.

I had hoped to have another novel completed by the end of this month, August, but instead I have absolutely nothing finished and nothing even started.

I started out with an idea for another folk horror, this one set in the present day in the mountains of eastern Washington state with an isolated community of woodworkers and the outsider who came there for lust mistaken for love and commercial profit but who instead encounters the thing under the mountain. I worked on that idea for several weeks: careful planning, character design, my beloved 5-act structure. And yet when I went to outline the project all of my passion just drained away. I still have all the notes, a spreadsheet with color-coded characters and their events, and yet I can’t seem to find the enthusiasm that started the story when it first came to me.

I shifted to another idea that came to me in the middle of the night. A horror novel that was also a noir. This one would have been set in the years following World War II, a great setting for noir, and it would deal with an airman returning to his west Texas town, the people there who hold him in deep suspicion, and his dark desires that were awakened by something he had encountered in the high cold air.

But that story is finding it hard to reach takeoff speed.

There are only four months left to 2026 and several of those months will be stressed with the busiest period of work for my day job. Work that will bring overtime and its blessing of extra money but that will make writing much more difficult. Still, I shall try to get a book out before this year closes.