Well I guess we’re at the start of a new year. If I sound uncertain it’s because picking a random day to be the start/end point of a year seems highly suspicious to me. I mean why December 31st and January 1st? It would make more sense to start the year on an actual astronomical marker like the winter solstice (or the summer one for that matter). I would even settle on something like either equinox. It’s not like people haven’t known how to find these particular days, regardless of how their calendar is constructed. It’s pretty obvious once you start looking, and our distant ancestors had nothing to do but look around.

I generally don’t do new years resolutions, figuring that if something is important enough to make a promise to yourself, then start that shit right away. No need to wait for a special day. Want to be kinder to animals, or tell your significant other they are important to you in a meaningful way? Then for Bog’s sake don’t fuck around about it. Do it now. All that to say don’t expect wisdom from me, except to point out the excellent resolution from a colleague of mine who every year resolved, “if someone offers me a donut, I will take it.” That still strikes me as good advice.

On a different note, I’ve been working on a novel titled “Mind the Slice” for a few years now. The darn thing should have been finished long ago. I would write and write, but for some reason I could not hit the dismount. In truth, the story would get bogged down on some minor point, and then I’d lose my nerve. To compensate, I would then spend days and days researching ways to plot a novel. Believe me, there is a lot of “helpful,” and not so helpful advice out there on the internet. All of which is fun to follow if one is feeling lost, but its not necessarily useful in terms of finishing a story.

For me, short stories are much easier to write because they are much easier to plot. You have clear beginning, middle, and end points, and I can hold all the salient parts in my head as I go. But once a story gets to a certain length then I lose that ability to keep it all up in my mind at once. Then I keep having to go back and look, writing myself little notes, like, “Kill the boy after she kisses him, not before.” That kind of thing. And all of that made me feel uncomfortable, like I am missing something, and once that kind of doubt creeps into your head, it’s hard to finish.

Because of this I have like four different starts to the novel, and a whole host of middle passages, much of which I need to prune. That shit is also hard. Some of the plot points that will not make the final cut are still glorious in their own way. They exist as a reminder that yes I can write, and no, not everything I write fits the goal.

Anyway, at some point near the end of last year I had a kind of epiphany, and figured out a passage through the muck. Since then I have been stitching my Frankenstein of a book together chapter by chapter. I am at the halfway point in terms of chapters and such, and much of the second half is already written. I just need to put it all together, and smooth out the transitions. That is the good news. There’s a good chance I will have something in a useful form by the end of this month, ready to send out to beta readers. The bad news is it looks to one longish, like 200k words or 400 pages.

I am so excited. I cannot wait to share this novel. Lilah Al-Marwin is a marvel of a young girl. She is so bad ass it makes me cry. She is smart, and laser focused, but also carries several dark secrets, including her other half. There’s the tall and handsome second son of an Earl named Aberdeen (who has his own secret). There’s Randal, the only child of a billionaire computer maker, who also has his own secrets. And finally there’s Wyoming Johnston, the child of the Senate Majority leader, who also happens to be politically ambitious, while somehow remaining both kind and human (and no secrets). All of them are delightful in their own way, and maybe a few of them get kissed, before they get killed. There is for sure more than one death.

Did I mention there’s a school taught by aliens from outer space? How about an overweight dolphin that teaches alien empathy, or the strange two-part creature that teaches programming and informs the students, “We are not an I, we are a we.” There’s even a mysterious captain, an Electronic Intelligence (who runs most of the show), and an alien who is both covered in strips of plastic, and yet is amazingly sexy. Each of them have their own secrets.

But that not all. The Earth has its own secrets, and those secrets might cause the planet to break into millions of pieces, which would be bad for everyone.

There’s love, and death, and destruction, and earthquakes. Computer get hacked, the planet gets cut in two, and teens get kissed. There’s amazing new alien tech, an end to our climate crises, and maybe even someone saves the planet. That is before they get blamed for everything that goes wrong, because you gotta know, things go wrong in this novel.

It starts with an explosion and ends with a scream. What more do you need?