Busy few days. The novella is coming along; it may clock in at slightly over 40,000 words, rather than the 40k I was going for.

I don’t have much else to say at this weird hour of the morning, save Once is basically my imagination’s sci-fi response to a late-night reading of John Donne’s “The Computation,” which has been my favorite poem since an AP English teacher read it aloud in class and my jaw dropped.

I’ve always interpreted it quite literally — she died, he’s a ghost discussing her many, many years into the future. That’s where the story idea came from. I guess there’s some interpretation (maybe the correct one, who knows) where the guy is just over-exaggerating being away from his lover for a day. I prefer the despairing version where he’s been hanging around for a thousand years missing her.

Once Once (now there’s some awkward phrasing) is off with a few beta readers, I will set into novella the second — tentatively called Ice Blink — and novella the third, which is happily all about zombies. I may write those two concurrently (Ice Blink is already about 8k through; it will be much shorter than Once). The zombies don’t have a name yet. But they’re going to be awesome.

I fully intend to get Once and one of the others out on Kindles and Nooks by mid-October, latest; that’s including time for horrific computer explosions, cover art nightmares, and formatting horrors. The third will come after that.

I feel like I finally have a game plan here.

Dammit it’s almost 2 AM.