You might have noticed the number creeping up on the Secret Book progress meter.  I don’t know why the status bar won’t move, but whatever.  I’ve been tapping away at it–I’m determined to finish.  On a much-needed six-day staycation, I decided I would do just that.  Only seven more parts I need to write and then I’m done.  It’s been going in dribs and drabs; two consecutive nights, I wrote over 4.000 words and then nothing, then 400, then 114.  Ugh.  That’s the way it goes sometimes.

Then I wrote over 2200 words of bullshit that had nothing to do with anything (just a stupid bunch of headjunk).  But hey, at least I was writing.  Judging by how I am at work, if I had a deadline–a REAL one–I wouldn’t have this problem.  Making up my own seldom has any effect because obviously, I don’t pay any attention to them.

Instead of writing, I went shopping at Barnes & Noble (and Amazon) and bought all this–

I’m not allowed to read ANY of this until I finish Secret Book!

Image:  Elizabeth West

The title of that photo is Torture, fittingly enough.  No one can stop raving about Joe Hill’s The Fireman, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.  I would love for that to happen to me someday.  The apple didn’t fall far from the tree there (Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son).

I’m a bad fan–I didn’t know the Clive Barker book had come out.  Forgive me, Mr. Barker!  I met him once, at a Fangoria magazine horror convention in L.A. in the early 1990s.  He’s a very nice man.

Now that I look at it, every bit of that reading material is horror/fantasy.  Wow.  I went through the bookstore and bought without really thinking about it–I knew I wanted the Joe Hill novel, and I was behind on my Stephen King (I also got The Colorado Kid on Kindle, though it’s not in the picture).

The one on the tablet is Foreign Devils, by John Hornor Jacobs, a sequel to his excellent fantasy novel The Incorruptibles.  He’s a really cool writer I met at VisionCon, the same day I met Brian Keene (whose Last of the Albatwitches also should be in that pile, though I didn’t get it at B&N).  You need to check him out.  He’s going places.

With all these lovely gems to plunder, I hope I can force my brain to get its ass in gear (brain ass? ass brain?) and just finish the damn thing.  Then I can move on to something else before I go back and finish all the research.  And I can hunker down and blast through all these beauties.  I need something to take my mind off real-life horrors.

When nightmares happen during the day, you make this face.

In the meantime, back to work!