Friday, September 12, 2003
At age 71, Johnny Cash is dead. There's really not much you can say about something like that, except to acknowledge the profundity of the loss. This year is taking so many good people from the world. It makes me wonder who will fill the vacancies.
We have a lot of a lot of things on this little planet, but good people are not, I believe, among our surpluses.
Yesterday the words would not come, and they would not come, and they would not come, even when I promised them seven-year-old apple brandy and chocolate-covered apricots and nubile young androgynes. At 3:30 p.m. I was still struggling to find the flow and had just about decided that I was about to lose another day I couldn't afford to lose, and then, mercifully, the floodgates opened. I wrote a very respectable 1,549 words on Chapter Nine in only about three hours, maybe a little less. I was much relieved. The book grows darker and darker and I fear for everyone trapped inside it. That sounds melodramatic (and, Heaven knows, I'd never want to do that), but I honestly do. Some of these people, Niki Ky and Daria Parker and Spyder Baxter, they've been with me since 1993. Others you'll meet, like Archer Day and Alex Singer and Marvin Garby are new, but I fear for them almost as much. I think something of the war with Iraq has seeped into Murder of Angels, the seeming inevitability of war, my mounting post-Cold War suspicion that no one is in control. I think that's definitely in this novel. There are worse things than secret conspiracies and cabals of evil men. I'll take an Illuminati or Vatican shadow-government over what I see actually happening any day. I don't see evil men. I see stupid men and stupid, hateful men with no clue, toddlers at the controls of a runaway locomotive. But I'm getting off topic. I was talking about the book. I'm beginning the think that maybe, just maybe, there's an eleventh chapter brewing, but I sincerely hope not. Fortunately, I'll not be leaving for New England until mid-October, so I'll have the little bit of extra time to write an eleventh chapter, should it be required. Let's hope it's not.
And speaking of New England, I'll be doing a show with The Crüxshadows at Man Ray in Cambridge, MA, on Wednesday, October 22nd. I think the way this thing will work out, I'll be doing a reading early in the evening, than another just before the band goes on stage. Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to this event and hope those who can attend will. It'll be sort of an unofficial release party for Low Red Moon. I'll post more details as they become available.
And I think that I have decided to forego World Fantasy again this year. I feel irresponsible doing so, but I always feel like a fifth wheel, or a wallflower, or simply an irrelevance, at those things, anyway, and New Orleans and the delights of Halloween in the French Quarter are calling so very loudly. Writers need fun, too. So, I expect Spooky and I will be heading from Rhode Island to Louisiana at the end of October. And after that, I have to come home and start writing again. There will be the rewrites on Murder of Angels, and I have a novella to do for Subterranean Press, and there's the screenplay for Threshold (which only thinks I've forgotten about it).
Remember the auctions?
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