I didn’t even want to look at the last time I posted here, it’d just make me feel guilty. I’ve been flip-flopping between writing this book– or ditching it and writing another one I’m thinking about– or pushing everybody involved to get the podcast going on my second novel. So as is par for the course for me, I’m sort of doing all three and not very well.

I think since I’m feeling ambivalent about Iced Out, which is normal midway through a novel, I’m losing touch with it. Also got stuck, so that’s probably why I started feeling ambivalent in the first place. Then since I was stuck, the question was whether I should even be doing any of this, is it worth the effort, am I any good at all, yada yada. My friend Nick calls all this boring-to-everyone-in-earshot garbage “Artist’s Angst.” He’s a singer/songwriter and very experienced in the condition and its symptoms, and since he’s actually quite wonderful at what he does, I imagine there’s no correlation between the angst and ability levels. Or maybe it’s inverse– considering the number of people who get rejected at American Idol tryouts, all the while protesting: “I know I can sing!”

I know I can’t sing, so I’m angst-free on that front. As for the writing front, I can’t say.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d throw up a chapter, see if anyone cared, and then make some pizza for my kids.

I will be blogging soon– with pictures this time– because Scott Sigler’s amazing novel Infected will be in bookstores on April 1st. Danny & I are going to B&N on his lunch hour to buy it and prove to Scott that even Buckeye fans have their good points too.

Okay, here it is: Lucky 13. As it turns out, this is kind of lucky, because this scene was the first one I thought of, before I had an idea for the book. My friend Lennox once made a comment about wanting to be in a movie where all his character did was make funny comments about what was going on around him. Whether Henry has turned out to be funny is not a question for me to answer, but I woke up in the middle of the night soon after, with an image of three guys sitting in a restaurant booth, griping about the weather. What the hell they were doing there, I didn’t know until quite some time later, but fortunately I wrote it down that night.

If you like it, let me know! Iced Out, Chapter 13