Problem Solved....sort of

I'm fairly undisciplined. I know the Greeks said "everything in moderation" but I've never been able to really practice that. I frequently eat too much, sometimes drink too much (less than I used to, but still more than I should). I spend more than I should, show up late for almost everything and the one thing I never seem to get tired of doing is sleeping, which I do whenever and wherever I get the chance.

Apologies to Gary Frank then, (and no slight to his excellent book) because I couldn't let "The Devil's Rose" sit on my desk and not read at least some of it. I was too damn curious. Had I not just come back from the desert, and if I weren't so intrigued by the idea of undead things skulking about the sun-baked wilderness, I might have held off. But I didn't.

I only got through about half the book last night. It's actually more of a novella with pictures. I think it runs around 115 pages. This Brom guy really did pull it off. The thing's a great, quick read and the illustrations, which range from full-blown paintings to pencil sketches, are fantastic.

Also, having read a fair piece of it now, I feel a little less conflicted about my own plans for this kind of story. Since Arizona, I've been toying with a few ideas for a western-horror/fantasy. Brom's book, I was happy to discover, is set not in the Old West, but in a nightmare version of present day Texas. I'm reasonably confident that I can write what I want to write now without appearing to imitate his work. What I'm interested in trying to do is different.

The fact is, I hope that's the case, because once I get an idea in my head, there isn't much chance that I'll write anything else for a while. When I write I have to have some kind of personal connection to what I'm doing. Much of the setting for The Lucifer Messiah, as an example, was the result of walking to work every day in Hell's Kitchen, stepping over junkies curled up on the 9th Ave. sidewalk in half-dried pools of their own urine. Then spending the rest of the day listening to old union guys trying to either impress or scare (or both) the college boy from Jersey with stories about the neighborhood. After taking in all those tales about the Westies and the old time gangsters and severed hands kept in a freezer to place decoy fingerprints on murder weapons (I later found out that was in a book about the Westies, so I'm not sure if they told me that because they knew it already or if they read it too), I couldn't not write about the neighborhood. It was stuck in my head.

Same thing with the rest of the locations in Lucifer. I wish I could tell you that I set a scene in Venice because the story demanded it, or that I set another scene in Leningrad for the same reason. But I didn't. I wrote those scenes the way I did because I had to, because I loved being in those places, and because I couldn't really write without writing about them.

The book I just finished is no exception. Over the last year and a half I've been in Washington DC, Cleveland, New Orleans and New York. And it's set in all of those places.

So there it is, demons and ghouls in the Old West. My mind's made up.

Assuming I don't suddenly make enough money on this writing thing to quit being a lawyer any time in the next few years, and further assuming that I manage to write something decent, and even further assuming that the publishing industry continues to move at a glacial speed, you can probably expect to see this project in your local bookstore sometime after 2011 or so.

One last thing.

I'm getting a fair amount of international traffic on the site lately. I'm kind of curious, do any of you folks out there in France or New Zealand or Brazil or the UK actually have The Lucifer Messiah? If so, I'd love to hear where you got it. I'm always curious about how the book makes its way to different places once it's out there. Drop me a comment if you have a second and let me know. I love having visitors from all over.