Happy New Year!

King's Monster, Ashen Wings, Short Stories

And best wishes for 2007! I went to a nice party with the TO gang, including Ruth & Gary back from the World Bank in D.C.; got to bed at 2, crawled out again at 8:30, and I feel reasonably well even after trying the Irish Car Bomb (dump Baileys into Guinness Stout and drink real fast before the cream curdles).

This morning, laying in bed, I thought through several plot points in The King’s Monster, so for the third day in a row I’ll be bent over my laptop all day. Much rewriting — a major character needs to be written out, and I’ll be darned if I know how to end the novel with these new changes, but at least it should be tighter and more coherent as I pare down characters.

January’s Harrow is up, so enjoy it and then go to the Preditors & Editors poll to vote for The Harrow as best webzine, please. … Our web guru will be moving us to an updated software version, so the look of the zine will change soon. Hopefully the look won’t be a 404: Page Not Found notice! Guess we’ll see if the Dark Gods of Cyberspace smile upon us. CT has been sacrificing much time and peace of mind to them, so perhaps they’ll be forgiving. In other Harrow news, we’ve officially closed Midnight Lullabies, and plans are apace to get it, The Harrow’s second fiction anthology, out this year, 2007. Yay! It’ll benefit Doctors Without Borders.

My resolutions for 2007: To lose some of the pounds that have been creeping back since leaving Italy and to get The King’s Monster completely redrafted and polished by July 1, and then send it out to agents or publishers. If possible, I’d also like to finish Tag and get that quartet of novels into circulation, but I’ll be satisfied if I can get KM out. These are, I admit, pretty much the same things I’ve resolved for the last few years: diet and write.

I had hoped to crew a tall ship in summer 2007, but I haven’t looked into it yet, and my expected move in June or July — I love my apartment but can’t afford it — may put a crimp in that plan. I need to do some research to see how feasible the crew idea really is w/regard to time and money this year.

Well, off to continue rewriting KM. The line floating in my head right now: Morgue attendant turns to 19-year-old Church acolyte Laile Keen and very ill city executioner Corbin Rook as they look at curiously mutilated corpses and says, “And then there’s the problem of all the dead dogs….”

Buon Anno, tutti!

drupagliassotti @ January 1, 2007