Happy Halloween!

I was supposed to post something this past Sunday, but as it happened, internet was down for the whole damn day. By the time things were back up and running again on Monday, I didn't have the energy or the motivation to get on here and say stuff. Not that much has happened, frankly, so you're not missing out on anything.

But yes! It's Halloween! 

October used to be my good month, the month were things went swimmingly and left me in pretty high spirits, but this year's been a real doozy of a dung pile. Then again, I lost my mojo when the lockdowns took place, and I couldn't seem to get it back again. Oh, there've been a few glimpses now and then, but on the whole, I think the pandemic's left a deeper than expected scar in my mind though I'm able to counter it still with my writing. 

At any rate, while I'm glad to see the end of this month (at least this year's version of October), I'm also celebrating all things autumn, all things spooky, and I'm looking forward (here I go again) to November and December and the coming winter months. Winter comes a very close second to autumn for my favorite season, so yeah. Yay.

This coming weekend will also mark the end of The Perfect Rochester as I only have two more chapters to write, and that's it for that book. It'll be rounds of revisions and edits following, and then I'll get started on Compline, hopefully in December. 

And since it's Halloween and I'm in the mood for a bit of escapist nuttiness, I finally got going on Van Helsing (2004), which is on Netflix at the moment. It's cheesy, it's fun, it's cheesy fun. And since I never got to see it when it first came out, I thought to make up for lost time, and I'm having a blast. As long as I shut my brain off and just run with it, it's a fun movie, terrible accents and all. 

However, if you're in the mood for some classic haunted house horror films sans the gore and jump scares, I still highly recommend my Holy Trinity of haunted house films:

The Changeling (1980)

The Orphanage (2007)

and The Others (2001).

So many ways of telling a ghost story. So many angles and PoVs to take. And, of course, they all have a mystery at the core of each ghost story. I'll never get tired of these three, and I also turn to them now and then to help feed the muse. Anyway, however way you want to celebrate Halloween, be safe, everyone!

Coming Down the Homestretch, Et. Al.

I finally finished my share of postcards for swing states, and I burned through the last twenty postcards with my ears getting blasted by the soundtrack to Underworld (2003), my favorite of the franchise. I mean -- all movies I've seen (first four, anyway, and I've yet to see Blood Wars) are technically guilty pleasure viewing, and I can't get enough of the first. 

And that makes me think about urban fantasy and how I never really got to tackle that -- beyond Ambrose and maybe some of my republished gay YA stuff. Much of what I've written so far are largely comedies, and I'd like to tackle something along those lines again a la Ambrose but with something other than ghosts. 

I know vampires and werewolves are pretty common in urban fantasy, so I'm going to have to look farther afield and see what else can be used. Not gonna lie. I'd love to mess around with variants of the vampire and lean heavily on all things occult. And it would be a nice break from my go-to settings of historical fantasy / an AU Victorian Europe. 

Something to think about now that I'm nearly done with The Perfect Rochester and am about to get preliminary stuff going for Compline.

Playing Catch Up

 

image from Don't Eat the Paste

Okeedokee, I filled out my ballot and sent it out. I'm also down to the last twenty postcards to sign and send out to a swing state, and then I'm done! At least I'll be done with anything to do with this year's elections. 

I recently started talking about my comfort series, The Great British Baking Show, and my predictions were based on only two episodes of this year's series. Welp... I've got to update them now after Bread Week, which saw one of the stronger bakers leave for, sadly, good reason. He fumbled the ball in the signature round, and the stress got to him. I could tell from the way he commented on his performance and his hopes for the showstopper round that he was getting agitated and anxious though I really don't blame him for it. My viewing of previous seasons has convinced me that those bakers who kept their heads and stayed calm and focused had a better chance of making it all the way through.

And that also makes me side-eye Andy, who also tends to panic when things blow up in his face. I pegged him as one to watch, but I've got a sinking feeling his nerves will get the better of him. I hope not, but this scenario's painfully familiar.

That said, I'm so happy to see my top three still competitive with Dylan coming out shining in the end, and with that I'm adjusting my predictions to add Nelly into the mix with Georgie a close second. I love that Nelly brings flavors from diverse sources (Eastern Europe and Asia). But seeing as how it's only the third episode so far, it's too early to tell, and the situation can still throw a curve ball. I do have to agree with Paul Hollywood's observation, though: this group of bakers are so far some of the most talented I've seen in the competition. Everyone seems to have style and substance pretty well-balanced -- more consistently than what I've seen in previous series, anyway, because any goof-ups tend to be small.

And in other news, the early November projected completion date for The Perfect Rochester is very much real as I'm looking at two chapters being added to the usual total of 26. But no problem there. Compline continues to reshape itself as new ideas and possibilities cross my mind, and I might just throw out any and all elements that have been inspired by Belouis Some's Some People (which I discussed a while ago). The epistolary narrative is the same, but the main plot as it reflects my take on "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is morphing and taking paths I've never even considered but are very, very promising. 

I'll be talking more about it soon. In the meantime, it's a case of "steady as she goes" in writing.

Gallery Page for 'Voices in the Briars' is Now Up

Yay, me. I'm off today (another one of those unexpected days off given by the company because, well, my team's too good at what we do, and now we're too far ahead of schedule on our workload), so I took the time to put together the gallery page for Voices in the Briars as well as finalize the print book for release on Nov. 1.

So to check out the page, go here for some this, that, and the other. The book will be out on November 1 in both print and e-book formats.  

I'll try to haul as much ass as I can with the postcards to swing states today since I don't have any writing planned to do. A couple of light chores around the house, and I'm free for the rest of the day. Mind you, I'll be poorer in my next paycheck since I'm not applying any PTOs to today. Gotta take the bitter with the sweet, I guess. 

Oh, and since I spent much of my time earlier scouring the 'net for images to use in my moodboard, I stumbled across this amazing art showing the protagonists of Dracula. It's by Deimus-Remus over at DeviantArt, and I love its classic illustration look. The artist has a website as well, and his real name is Nathan J. Anderson, and you can check out his other work here.

click the image for a closer look

I'm so in love with this art style, and knowing it was the artist's attempt at interpreting vaguely described characters in the book makes this even more special. Love, love, love.

I'm champing at the bit over The Great British Baking Show since it's being released on Nettflix to mirror the UK release, which follows the weekly episode format. We've been so spoiled by entire seasons being dropped all at once that we often forget that this is actually an abnormal method of entertainment. At least I see it that way, anyway, especially when the survival of a show depends on metrics that are stupid at best and don't account for nuances in viewers' habits. But this is the present and likely the future of home entertainment, alas. 

Anyway, I'm going to put myself out there with this. 

There are only two episodes so far of The Great British Baking Show, but I'm starting to play around with possibilities of who might be in the final, and I'm basing my choices largely on flavor combinations and how gutsy the bakers are in tackling the unusual and making it work. So in this instance, if these bakers not only stick to their guns but improve over time, they're the ones to beat.

Dylan, Christiaan, and Sumayah. They're still hit or miss in one way or another, but episode two gave us a nice peek into their strengths and what they're capable of, and that's why I'm marking them as the ones to watch. Coming not far behind are John, Mike, and Andy. Those three are the "Steady Eddie" types who aren't as experimental in their flavors, but they do produce something special in the end. The rest of the bakers can still pull a rabbit out of a hat along the way and surprise me, and that'll be great if they do. This is one group that's neck-and-neck with the previous batch of bakers from 2023 in vying for the top spot of my favorite, so losing any one of them will be a real drag. 

Now I'm really excited about Bread Week.

Regressing... I'm Regressing...

Yeah, September was a shitty month -- by far the shittiest of the year unless I'm just saying that because I've already actively blocked the other bad contenders for the top spot. At any rate, the month's finally over, but its residual slimy ooze carried over to the first week of October, so here we are. I'm hoping this week will be a vast improvement from last week, but one can never tell. It certainly doesn't help that the Bay Area's experiencing a heat wave -- not normal back in the day but more and more normal now while the south is getting hammered by their share of abnormal weather patterns. 

So firstly, no major updates on the writing end. It's just been a steady drumbeat of chapter after chapter being written weekend after weekend. That said, I suppose the only major update involves my projected completion date for The Perfect Rochester. Depending on how many more chapters I need to tie things up, the expected end-of-October target might very well end up getting pushed to the first weekend of November, which is still way ahead of schedule for me even if I do tweak my 2025 calendar to move everything forward to my original schedule of February - June - October releases. There'll be a month less spent on polishing this book, which might end up being the deal-breaker, but as I'm still sitting on the fence over this, I'm not stressing over final decisions. 

As for the rest of my publishing calendar, nothing's budged from its spot yet, and I still have to add Camera Obscura to the list even though I've already posted about it, and the notes are growing in my writing notebook. It's too far in the future for me to settle on a plan, and as I've noted before, I can move things around and squeeze that book in the two-year calendar I currently have. It all depends on how things work out on my end (as it always does), particularly this current balancing act I'm doing with my writing and my day job. 

And so far no new story ideas are popping out, which is a godsend, even though it's really because I'm too weighed down by the recent stress-filled days of the day job. I'm happy with what I currently have listed, thank you, and I'd rather buckle down and focus on them, not be distracted by new stuff. 

One of the things I've been entertaining myself with lately is my constant digging up of stuff about ghosts and nostalgic childhood fun over on Youtube. It's really insane what you can find over there, particularly the more obscure series or films from days of yore (the 1970s in my case, which defined my childhood). Anyone of a certain age (Christ's ass, I'm feeling my age) will probably remember not only Scooby-Doo, but also Wacky Races, The Funky Phantom, and especially Mission: Magic! which was my favorite cartoon series. Granted, some of the series I mentioned aired in the late 1960s, but I grew up watching reruns less than a decade later. 

Now this episode stayed with me the most. I don't know why, but I loved it as a kid, and I still love it now after a re-watch. The episode's message ("the grass is never greener on the other side") struck something in me then, and it still does now, but the main villain, his sidekicks, and their main "weapon" are hilarious but also -- pretty damn clever when I really think about it. And for better or for worse, I do tend to think things over to unnecessary lengths, but that might be because there's something about a detail or two in the show that I find inspiring (or something about it is inspiring a new story idea in me). 

So I'm posting the full episode here for me to return to again and again. The entire series run is also on Youtube, and it lasted one season with sixteen episodes total. And after that, I'm going to dig around some more for other stuff from my childhood since that was the age when my imagination got drunk on so much creativity around me, and my parents (bless them) encouraged us kids to reach as far as we wanted.