Been ignoring everything I could get away with ignoring since Dec1: started a novel that day. Finished Saturday. Think I said on X or BlueSky that it’s my first vampire novel, but . . . realizing now I actually wrote another back in 1999. But it wasn’t good enough even to mess around rewriting. Some novels you write just to learn, yes? How it is for me, anyway. Wrote my first werewolf novel that year too, which wasn’t good enough to send out. So it goes. Like that peasant says in Holy Grail: “I got better!” I mean, maybe I did? Hopefully? Anyway, not announcing the title or the particulars or release date (doesn’t have one. agent hasn’t even seen it. but it is already under contract, and, to me, right now, still in the afterglow of it, I think it’s maybe the best book I’ve ever done. also? I think that about all of them, and then I write another, and forget about the last one, have to really squint to remember that last one when I catch questions about it from crowds. I don’t think any writer writes books to remember them, though, do they? I don’t. I write to get them out of my head, and because my heart’s too full with this one. and then my head and my heart fill right back up a day or two later.
Anyway, trying not to start the next one for a bit, here. Have many stages of pre–publication yet to go through with I Was a Teenage Slasher. And then there’s the brief The Angel of Indian Lake tour. And then a much more intense tour for Teen Slasher (it being summer, then). And there’s still a lot of cycling to do, as ever. And I’ve decided to grow my hair back out on the sides, as I’m tired of constantly getting haircuts. Haven’t had to grow my hair out since I was nineteen. Gonna be an adventure. Gonna have to wear my hair down and loose for, I don’t know—a year? three years? I really don’t know. Or maybe I just hats and caps and bandannas and the like the whole time. Or maybe I get a wig, a weave. Or . . . don’t young kids who want to be NBA starts spend a lot of time hanging by their arms from stuff, to stretch themselves longer? Seems I’ve heard a few say that. Maybe I’ll tie my hair to bar, spend twenty minutes hanging like that every day. Working on the model that my skull is just full of hair that must be extracted, yes.
Maybe I’ll also start capitalizing regularly. But not today. not here.
Anyway, this vampire novel: only thing I can say about it, I guess, is that it’s 130K or so words, right now, pre–revision and notes and more revision. Not sure what that comes to per day. Minus a week I spent with a fever that wouldn’t leave. and also a weekend a documentary crew was here interviewing me.
Hope to be able to say more soon, but, by “soon,” I guess I mean, probably . . . fall? Late summer? Honestly don’t know. though, chances are I let it slip at some Q&A.
Also: lot of rows &etc piled up, to be posting here. Maybe soon. except everything I’ve put off for the last nine weeks is now stacked up against every waking minute of the next two weeks. you know, kind of like something that wants to suck the life from me . . .
