. To once again pound the damn keyboard to crank out yet another pitch.

Also, just send it somewhere else? If you've been at this a while then you know that there's no magical list of people sitting anxiously at their PC's with money burning holes in their bank accounts, waiting for quality (fill in your genre) stories. Are there some lists? Hell yes, and praise (fill in your deity) for that. These are often set up and maintained by other writers, some for free, some for pay. I've never heard of anyone getting rich or even just making a living from such a list. Nor do I expect to hear about one anytime soon.

Yeah, that bit of a point that she had. If you send a fantastic comedy story to someone who is reading for an anthology full of noir thrillers, you're going to get rejected. You might even annoy the editor so much that they remember your name and bite you in the ass later. Can you afford to take that chance? I have listened to enough editors to know that the only thing worse than sending them an e-mail asking if the word count they listed is a hard limit is not even asking and sending in a story that's larger than they asked for. If your submission is ten or thirty words over the limit, they PROBABLY won't care. But they decide that, not you. If that overworked editor is putting together a paying anthology or magazine issue and they've put out a general call for submissions, then they're probably going to get a thousand submissions, or more.

That means, if our anthology has room for ten stories, that almost a hundred times more stories will be rejected than will be accepted.

So yes, pay attention to what they ask for. Sticking out by breaking the rules is going to get your hard-written tale yanked out of the running. But don't stop sending things in. Send in stories that will pass through all the filters. That's what those requirements are.

But remember this. Ten of those hypothetical people who sent stories in, got into that book.

Who are those ten, then? Well by definition, they're the exceptions.

Have I made my point? If I haven't, let me pick up a hammer and make it. Saying 'I am not the exception' means accepting that 'I will not get picked.' The minute I accept that, I'll delete this blog, burn my computer with all my stories stored on it, and drill out the part of my brain that dreams. When that woman talked to me and everyone else in that room like we were nothing better than cogs, why did she do it? Because she was annoyed. What did she tell us? Don't get annoyed.

Okay. Let's check the horse's vital signs. It's dead, Jim.

The con in question took place a few years ago, and I've been mulling over whether the incident needed to be talked about ever since then. If she or anyone else recognizes themselves in the above anecdote and needs to tell their side of it, that's what the comments section is for. Ball's in your court.

Also, while putting this down I came up with some other points that might give everyone an idea of what it's like to be on the receiving end of all those submissions, and it may be next week's post. We'll see.

In the meantime, I am the exception, after all. I'll keep writing.

One of those moments in life that are all too rare

Every once in a while, a bunch of different events get scheduled in the same period. That's been the case these last two months. Right before A-kon I attended the wedding of some friends, and had just a few days to get ready for Dallas. A-kon was a success, and I've got an upcoming post detailing my adventures there. Hint: people lost their pants.

But last month, well last month I flew out to Nevada, put on a suit, and watched as my daughter walked up onto a stage, was handed a diploma, and then moved the tassel on her cap from one side to the other.

I'm proud of her. I'm happy that I was able to be there to witness her milestone achievement.

Nope. Those words don't do the moment justice.

Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental (yeah, fuck you too), but I want to get this right. I want to put down in words how I feel, describing it well enough so that a thousand years from now when time-traveling bug-eyed aliens from Neptune browse the web, they'll find this post and say, “Okay, we understand.”

I was there when my daughter was born. She was tall and strong as a baby, and she only got taller and stronger as time went on. When she was, I think, five years old, she challenged something I was telling her, an event that found its way into the story I was then writing.

Her mother and I divorced when she was still young, and I had to sit down with her one day and tell her that when she came home from school that afternoon that I wasn't going to be there. That memory still hurts.

Through the years we've been separated by as little as a hundred miles and as much as the entire length of the country. Time went on, without all those day-to-day moments when life happens. That's a loss I can never make up.

But last month I hopped on a plane and flew to Nevada. The desert climate didn't faze me, but the elevation was murder. I spent a short day talking with her and getting as caught up as I could, and then I stood in line, then took a seat along with a thousand other parents, all of us waiting for our turn to witness for our children. There were signs forbidding horns, balloons, and big gaudy banners, and I saw dozens of each before the ceremony began. I should have brought some.

They didn't call the class up in alphabetical order, so everyone kept following along with the names as they were listed in the schedule, holding it up and carefully moving their finger down each line as the names were called out. (this all happened in a college auditorium, so I also should have brought some binoculars) Somewhere, deep down and propping up all that eagerness and enthusiasm, I don't think there was a person in that building that wasn't holding the door to their anxiety closet shut as hard as they could. I think we all shared a secret dread that the name we were waiting for would never be called. That someone would go through all the paperwork one last time and find some signature missing or some box not checked and say, “Whoops. Well at least we caught it before they tried to graduate.” Bet it was even worse for the ones waiting to be called.

I waited. Her boyfriend's family waited. Everyone waited.

They called her name. A thousand people watched her walk across that stage to get a handshake and a diploma, and none of them had a bigger smile or a more swollen chest than me. If I could have opened the roof of that building to shout to the whole world, 'Look at what my daughter has achieved,' I would have done it, and you would have heard it.

My daughter has graduated.

Still smiling about it. I'm happy to have written about it, too.

Still here, and still -

Short update, because I'm writing this as I'm prepping to head up to Dallas for Project A-Kon. Claudia has expanded her business, teaming up with a friend of hers who is also an artist, and founded LuxWyrks. Lots of new stuff, including postcards with swearing fairies. So if you're up there this weekend, stop by the booth in the Artist Alley and say hello!

Last entry detailed my first shot at sending Roja to an agent, and since you haven't heard me singing (wherever you happen to be) then you've probably realized that fame and fortune haven't yet found their way to my door. That first agent declined, as did the second. So as I'm packing, I'm also taking the draft of my next pitch to work on, and I've already got the agent selected.

Still writing.

So this is the deep end

Been away for a while, but it's been productive time. Got rid of some stumbling blocks that have been preventing me from building a website, and found a glaring error in my current book that I can fix. Claudia has been published, again, so now she and I have started a little book collection of our successes.

I also, as of tonight, put together a query package for Roja and sent it to an agent. What comes to mind is the moment a few (cough) years ago when I was young and didn't know how to swim. I was in a pool with some other naïve kids listening to a nice lady explain how to not drown when I took a step forward to get some space around me. The water was clean but not clear, so I didn't know I had been standing on a raised platform against the side of the pool and suddenly the cold, heavy water was six inches deeper than I was tall. I remember treading water, or doing something like it, and realizing I was suddenly in very deep shit. I've had that same feeling once or twice since then, but there's nothing like the first time.

Fortunately, I didn't drown, because the nice lady patiently picked me up and got me back on the platform. I learned how to swim, and ended up doing my part to teach a brand new generation of naïve kids how to not drown a few years later. Hitting the send button tonight was like taking that one extra step all over again. Yep, this is cold, heavy water, and boy is it deep.

I'm not going to name the agent. The research I've been able to do clued me in on the incredible amount of BS that already gets flung at people who do that job, and the last thing I want to do is add to the pile. Trust me, if things go well people will hear me singing their praises from the rooftops.

Now? Well it's time to wait. I'll touch base with all those people who are reading In The Dark for me, catch up on all the reading that I've fallen behind on, and get back to plugging away on The Red Man Burning.

It's time to write.