Neck deep in novel.

I’ve got less then a month to go and most of it (the new draft) to write. I picked up a lot of slothful habits that I’m having a bitch of a time trying to kill. But I need to. If I’m not productive, I tend to not sleep well these days…so writing and running and working out and writing…hopefully when the month is out I’ll have a book and be a bit thinner (all to earn the zzzzzz’s).

This pretty much leaves me a hermit until June 1st.

But I’ll try and pop on here, every so often, to surface…maybe a month of posts following the progress of a novel. It’s a novel for White Wolf. It’s a horror story…though I like to think of it as a love story on the other side of entropy. It’s about a very eccentric, absinthe addicted forensic pathologist, Simon, who meets a girl, falls for the girl, looses the girl, and then gets her back…one piece at a time (and he falls down a very twisted rabbit hole along the way). It’s called Strangeness in the Proportion.

By the bye, the reading at SWING STATE went really well. At first, I thought it wasn’t. It’s a loud and raucous place—nothing wrong with that…but I started getting the feeling, while reading my story from BOOK OF DEAD THINGS, that I was reading to an audience that couldn’t hear, and didn’t really want to. But…people started scooching up, people started complimenting, and as the Twilight Tales crew read further, we gathered more of them, and we read some more…only this time picking out the more lyrical, short, and violent/suggestive/funny/sexy pieces to read. I read my poem, “Poe Goes to the Singles Bar” and that seemed to be a hit. In the end, we sold as many, or more books than we have at quieter, more “attentive” venues, so I chalk it a success. Thanks for having us out Swing State!

Back to the novel…when I write, I like to make playlists for the things I’m writing, little (or big) soundtracks to my fiction. A lot of it is instrumental/mood music…but a sizable chunk has lyrics and sometimes lyrics help by adding images and words that help focus the project in question. I might make another post, later, about more of the music I listen to while writing this novel, but right now, I thought I’d mention two songs that I think sort of indirectly narrate the plot of the book (from different angels).

The first song is by my bestest friend, Torrie’s brother’s former band, Lucigen. The song is called “Cadaver”. The lyrics go:

But, I think, if we shuffle the two sets of lyrics together…we come to something that gets really close to a surreal plot synopsis: