A few things on the fire right now:
1. Can you imagine being the one person immune to a disease wiping out your entire family? Everyone's dying around you, no known cure, lots of wild theories and rumors, and, after everyone dies off and you survive, you walk out of your home--which had been quarantined--only to find that your whole village had been wiped out. Sound crazy? Look at this link, about Eyam, Derbyshire, England, a village that suffered for 14 months with the plague in 1665-6 and deliberately quarantined itself. About 25% of the village survived; entire families were wiped out. (Look at the pic of the Rose Cottage, about the Thorpe family.) Some people in the village, like a woman who buried her whole family, and the town gravedigger, survived, though they came in touch with countless of the infected. Imagine being that woman, who survived as all of her family died around her? Or being that gravedigger? What happened to his family? How did he feel burying all his friends? Working on this now; setting either in 1665, or present day, I don't know. Leaning towards present-day. Novella or novel.
2. The other short story I'm excited about because it's my first non-genre piece, called "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season." It's about a writer coming home from a book tour at Christmas Eve, to a wife he knows is cheating on him and wants to divorce him. His internal struggles on the plane ride home, in the airport with a fan as his wife approaches, and then on the ride home, when his wife tells him that her parents are already there, and that she's leaving him after the holidays for the guy she's been having the affair with. Both pieces are ready to ship out.
3. News, soon, about a short story recently accepted. TBA.
4. I have to send out two new short stories, one of them a Brad Foster short, called "Pink Lemonade." There's another short story of Foster out there right now, knocking on doors, looking for a home. (Foster is the main character and 1st person narrator of Cursing the Darkness, the prologue of which is below, with Chapter One waiting in the wings at my website.) A poem is out there, too.
5. Follow-up to Cursing the Darkness. Leaning towards a prequel. Writing decisions are hard.
6. Finishing "Cribbage," a short story about a father and son (wife/mother has recently died) who bond over a game of cribbage; the boy has an adult-consciousness epiphany at the end.
7. Novels: The Observer and Apocalypse.
8. Novella that needs and wants to be a novel: The Gravediggers. An existentialist/horror/vampire tale. I began it in the mid- to late-90s, before everyone wrote vampire stuff.
9. My day job.
10. Spending less time at the computer.
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