Pentawhist.
There was a bit of a break, wasn’t there. Let’s call it the mid-season hiatus, that excess of late-model broadcast television that led to such grotesque neologisms as the “mid-season finale,” I mean, really. While the story wasn’t progressing, we were finding a new house, and moving into it, and I was preparing for my first federal criminal trial which got postponed at the last minute (COVID) (not mine), and so have had to prepare for it all over again. We’ve already done the cover reveal and talked about the re-runs; here, have a gander at the new study, where the magic will be happening from now on.
The first draft for no. 40 came in at 21,219 words that were trimmed to a fighting count of 15,175, which might help to explain why it took so long. (Might not, granted.) And I’m in the very odd and highly magical space, here as we approach the end of the current volume, where I need a solution to a story problem and cast about only to find the perfect answer assembling itself from bits and pieces I’d stuck in earlier, on this whim or that, not at all knowing what I might need them for, or why, and on the one hand it is shivery spooky, this sensation, but any gift cuts both ways: shouldn’t I have meant to have planned it this way all along, if I had been paying attention? Genius is not luck, after all.
But nonetheless: I’ll take the luck. —No. 40, available now on paper; appearing here for free at the very end of this month.
—posted 546 days ago
