like this blog and the booklist I was going to put on it. I got overwhelmed with the idea of updating, without ever doing any real updating. So here are the books I need to add to the list (again, not exhaustive because I haven’t been updating):

the shining – stephen king
zombie – joyce carol oates (holy hell, this kept me up nights.)
camilla – Sheridan Le Fanu
sharp objects – gillian flynn
dark places  – gillian flynn (finished an hour ago, as you can see, also, I’m up at night.)

The astute reader and genre-ist (alright, not a true word in the Oxford English Dictionary sense, but what the hell, you know what I mean) will notice that I’ve been reading thrillers lately, mostly because I’m trying to write one. I’m 50k words into a novel about a serial killer (god, so trite, I know). It’s as cliche a subject as any in fiction, but I’m doing my best to keep it interesting, not so much so that people will read it (which is a hope), but so that I can get through it. If something doesn’t keep my fire lit I flag and eventually stop, so I have to keep changing things up. So far I’m happy with what I’ve written, but a tad dismayed about the progress. I started it last September and have only gotten to 50k and a little over half of the total story I want to tell. Anyhow, more updates on this as they come, or I can be bothered to give them, I guess.

The other project that I’ve been working on for a long time is a (magical realism?) novel about a young man who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a crashed plane on the street under his apartment building and everyone on the planet missing. It’s idling at a slim 65k right now, at least that’s where the first draft ended before it sat on the shelf for six months. I got one little bite from an agent, asking for a full manuscript, but although she kept responding to my emails for awhile, eventually she stopped. I know the book just wasn’t really ready.

Lately I’ve been reworking it, hoping to add a cool 20-30k to make it more presentable, along with cleaning up the more awkward bits of prose. I’ve found entire sections that are little more than a summarized skeleton. I’m hard at work at expanding into scenes that are sorely needed. The project was so close to my heart when I wrote it that it needed six months on the shelf so I could look at it with fresh eyes. Still, it’s my first real novel and I don’t know if it’ll ever be professional enough that I’ll ever be able to sell it. I may end up putting it on Scribd as a free download like I did with Neither a Borrower, but I’ve spent so much time on it I would be a bit nonplussed to never see it in ole fashioned print.

There are a couple of other projects, some even with a few chapters written, in my ideas folder, but I’m trying not to work on them until the other two things listed above are done.