I apologize for being silent so much. Not that anyone cares. The three of you that read my blog get annoying emails from me almost daily so…this is mostly to hear myself speak (type?).

I’m currently about 91,000 words into the book “Enforcer” and still cranking out about 3,000-10,000 words per night, closer to the 3k number really. Depends I guess, some nights I can go for two or three full chapters, sometimes I just have one in me. The title is still a working title, though it will most likely be the published title. It’s about a minor league hockey enforcer that gets tangled up with the Romanian mafia, moonlighting as an enforcer for them.

I’m meeting with a few ex-pro’s tomorrow (today), one of them a fairly famous enforcer…so famous in fact, that there’s a rule named after him in the KHL (Russia’s top pro hockey league). The guy was a brute when he played here in Boise, and he’s a feared MMA fighter when he isn’t breaking some rule or other in the KHL and getting punished (and cheered like a madman by his city’s fans).

“Alive, Or Just Breathing” is an 89,000 word novel about growing up as a teenager through some hard times, falling in love with a damaged girl, and trying to just make it to the end of high school without everything falling apart. It’s in editing stage, and needs a good revision, which I won’t get to until I get Enforcer’s first draft completed (about 120k words it looks like). I’ll put Enforcer away for a week to a month while I whittle “Alive” down and make it ready to publish.

I have two others in the works that are both around 30,000 to 40,000 words currently, and both will end up somewhere around 60,000 to 90,000 words each. That’s a pretty rangy estimate I’m sure, but I never know for sure.

Diablolus Mendax (working title, my Latin would get me beaten into a coma by a gang of nuns if they read this) is a sci-fi story about a disgraced bishop, a priest-hacker (a new breed of Catholic that is helping to bring the Church into the 22nd century), and their battle with an AI that claims it is Satan, come to have the last battle with the Church so that Armageddon can come to pass. Think ‘Skynet meets The Exorcist’.

Finally, and then I can take a break, yay, is Extraction. It’s another sci-fi story, but I don’t really want to give this one away at all. It’s…so unconventional that I don’t think it has ever been done before, whether sci-fi or otherwise. Yeah yeah, pretty big claim from a nobody author, but if you ever read it, you’ll have no choice but to agree. Well, maybe. I might be talking out of my ass on that part, but it is definitely a…very, very different story. It’s about first contact with aliens, but it doesn’t go anywhere near the path that the majority of first contact stories ever go.

I’ve got a ton of short stories that are half-baked or needs-editing-baked, and a concept idea for yet another sci-fi book that is fairly unconventional as well.

At some point I want to get back to the “It’s Better This Way” universe. I wrote it as a short story for a contest, but it grew far beyond the 5,000 word contest limit. At 24,000 words, it is just long enough to be a novella, but too short to be a real story. A couple of reviews have complained that it simply wasn’t long enough, which at least tells me they enjoyed it enough to want to read more of the universe.

A couple of reviews I think told me to stop writing, I was terrible at it, but they probably worded it better than that. I don’t disagree with that assessment. I should probably never write another word. But I will, because I love to do it, and I enjoy annoying others with it.

But on a serious note, I’d love to go back to revisit Evan and the ‘bulls’ and the happenings at Crater Lake and The Farm. Evan’s sister is still lost in the world, probably dead, but until there’s proof, a brother who never got to say goodbye to his sister will never give up the search, even twenty-three years later.

Then there’s the sticky issue of the Crater Lake military base to deal with. The residents of The Farm were pretty adamant about how they preferred the way things were going, but the tug of modern amenities, hot showers, electricity, computers…those things might have been forgotten and maybe not even missed all that much, but that’s what happens when there are no cookies in the house…you think about something else. The instant someone brings cookies…all you can think about it cookies.

There’s also the fourteen years Evan spent wandering the Pacific Coast area looking for his sister. He’s killed men, some women, even a child, and was once married to a woman, though legal marriage was just another thing the bulls destroyed in the first few days after their arrival. I bet there are some stories there to tell, especially in the chaos after the fall of man.

So there you have it. That’s what I’m up to lately. If you give a damn, awesome. We are BFF’s. You can send me a message on Twitter (@Angry_Games), or you can leave a comment here. One day I’ll fix the comment system so you don’t have to sign up at the site to leave comments. Until then, you may complain very loudly on Twitter. Or Tumblr, or even Facebook if you can find me (I hate FB, but I, like everyone else, still have an account there, though I usually only go there to troll people I know).

Toodles, and all of that…

T