HAPPY HAIRY FAT MAN DANCING

Luscious has started writing again :)

10 BOOKS

Nigel Read has an interesting article in the latest issue of the Visions ezine. He asks 10 writers what 10 books comprise their must-keep-close bookshelf. Desert Island Books, if you will. So I thought, for the purposes of cat vacuuming, that I'd list mine.

1. The Collins Concise English Dictionary
2. Roget's Thesaurus
3. Deadly Doses- A Writer's Guide to Poisons (Stevens & Klarner)
4. Fiction Writer's Workshop (Novakovich)
5. The Wordsworth Book of Euphemism (Neaman & Silver)
6. The Codeword Dictionary (Adkins)
7. Armed And Dangerous- A Writer's Guide To Weapons (Newton)
8. On Writing (King)
9. Aliens and Alien Societies (Bova, ed.)
10. The Wordsworth Medical Companion (Pescar and Nelson)

Mind you, like any writer, that's a carefully chosen selection. You wouldn't want me to list all 800+ books in our collection, would you?

TITLES

Something fun I spied on Chaosmanor's site. Pick 5 titles and explain how you came by them. So:

1. Father Muerte & The Theft/The Rain/The Flesh/The Joy of Warfare: A simple case of pinching something you like. I read a collection of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, all of which have titles beginning "Father Brown and..." and decided I was going to emulate that for this idea I had about a priest who wasn't really a priest...

2. Ecdysis: One of those examples whereby the title comes from the research. Ecdysis is the scientific name for the shedding of skin. As the shedding of skin is the central core of the story, and I needed the antagonist to have a realistic 'foreign-ishy' name, it fitted together nicely.

3. Moment: A simple title, but one designed to have multiple resonances. I wanted something to reinforce the protagonist's knowledge that the actions he was taking were brief and ethereal, yet all that were left of importance to him.

4. Tales of Nireym: A story of a single father hunting for an only child who ran away after an argument. Read 'Nireym' backwards.

5. Through Soft Air: The walls of reality are melting, and our hero is haunted by those who can move through. I needed an image that reflected both the way these walls were being breached, and the sense of unreality that surrounded the aging, war poet hero.

A BIT OF A WORD COUNT

As of this posting, I'm this far into my current projects:

Nouvelle Hollande: (Alternative History novel)- 2 and a half chapters
Expedition: (SF story)- 1030 words
Father Muerte & The Flesh: (Fantasy story)- 2510 words
Father Muerte & The Joy of Warfare: (Fantasy story)- 220 words
Father Renoir's Hands: (horror story)- Final draft.

A DATE IN THE DIRECTION OF UP

Just a general career update, coz it's been a while.

30 stories sold: 23 published.
4 reprints sold: 3 published.
4 poems sold: 3 published.
17 reviews published.
23 stories published.
3 non-fiction articles and interviews published.
7 stories, 1 reprint, and 1 poem upcoming.
11 stories and 1 reprint under consideration.

Not bad, all things considered.