News from the Chief Bustard
Spring is coming in upstate New York. Although the grass is still brown and there are no leaves on the trees, we’re hearing the cardinals sing and beginning to see the earliest of the early flowers, crocuses, snowdrops, and winter aconite. At this time of year it’s too much to hope for that we’ll have any kind of protracted warm spells, and the doomsayers amongst us point out that the biggest blizzard to hit the Northeast in the last hundred years, the infamous Storm of ’93, happened on March 13 and 14.
Still, I’ll take what harbingers of warmer weather I can find.
My upcoming novel The Accidental Magician, about a woman who finds herself in the middle of a battle between the agents of order and the agents of chaos, is in its final stages of editing, still aiming for a May release date. We’ll have more specifics, along with a cover reveal, soon! This one—for all the dark sorcery it involves—is more lighthearted fare than some of my more recent books, and its tone is similar to Signal to Noise, Lock & Key, and The Shambles. So if you liked those three, stay tuned for the adventures of Carla Kellogg in The Accidental Magician.
I’m still working on a collaborative novel with the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, centering on the post-mortem exploits of a pair of sibling ghosts who just can’t help meddling in the affairs of the living. I’m also toying with coming back to two unfinished projects I left hanging a while back. Not sure which one to tackle first.
The first one, The Harmonic Labyrinth, is a dark supernatural thriller, in the same vein as my novels Gears and Kill Switch. A professional musician finds himself trapped in a maze of interlocking realities, each one only slightly different from the others, connected by passageways set up in an intricate pattern that no one has yet been able to decipher. Not only does this mean that every time he moves from one to the next, small details—things like names of streets and positions of houses—have shifted, but only he and a handful of others are aware of the dozens of alternate versions of reality existing alongside our own. And when he finds out that there is a group of ruthless guardians called the Auditors who hunt down and kill anyone who tries to jump from one level to another, his fate—and his newfound friends’—takes a much more perilous turn.
The second is once again much lighter and funnier. It’s a rollicking tale called Kiss the Chameleon, which if I had to sum up in three words, would be “alien love story.” An alien scientist, shapeshifted into human form, has been on assignment on Earth to study humanity, and (contrary to direct orders from his boss) has fallen in love with a human woman who is none the wiser about his actual identity. His peaceful mission of anthropological study takes a sudden left turn when he discovers, quite by accident, that the Earth is being invaded by a different alien species—whose intentions are anything but benevolent. Should he blow his own cover and let humanity know about the danger they’re in—contravening yet another direct order from his boss—or let Homo sapiens, including the woman he loves, fend for themselves?
So how about it, readers? I do want to finish both of them eventually, but which should I tackle first? Let me know what your vote is!
And until next time, enjoy the coming lovely weather!