I have a problem.
Yes, I Know… let’s leave those for a lady to illuminate.
My goal, in writing, was always to write fiction, because, I owed Robert E. Howard for speaking across the void to my younger self and wanted to preserve some shreds of wonder across the void that yet yawns ahead for some as yet unborn punk.
My JOB, though, turns out to be history and journalism.
I owe it to the ancients my inspiration to continue the Arуas Excavation, and the millions of anonymous ghosts murdered in the land of my birth to continue the Plantation America Investigation.
Novel ideas, though, intrude, and get in the way. These are mostly suggested by circumstances or readers. A reader wanted a sequel to American Dream Boat, so that is the next novel I will complete. I have 27 days to finish annotating two history books for Plantation America.
I try to avoid journalism, then I board a bus with a homeless, barefoot Jamaican who served in The Royal Marines… And the old fellow wants to talk, not to just anyone, but to me. Perhaps I will cast him as a character in King Klan. Having just finished Nihil, this writer experienced not a moment of satisfaction for a task done, but rather found himself harried into the night by the gaggle of jealous muses below.
Currently I am afflicted by novel ideas:
-1. Slave, #4 in The Elder Earth cycle, a novel that is very close to my heart…
-2. Siren, a fable suggested to me by a seductress upon her mare like conquest of this pulp rate novelist…
-3. Of Ichor and War, a mythic novel I am intimidated by, afraid to wrestle with, hoping that the writing of lesser tales will enable the treading in Homer’s shadow…
-4. Sons of Arete, the resurrection of a novel titled Grace and Joy I trashed six years ago, inspired by a skype conversation with a man named Achilleas…
-5. Good Morning, a novelette imposed upon me by three women at Planet Fitness…
-6. The Warriors, a novel suggested by a reader of American Dream Boat and actually written in my head while discussing the concept with my driver from Pittsburgh to Reading, PA…
-7. Porch, a Baltimore novel lain fallow these two years and hopefully yarned out in the autumn.
-8. King Klan, a novel suggested by Barry Bliss sending me a large font copy of an article by John Michael Greer…
-9. A Gaslight Knight, a novel inspired by Pulp Fiction Renaissance publisher Richard Barrett…
-10. Trove of the Murderess, the conclusion of the Song of the Secret Gardener, following Yusef of the Dusk, suggested to me by the third reading of The Infortunate by William Moraely, the chronicle of his betrayal, enslavement and redemption. William did aspire to the poetical account…
-11. Tinman, sequel to Motherboard, a Postapocalispic novel set in Baltimore
-12. Bound is a history novel, so he earns the bottom shelf of dust until I have finished the massive three volume Plantation America history.
Yikes, that is not precisely ten—oh well.
These novels, first as the outline and front matter, will not appear in any regular order, but as written.
My intent, other then with the ongoing publication of Elder Earth novels, is to, each Christmas, publish the year’s fiction as an anthology, in ebook, and hopefully as a print pulp.
Some of the novels above may not be written. Others might be reduced into shorts, some retired. Presenting the outlines of novels as yet undone is a way of pressuring my slave self to work harder—“To work, SLAVE!” snarls the wicked monkey upon this weak back, a beast that never sleeps. To YOU, Manic Muse, I cast these novel acorns as pearls, in offering to Your Rule.
People have, scores of times, asked me how I might write so much. One answer is that I frame and then shelve invasive inspirations so that paying work might be addressed. This results in the novel ideas, wrestling sleepily in the back of this addled mind. Once I finish such a book I get black out drunk in order to drown these clamoring ideas. After this wake, this ritual burial of the last novel, is intended to silence the many calls to write. From this mass grave will emerge only the most virulent idea, forcing this slave brain to focus only upon the strongest story, the one that claws its way to the surface. Aside from the obvious brain damage caused by this Gaelic mental reset method, some of these novels will be drowned for good.
You nonfiction readers that might stumble upon this article, thank you for supporting my literary misbehavior.
You fiction readers, some of whom I am certain are writers, thank you so much for encouraging the improvement of my craft. I wish to be a better writer and see the path to such far gate as marked with various genre fictions explored along the way to an baffled Helicon.
