Friday, April 09, 2004
Yesterday, I did 1,307 words on "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles." It was the sort of writing day that I most despise, when I have to struggle for every other word and, in the end, I'm left with something which seems, at best, a vague approximation of what I had in mind. I'll do a little revision this afternoon to try to remedy that, before moving along to the new stuff I'll write today, but I know it's mostly futile. Sometimes, words just cannot convey the pictures in my head. Pictures could, but words are hopelessly insufficient. By the by, both "Houses Under the Sea" and "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles" will appear in the Cemetery Dance Publications anthology, Thrillers 2, edited by Wayne Edwards (Palace Corbie). I'll post the preorder information and release date as soon as I have them.
Also, I received word this morning from John Pelan that Del Rey's trade-paperback edition of Shadows Over Baker Street will actually be printing the story I wrote, instead of the "corrected" version of it created by some upstart anonym at Del Rey. Of course, this means I have to go over page proofs for "The Drowned Geologist" and make all the corrections myself, but at least the second edition of the anthology will present the story as I meant it to be read. I assume that the other authors in this book will likewise be given the opportunity to return their stories to the versions they intended to be published.
According to the Cemetery Dance Publications website, CD will be releasing John Skipp's Mondo Zombie sometime in 2004. This is the book that was originally to have been published by Bantam as Book of the Dead 4, and it's bizarre and sordid history is almost as old as my entire writing career. John Skipp contacted me late in '93 about writing a story for it, and that March I wrote "Two Worlds, and In Between." But then Book of the Dead 4 was bounced from one publisher to another and, in 1997, I finally gave Stephen Jones permission to publish "Two Worlds, and In Between" in the first anthology from UK's Pumpkin Books, Dark of the Night. Subsequently, the story was also included in my second collection, From Weird and Distant Shores. Now, after more than a decade, it seems there will be closure and the story will appear in the book it was originally written for.
Wow. A whole entry about writing stuff. How often does that happen?
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