October‘s flown by so far. A friend of mine called it the ninja month and… yeah.

Anyway, let’s get to the stuff you want to know…

Since we last spoke, my agent and I got on the phone and talked for a while about GJD. Then I did a massive rethinking/re-outlining of the whole book. A lot of it’s still usable and the core plot still holds together well, but there are some places where it’s going to need changes. A few chapters are getting big rewrites. A few are getting removed altogether. It’s progressing at a steady pace.

I’m also trying to still spend some time on TOS, just so I don’t lose momentum on it. They’re two very different books, so it can be a bit of a gearshift at times, but overall I think it’s going well. Although this past week (as I write this) has been that perfect storm of this book and that book and blog posts and newsletter and…

Where were we?

Right, so, things still look good to have GJD back to my agent before the end of the year (things always get rough around the holidays) and then we see where things go from there. And then I may have TOS for him shortly after that.

In other news… I’ve got stories in two anthologies coming out before the end of the year. In just a few weeks, on November 10th, we’ll see the release of Joe Ledger: Unbreakable, edited by Jonathan Maberry and Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Jonathan suggested doing something we’ve both hinted at for a while in our respective books, so I wrote a little tale about Bunny (if you’re familiar with the DMS/RTI books) that could only be called “Crossover Story.” Feel free to read that title any way you’d like and you’ll probably be right. This one’s already up for preorder pretty much everywhere, I believe.

And then just a month after that is The Reinvented Detective from Jennifer Brozek and Cat Rambo, an anthology about future crime and punishment. Jennifer tempted me into this one by casually dropping an idea in my lap, and then I of course went waaaay overboard and wrote an 12K+ word almost-novella which had to be cut and trimmed back down into “The Unassembled Victims.” It’s a pleasant little tale about two mismatched detectives and a serial killer, and it also has a light tie-in to GJD, the thing I’m currently rewriting.

In other news…

I think a lot of the reason (for me) October’s flown by—that a lot of this year feels like it’s flown by—is that our lives here are still being upended by the never-ending construction noise (and accompanying stress) that’s been going on for the past six months. The houses on either side of us are being flipped, and they’re getting gutted and rebuilt and re-roofed. The city’s done major road work here three times (and still might not be done). Plus, since the last newsletter, both flippers decided to chainsaw all the trees and bushes on each property. We’ve gone from having a house semi-surrounded by trees (and shade) to one that looks like we’re in the middle of a stark wasteland. And if it rains… well, we’ve still got plants holding the canyon together behind our house, but all around us…

I might’ve gone mad if it weren’t for little pleasures…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— House of Usher (we watched Midnight Mass last year and I’m a devout Flanagan junkie now). Haunted Mansion (which I liked a lot more than I thought I would). I decided to do a seasonal rewatch of all the Milla Jovovitch Resident Evil movies.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading—I’ve still read nothing, which is awful on a number of levels. Mysterious Galaxy actually wrote to let me know I’ve had some things on hold there for several weeks now. Had to give up on a massive book I was reading to blurb because… well, it’s massive and there’s no way I’m going to be able to finish it in time for the deadline.

Cool New Toys – My Plunderstrong from the latest Plunderlings Kickstarter arrived and they’re just fantastic. Big, solid, lots of accessories. I got the LEGO Lunar Roving Vehicle to use as part of a Halloween display, but now I’m not sure I’m going to have time to build it. Maybe? Watch Instagram for updates…