Lately, it feels as if I’m working on a million different projects. Combine that with a particularly stressful week at work when one of my fellow techs was on vacation, parents visiting (meaning a fast and furious house cleaning), and Erich being sick for the past week with a mysterious vertigo (that two doctors have assured us isn’t a stroke or heart-related), and I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed. I purchased a brand new vacuum – it did a pretty amazing job with the blots from last weekends partying.
And the best of it is that it can clean by itself only if you program it, so is the best vacuum I ever had.
First of all, let me mention that Lou Sylvre was kind enough to invite me to be a guest blogger this week at sylvre.com. I really appreciate the opportunity to put myself out there a bit more, so if you’re interested in my adventures adapting a screenplay I’ve written into prose format, please hop on over!
The screenplay I’m adapting is as yet unnamed. The original was called At the Edge of the Forest, which is yet another example of how bad I am at titles (I really need to work on that). Despite the mediocre title, I’m fond of the screenplay, but it’s proven difficult to film. So after three years, I’ve called it quits on that film project and I’m going to write it as a short story and put it out there for people to read.
I have two other werewolf short stories, featuring a character named Devon, that were originally submitted, independently, to horror anthologies. They weren’t accepted, so I’m stringing them together, reworking them a bit, and then adding a third part to make a triptych of stories about Devon and the character, Ronnie, that he meets in the second story. The original two stories weren’t more than 6,000 words, so the whole may not be more than a short novella.
My publisher has put out a call for very short (under 2,000 words) fiction for an October collection, and I’ve had an idea kicking around in my head for a story about a man who encounters Sasquatch in the northern NH forests that I think would be perfect. I’ve written two-thirds of it, but I’m in a race to see if I can finish before they get the 31 stories they’re asking for.
I also need to reassemble my film editing workstation, so I can finish up our last two shorts, Sunny Cafe and Blue Collar Crime. Currently, everything is stacked in one corner of the basement, since we had to rip up the carpet and put tile down. And I’m still trying to sort out our epic film project, The Resurrection.
And I promised my brother I’d finish his film score by September.
Lastly, my friend, Xebic, has come up with an idea for a short film he’d like to do this summer, and he’s asked me to write it and film it. It’s a bit of a tall order, but I like the basic idea, and I’ve already been able to write about ten minutes worth of a screenplay. If the story stays under a half hour, it might be doable in a couple weekends before winter sets in.
My occult murder mystery has come to another halt at 50,000 words. It’s not that I don’t know where it’s going next (at least, for the next few scenes). I just got sick to death of it. I’ll probably go back to it in a couple months and love it again — that’s just how I am with long works. But for now, I’m putting it aside.
Now…inhale slowly…hold it…then exhale, while counting down….
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