Late last year submitted a short story to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s called “Passing Sentence,” and I wrote it quite some time ago. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been, but I found files in the same folder with dates reaching back to the year 2000. That can’t be right, because this is one of the last things that I completed before this year, and that would mean that I took nearly a ten-year break from writing.
Okay, in that time I found steady work as a technical writer, so my skills with the mother tongue were not going entirely to waste. That was not, however, the most stimulating use of my talents, so a return to more creative writing was long overdue.
The best thing to happen to me on that front came at the beginning of October, when I lost my job. Normally, that isn’t a cause for celebration, but freeing me from the need to spend eight hours a day in an office allowed me time to break out a concept for a novel that I had been nurturing since sometime during the mid-nineties. Between my last day of work and when I starting my new job in late November, I banged out the healthy 70,000+ words that comprise Human X, a techno-thriller about “gray market” human genetic engineering.
My current plan is to self-publish this thing in early in 2012, both in print and on the Kindle and NOOK. “Why,” you might ask, “don’t I send it into a legitimate publisher?”
What? And waste two years of my life waiting for some corporate slob to grant me permission to share my work with the rest of the world? In all seriousness, I’ll go into the why and the how in a later post.
For the moment, I’m sitting on the manuscript for a few weeks, so I can return to it fresh for one last round of rewriting (“writing is rewriting,” they always say). In the meantime, I’ve started working on another project. Now that I’m working again, I probably won’t be knocking this one out in a little more than a month, but I’ll do my best.
Until next time, then…