I am coming to the conclusion…

…that many of these beach movies do not hold up well. It’s not just the out-of-date cultural referents. It’s how the culture itself sounds different, pre-Beatles. On the bright side, I haven’t seen anything that should make me do things much differently for BANSHEE BEACH. My existing rough impressions of the genre are actually fine.

I should watch JAWS again, though.

#commissionearned

New Flash Fiction contest!

Which I will not win, because I don’t win things. It’s weird, and yes, annoying. Still, it’s already written and I’m going to sit on it a day before I edit. In the meantime, I’m putting up the link in case you want to give it a try.

I gotta decide on Awesome Con.

$375 for a table for three days. It’s expensive, but the foot traffic is insane there. Rough calculations are, if I sell 16 books a day, I should basically break even. I’ll need to maybe turbocharge that crowdfunding the RPG thing I was thinking about doing via Backerkit, get the money together to have it at the sale, if I want to have something new. And then there’s the chance for increased Kindle/KU sales. But that’s a good hunk of change that we’re talking about, here. And higher sales than I normally sustain.

I will need to decide this in the next couple of days.

11/04/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 288/55713

Yeah, I’m really tired. Up too late, up too early, going to bed early tonight and sleeping in.

I wasn’t really surprised when the knock on the hotel door came, except that it took so long. I hadn’t been joking when I told Lucas that trouble followed guys like me around. Heck, this time it had even waited until I had gotten a glass of wine around me. Wine! It really was a vacation.

So it was with only a little bit of an eye-roll that I got up to answer. “Look, compadre,” I started saying as I opened the door, “whatever you’re up to down here, it’s nothing to do with me—”

And that’s when the gal tried to slap a mickey on me.

11/03/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1677/55493.

Busy day, had to stay up late to finish. But I did!

So. Horses have ropes. Ropes have ends. The ends go in driver’s hands. Easy, right? Sure it is! Especially when the rope ends are right there, flapping around. They weren’t even out of reach. Why, one rope knocked my hat off, with a whir and a snap.

Yeah. Something like that’s not out of reach at all.

A younger, dumber me would have tried to snatch at the hat, then probably ended up clinging to the door frame and trying to keep from sucked in under a wagon wheel. But I ain’t dumb like that. It’s a hat. I could always go back afterward and find it again. I might have to fight a bobcat or something to retrieve it, but Shamuses have a mystic way with animals. That is, they usually prefer to claw, instead of claw-claw-bite. So I kept my eye on the prize.

At least, until Priscilla went for the hat.

She had been watching behind me, and when my headgear went flying she leaned out just a little too far, and got herself off balance. To be fair, she did grab the hat, and for one brief second it looked like she could maintain an even strain; but then the wagon bumped a rut, and the magic was gone. I can still see the look on her face as she toppled back onto the indifferent road below…

…and then I grabbed her flailing hand with one of mine, and concentrated really hard on holding onto the door with the other.