I really meant to not write anything else new this year, after finishing novella #30. 2019 has been a geyser, a fire hose, a volcano of writing. Surely all the stuff I wanted to write was safely out of my head.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No.

When I was doing the expansion of EXPOSURE I created a new character. I made some notes about him, because I could tell I was going to do something with him eventually, and then I went on to other things. But #%&@$! if he didn’t knock on the inside of my head and say ‘let me out please.’

I already had an idea of who this character would fall in love with; someone I’d invented for a different project, earlier this year. I had ‘how they meet’ already lined up, like a good shot on a billiards table. I knew these guys’ professions and a little bit about them. They should have kept till 2020, but they didn’t. Between December 9 and December 20 I wrote that 25000-word novella. So now there are 31 novellas, four of which are in the queue for 2020 publication, and COME ON.

When I started this whole thing, back in 2012, I was writing very light and frothy things. Romantic comedy, really. And I still try to put a lot of humor in these things, because my personal taste in a novella is one that is fun to read. I recently read a classic mystery novel that was very very good indeed, but it wasn’t fun to read. I’m not in the head space right now to take much Not Fun.

In which I get personal:

The truth is I am in a phase of intermittent depression, which is largely situational and also age-related. I have mood swings, which are quite likely exacerbated by hormones (hello, 54 years old here). On any given day I maintain a relatively even temper thanks to nothing more than awareness that this is happening. I know that the depression, the anxiety, the rage are rooted in mid-life crisis and in my changing physiology as much as in what is happening in the outside world. I do what I need to do to not explode on other people. Yoga every day, for example, a minimum of twenty minutes and sometimes more like forty. I walk, I take the stairs, I don’t drink much, I try to avoid too much sugar (not easy, this time of year). I try to get enough sleep. And I write.

I write because being 54 means knowing there are things I will never get to do again, or never get to do well, or never get to do at all. I am out of time for a lot of things, and we’ll never have the money for other things. There are a dozen dreams I’ve had to defer for Reasons over the years, which I will never be able to pursue. There are other dreams that we took some tentative steps toward, that now we have had to step back from, and our forward momentum will probably never recover. That is hard to take.

So I write.

In novella #31, I take Gino Corsetti, a 47-year-old singer, and Sergei Kotov, a 53-year-old dancer, and give them a new dream.
In #30 it’s Max Davies, a 40-year-old actress, and Anton Tsvirko, a 40-year-old project manager.
In #29 it’s Serena Lewis, a 55-year-old attorney, and Aaron Marshall, a 45-year-old billing manager.
In #28 it’s Reggie Galant, a 44-year-old painter, and Ro Gallo, a 34-year-old butcher.
These are the four stories currently awaiting publication. If you average all those ages you may get a sense of what’s happening in Ye Brain.

The first novella, GETTING OFF, was about a pair of 30-year-old women. The next, ALL THE BARS ON SUNSET, was about a 31-year-old woman and a 32-year-old man. My protagonists have aged up. My oldest, so far, is Frank Cavatini (65 in THE WHOLE TRUTH). I don’t plan to stop writing about younger people; in LIFT I had Karen Scott and Zach Tyler, who are 31 and 33 when they meet, and in the National Novel Writing Month project my protagonists Richard and Willem are 30 and 34 when they meet.

But I’m aware that my own sense of stifled potential is going to color how I treat younger protagonists. I want to be fair to them. All four of those young characters have Issues, and I don’t want to be always about Issues. Sometimes people can have a romance in which nothing bad has happened, is happening, or will happen.

Anyway that is a long way to say ‘I wrote another one.’ Watch this space for the next launch. And hey - go buy a book!