The Children’s Crusade didn’t make the shortlist…

So New Directions finally announced its shortlist for its novel contest, and The Children’s Crusade wasn’t on it. I’m not overly surprised, but it would’ve been nice. I guess I’ve never pursued real publication seriously, and I’m about as far from the publishing world as you can get. They wouldn’t know what to do with me, y’know? But I love writing. I’ve got a huge backlog of material waiting to upload into new paperbacks, which, lately, I was kind of holding off on in the absurd case it might hurt my chances. While also releasing that twentieth anniversary edition of that one book (the physical copy of which I finally got in the mail!)…

It’s cool. In years past losing out on things like this put me in a terrible funk. I’m going to try not to let that happen. We’ll see! 

The reward here was having written it. And knowing I’ve got plenty left in the tank.

Not-the-Tonys 2025

 Look at me actually keeping up with this in consecutive years!  This time it's even more self-serving, as I also want to have content for this blog, which can sometimes seem a little neglected.  Anyway!

MOVIES

My favorite movie of 2024 ended up turning out to be A Complete Unknown, which helped explain the rest of why Bob Dylan has been such a fascinating adult discovery for me, a little like if Yesterday really had explored one dude inexplicably writing a bunch of genius songs one after the other with no effort...because that's really what Bob Dylan's done all his life.  Also heavily in the mix, Conclave, which pleasantly is another critically-acclaimed movie I also happen to have loved, which doesn't happen overly often these days.

BOOKS

My favorite book of the year was also, coincidentally, a critically acclaimed (read: Nobel Prize for Literature) work, Jon Fosse's Septology, which I read after learning about its dubbing, hoping to find another great work of literature, and I did.  That was gratifying!

MUSIC

This one's kind of tough unless I cheat and just pick a song: Billy Joel's "Turn the Lights Back On."

My brother long identified himself as a huge Billy Joe fan, and by extension I listened to a lot of his music and then became a pretty big fan myself, which was immeasurably gratifying (apparently the word of the year) when he dropped this new song at the start of the year, a career statement unlike but similar to what Johnny Cash did with "Hurt."  Brilliant video.  Among albums from favorite artists, Vampire Weekend's Only God Was Above Us probably proved most satisfying, but I was really spoiled for new additions to my collection.  

TV

Ghosts, the CBS version, continues to be my favorite show, but I did finally finished a complete watch for the original BBC version.  I also caught up on 1883 and 1923, the Yellowstone prequels, and finally got to watch some of Disenchantment, the Matt Groening Netflix show that came and went, and I think deserves the same kind of cult following as Futurama.  

WRITING PROJECTS

I wrote The Children's Crusade at the start of the year, which turned out to be, well, gratifying.  I hope to write Collider this year and if I'm really ambitious And A Centaur Died. but certainly next year.  It all depends on how things turn out!  There were other things I wrote throughout the year, and plenty of things I'll tackle this year, too.  2024 was also a kind of 20th anniversary for my first novel, and I celebrated that by issuing a long-awaited new edition, which I'm still waiting on Amazon to ship the copies I've ordered.  Kindle Direct Publishing has had a hardcover option for a couple of years now.  I wonder if it's still a bit more complicated than Amazon thinks.

FAMILY

I was fortunate to again have two family vacation experiences in 2024, one once again with the Burrito and her ever-expanding family (new baby sister! new dog!), and then later a whole family reunion, which hadn't happened since 2015 (which, not incidentally, also marks this year as the decade anniversary of my mom's death, which is astonishing), in which I got to catch up with my nephews up in Maine, since I stayed with them for the trip.

WORK

The job was a series of unfortunate complications throughout the year, starting with an awful nasty experience I'm certainly not discussing here (even a personal writer's blog, for me, doesn't have room for such things), but happily, there were plenty of happy babies and other assorted young youth I had the privilege to spend time with, and during one of two rounds of inspections I got singled out for praise, so that was (you guessed it) gratifying.

The Man Comes Around...to Amazon (now available)

The Man Comes Around is now available on Amazon.

This has been a passion project literally for decades.  When Amazon unlocked hardcover options a few years back, in beta mode, I knew if I was ever going to pull the trigger on self-(re)publishing The Cloak of Shrouded Men it was going to be in that format.  Formatting it was a little tricky once I learned that there's an actual pagecount limit, which, given what I wanted to include as extras, took a little maneuvering.  This is how I spent my Thanksgiving afternoon (before I ever got around to cooking Thanksgiving dinner!) (besides writing the last element, the last of the script projects included, which you can also read here, an account of just how The Duke ended up in the state we find him in Nine Panel Grid from where he is in the Ferryman tales), thanks to wanting to include it for my nephew as part of the Christmas gifts I just sent off (he's not supposed to actually get it until early January), in part because of the many notes I left him in the books sitting on his shelves I got to see a few months back when I visited (hey, Julian!), since it includes something that wasn't in the original edition of Nine Panel but is subsequently essential to its overall packaging, and to my mind to the Man Comes Around edition, too.

...If I could just get some readers as interested in all this as I am...

The Man Comes Around...

 Twenty years ago, November 2004, I stumbled on National Novel Writing Month, and assumed I had to come up with the story and write it all in that month.  I’d graduated from college about a year prior, and that January had assembled material for a Top Cow contest, coming up with a new story for an old character I’d played with for a number of years, Bandit, and that didn’t go anywhere because I didn’t win and had no idea what else to do with the material, but since I still knew superheroes and superhero storytelling better than anything at that point, I came up with a new superhero and a story to tell about him, and for a month I wrote and completed 50,000 words, and assumed I was done.  Then November 2005 came along, and I discovered not only did I want to try NaNoWriMo (as the acronym goes), but I had more to write about that character, and then again in November 2006…So by the end of that I had a hundred and fifty thousand words of a story, a novel by any standard, and in 2007 I decided to self-publish the results, through iUniverse, as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.  I somehow ended up getting my author copies the same day the final Harry Potter was published that July.

The edition that existed then had some editing issues I wished had been intercepted.  I’m not great at self-editing, and I’m also not great at paying for or finding services from others.  I have no idea how much better the manuscript is now, but I’ve certainly combed through it over the ensuing two decades, so hopefully it’s better.  It’s been reformatted a little (Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky was an inspiration), and retitled (no one ever really got the original), and sports a new ending, a dramatic turnaround for a character from the first act but thematically putting a pin in an element that otherwise hadn’t really been resolved or explored previously.  Since we follow Cotton Colinaude so closely throughout the book, it’s not inconceivable that he wasn’t clear about what actually happened to Cassie Dawes, and besides, there’s at least one comic book writer whose whole career is owed to pointing out the “women in fridges” phenomenon.

Since this all began, I’ve of course continued writing, and a few years back I finally wrote a version of Bandit’s story, somewhat in alarm since in the meantime a whole movie kind of borrowed from the ether one of its central premises (Hancock), and that’s Nine Panel Grid, included in this new edition, sort of a primer on the art of comic book storytelling.  Since I never have yet broken into comics themselves, I’ve dedicated more than a little time to writing scripts, just for the fun of it, and that’s why there’s some of those included as well, eventually tying together the careers of Bandit and the Eidolon (pronounced “Idol-on,” in case you were wondering).  There was a time when I was promoting the original book at the bottom of columns I wrote for a website called Paperback Reader with the tagline suggesting Cotton “never had a ghost of a chance,” which would simplify things so much if I could just call the guy the Ghost, but there’s already registered and trademarked for that, and besides, I like Eidolon.  The last guy holding the ball at Paperback Reader was one of several acquaintances who was going to help issue a corrected reprint of the book in the first decade of its existence, which never ended up happening.  I tried traditional publishers.  I had a coworker at Borders who tried to help sell it to customers.  Had it stocked on the shelves.  This was around the release of The Dark Knight.  No takers, alas.

I remain proud of it.  It’s the first thing of substance I wrote, finished, completed, and it forced me to write in ways I’d never managed to, before, when I was always scrambling for ways to tell stories that felt authentic to me, which was a longer journey than many writers claim.  I knew, and know, comic book storytelling, though, and in a lot of ways, its language is what still permeates my work, perhaps more than ever, to this day, and its logic, its insane publishing models, is what I still understand best, even while I still pursue traditional publishers with other material.

Twenty years has just flown by, though. 

The Man Comes Around.  Coming soon. 

61 Years…

Today marked sixty-one years since JFK’s assassination, and as certainly seemed apparent to me last year, I think interest in it and/or John Kennedy in general has officially waned in the popular consciousness. 

This is both sad and I guess expected. Public memory is relatively short. What we obsess over today becomes tomorrow’s trivia. There was a time when it seemed 11/22/63 was inescapable, even just the obsession with conspiracy theories, but even that has become marginalized. Rob Reiner did a whole ballyhooed podcast series promising names, and by the time it reached its conclusion all the hype had completely dissipated, but even supermarket tabloids (which themselves are now consigned to a bygone era) couldn’t interest anyone with their ideas just a few years back, claiming surefire Cuban connections, or Martin Scorsese, in The Irishman, claiming a certain mob association.

Some of us remember. For some, Kennedy remains a giant. Years ago I skimmed a book extolling the 100 greatest persons of the 20th century, which claimed he simply didn’t accomplish enough to warrant serious consideration.

Well. Personally I can think of fewer more consequential lives. His legacy endures to this day, and stood like a specter over the Democrats who followed him in the White House straight through Obama. They were all chasing him. All of them.

One day I will write a novel and Hamilton and Burr, despite that fancy musical that created such a fuss. I think that’s one of the defining stories of American history, and has plenty of juice left in it. And one day I will write a novel about Kennedy and Oswald. I have no idea how any author could ever struggle for material. I have stories I’ve burned decades to write. Whatever you think of Oswald, he’s beyond fascinating subject matter, and his story is perfect counterpoint to Kennedy’s. There is great material in there. I might only help contribute. But I know I will have to. 

I can’t ignore it. I can’t forget it. And a little bit of time makes no difference at all. It heightens the drama, if anything.

Abigail Only!

Last week I finalized and Amazon published Abigail Only, the 2024 family Christmas collection.

Every year this millennium (or more or less) I've written and distributed at least a poem each Christmas for family, and since 2020 I've led the chapbooks I've been distributing with novellas.  This year's was a departure from the ones I'd been writing, the first one set in the real world rather than the fantasy land of Wendale.  This year I had the story already set, but the title was inspired by something my sister said in relation to my newest and possibly last of all niece, a phrase that just seemed irresistible.

Among the other material I included is a short story relating to the Danab Cycle, a follow-up to a story I wrote years ago that I'd been wanting to revisit, and anyway helps further flesh out Danab society, which since I decided finally to call the Space Corps stories the Danab Cycle because of their huge importance in the saga, was always necessary as I've gotten around to writing more of it, and am headed steadily toward writing Collider, thirty years in the making...Before I get there, though, I have another short project I want to tackle, examining a kind of origin (in this world there are a lot of origin stories that need telling, and I've got two of the last books I intend to write dedicated to the two biggest secret origins of the whole saga), what exactly might be known about all this in the present day, Earth, when nothing at all here seems to be happening in relation to it.

A Journal of the Pandemic #36: A Conclusion

Back in 2020, the pandemic for me began with the cancellation of a family reunion. I’m happy to report we finally got around to making up for that.

COVID is still circulating. At my workplace it was running kind of rampant (as much as it can these days) in recent weeks, so obviously it’s not going away anytime soon. 

The good news is that life is pretty much back to normal, where it was before all that began. 

My brother, the oldest one, who was the first to bow out of the 2020 reunion when it was still voluntary to decide about lockdown measures, is retiring from the Air Force. This ended up being the occasion, at the ceremony yesterday, to getting the gang back together for the first time in nine years (at Mom’s funeral).

It was pretty awesome. I’m not going to describe everything here, but it also meant I got to catch up with my Maine nephews for the first time since 2017, in which they’ve both been literally and figuratively growing leaps and bounds.

Of course I got to see the Burito (as I did last year) (twice) (and again in June!), and her expanding network of sisters and brother, and that was great!

I learned a little of the new Billy Joel song and almost pulled it off at the ceremony (my brother’s a big fan, but I seem to be a little more involved in some of Billy Joel’s career in recent years than he’s been, but then he’s been very, very busy in his career(s)).

Played some card games! Card games are one of the religions we ascribe to.

And other games. Even a little of the Olympic Games! 

And some good tours of a little local nature (including the obligatory trip to Bailey Island) (and several helpings of Moxie).

May have made the most significant breakthroughs in thirty years of prep work on Collider! So that was pretty cool.

And yes, officially closing the thoughts on the pandemic here, about a year after I last discussed it.