Catching Up

When this blog goes silent, as it has for the past week, you know I haven't been doing much of anything except sitting in a room and typing. The current project is going along fairly well, although the past couple of days I'm starting to sense that I've overcomplicated the plot, something that's a recurring problem with me. I tend to throw in too many twists and sometimes have to prune some of them as I go along. I'm working from a very short outline this time, and that usually makes the problem worse. But I'm confident that I'll be able to hammer it all into shape.

I've also been in one of my reading funks (which, oddly enough, often seem to coincide with my blogging funks) and don't have the patience right now to read novels, even though I have a ton of them on hand that I want to get to. And considering how much books weigh, I may not be exaggerating with that "ton" reference. Anyway, thank goodness for short stories. I've been alternating between three different volumes: THE WEIRD DETECTIVE ADVENTURES OF WADE HAMMOND by Paul Chadwick, a small-press collection of stories from a series that originally appeared in the pulps Detective Dragnet and Ten Detective Aces; BLACK FRIDAY & SELECTED STORIES by David Goodis, a Serpent's Tail collection of the novel BLACK FRIDAY and a dozen stories from various detective pulps (I'm just reading the short stories and saving the novel until later); and 100 CROOKED LITTLE CRIME STORIES, one of those Barnes & Noble anthologies edited by Marty Greenberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Bob Weinberg that I've been working my way through for at least a year now. If I finish these off and still don't feel like reading novels, I have plenty of other collections and anthologies and digest magazines on hand.

The only other thing I have to report is that I got to watch the film based on my short story "Graveyard Shift", which I mentioned in the previous post. I liked it a lot and thought the actor who played the lead character was just about perfect in the role. Patrick Wager, the writer/director, did a fine job of adapting the story. And to answer the question Juri asked in a comment, Patrick is not related to the writer Walter Wager, although his father is named Walter.