Why Yes, I Do Have a Work in Progress

Also: Haiku!

This Friday is moving day, when we get out of the cabin and move into a house with two bedrooms, one bath, a beautifully-manicured lawn, and water that doesn’t have to be brought in on a truck. Wish us luck. Also, if you could put us in touch with someone who wants to buy a dome house on four acres in Iowa, that would be great.

Friday is also the day when I post reruns of previous newsletters, and this week it’s going to be “Misery and the Potboiler,” originally published on October 25 of 2023. At the end of that essay there’s a foreshadowing of today’s newsletter, which sounds like a weird temporal paradox but actually makes sense when you consider the original publication date. It took almost a whole year, but today I’m paying off that foreshadowing.

First off, though, a look at what’s in the pipeline: A sequel to The Smalltown Way that would most likely wrap up things in Colby City. The umpteenth rewrite of my very first novel, Bob Smith, a comic mystery about immortality. A novel version of my caveman musical, Broadway Melody of 77,000 BC. (This is more of a play with songs as opposed to a musical. I’ve only written five songs for it. I’d be happy to share the script and listen to ideas for getting it produced—let me know.) I also think I have a baseball novel and a noir parody in here somewhere. But some of this stuff is so far down the pipeline that Bruce Willis and his ragtag team of misfit drillers couldn’t reach it.

Yeah, I know—wells are vertical and pipelines are horizontal. But hey, I thought I’d give Bruce Willis a shout-out and wish him the best.

Anyway, the closest thing to the opening of the pipeline is a novel with the working title Ripples in the Catfish Pond, the one mentioned at the end of Friday’s essay. This one will contain part of a plotline salvaged from what I hoped would be my potboiler, an erotic mystery called Godiva Nights, which was ignored by literary agents claiming to represent erotica, mysteries, and erotic mysteries. In Ripples, a divorced English teacher named Mitchell Lazarus searches for love in all the wrong places and winds up in a bizarre situation, and a mystery writer with the pen name Cooper Keye—Lazarus’s former student—sets out to find out what happened. There will be catfishing. One plotline will be based loosely on my January 8 essay, “27 Hours in Harrisburg.” And one or two pages will contain a section from Godiva Nights that I consider one of the best passages I’ve ever written. I’d put it on my tombstone except that it wouldn’t make sense out of context and if they charge by the letter it might get kind of spendy. There might, in fact, be very little stone left.

Ripples takes place in the Colby County universe from 1998-2002 and 2015. Right now Mary Marchese and Gene Steuben are the only Colby County characters to appear in this one, although you never know: Chuck Kelso has a way of slipping into my stories.

I think this one will be ready to go sometime in 2025, in the meantime, there’s lots of good reading to be found at www.hillsboropublishing.com.

Haiku Corner

I don’t do it nearly often enough, but I enjoy writing haiku. Here’s a handful from years past.

Three Haiku

Art is sometimes found

On the refrigerator

Defying purists

Somewhere in the world

People we haven’t met are

Making Almond Joys

Life is too short to

Worry about things like how

Short life really is

Five Haiku

Eventually

Koko in her cage will scream

“I am somebody”

A poet musing

On the universe offers

His two pennies worth

The cosmic scorecard

With our lifetime statistics

Is ever hidden

They call him God but

Still want him to do magic

For scattered applause

At what point does God

Do the math and say that this

Coulda gone better?

Haiku for You and Me and the Universe

In the dead of night

The cold is colder, for we

Cannot prove the sun

We are two out of

Billions, huddled together

As the world screams on

Your atoms and mine

Will be strangers when they meet

In the next go-round

It just goes to show you, you never know what might come from the desk of John M Donovan.