This Week, I Have Been Mostly...

READING: Locke & Key Vol 4, Keys to the Kingdom by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Love, love LOVE this series. Fantastic artwork, brilliant story. Wonderful sense of menace throughout. Highly recommended.

Short stories: 51 - 62 of 500. Favourite this week was
Zebulon Vance Sings the Alphabet Songs of Love, by Merrie Haskell at Apex
Sweet robot love story in an interesting setting. How can you not love a character called Robot!Ophelia?

WRITING: A 2.5k horror-y, slipstream-y story with an unreliable, secretive narrator. Could be too oblique? We'll see.

WATCHING: 'Ricochet,' Dude, that was not a good film. Julie Benz and Gary Cole are always good value, but that was the only upside. Normally this kind of twisty-suspense story relies a lot on misdirection, but this was so badly put together that I had no idea where it was trying to direct me in the first place. Out of many, many issues, what bugged me the most was (!!SPOILER WARNING!!) that when Elise fakes her own death, a body is fished out of the river wearing her dress, and identified as her. And this poor woman, who was presumably murdered to make this possible (unless Elise keeps a stash of dead clones on ice, in case they come in handy?) is never mentioned again, by anybody--not even the supposed-good-guy cops. I just kept thinking, doesn't anyone care about her? Was she just the wrong lookalike in the wrong place? Maybe there's a companion-piece story in there, telling her side.

QUOTING: Dean Wesley Smith: 'The truth is that the best way to sell books is to write a lot, work on learning how to be a better storyteller constantly, get your work in front of editors, readers or both, and plan for the long haul.' You can't argue with that.

TAKING: Dean Wesley Smith's advice to Think Like A Publisher and set my production schedule & deadlines for the rest of the year. Publisher-Me is happy. Writer-Me is gibbering in terror. If I'd known I was going to be such a hard-ass boss, I might  have re-thought this gig.

LISTENING TO: my favourite TV theme music, from Romanzo Criminale - you can hear it from 3.30 to 6.00 on  this clip

WISHING: that this was real. If someone could just nip through a wormhole into the parallel universe where it exists and pick me up the boxset, that'd be awesome. Ta.