Life In Monochrome

Hello, everyone. I’ve been AWOL for the last several days on account of having my lower wisdom teeth extracted. Yeah. Not fun. I’ve spent the last week (slowly) healing, and I’ve still got a ways to go. So there won’t be any video blogs in the immediate future, but if all goes well, I may whip up something for you around the holiday.

I have one order of business to address this afternoon. Namely, that last Monochrome novel. Some of you have asked about it again, and the only answer I can give you is that I’m thinking about it. I did begin preliminary work on the plot back in August, but then ULT edits began, and then came all the business-related fallout of no sales, and . . . well, you get the idea.

See, I’ve been thinking more about Dullington, his nature, his motivation, where he came from, that sort of thing. There are some details which aren’t entirely necessary for the plot of the final Monochrome book, but which are necessary for me to understand him as a character, and the only way for me to find those details is to go looking for them in the fiction. In other words, I may write Dullington’s origin story.

There’s another character in the ether, Aleister’s predecessor referenced in TLM, who was to Dullington what he is now to Donovan Candle. His name is Pontius Vile, and he isn’t a good man (with a name like that, how could he be?). For a while I thought he was just a part of Dullington’s history, but now I think he’s something more. He’s a threat. And he’s a bigger problem than Sparrow ever was.

I know how this all involves Donovan. The problem with these recent revelations is that it’s changed how the story starts, and until I have a starting point, I can’t begin the final Monochrome novel. That’s just how my process goes. What this means is that I will begin work on something Monochrome-related in January, searching for Dullington’s origins with the hope that whatever this “something” is will lead me to the start of the beginning of the last novel. This project could be a short story, could be a novella, or it could become a novel in its own right. It could even be a part of Monochrome #3 for all I know. Time will most certainly tell.

In the meantime, I have one last writing commitment left this year: a short story I owe Mercedes Yardley. It’s called TIMMY THE DESTRUCTO-BOT VS. THE BULLIES FROM FUTURE STREET. My goal is to finish a draft by the end of December and polish it up for submission early next year. And if no one picks it up, well, it’ll have a good home with the ULT series.

Speaking of which, the series kicks off in just a few weeks. Who’s excited?

TK