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NEWS AND VIEWS - AUGUST 2022
WRITING NEWS I finally finished writing A City Burnished Silver this month. This is the third book in The Chemical Empires trilogy; Drom Overholt and Aemilia Owen return as POV characters with Luc d'Fensi for this outing. Whereas The Brassfire Fleet was something of a standalone novel, A City Burnished Silver refers back to the events of The Demon in the Metal quite a bit and I wouldn't recommend reading it without tackling that book first. It took me a long time to write this one -- I started it last October, I think. In contrast, The Demon in the Metal, which is actually longer than this book, only took me about seven months to write. So what's been slowing me down? Well, I'm still struggling with the insomina, for one thing, and I've been busy at work as well. But probably the main reason for this slower pace was just a lack of enthusiasm for this project. I had high hopes for this series to start -- I thought The Demon in the Metal was an above-average fantasy and I thought The Brassfire Fleet turned out pretty well, too. Unfortunately nobody else seemed to think so. Reviews have been mixed and sales have been bad (actually nonexistent, in the case of The Brassfire Fleet). So I found it kind of hard to get excited about this third book, after those first two performed so badly -- I knew going into it that very few people were going to be interested in another sequel. I was determined to turn this series into a proper trilogy, though, so I kept at it regardless, fighting my apathy every step of the way. It's probably not very good marketing to admit that this series has been a disappointment to me and that I've been losing interest in it, especially considering the new book isn't even out yet. I feel like I owe it to my readers to be honest about these things, though. Anyway, I've still got a lot of work to do to get the book ready for publication, but I'm hoping to get it out there in September or maybe early October. And then I'll be starting work on my next project, which is probably going to be Playground Noir, a set of three kid-detective novellas, collected in a single volume, and written in what I hope will be an amusingly hard-boiled style. And if you haven't picked up The Complete Guide to the Signalverse yet, well, you can get it here. * * * * * * * * INSOMNIA UPDATE I'm still dealing with the insomnia, but it's gotten a lot better since last year, when it first started. I usually only have one or two bad nights a week now. (Probably a lot of insomniacs would kill to get that much sleep.) The catch is I have to follow my bedtime routine exactly; if anything disrupts it, I'm almost guaranteed a bad, sleepless night. I have to cover up my bedroom windows (to block out the light) and unplug every electronic device I have (because even standby lights are too bright for me). I have to get into bed at 9:00 PM -- if I'm out of bed any later than that I start to feel uneasy. I then read for about twenty or thirty minutes (usually some dry academic text; I'm currently working on Trevor Bryce's Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites) and then roll over and try to sleep. I sometimes take a little melatonin as well, but I can't really tell if it's doing anything most of the time. I don't really like going to sleep at 9:00 -- before this insomnia started I would usually stay up until about 10:30 or 11:00, watching TV or screwing around online -- but this new schedule seems to be working for me, so I'm sticking with it. At this point I feel like I'm probably never going to get back to normal, or to the way I was before this problem started -- it's just something I'm going to have to learn to live with. There are plenty of people out there with worse problems than me, though, and a couple of bad nights a week, in the big scheme of things, really isn't all that bad. * * * * * * * * THE MAGIC OF MINI MIDDLES I loved Mini Middles. 
These were little shortbread cookies with a fudge filling that were available from the late 80's into the early 90's -- they were about twice the size of a Cookie Crisp cookie, to give you some idea of the size, but they tasted way, way better. They were a sort of spinoff of another Keebler snack, Magic Middles, which were full-sized cookies with that same fudge filling. Both Magic Middles and Mini Middles were discontinued probably around 1993 or 1994; at least, that's when I stopped seeing them in the stores. 
Thinking about these little cookies fills me with nostalgia. Back when I was ten or eleven years old, my mom used to buy me a box of Mini Middles every Friday when she went to town to get groceries. Sometimes I'd tag along with her, and I'd get to rent an NES game from the convenience store as well -- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, or Mega Man 2, or Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure (which wasn't very good). And when I got a Super Nintendo I started renting the early SNES games they had there -- titles like Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge and Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball (again, not a very good game). And then, when we got home from the store...well, this requires a bit of an explanation. I grew up in a very old farmhouse, a shack really, which was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1888 and which didn't even have electricity until the 1960's. It had a living room, a kitchen, one bathroom, a laundry room, a downstairs bedroom, and an upstairs bedroom, and it was very small, only about nine hundred square feet. We did what we could to make it presentable, but by the late 80's it was getting pretty run-down, and my brother and I were getting bigger, and my parents decided it was time to get out of there. We didn't have enough money to buy or build a new house, though, so we started converting our barn into a house instead. My dad -- who is a carpenter and electrician -- wound up doing most of the work himself, on nights and weekends. It took him several years. By 1991 he'd finished the downstairs and part of the upstairs, so we moved in. The old house, though, up on the hill, was still standing, and still in pretty good shape, so during the summer my brother and I would basically move back up there -- he had the whole downstairs to himself, and I had the upstairs. 
So I'd get home on a Friday evening, grab my rented video game and my box of Mini Middles, fill up a big bottle with milk (can't have cookies without milk) and head up to the old house. I'd play the game on my little 19-inch TV, munch on the Mini Middles, watch ABC's TGIF lineup if I got bored with the game (that'd be Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, stuff like that), go to sleep, and wake up early the next morning to watch Saturday morning cartoons (and, around noon, WWF Wrestling Challenge). I look back on those long summer nights with great fondness now -- in fact I now regard them as some of the best nights of my life. To say that the some of the best nights of my life were spent by myself, in a dark, attic-like room in an old house, sitting in front of a softly-glowing TV, playing Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse while stuffing my face with Mini Middles, might strike you as a little strange, but you wouldn't think that if you knew me. I'm, uhh, not exactly an extrovert. Anyway, I wish they'd bring Mini Middles back. |