AMostExcellentFancy is the last of my Kindle Vella projects, and the latest novella now available in paperback. It’s a farce, ultimately, but a tragedy loosely based on a Shakespearean model, with one chapter in verse. This edition incorporates as footnotes the original notes Vella always encouraged authors to include, mostly detailing the famous Shakespeare phrases used as chapter titles. This is also the first time in fiction I use Mount Rushmore as a backdrop, though it shouldn’t be the last. I hugely valued Kindle Vella as a platform, its ability to draw out material I would likely have never written without it.
I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...
Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated. I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way. Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making. But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions. I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...
Soldiers is actually a bridge between them. It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted) at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!). Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.
Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later. I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers. If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.
I think Patrick “Pat” “P.T.” “Eric Filler” (etc.) Dilloway is dead.
This will come as a surprise to anyone with a small inkling at how exasperated he made me for a lot of the time I knew him in this blogging community. Don’t worry if you had no clue about that. If he’s dead, it literally can’t possibly matter anymore.
I met Pat during the 2012 Blogging A to Z Challenge. I chose his blog among the listed entrants because he was writing about a superhero book he’d written. For several years afterward I was a regular visitor to his blog, and my biggest blogging claim to fame is arguably successfully participating in his original box office challenge.
As the opening line suggests, Pat used a lot of aliases, and probably most of the people who knew him online or through his many books had no idea.
He went radio silent before the new year. His last post on his blog was at the start of December. There are bloggers who take breaks, but usually they’ll post about it. A lot of bloggers became considerably more sporadic over recent years, and many outright walked away. I didn’t expect Pat to do anything like that, or certainly not anytime soon. I thought he was just slowing down.
A post I saw when I tried to look up any possible activity elsewhere, on a Wordpress blog Pat maintained for Eric Filler, suggests he was battling cancer last year. He never mentioned this on his Dilloway blog.
All considered, if you’re dead, rest in peace, dude.
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.
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.
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...
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.
