I'm throwing some stuff up for posterity's sake as I'm experiencing an altogether new form of ennui these days. For anybody who somehow follows this blog and doesn't know, I recently had the good fortune of teaming up with the very talented folks over at Immortal Ink Publishing, for the purposes of putting out Infernal Machines my first full-length novel, out this August.
http://immortalinkpublishing.com/books.php?id=13"
Did I mention there would be shameless plugging here? I'm sure I did, at some point. Maybe I just thought about mentioning it and then went out for tacos or something. Anyway, so this incredible, life changing news happened, and then as this was happening I got notice from the editors over at Cracked.com that they'd accepted not one, but two articles for their site.
I couldn't be happier about the convergence of these events. That being said, the 1st email came in about 4 days apart from the 3rd, and everything was pretty much due back within a 96 hour period.
So for the last couple of weeks I would get home from my day job (pest control in AZ, in summertime - a topic for a whole 'nuther day), and then square off face to face with the monitor. I'd dive right the fuck in, and in a fury of focus and productivity I'd write and research and edit and re-write until the bells tolled midnight and my fingertips grew too hot to work the touch screen properly. My eyeballs would get this feeling like somebody plucked them out and rolled them around in hot sand and then wedged them back in. And when the cock crowed I'd roll out of bed and slug down some hi-test and get back to squashing bugs again.
Writing is what I do, and I hit all 3 of my deadlines, and the people rejoiced. By people I mean my girlfriend Cassie, and my kids, all of whom have the patience of saints at times when it comes to my work.
As for that ennui thing - You see, while my artistic (read: moody bordering on downright goddamn surly) temperament means I'm never out and out bubbly, when I have stuff to do I'm at least too busy for the weirdness to set in. And this period of industrious freneticism kept me about as close to effervescent as a guy like me gets. All of a sudden, I was in demand, and for me that was pretty new and exciting and awesome and there's probably a word I'm looking for that sums all this stuff up quite nicely but it's late and my thesaurus is at the downstairs computer and the Ambien is starting to kick in and where was I?
I'd better wrap this up before I start to get strange. I'm back to a bit of a lull, which for me means only working on 2 projects at once (one of them is actually a zombie story, for those of you who look at the title of the blog and wonder if I'd ever get around to writing one) and the other a non-fiction article that I'm gonna try for Esquire or The New Yorker or maybe just on a place mat at a diner somewhere. Then I have 2 other stories shortlisted at 2 different anthologies.
So, in so many words it's back to the "wait" portion of the "Hurry Up and Wait Game."
Anyway, good night everybody, and be cool to each other - Will
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