Hello everybody! I realized I haven't updated in quite some time, and there is a good chance that I haven't left any sign of what projects I am working on. In the impossible chance that somebody wanted to know, they now have a method of finding out!
Currently, I am working on two novels, both about halfway completed. Here's a rundown:
The first to be started of the two - a manuscript that is slightly farther along than the other, but will not be finished until after that other one is completed - is tentatively called 'Fiver Films,' and is a disturbing mystery story with a 'will they or won't they?' relationship with horror, that will keep even the sleuthiest readers guessing and ease the most horror-fied horror fans into feeling at home.
Former college student directors across the country receive invitations to a student film convention celebrating college film majors' adaptations of the short stories of major horror author Peter Blake.
Out of all attending, only Blake knows the true purpose of the film festival he'd had arranged: to serve as a cunning trap for a threatening, lunatic filmmaker who started stalking him.
Can fact meet fiction and survive intact? Can the word and the lens really be allies, or are they forever doomed to depict differing worlds? Can major filmmakers, minor filmmakers, a television showrunner, a game animators, a pair of precocious and talented but ultimately naive twelve year olds, a regular schmuck who's down on his luck in a borrowed truck, and, most questionably of all, the fear-stricken horror novel magnate himself survive in a celebration as rife with terror and deception as the First Annual Fiver Film Festival?
You tell me: after I finish writing the book. About 60% done now.
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The second book that I'm working on - the one that I paused the above project to attempt as a NaNoWriMo novel in November and didn't finish in near enough time - is about halfway done or so, as well, though more like 40% finished than 60%. It's called 'Through The Woods,' and is the third and final book in my set of cat books. It is also a prequel.
For those who don't know, I have two books about cats. The first, entitled 'Under the Wall,' was about a cat named Leviticus who had the power to see the insides of minds as clearly as he could smell the odors of the world around him. This hadn't affected him in meaningful ways for years, and he lived happily with his family, until suddenly the thoughts of a killer, bent on murdering his family, entered his head. It was then that supernatural powers beyond mere mindreading came into play, kicking off a deadly game of cat and mouse with a bloodthirsty criminal.
Book two in the 'cats with mindeffin' powers' series is 'Out the Door,' a tale about a decidedly less loving kitty. Named after the vicious bigger brother of the Velociraptor, 'Deinonychus' was one nasty cat. His mental powers were vast and endlessly destructive, and his will was only to crush, destroy, dominate.
Only one thing stopped him: he needed to draw on the the power of living blood in order to use his powers. As he lashed out with his mind at the external world, something inside him was depleted that needed to feast on live flesh and bone - such as mice, birds, and squirrels, to start with - in order to find mental energy. However, Deinonychus the terrible has been trapped inside a suburban home - a lair of ridiculous, smelly humans - a rambunctious little tyke who thinks nothing of grabbing at him rudely, and her grousing, sour-face mother who hates them both.
The potentially ruinous cat had nothing to eat but dry, dusty kibble - certainly no blood.
All that changes when the cat gets a plan, tricks the hapless child into releasing him into the backyard, and finally gets OUT THE DOOR (and into some blood-filled rodents), finally remembering the power slumbering within him.
Needless to say, this is not a good development for the Twin Cities.
Out the Door is the story of one cat's horrifying journey toward's infinity, one crushed life at a time.
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This third book, 'Through the Woods,' that I am literally working on each day right now and will finish next, is a prequel in this cat series.
It's set in a government facility run by a group known primarily as 'The Agency,' whose purpose is to research and provide countermeasures to potentially hazardous - though probably fictional - claims. The premise of 'The Agency,' (the National Unexpected Countermeasure and Preparedness Agency) is to determine the actuality of, and tactical potential for, fantastic (and possibly devastating) technologies or techniques.
"It's not BS until we say it is" - Motto of 'The Agency'
The particular Agency laboratory where this story begins is situated deep in the protected state forests of northern Minnesota, and is set up to study those seemingly unreasonable or outright supernatural claims which HAVE been proven.
A young new worker named Ben shows up for his first day of work at this secret, hidden facility - a place where all manner of insane things must happen behind closed doors - only to be assigned to a project where his tasks consist, at first, of making homemade cat food from special, gourmet ingredients.
Needless to say, his lifelong dream of working on secret projects is rapidly deromanticized. Slowly, however, he learns that the subject of this particular experiment is a litter of peculiar cats, who exhibit a highly unusual set of capabilities.
Nine young cats in an experiment which none of the little members of the litter particularly seem to like - trapped only until one of them learns how to game the system.
Ben, still feeling out his new job, doesn't particularly know what to think of his e-cigarette puffing boss, or the trio of scientists running the experiment, but he knows that the cats he is working with make him uneasy.
And when things go wrong, it becomes apparent to him rather quickly that he might be the best of the five of them to take charge of the situation.
This is the story of nine cats with unusual powers, the government who wanted to study them, and the way they got away - two of them for good - and what happened to them after - up to a point.
Oh, the names of the two cats who got away clean?
Deinonychus and Leviticus.
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