If Time is the Fire in Which We All Burn...

...then I should be roasting much better in a few months after I catch up on a bunch of things that coaching high school sports (that stuff goes on every day!) and an over-full plate left me buried alive under way too many projects.

Now--or in a little while--I'll be able to devote more time to writing itself, and not to doing things to promote books. Other people's books, anyway. I'll still write introductory essays, I believe--next one for a July Peter Rabe release, a collection of his latter three Daniel Port books--and I'll have more time to write my own books.

My next one is called--at the moment--Truth Always Kills, mostly because I completely suck at coming up with titles, is due out in September. I have a short story to finish for an anthology based on a rock-n-roll band that grew up around the same time as I did in good old Minneapolis, an editorial gig for a very, very patient new author, a trip to Manhattan for ThrillerFest where I'll be on some as yet unknown panel, a trip to Bouchercon in Raleigh where I've been invited to be on a panel that is tentative until the schedule is finalized in a few months, and on and on.

There's a piece on my father's passing that I'd like to finish, too. That one won't be easy for any number of reasons. Writing about one's family is probably not the smartest idea, writing honestly about one's family is probably a terrible idea, writing honestly about my own family is probably a Titanic-sized "Oh, the humanity" sort of disaster. Still, there are things to be said and I'd love to place it in a literary magazine where no one my family knows, let alone my family, would ever discover it. Still, there's a risk, but you can only absorb so much enmity before your cup runneth over and the rest is just so much spillage. And there's no guarantee of anyone publishing it anyway.

Is the National Enquirer still around? Do they pay anything if you don't include a Kardashian photo? I could wear a meat dress for my author photo.

I hope to actually put time here again, as well as work on my perpetually unfinished web site. Anyway, here's a post, stuff's going on, and if anyone cares, feel free to comment. It gets lonely out here sometimes.