It’s been a strange run of writing this year. I’ll give you an idea of what’s definitely coming soon (almost half of it is in edit already), and then some future-looking thoughts.
I took a long break from my fiction stories, but came back late last year to them. I managed to get a new story and two polished older ones out last year. And already this year, I have two full length novellas done, two second-volumes to those well on their way, and a couple of shorts.
It helps that California is rainy and I really don’t want to go outside much.
But it also makes me feel good getting stories ready to share. Some of these are years old, and some are fresh off the brain. And surprisingly, even some of what I wrote twenty years ago still feels fresh enough to share. Philosophy and good sex have a longer shelf life in print (so to speak) than politics and current trends. Although I suspect the events of Spring 2020 have put a dent in that maxim.
Speaking of ready to share, you can look forward to a couple of things coming in the next couple of weeks:
- A new series currently called the Solana Journey, which I teased here. It’s set in Southern California, with a man taking a journey into mobile, nomadic life, and having it seemingly crash back into stable life in a single place at a time. This is the John Fowles reference from my year-in-review post here. But as a spoiler, nobody is held prisoner, and nobody has died yet.
- Another newish series called Mendocino. I’ve posted about it before. It builds on the Tracey Rose story in a way that came to mind long after the Tracey dreams subsided into a Word document. It’s the almost-Internet-famous man I mentioned at the end of 2023, and in progress of words last week.
- A story that touches on how a man who recently became moderately wealthy would deal with finding a long-term lover (or more). It was going to be called “Eleven First Dates” but when I got past the eleventh date in the first chapter, I had to go back to the drawing board.
- And finally, can a guy get it up when his new lover’s house has Frida Kahlo staring him down from every direction, in every room?
I’ve been reading and enjoying some post-apocalyptic fiction lately, and I’m vaguely imagining writing something like that.
Some of it really gets my head into role-playing territory. Not so much teacher/student or doctor/patient role-playing, but the old dice and saving throws from the 80s. I can imagine the map of the space the characters are searching, and figuring out who survives a conflict and how close the bullets, arrows, or claws come to the characters’ vital organs.
I have to admit that when I was around those dungeon games, I don’t remember any saving throws vs orgasms, but in some of these stories the characters definitely fail those. “You find an empty bed. Roll to decide who is on their back first.”
The image on this post is from a story that could be semi-post-apocalyptic. It’s more being snowed in for a weekend or so. But most apocalypses seem to start out small, or at least in a short period of time.
But a new idea came to mind in the last couple of days, where world communication is dependent on the work of sysadmins who went overboard and produced a communication system that outlived most of the world’s traditional infrastructure.
Maybe you’ll be able to read that before the rains and snows are gone this spring. Let me know what you think.
I’m giving some thought to a Patreon or something like that, to give people early access to my new ideas and sample chapters. I’d have to change the back matter in everything to remove the “I don’t have a Patreon” wording, but it might be easier than setting up payments here on my blog. I’ll update you here if that changes.
For now, thanks for reading my words here, buying or borrowing my books on Amazon, and for supporting independent writers in any way you can.
Stay warm, stay safe.
Marklin Foster 