Writing Update

I'm finally almost done writing out the first draft of "The Yellow Notebook." Hopefully I'll finish that one this year. Then it's just a matter of typing it out, then submitting it to the usual genre magazines. One of my goals for 2011 is to try to write at least one short story a month, and to try to get some of those short stories published. As it is, I have plenty of ideas for stories at the moment, though some of those ideas consist mainly of titles that I think sound cool (such as "The Evil Animators").

On the novel writing front... when I initially found out that Grimoire was going to be published, I decided that I wouldn't start any other major projects until it was actually released, aside from working on the occasional short story. So it's my hope to start work on a new novel next year. In the meantime, to keep from getting rusty, I've been working on The Marble Index, which is book two of my Trinity fantasy trilogy. It's been nearly a decade since I finished book one, so I figured this one's time had come. I started work on it on August 4th of this year and now I'm nearly 240 pages into it, with only about 40 pages to go, so I hope to finish it in January. It's been hard work because I've been writing it all out by hand, in the fashion that I wrote all those old books back in high school and college (see my earlier Previous Works/Juvenilia entry). But it's satisfying to me to finally be finishing book two, and even though I have no intentions of publishing this one it's a nice way to remind myself that I can still write novels when I put my mind to it (ever since I finished Confusion in 2006 I've been kind of lax on the novel writing front, though I did have some failed attempts, such as a novel set at Warhol's Silver Factory during the 1960's, or a short novel about a retail worker employed at a bookstore job he hated). I'm just not sure what my next "official" novel is going to be about.