Welcome to 2010!
That’s right. Twenty-Ten. We’re living in the future now, boy howdy!
For most of us that just means having to remember to write ’10 on checks and documents for the first few weeks. It’s a time of lists. A time of looking not just back but forward into the new decade.
Ten years ago I was writing screenplays, pursuing that oh-so-elusive milli0n dollar spec script. And while I love the the scripts I did with my writing partner (a delightfully-successful playwright in his own circles), there were certain realities of movies that just didn’t suit me. I had a tendency towards bigger stories — the kinds that involve a lot of people with a lot of money to make. That narrows the avenues in which those stories to be heard. And the more money thrown into a project, the less control I was likely to have over it. Frustrated, I stopped writing screenplays in the spring of 2000.
But I wasn’t done with writing, and less than four years later I started taking writing seriously again. A few short stories turned into my first novel, Cobalt City Blues, which I wrote at the urging of my wife. It was intended to be fluff — just a little love note to The Protectorate, a group of super hero characters that I created with family and friends. Thanks to the growth of Print on Demand, it was easy to make actual book versions of that first novel to distribute to those friends and creators.
It never occurred to me at the time that people who had no familiarity with The Protectorate would enjoy the same stories. But a fuse was lit. By the time I was deep in my second novel, the demand for more stories in the Cobalt City universe was something I couldn’t ignore. Cobalt City Blues has been through several loving rewrites and edits since then, but as it’s core, it has never changed. It remains an epic tale of super-humans who are often more human than super; a tale of loss, redemption, and what it means to be human told against a backdrop of four-color action and world-shaking evil. It will always hold a special place on my shelf.
Ten years ago, I was on the brink of giving up writing.
Today, I have two of the three Protectorate novels in print looking better than ever. The third is on deck to be written in 2010. Detective/vigilante Gato Loco and his man/panda sidekick Snowflake have spun out into their own series, and the de la Vega Mysteries now stands at two novels and growing. I’ve edited an anthology of stories set in Cobalt City written by regional authors who I adore and admire, and big plans are in the works for another anthology this year.
My first short fiction publication was December 2005. I will be appearing in at least two wonderful anthologies in 2010, and I’m not ruling out the possibility of more.
We’re living in the future now, people.
Pull up a chair, grab a book, and make yourself at home!
Tales from the Ragged Edge 