December ’25 update

As you can see, winter has arrived in Illinois. With it has come some changes to my writing. I had been doing the prep work for my third story (Fantome Fatale), when I suddenly realized that the isolated mansion/family curse scenario was being shoehorned into my impossible footprint ideas. Basically, I was trying to force the scenario instead of creating it naturally from the material. It just wasn’t working.

I reorganized and came up with a different setting. This material wanted to be a village mystery and, as much as I hate to say it, it wanted to be a novel. It’s disconcerting because I was well on my way to a second book of short stories. I hate to disrupt that momentum.

Most of all, I’m worried that I won’t put out any work next year because of the time this novel will take. I haven’t released work in back to back years since 20-21. It’s hard for me to see it as anything but regression. I should be releasing a book a year.

The village in this story has a big cast. If this is going to work, the village has to have a flavor that comes across with life on the page — I’m thinking of the flavor in Death Walks in Eastrepps. The short story I was writing would have been about the impossibilities and pretty much only the impossibilities. The novel of Fantome Fatale is about resistance to evolution. It’s about the death drive. It’s a little more important to me and I don’t want to fuck it up.

Anyway, it’s about a village that was once home to a magician named Ambrose Kellach. He was found guilty of murdering his assistant and hanged by a lynch mob. Flash forward to 1924, and the town is considering selling land rights to the Midlands Holding Company, a business intent on changing the town’s name and modernizing it. That’s when the murders begin, each one a magic trick of Ambrose’s. Who’s doing them? Someone who doesn’t want the town sold? The medium who claims to speak with Kellach’s ghost? The descendant of Kellach, himself a magician?

I’m going to work on profiles for all 24 characters and plot out the scenes before I start writing. It’s a massive undertaking–at least, for me.

Meanwhile, I’ve got the two short stories about one or two draft passes away from completion. They stand at about 19000 words each. That’s nearly 40000 words of the collection finished. I can return to that project after the novel or maybe I’ll just put the stories on a blog post and return to novel writing full time. I dunno. I’m worried this is a mistake, but I’ve made plenty of those before.

I’ll try and do a few reviews before the end of the year. My last read was Psycho 2 by Robert Bloch. Batshit crazy but not necessarily in the way I like. He wrote a script for the sequel in the early 80s. When Paramount read it, they said, “No, thanks.” and commissioned their own script. They even tried to discourage Bloch from releasing the book, but he told them to go fuck themselves. The reviews weren’t great, but sales were excellent and good for Bloch. He wanted to write a story about Norman Bates raping the corpse of a nun and then dressing in her habit before travelling to Hollywood just in time for the filming of the story of his murderous exploits. God bless him, the bastard did it.

I hope all is well.