Secret Project: Secret No More

Image by Matěj Konečný from Pixabay

I think I hinted a while back that I was working on a secret project. Well, it’s no longer a secret. I’m scheduled to write two novellas this year. This is while my next novel makes its way through the publishing process.

I have my ideas for both novellas in place, but I’ve only developed the first one well enough to discuss. In it, a YouTuber investigates the disappearance of a popular couple from Hollywood’s golden age. There is also a missing screenplay and a mysterious painting. Of course, it wouldn’t be a book of mine without something uncanny or surreal. In this novel, two characters are drawn to the power of reflections and are unsettled by what camera lenses do to them. Maybe not the pithy sales pitch I need, but it was enough to get me writing.

My first deadline is April 30th. I don’t know if I’ll make that of not. If you’re interested in more detailed progress reports, I’m sharing updates and early drafts over at Working Writer.

Novel Update

In recent weeks I completed a revision of the novel I’ve been calling ‘A Dangerous Magic.’ It’s taken a long time to reach this point and it feels like a very different book from what I started out to write. But each book is a journey and an education.

The same thing happened with At the End of the World. Each revision of a story alters not just the words and sentences but the story and the characters themselves. Little may survive the earliest drafts of a novel. And even as I revised this novel’s last scenes, I discovered something new about the two main characters. These revelations will ripple throughout the book in the next revision, changing the novel again.

It’s over 500 pages and I need to cut about 75 of them. I’m also no longer certain ‘A Dangerous Magic’ is the title. This revision took nearly two months, seven days a week. But I’m grateful to have crossed this milestone and I can finally lift my head.

It has allowed me to work on short stories and a secret project. More on that soon when I hope it will no longer be a secret!

New Short Story: These Years of Black and White

If you awoke in a colorless past and lived through each day as though real, but woke daily to a deeper past, what would you do? Would you explore? Assume it was a dream or nightmare? And in the end, wouldn’t you wish to dream in color?

I wrote the story for a flash fiction contest. It didn’t win, show, or place, but I still like the story. I expanded this version a little, though it still qualifies as flash. I also formatted it for reading offline. You can download it here.