Okay, to begin with:  an apology.  I didn’t write a blog post last Thursday because I was sick in bed, and I felt so low and grungy that I wasn’t even up to composing a brief paragraph to let everyone know of my state.  Perhaps I should have, in case any of you were worried about me, or awaited my blog post with bated breath, your happiness intrinsically and inescapably tied to the weekly presence of my words.  If such a person exists anywhere in the multiverse, I apologize especially to that individual (and recommend psychiatric care).

Other than those days in which I accomplished very little due to my illness, I’ve been proceeding at a good pace.  Some improvements in my schedule have given me a bit more time (and energy) in the mornings, so I’ve written slightly more than usual on Unanimity this week—about two thousand words a day.  It’s coming along well; the story arcs toward its climax, which is on the distant horizon at least, if not yet in easy reach.

As followers of the blog (and of my Facebook page and Twitter feed) will know, I haven’t been remiss in recording and posting the audio for the chapters of The Chasm and the Collision.  You can listen to Chapter 6, with the name “Discussion and Encounter”* here, or you can listen to the “video” on YouTube, here.  It’s shorter than the preceding chapters, but new and surprising things are happening to Alex, Meghan, and Simon, and they’ll soon learn much more about the strange events in which they’ve become embroiled.

I’m vaguely embarrassed by some minor recording glitches that happened for a short time in the middle of Chapter 6’s audio.  I did my best to correct them in the edit, and maybe they aren’t noticeable to anyone but me, but I find them annoying.  However, despite that annoyance, the prospect of going back and re-recording those sections was too daunting.  Your enjoyment of the story shouldn’t be diminished by them, but I will try to keep them from happening again.

On other matters, I was a bit surprised (dare I say disappointed?) that the third installment of “My heroes have always been villains” didn’t get more readership than it did.  I would have thought that Hannibal Lecter would be an extremely popular character to discuss, but maybe he’s not in the front of everyone’s minds anymore.  Or perhaps most people know him solely from the movies, and the fact that I focused on the character in the books was too alien an approach.  If anyone has feedback to give, I would certainly welcome it.  In any case, I invite and encourage you to go back and read it, here, if you missed it.

On to still other topics:  looking back, I realize that, with the exception of my author’s notes, and “My heroes have always been villains,” these blog posts tend to have the character of a sort of weekly report, as though I were summarizing my activities for an employer.  Of course, in a sense, those of you who read this, and especially those who buy my books, are my employers, so that’s not an inappropriate format for the posts to take.  Still, some of you may find them unexciting, and if you have any suggestions, please forward them to me here in the comments, or send them to me via Facebook or Twitter.  I’m always interested in getting your feedback.

There’s not much else to report, meanwhile, given that my productivity was impaired a bit this last fortnight.  Unanimity approaches its climax, and once it’s finished I’ll give it a bit of a rest (about a month or so, as per the practice of my role model, Stephen King), before beginning the arduous but rewarding tasks of rewriting and editing.  I already have one short story to write during that break time, and I may end up writing two, because there’s another one that’s been percolating and festering in my brain for ages.  My head, it turns out, is an excellent environment for such festering; I’m just lucky that way.  After that, I will begin my next novel—probably even as I rewrite and edit Unanimity, if I can make that work—which will be called Neko/Neneko.  More on that later, but it’s going to be much more lighthearted than Unanimity, and probably considerably shorter.  At sometime in the not-too-distant future, I really need to work on the second book in the saga of Mark Red.  I don’t want to leave Mark, and especially Morgan (my favorite of my characters so far) alone for too long.  They deserve better.

With that, I will bid you adieu for another week, and this time it really should be just one week.  I’m also going to try to increase the rate of my posting on Iterations of Zero, so keep your eyes on that; I just need to work out effective scheduling for it.  Be well, all of you, and again, feel free to give me your feedback.

TTFN

*This may sound like an inauspicious title, but it’s not always easy to keep finding intense and gripping chapter names for an entire novel.  It’s a pivotal chapter, however, and at the end of it, some very dramatic events occur, so be of good cheer.