I’ve mentioned before that the next Metamor City novel will be called The Lost and the Least. I haven’t spoken very much in public, though, about where this story came from, or why it needs to be written. This blog post is the start of a new series, which I plan to add to roughly once a month, in which I’ll explore the real-life roots of the story and why they matter.
Tax season is once again upon us, and that means it’s time to take stock of how my adventures in self-publishing have progressed this year. Several of my fellow authors in the Podcast Fiction Tribe have taken the lead in disclosing their sales numbers and earnings from self-publishing (hat-tips to Abigail Hilton and Matthew Wayne Selznick), and in the interest of transparency I’m going to do likewise.
On January 17th I had the pleasure of attending a special exhibition by the Benevolent Order of Mountain Artists (BOOMA), hosted at The Danforth Gallery. The show was called “Exquisite Corpse”, which sounds rather morbid, but the concept behind it is actually quite fun and the end result is extremely cool. More details after the jump…
It’s after 1 A.M., and the ghosts are awake.
I’m walking westbound down Cavendish Street, from the residential neighborhood toward our few little blocks of downtown. It’s blasted cold and the wind is howling like the demons that used to plague this place, but I’m out here because the dog needs to go to the bathroom and it takes her a good half-a-mile walk to get her bowels loose. God only knows why she won’t go in our nice fenced-in yard, but I guess when you’re a twelve-year-old retired ranch dog you’re bound to have picked up a few eccentricities. Whatever her reasons, a walk is the only thing that will do, and loving a senior animal means you do these things because at this point you’re just not going to change them.
The dog trots down the pavement on her too-short little legs, her back end bouncing with every step. With her plush double-coat she laughs at winter, while I cinch up the mouth of my hood and wrap my scarf tighter around my face. If it were only the cold, it wouldn’t be so bad — she and I have braved colder nights than this together — but the hood and the scarf cut off my peripheral vision, and that’s not a welcome thing on nights like this.
As I said, the ghosts are awake. Living people don’t belong outside on nights like this, and everyone but me and the dog seems to know it.