The writing proceeds apace at Chez Olson, after some bumpy days where I was not sure what the hell I wanted to write–not because I didn’t like what I was writing, but because I had several ideas that all wanted to come out at once. For a while, I thought that Entering Cadence, my ‘science fiction noir’ novella, would be what occupied my winter, until it decided it wanted to be a novel instead. I knocked out the first draft of a short horror story, “Goldilocks Zone,” then had to decide whether to return to Entering Cadence or start in on one of these other ideas.
The idea that won was to revisit a very old short story of mine, The Morpheist, and rework it into a dark fantasy novella set in a biopunkish future (once again, showing no respect for genre boundaries–tsch!). For the first time in a long time, I’ve been meeting the (admittedly modest) daily writing goals I’ve set for myself, and expect to have a first draft done by mid-April (stopping only to revisit, revise, polish, and send out “Goldilocks Zone”). After that… it’s either back to Entering Cadence, on to an as-yet-untitled biopunk SF story targeted for an anthology, or over to True Places to see if I can take the salvagable first half of that and turn it into a decent standalone book.
(As far as Starless Midnight–the projected sequel to Brutal Light–goes, that’s also a possibility, but low in priority at this point. Maybe by fall I’ll be ready for it…)
In the meantime, here are links! Yay?
I’m going to be on Blog Talk Radio’s A Cup of Coffee and a Good Book, hosted by Jennifer Walker, on February 29th from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. Jennifer will be interviewing me on Brutal Light and other writerly things, and I’ll be doing my best to keep my brain from locking up due to the stress that comes to me from trying to keep my train of thought from leaving the station before all the words are done boarding. Drop in and listen! (It’s not really ‘radio,’ it’s streaming, so if you’ve got a good internet connection, you should be able to follow along. Also, it’ll be archived, just in case you decide not to rearrange your life so as to listen live.)
Lincoln Crisler recently released a free story on Smashwords (you’ll need to log in or create an account to see it) to promote his soon-to-be-released anthology, Corrupts, Absolutely?. (And yeah, that anthology is one of the new releases I just talked about above.) Check it out!
Here’s something that’s simultaneously both cool and worrisome: Google will be selling ‘heads-up display’ glasses by year’s end. Cool because… well, come on. Worrisome because you just know people are going to be wearing these while doing other things, such as walking and driving and who knows what else, and it’s only a matter of time until we hear someone caused a multi-car pileup because they saw that a store they were passing had several funny cat videos on their YouTube channel.
Speaking of biopunk, here’s an article on some of the real-life bio-hacking that some people are already doing. This has ‘beginning of a SyFy Channel movie’ all over it…
I used to like eating hot, hot foods. In college, I would snork up jalapeno peppers straight out of the jar, and afterward, for years, I’d grow my own chili peppers. I’ve mellowed somewhat on that (my orders of Indian food never go above ‘medium,’ which is ‘hot’ to most sane people), but this article on the world’s hottest pepper tempts me to the challenge…
Here’s Five leadership mistakes of the Galactic Empire that you’ll want to avoid, especially if ‘force choke’ isn’t an option on the table for keeping your employees in line…
Finally, here’s something (originally brought to my attention by Naomi Clark) that I just loved: the opening of Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus, retold as a heartwarming children’s story. It is made of awesome.
***Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.
I had a quick little blog entry all written yesterday. It was the story behind a funny photograph I took seventeen years ago, on my first trip to the Pacific Northwest. It was a picture of a mountain, and a terse little sign that told me where it was. I figured I’d scan the picture when I got home, post the blog entry, and that’d be that.