Hitting the halfway point

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The November blog post is coming a little early because I actually have something to share for once, and also because I feel a little guilty.

In October, I mentioned that I would do a rundown of sorts on the spooky Halloween movies I’ve watched this year. I haven’t. In part that was because of the usual busy-ness. In part it was because I just didn’t see as much new stuff that I genuinely loved.

The best horror movie I saw last month was Possession (1981) about a marriage that’s falling apart and the creepy supernatural stuff mixed up in the dissolution. We also watched Don’t Look Now (1974) about a couple who goes to Venice after the death of their child, and a “psychic” who gloms onto them.

They’re both well-made, but the former feels more like an endurance test than a movie and the latter was full of stylish, interesting choices only to drop the ball at the end. I got more joy out of rewatches like Exhuma. Oh well.

In better news, you guys know I’m currently in my “final polish” on the last Twenty Palaces novel, and I wanted to let you know it has taken me almost three weeks to reach the halfway point, which I just did yesterday.

The reason I put sarcasm quotes around the words final polish is that I keep finding things that need more than just a quick polish. That’s how it is with me, sometimes. I’m going over a piece of text that I have worked on quite a bit and already feel good about it. Many of the changes are minor stuff, like fixing punctuation, filling out a scene that feels rushed, or deleting a lightning bug word for a lightning one.

Then I stumble on a section that looks like someone has put a ritual curse on a whole sequence, and I need three days to unfuck the whole thing.

Frustrating but necessary.

Anyway, I wanted to write a bunch about the new Carrie TV show and why we are quitting Lupin with only two episodes left in season four, but I’m going to spend that time on the new book instead.

Happy Turkey Day to everyone who celebrates.

Sleep it off, a non-remedy for stress

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This morning when my alarm woke me up I could hardly think or move.

I’d gone to bed at the right hour and gotten my usual seven hours, but i was not ready for the day. So I shuffled across the room, shut off the alarm and went back to sleep.

Ordinarily, I need about ten seconds to come around. Then, and I kid you not when I say this, I tell myself “I get to work on my book today,” and that gives me the energy to throw off the covers and jump to my feet. Not today.

Instead, I overslept, then shuffled around my living room listening to news about the election and visiting a few news websites to confirm that things were shaking out as well as they seemed last night.

A “blue-nami” they were calling it. A broad swath of solid Democratic candidates had flipped a lot of Republican seats in red state strongholds.

It took me a few hours to realize that was why I’d slept like a dead man. We’ve had two years of corruption, incompetence, and humiliation under GOP rule. DOGE. The East Wing. Renee Good. Six year old children representing themselves in immigration court. The reflecting pool. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Putin. Israel. Medicare and Medicaid cuts. “They’re eating the dogs and Cats”. “Quiet, Piggy”.

It has been humiliating and infuriating.

And now the people have given the power to legislate and investigate to the Democrats.

When I got that publishing contract with Del Rey nearly twenty years ago, I didn’t celebrate. I didn’t dance around or cheer or show any kind of exuberance. What I felt instead was a profound relief. I’d spent literal decades working toward a goal that I knew I might never reach, and achieving that goal was more of a Oh, thank God moment than a Yippee I did it! moment.

That’s why I slept so heavily and could not wake myself up. I went to bed with good news, and that release of tension made me pretty much collapse. Two years of stress just washed out of me.

But of course, now I’ve been up all day and it’s clear the tension is back. The election was only the fight to put the right people in place. Now they have to start their struggle, and we the voters have to urge them on. We have to pressure them to do it.

And I don’t just mean lower prices and restore the services they cut and the billionaire taxes they shrunk.

They must prosecute crimes.

It’s not “getting even”, as some in the media have called it. Enforcing existing laws is the only way to deter this outrageous corruption in the future. The only way to prevent another DOGE, or another secret slush fund for South American oil money, or future pay-for-pardons schemes.

It’s going to be hard enough to undo the damage this administration has caused. Elected officials must also punish those who have broken the law, or it will get worse and worse, administration after administration.

Anyway, I’m making very good progress on the last 20P novel (except for today, obviously) and will be hard at it again tomorrow.

Contact your elected officials and tell them what you want from them.

Peace.

A Scary Halloween Story That’s Actually True

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“Monday night I fell asleep on the couch” is a perfectly ordinary way to start a scary, awful, utterly ordinary story.

I sleep on the couch fairly often. I like to stay up and my wife likes to go to bed early. She’s also a light sleeper, so if I disturb her she’s likely to wake up and stay awake for hours. Plus, it’s a comfortable old couch. I know I’m describing a cultural metaphor for a troubled marriage, but that’s not the case. One of the reasons my wife and I are still so in love is that I try to give her a good night’s sleep once in a while.

Anyway, over the 32 years we’ve been together, we’ve lived in two apartments in the same neighborhood, and both of those apartments had the same basic layout. After so many years in the first one, I didn’t much care to change things around. So I’ve been living with the same features for most of my adult life: dutch door with no screen door, big bay windows, tall, narrow windows on the outer edge that slide open. That sort of thing.

On Monday night, I had done exactly what I’d done many times over the years. I’d nodded off over the ending of a novel (This time a James Lee Burke novel from the nineties), pulled a flannel blanket over me, and left the sliding window behind the couch open a few inches for some fresh cool-but-not-cold October air.

Around two am, I was stirred awake (slowly, because unlike my wife I sleep heavy) by a really annoying noise. Then I felt something.

I’m sure that people with cats or small dogs are familiar with the feeling of a pet walking across the back of your legs while you sleep.

But we don’t have any pets.

The noise that had bothered me was a rat chewing a hole in the screen. The little feet on the back of my legs was a rat walking across me.

Obviously, I flipped the fuck out, although I managed to keep my voice down so I wouldn’t disturb my family. I have a genuine horror of rats. Heights, too, but heights can be avoided pretty easily. Heights you can usually choose, but rats just show up.

By the time I got out from under the blanket and onto my feet, the rat was nowhere to be seen. But that fucking hole in the window screen made it pretty clear what was going on. I searched as best I could for a small, filthy invader, but I couldn’t find any signs. I sat up for three hours, listening for movement and trying to instigate movement.

Eventually, I decided that me kicking myself awake had frightened the rat so badly that it went back out the hole, so I shut the window. I got what confirmation I could when I later saw movement on the ledge outside as it tried to come back.

Obviously, I stripped the couch down, and used steam from an iron to destroy any leftover hantavirus in the fabric of the couch.

My wife (bless her) tried to convince me it might be a squirrel instead of a rat, partly because they’ve become a little too courageous in our neighborhood, but I didn’t believe it, mainly because I really, really wanted it to be true.

But damn. It’s been thirty-two years, and this is the first time we’ve had an actual burglar rat that tried to get inside our place.

I hate it. And I’m not going to forget that feeling of some small thing scrambling around on the back of my legs anytime soon.

In other news, today, October 21st, 2026, is the one year anniversary of my wife being struck by a car. So, everything is hunky-dory around here.

In other, other news, I’ve started what I hope will be the final polish for the last Twenty Palaces novel. Currently, it’s over 140K words long, with is too long. Also, this project has taken more than two years of my life already, with is also too long.

Which leads me to thank everyone for their support. Thank you, Patreon backer, readers, and folks who are just spreading the word.

Soon I hope to post a bit of a Halloween movie roundup, as I sometimes have in years past. We’ll see.

Super Fund Sites and Dinosaurs

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Now, for a proper September post.

First of all, one of the interesting things about being a writer is that sometimes you spend a little too much time on Google maps looking for a sign posted outside a super fund site just to see what’s written on them.

In hindsight, I should have guessed that no one would want the word “SUPER FUND” on a sign in their neighborhood. Such and Such Cleanup Project seems to be much more common.

Also, I’ve learned there are a number of websites, like “parkopedia”, that provide databases, city by city, for parking spots. Sadly, they didn’t have the information that I was looking for, but for every little need, it seems like there’s an ongoing competition to create something to meet it.

Anyway, a need to write with the internet blocked makes it easy to be wrong about very basic stuff. In my mind’s eye, I still see small towns by the highway the way they looked in movies and television of my youth: two-lane roads, family-owned businesses, ramshackle buildings. In the current day, there are a lot of stroads (IYKYK) and big box stores with expansive parking lots.

I’ve always said that I am reliant on revisions, and it’s not just stylistically.

The book is currently over 140K words long. That’s probably a little too long for a POD edition. But we’ll see.

Last post, I talked about being a DINO MASTER (exclamation points!) in the Jurassic Park ttrpg that I ran for my family, and how it didn’t really work for the game’s genre if I was reluctant to kill off a PC.

I mean, I love my family. Also, they’re not experienced gamers. We haven’t been playing for very long and we haven’t, at this point, experienced the actual death of an actual PC. We spent months playing Brindlewood Bay, for example, which has numerous mechanics that let you kill off a character and then immediately undo it.

But a game full of vicious dinosaurs? (and also technologically advanced sleestaks riding around on armored T-rexes?) That definitely calls for character death. So I psyched myself up for it.

(Un)Fortunately, in the session immediately after that post, they didn’t roll a single failure in a peril move. It was all successes and partial successes.

The session after? My son, who had chosen the playbook “The Kid” and was playing the dino-loving 12yo child of Dino Island “founder” Ethan Rusk, failed a peril move and took an injury.

In this game, you don’t get three strikes. A second injury meant you make the casualty move, which is that you do something heroic and permanently die, or you fall down and are helpless until another PC carries you to medical help.

Let me tell you, when I announced that injury, the whole tone of the session changed. Voices were hushed. Glances? They were wary. My wife looked at me like she couldn’t believe that I might actually be a man who would kill my own child(‘s player character).

But it didn’t come to that. They worked well together and had a few solid rolls, so both characters made it off the island. (Rusk didn’t, naturally).

Well, this is a little long. More to come in October. I’m hoping to catch up on a few old horror movies I have somehow missed, once Spooktober arrives, starting with Don’t Look Now. We’ll see how it plays.

Dino Master is SOFT! a belated August Post

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Three things to make a belated August update:

First, in this latest (but not final) revision of the book, I’ve completely thrown out the denouement and rewritten it from scratch.

It’s longer now, but I’m not too concerned about that. It’s the denouement for an entire series of novels (plus the shorter stuff, too) so I wanted to give it a chance to breathe. If it feels like it’s breathing too much when you finally get a chance to read it, mea culpa.

The next task is to add some chapters from the point of view of the main villain. That’s not really a spoiler, but it is something new and unexpected. And after so much time spent revising, just sitting down to write new text is very satisfying.

Second, I’m a fat guy who has had two incidents of chest pain over the past year, so the doctors wanted me to do an angiogram, with the potential to implant a stent or two if I needed it. For those who don’t recognize the term, it involves sticking a long wire with a camera at the tip into an artery, usually at the wrist but sometimes at the groin, and sliding it all the way up to take photos of collections of plaque that sometimes builds up near the heart.

A good thing: if I ever need to write a scene where an alien worm is crawling through a body, I now have sense memory to draw on.

Another: they didn’t find anything of any significance. There was a little bit of cholesterol buildup, but nothing they felt particularly concerned about. No stents.

Yet another: the nurse told me that I was the easiest patient she had to deal with that day. Now, I realize that it’s not a competition, but if we’re talking about patients who cheerfully go along with whatever the medical staff wants without being too demanding in return, I’m tops.

(When I made that joke to my family, my son laughed and my wife gave me A Look. Her health mantra is “Be demanding.”)

Third, it’s finally official that I have arthritis in my knees.

Fourth, for Tabletop Tuesday, we have just started a campaign of Escape from Dino Island.

I was hoping they would dig it, and everyone seems to have picked up on the tone and the style pretty much right away. The game itself is meant to be a one- or two-shot, but this might run a little extra.

My wife and son may not be avid gamers, but they do like this family tradition and they enjoy playing. My favorite part is when things take a turn they absolutely did not expect. Last session, while they camped inside a crashed helicopter on the beach, one saw a dino run out of the jungle with a long stick in its mouth. They saw it dip the end into the flames and run back in the foliage with a lit torch. There was, maybe, ten seconds of silence as they stared at me, thinking about what that might mean.

Love that. So much fun.

Sadly, it seems that I’m a wimp of a GM. (Or in this case, a “DM” for “Dino-Master”.) I hate injuring my family’s PCs, let alone killing them, and what fun is a Jurassic Park knock off if the dinosaurs aren’t killing people? Next session I’ll have to toughen up.

That’s my belated August update. Thanks to everyone who supports my Patreon, and I’ll try to get September done on time.

Being Specifically Yourself

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This needs to be a quick note because the month is about to end, I’m sick again, and I want to get back to the ending of this book. (I am rewriting it pretty extensively from my first attempt. It’s not the climax that I’m changing, it’s the epilogue. It’ll be a bit long, certainly longer than the one I wrote for Child of Fire, which irritated–in a good way, imo–so many people.)

There has been much talk about so-called AI and fiction lately. I say “so-called” because there are a lot of different kinds of software being labeled “AI”, and much of it (the maybe-possibly useful stuff) seems to be about analysis of scientific data. Not all of it is good, but people who know more than I do have managed to get worthwhile results (like fancy math proofs) from it. And that’s fine.

But when we talk about fiction, we’re almost always talking about large language models, and those are pretty clearly not good.

I don’t know if I’ve said this here before, but I have never used an LLM in my writing and I have no intention of doing so in the future. Never not ever.

First of all, the “AI” branding is fake. The text it spits out might seem to be sapient, but it’s not. The software has no intelligence. It can’t vet itself because it has no conscious awareness. It’s a plagiarism algorithm that is only good at guessing which word should follow next, based on the thousands of authors whose work has been stolen to create it.

Second, the last thing in the world that I want is a story, paragraph, or sentence that proceeds in the most statistically likely way. I’m not aiming for average. I’m trying to do something interesting and unique. Flooding Amazon with generic, machine-processed stories is only good for bilking people out of their hard-earned money. I work hard so that people feel glad that they bought my book.

Third, I sometimes see people bragging about how good they are with “prompts”, and I recognize them as the same guys who used to say they had a great idea for a book. Then they’d suggest I write it up so we could split the money fifty/fifty.

Ideas are cheap, and while I’m glad this particular kind of guy isn’t bothering authors any more, I’m sorry to see them dumping their pseudo-stories into the same marketplaces that actual human writers need.

Okay. Back to it.

 

Adding the Color Commentary: Accretion and Revision

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Our planet Earth was formed by an accretion of whatever matter happened to be nearby, all falling together over a period of giga-years. It collided, made a mess, and eventually settled out into something that could support life.

Giga-years.

I bet you can guess why I’m talking about this: my books come together in a similar way. I write a scene, and revise it over and over. And sure, each round involves smoothing out the text, but I’m also adding little things the story needs–tiny character moments, details that establish the “rules” of the setting, important scene setting, and often times it’s just little ways to slow down the pacing to make sure the action will have more impact.

This is a problem for me sometimes. People can easily recognize when a book is too slow, but when a book (or even just a scene within the book) is too fast, people rarely describe it that way. It’s much more likely for them to say “I didn’t care.”

This reminds me of a fight scene from a best-seller. The narrative off the fight was just a string of karate moves in detail. Reading it, I got that confused-puppy-headquirk. I didn’t recognize the names of some of the strikes and blocks and couldn’t picture them. The guy Our Hero was fighting was just a mook that I didn’t know or care about. I didn’t understand what the stakes were beyond a bloody nose.

Now, that sort of thing can work in a Bruce Lee movie where the physicality of a fight scene can be beautiful and thrilling to watch, but on the page it came to nothing. What works in text is not the play-by-play, it’s the color commentary.

My first drafts usually feel a bit stripped down, as I race through the narrative. It’s only in revisions that I look at things a second time and add in the important stuff: how it feels, what is means, why it’s frightening or embarrassing or just depressing, how it smells or tastes.

And that turns out to be a process of dropping text–sometimes long segments of text–into dialog or between paragraphs. It would take less time if I could do that in the first time around, but I can’t. I can only spend the time to do fix after fix after fix, because these first drafts really are not worth reading.

At least it doesn’t take giga-years.

Anyway, I’m making good progress.

Moving on, this is June, which means my actual birthday recently passed but the day I celebrate it is still in the future. Plus, Father’s Day. As a gift, I got a month’s worth of AppleTV so we can watch more Slow Horses, Severance, and other shows, too. FYI: The Gorge was a delight and I’m really looking forward to Widow’s Bay.

I wish I could pass on a book rec, but everything I’ve been reading has been a little off, for one reason or another. Maybe in July.

Thanks for reading. Talk to you next month, if I’m still alive.

Religious Faith as Superpower, and Other Nonsense

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I had originally written up a long post about religion in fantasy and horror, and the way that having the “right” religion had traditionally been treated at a superpower to use against supernatural evil. But I just deleted it.

First, I was talking about a specific as-yet unrealized project and I didn’t want to name it or kick the people involved.

Second, I was raised in a religious family but I’m an atheist now. As an atheist, I much prefer stories use the concept of a loving god of infinite mercy over the idea of a god who takes sides. Why shouldn’t vampires have the chance to receive salvation? Why shouldn’t demons? God created both. He should love them, too.

Third, all that said, I’ll sit down and watch as many Salem’s Lot movies as they care to make.

Fourth, speaking of that, fuck those Harry Potter TV seasons. We need a deeply faithful Salem’s Lot TV miniseries.

Anyway, the point was supposed to be that lately I much prefer science horror and cosmic horror.

Also, The Boroughs is really well done.

Moving on, I’m more than two-thirds of the way through *this* revision of the final 20P novel and some of these story problems are going to haunt me for the rest of my days. I keep having to stop and rethink/recontextualize whole scenes while trying to preserve the story I’ve already got going.

I sort of feel that Pandemic Me must have hated Current Me to have dropped this vomit draft on me.

In personal medical news, I posted earlier this month about my recurring chest pains. This past week I went in for a echo cardiogram. The result appears to be that my heart has no discoverable defect. I’m sure that’s significant but I won’t have context until I can actually sit down with the cardiologist.

Last thing: for Tabletop Tuesday, we have reached the part of our Brindlewood Bay campaign where I’m allowed to make the villains attack them with “sendings and servitors” and boy, were my wife and son startled by this scene. Both gave me that head-shudder-wide-eyes look of surprised.

Very satisfying.

Take care. Look after each other, and thank you for your support on Patreon.

What does it look like when someone is drowning? 2026

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Up here in the northern hemisphere, summer is about to start, so it’s time to repost my annual warning:

How to recognize when someone is drowning.

It’s not what you think. Before you take your kids or loved ones into the water, read this article.

Please.

It happened again

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For once, let’s not bury the lede: 

Last week I had my second non-heart attack. 

It was a minor one. I treated it myself with nitro and aspirin, which drove down my blood pressure quickly and effectively, and I went to bed expecting to wake up the next morning. Which I obviously did. 

(For those who missed it, the first was more serious and it happened last August http://harryjconnolly.com/i-am-rushed-to-the-emergency-room-and-other-news-tidbits/ .)

There’s no need for advice or well-wishing. My doctor and my wife are already helping me do what I need to do, almost all of which I have already been doing, and they are appraised of all of the little details I’m managing. 

If you do feel the need to say something, reach out to someone you love to let them know what they mean to you. 

Anyway, that sort of scare is why I’m trying to finish this last 20P novel, although this added stress and exhaustion is not exactly making me more productive. And as I’ve been saying, revisions for this book have been extensive.

It’s funny. Just now as I was sitting in the library, revising a scene, I’d come to the “afternoon doldrums” part of the day, and I was half-nodding off right at the table in the public place. It was the kind of tired that takes you right from your waking life into a kind of dream. After the third time I shook it off, I realized that I couldn’t tell the difference between the story in the book and the story in my dream. That’s when I decided to get this post done, although I won’t post it until tomorrow because it needs to be tidied up.

Okay. I’m going to get back to it. Remember, please, that I have a Patreon and a mountain of gratitude for my supporters.