Friday, February 14, 2014

Finally, A New Post

Just checked my writing blog and realized it was painfully in need of updating.  Last entry: back in March!  Sorry, I’ve been quite remiss in keeping it up. 

I have been writing.  Mostly work on a novel, hence the dearth of short stories this year, though I did manage a few pieces of flash, most of which are up over at Every Day Fiction.

Update for 2013.  My word totals were a little under my goals (which is 1K words a day).  I ended up with 259,000 words for twenty thirteen.  Not bad, but I should be able to manage more.  But, with the novel writing, I’m doing a lot of revising, so that kept the word totals down. 

The biggest thing on the writing front for Two-Ought-Thirteen was I got the chance to attend the Summer Writing Program at Yale last June.  Not only was it quite a cool experience to spend a week attending Yale, but the program was taught by my favorite writer, John Crowley.  Getting to meet John and work with him one-on-one on my writing was quite a thrill for me.  I can’t tell you how much I am in awe of this man and his writing ability.  I hope just a little bit rubbed off. 

The little town of New Haven, CT was the locale of the program, and it was a cool little town.  The Yale campus was interesting, as it isn’t cordoned off by itself like a lot of universities, but it sort of just permeates the town, with lecture halls and student residences mixed in on the streets with restaurants and other businesses. 

My favorite of these other places was a little cigar bar called the Owl Shop.  It’s an old guard cigar store that’s been around since the ‘30s, and it’s the only place where you can get a drink AND a smoke in town.  Smoking, outlawed everywhere else, is allowed in the Owl Shop as their license is grandfathered, or whatever you call it.  Anyway, it was pleasant after class and meetings each day to stop by and have a beer and a nice cigar in a cool old environment. 

So, to sum up, Yale was cool.  I met some cool new writing friends, got to know John Crowley, and enjoyed staying in the rather castle-y student dorms and eating in the Hogwarts-y Yale dining hall. 

The novel I’ve been working on is a new one, different from the ones I’ve got in my ‘in the works’ section here on the blog.   I still work on those from time to time, but this new one is an expansion of the short story I wrote for the Yale Workshop, called ‘The Fairies of Maine.’  (Since I was working with John Crowley, I couldn’t resist writing a fairy story of my own)

TFOM takes place during a single week in June in the fictional town of Brandywine, Maine.  (The week of Midsummer’s Eve, no less)  It follows the varied and diverse lives of five people who stay at the Brandywine Inn for that week, and their subtle interactions with the world of Faerie. 

So, that’s about all for now.  Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting little tidbits to keep the blog fresh this year.  For now, back to the writing grindstone.


Chris