HEREAFTER still haunts me...

[Nick Lawless]

So I'm into my conversion of EL REY from script to novel form, hoping to iron out the kinks in the story whilst doing so, and my imagination stalls on me, taking me back in time to the not-so-salad-days of HEREAFTER, a story I wrote when I was feeling pretty low and overdosing on Dashiell Hammett/Clive Barker. I'm chalking this moment up to just being another angle of attack from the demon known as Procrastination (kind of like blogging), but I couldn't help getting lost in that story again for quite a while and how good it COULD be. The character of private eye Frank Valen is nothing new to the genre of crime fiction (he's basically Mike Hammer in the abyssmal 1st draft) but the setting of the story should more than make up for it. There's just so much possibility to the idea, and I've always thought that if the story haunts you this hard, you HAVE to see it through or you'll go nuts. I can seriously see a series of books coming out of this. But how the hell do I find the time short of not ever sleeping and/or alienating my family? I feel like I should write EL REY in the day and HEREAFTER in the night, given the darkness that surrounds the story, but I know I'm biting off more than I can chew already with one novel in the works and I'd probably end up losing my mind anyway.

Any advice?