Summer Lovin' -- Had Me A Blast

(Arrival to Anthocon 4, with the luminous Roxanne Dent and the
equally brilliant Judi Ann Calhoun)

On a balmy August night in 1980, I exited the rear doors of the long-gone Salem Tri-Cinema and my life was forever changed. I'd just taken in the movie Xanadu with my circle of high school friends and was so inspired by the flick's theme -- that our dreams are worth pursuing if we have the backbone to try -- that my life was forever changed. An enormous full moon lit the sky. The air was sweet and intoxicating. As we negotiated the rear of the cinema and ambled toward the parking lot, I had that Eureka! moment: I loved to write, and I was going to be a writer, both end of story and the beginning. Thirty-five years later (twenty-five of them as a published writer), and especially now that I've gotten so unthinkably older, I've come to appreciate the summer months both for the warmth and also for keeping me young at heart. Soon, it will be winter, and I'll be negotiating around the house like something out of Toulouse Lautrec.

This summer actually kicked off early with a spell of gorgeous sunny weather at the start of April that ran for a full week. During that time, I finished a first draft of my M/M high fantasy novel, Kingdoms Be Damned, seated outside on the sun porch. As winter waned, one night while cooking dinner I challenged myself to come up with my own genre. What I created was "Sweat Punk" -- a futuristic storyline in which humans had willingly sold off soul for technology and longed to reclaim what they'd renounced. In late April, I put pen to page and began work on a novella, Sweat Punk: A Love Story. I was instantly sucked into the world I'd created and specifically the love between my two leads. For months while working on the story in the background, I found myself walking about in a daze, eager to return to them and their seemingly-impossible situation. I wrapped the first draft in early July. Like Kingdoms, I soon plan to begin computer edits on the project for submission.

In May, I hit the Big 5-0. One of my fondest goals for my fiftieth year on Spaceship Earth was to write my Space:1999 novel Metamorphosis. I put pen to page on my birthday and, like Sweat Punk: A Love Story, wrote it in the background, throughout the summer. The experience was so uplifting, so ridiculously fun, as I drew the courageous men and women of Moonbase Alpha into the biggest space battle in the history of the universe. I began reading the novel at writers' group meetings and, on those nights, was a kid again.

In early June, I headed to the fourth Anthocon, a world-class conference held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Anthocon saw the launch of several anthologies containing my short stories, including the stellar Dreamscapes into Darkness, where my tale "One More" is cozied up against a reprint by D. H. Lawrence, and From the Corner of Your Eye: A Cryptids Anthology. Most exciting was the release of my new book, Tales From the Robot Graveyard, which sold out within two hours of my arrival to the dealer's room. I managed to escape from Anthocon with one copy, signed the rest (along with a plethora of other anthologies), and gave two open mic readings. My two writers' groups -- Berlin Writers' Group here in the north and Nashua Writers' Group from the south -- were well represented, and over a dozen of us lunched together at the classic diner attached to the hotel next door, sight of the original con.

Most of my summer days began with iced coffee and blueberry bubble water in my Writing Room, but soon transitioned to the sun porch, my summer de facto home office. There, bookended by cats, I wrote a new horror-themed screenplay on spec, numerous short stories, and, during the first half of July, half of a new novel, which I plan to complete next month during National Novel Writing Month. I found myself besieged by new ideas from every direction -- while taking in the Chris Pratt event movie Jurassic World with friends on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, three ideas latched onto me, leaving me scrambling for pen and paper (despite having an excellent memory for details, I still don't trust my brain enough to recall everything).  I sold numerous short stories in a multitude of genres to various magazines and anthologies, and enjoyed the long, laid back (but hardly lazy) days.

(screen capture from the feature film Brutal Colors, due to be released soon)

On September the third, we paid off our mortgage on our house, Xanadu -- lovingly named after that movie from my formative youth, a place where dreams come true. As I write this report on my summer adventures, a cold wind is blowing down from the mountains, knocking leaves from trees, a clear promise of winter. My plan for the cold months is to do what I did throughout the warm: live, write, and dream. And among those winter dreams, surely, will be ones concerning a return of the greenery outside, the balmy summer breezes, and the upsurge of passion I always experience when the days grow longer and brighter.

How I Spent My Summer Stay-cation

(A typical day writing on the sun porch)

I've learned that in this part of the globe, summer usually means three short, hot months bookended by two warmish months, while the rest of the year belongs to winter.  It seems to me that we just came out of a very long, very cold winter when -30 degrees wasn't uncommon, and most of the time the thermometer hovered close to 0, and that the lovely, lush green realm that surrounds our house only just arrived. But the truth according to the calendar is that today is the last day of August. I blinked, and summer was gone.

The one big thing I have to show for the time is a lot of completed writing.  Finished first drafts in desperate need of filing have piled up atop one of my two big lateral drawer cabinets, and with summer unofficially over in a few short hours, my plan for the first week of unofficial autumn is to get those stories filed.  Back in June (was it really that long ago?), on the first hot day I remember, I started a wonderful week of free writing, something I've done too little of, and the results were tremendous.  Several of the stories I produced during that time have since found homes.  The same week, an interview I gave to the fine folks at Grey Matter Press came out -- it can be read in its entirely here.  I also learned that my ghostly historical short story "Drowning" is set to appear in their forthcoming anthology Death's Realm, one of only seventeen accepted from over 2,000 submissions!

Many of my summer days started in my Writing Room, a place I love, and ended on the old sofa on our sun porch, with its beautiful views out six tall windows.  I am seated there as I write this, looking out two at the fiery red maple leaves of a tree in the neighbor's backyard, already showing the first color before September's arrival.  Out here, while penning westerns, mysteries, a long detective story, M/M romance, writing about robots and things that go bump in the night, I sipped copious amounts of iced coffee from tall, sweating plastic cups, as well as a brand of blueberry bubble water I discovered at the local grocery store in July.  I submitted to numerous markets, and a lot of my babies came home with contracts in hand.  In the thick of so many completed projects, I also wrote a screenplay, my second for the indie Hollywood filmmaker who filmed the first bearing my byline in June.  That first feature film is presently being color-corrected and edited for sound out in Tinseltown, and there are rumors of an autumn screening in the not-too-distant future.

As stated, Robots were a big part of my summer.  They have, in fact, been a prevalent theme since my boyhood, when iconic mechanical men like the Robinson Robot from Lost in Space and other

favorite TV shows forever influenced both my life and my pen. The release of my collection of three novellas, Tales From the Robot Graveyard, is another event I look forward to in the fall.  In my book, which boasts an amazing cover by Eric Chu, conceptual artist on the new Battlestar Galactica:
               

·                Two brothers—one human, the other manufactured—test the limits of family loyalty in a dead city that harbors diabolical secrets in “Ghosts and Robots”.

·                 Mad technology decimated the Earth.  Could an even madder one save it when mechanical emissaries arrive bearing gifts in “Robot Kind”?

·                 And in “The Long Frost”, on a planet of ice, somewhere between man and machine, lies one last desperate hope for survival.

In addition to the bling from Eric Chu, the book will feature a blurb from Amy Howard Wilson of Star Blazers fame, and an inaugural poem from my good friend, poet Esther M. Leiper-Estabrooks.  I'm beyond excited to see the book's release and have had so much fun writing the tales, one of which ("The Long Frost") dates back almost to the beginning of my writing dreams.

August was a delightful month, with not one but two Sunday writers' group parties/cookouts, and numerous weekend guests (in part to enjoy Yard Sale, the newest play written, directed, and produced by my friend and fellow writers' group member, Jonathan Dubey).  On the 1st, we spent a day beyond the notches in the town of North Conway, eating Chinese buffet for lunch, shopping for office supplies -- I picked up some great composition notebooks, which I've since used voraciously for my summer literary adventures -- and taking in the first showing of Guardians of the Galaxy, which we all loved.  

(Summer drafts done, edited, and submitted to be filed)

For the second summer in a row, we made due without the need for air conditioning.  Our house boasts lots of windows and four ceiling fans (one in my Writing Room), and the two box fans more than made up for days and nights when the temperature soared into the upper 80s (not once did we pass into the 90s). The smells of summer -- roses from the giant Lovecraftian menace in the backyard, newly mowed lawn, the green veldt that surrounds Xanadu, our home on the hill -- were welcome, and in abundance. There was even a bear sighting in late June, when a curious hulkster moseyed down from the woods behind our home in search of picnic baskets and, sensing we keep our garbage in the small shed attached to the back of the house, just beyond the far wall of my Writing Room, employed brutish strength to snap off the latch.  It was all very exciting and, no doubt, fodder for my future stories.

(Our very own black bear, seen crossing the neighbor's yard)

I'm sad to see the summer end. Forget the insane cost of heating oil that looms not far down the road, the oppressive cold that is surely coming, the short, gray days that define winters in the North Country.  I'm going to miss sitting out in the cozy, sunlit warmth of my other office, where so many of the season's stories were composed -- the short, long, and screenplay alike.  I loved the heat, what there was of it, and the green, and the occasional Sunday afternoon writing with the Red Sox game playing on the flat-screen. But winter has its own charm, too, and I look forward to the work I'll be doing nestled in my beautiful Writing Room with the cube heater on.  And first, there's autumn to enjoy, brief as it surely will be, with all those crisp days, falling leaves, and the mysteries of Halloween to enjoy and write about!