October 2022

At the beginning of the month, I thought I would make tons of progress on a bunch of stuff, but I didn't. 

But what did I do?

I started reading the play The Whale by Samual D. Hunter, and it's good. I've only read a few plays, but this one from the start pulled me into the scene. When reading, I feel like I'm there, able to walk around the stage and set while the scenes happen. 

I added a few additional books to my reading backlog. Tripticks by Ann Quin, The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, and Thistlefoot by Gennarose Nethercott. The reading stack grows more than it shrinks. 

I had big plans for watching scary movies but so far only watched a couple of episodes of The Midnight Club and, The Ritual, and last night I watched Barbarian. Barbarian was messed up, entertaining, and freaky enough to raise the heart rate several times. What I really liked about it is what's not shown. There is a lot of bad stuff that happens in that movie but they don't show all of the nastiness. Just enough to keep it tense. 

I also watched the new Hellraiser movie, which showed a lot of the horror, and, while not as intense as Barbarian, was still entertaining. 

Reminded me to look at this again. 

Worse than any scary movie, I participated in the Quiet City Books Halloween Grown up Storytime and read my short story Werewolf, which you can read here. I have to speak to groups a lot for my work, but reading something you created out loud to a group of friends and strangers is a bit scary, and imposter syndrome kicked in really hard. Overall, there were some great stories and readers, and I was happy to be included. You can see some of the images here. (I'm the one with the furrowed brow and white beard.)

Writing and editing this month have been light. I edited a bit of Disappearing and came up with a new story idea that I outlined to avoid editing. I also spent a little time researching and planning how I will publish a few things moving forward. I want to share a handful of novellas and short stories, and I was going to put them all together, but I think It might be better in two volumes and keep the sci-fi'y stories separate from the scary stories. I'll have to see how they look separated before I decide, though. It's nice to have a lot of stories at once, but it's also nice to have a small book that's easy to hold and read. 

That's it for October - Have a Happy Halloween. 

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