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September, 2009
Long overdue greetings, patient ones!
And for those of you who remember the POLTERGEIST film: We’re baa-aack!
There has been much conjecture about our unexplained absence from the scene, but contrary to popular belief, there was no alien abduction involved. No, nothing nearly so exotic – it has simply been very intense work on the fifth Monkeewrench novel that has kept our normally very active yappers closed, and our focus to the exclusion of all else has finally paid off!
We are extremely pleased to tell you that #5 is officially fluffed and buffed, and will debut this spring of 2010 in both the U.S. and the U.K., under the titles SHOOT TO THRILL (U.S. title) and PLAY TO KILL (U.K. title). AC/DC, anyone?! We really love this book, and it was a joy to write, even though it took a long time to eke it out – and we hope you will all feel the same.
PJ and I exhaustively researched the procedure required to surgically separate us from our computers, but found it would be too painful and costly, so we are already at work on the next Monkeewrench book, plus an additional, non-Monkeewrench Christmas novel we hope will be an edgy, yet warm and fuzzy holiday treat for an edgy and not-so-warm-and-fuzzy time. But that won’t stop us from tackling some of our more immediate goals:
PJ: Oh, yah, shure, we were totally immersed in the 5th book to the exclusion of all else, but there were also real-life problems that kept slapping us in the face when we least expected it. These were extremely personal, traumatic events – tabloid stuff like whatever drove Britney to shave her head, which oddly enough, took a back seat to the economy crashing around our ears and friends acquiring truly rare and strange diseases. But just when you think you absolutely cannot cope without medication, fate sends you a special wake-up call in the form of a mini-trauma that distracts you from the truly awful things by demanding your immediate attention. The bats did that, bless their little leathery hearts.
So you finally finish the manuscript, happy, happy, joy, joy; go to bed at night, thinking you’ll wake up perky and ready to write a fun newsletter, and then bingo. You are startled awake at 3 a.m. by the dive-bombing whoosh of something buzzing over your face, and it’s a bat the size of a DC-10. Even the cats are afraid. You immediately forget your terminal retirement fund, the house you can’t sell even though you’ve bought another one, and all the frightening germs that are sitting there on the grocery cart handle, waiting to jump up and kill you.
Now you don’t want to murder bats. They eat mosquitoes and flies and gnats that do disgusting things to the half-eaten banana you left on the counter, so you race through the house in your underwear with a fish net bigger than your torso, trying to capture the creature and turn it loose outside. Well, actually, you crouch on the floor in your underwear squealing while encouraging your husband to flit around with the fish net. Not because you’re afraid of the bat, but primarily because if you haven’t seen a 60-plus man in jockey shorts chasing a terrified bat with a big net, you just haven’t lived.
When the bat is successfully returned to the great outdoors by the man whose net has seen more bats than fish, you bang yourself on the back for respecting wild life and settle back into bed. And there you lie, eyes wide open, waiting for the next whoosh over your face, wondering if these resident bats have rabies, if rabies shots are as painful as they say, or if maybe these particular bats carry that bizarre disease that killed all those people at the church picnic in Pennsylvania, or where ever the heck it was. There is no return from this paranoid train of thought. You will most certainly die in your sleep from the bite of a flying rodent. The good thing about this is that you no longer care about your desiccated retirement fund or the shocking discovery that you have more chins than you had yesterday because your cheeks fell down.
Traci had a bat thing going in her house as well, but seriously, the woman is an Amazon. Three flies in the house that never had flies when she went to bed; twenty flies when she woke up, which she realized were coming from the flue in one of her fireplaces. This is Amityville Horror stuff, and it didn’t take long to remember that flies don’t nest in convenient places like bees; they gather in carrion to lay their eggs. There is an immediate visualization to this revelation that is very unpleasant. Something very dead is in the fireplace.
Thirty-plus dead bats tumbled down when Traci opened the flue, and lacking a 60-plus year old man in jockey shorts, she bagged them solo and buried them in her recycling bin after a brief ceremony. Creepy, crawly gross stuff, very vivid reminders that we deal with the unexpected as it occurs, and that most often, dead bats in a fireplace are the open door away from the real terrors of a sick friend, a hairless Brittany, or a failing economy. Yes, we’re working on the next Monkeewrench novel, even as we happily keep plugging away on “Return of the Magi”, the Christmas book we have always wanted to write. We put magic in it, because beneath the cynicism, the frustration and the doubt, we can’t stop ourselves from believing in magic. It comes when you least expect it. Like bats.
Long overdue greetings, patient ones!
And for those of you who remember the POLTERGEIST film: We’re baa-aack!
There has been much conjecture about our unexplained absence from the scene, but contrary to popular belief, there was no alien abduction involved. No, nothing nearly so exotic – it has simply been very intense work on the fifth Monkeewrench novel that has kept our normally very active yappers closed, and our focus to the exclusion of all else has finally paid off!
We are extremely pleased to tell you that #5 is officially fluffed and buffed, and will debut this spring of 2010 in both the U.S. and the U.K., under the titles SHOOT TO THRILL (U.S. title) and PLAY TO KILL (U.K. title). AC/DC, anyone?! We really love this book, and it was a joy to write, even though it took a long time to eke it out – and we hope you will all feel the same.
PJ and I exhaustively researched the procedure required to surgically separate us from our computers, but found it would be too painful and costly, so we are already at work on the next Monkeewrench book, plus an additional, non-Monkeewrench Christmas novel we hope will be an edgy, yet warm and fuzzy holiday treat for an edgy and not-so-warm-and-fuzzy time. But that won’t stop us from tackling some of our more immediate goals:
- Get hair cut to expose eyes, therefore improving vision (or maybe glasses are a better idea?)
- Lovingly tend to our weed gardens
- Sleep (optional)
- Update the website!!!!!
PJ: Oh, yah, shure, we were totally immersed in the 5th book to the exclusion of all else, but there were also real-life problems that kept slapping us in the face when we least expected it. These were extremely personal, traumatic events – tabloid stuff like whatever drove Britney to shave her head, which oddly enough, took a back seat to the economy crashing around our ears and friends acquiring truly rare and strange diseases. But just when you think you absolutely cannot cope without medication, fate sends you a special wake-up call in the form of a mini-trauma that distracts you from the truly awful things by demanding your immediate attention. The bats did that, bless their little leathery hearts.
So you finally finish the manuscript, happy, happy, joy, joy; go to bed at night, thinking you’ll wake up perky and ready to write a fun newsletter, and then bingo. You are startled awake at 3 a.m. by the dive-bombing whoosh of something buzzing over your face, and it’s a bat the size of a DC-10. Even the cats are afraid. You immediately forget your terminal retirement fund, the house you can’t sell even though you’ve bought another one, and all the frightening germs that are sitting there on the grocery cart handle, waiting to jump up and kill you.
Now you don’t want to murder bats. They eat mosquitoes and flies and gnats that do disgusting things to the half-eaten banana you left on the counter, so you race through the house in your underwear with a fish net bigger than your torso, trying to capture the creature and turn it loose outside. Well, actually, you crouch on the floor in your underwear squealing while encouraging your husband to flit around with the fish net. Not because you’re afraid of the bat, but primarily because if you haven’t seen a 60-plus man in jockey shorts chasing a terrified bat with a big net, you just haven’t lived.
When the bat is successfully returned to the great outdoors by the man whose net has seen more bats than fish, you bang yourself on the back for respecting wild life and settle back into bed. And there you lie, eyes wide open, waiting for the next whoosh over your face, wondering if these resident bats have rabies, if rabies shots are as painful as they say, or if maybe these particular bats carry that bizarre disease that killed all those people at the church picnic in Pennsylvania, or where ever the heck it was. There is no return from this paranoid train of thought. You will most certainly die in your sleep from the bite of a flying rodent. The good thing about this is that you no longer care about your desiccated retirement fund or the shocking discovery that you have more chins than you had yesterday because your cheeks fell down.
Traci had a bat thing going in her house as well, but seriously, the woman is an Amazon. Three flies in the house that never had flies when she went to bed; twenty flies when she woke up, which she realized were coming from the flue in one of her fireplaces. This is Amityville Horror stuff, and it didn’t take long to remember that flies don’t nest in convenient places like bees; they gather in carrion to lay their eggs. There is an immediate visualization to this revelation that is very unpleasant. Something very dead is in the fireplace.
Thirty-plus dead bats tumbled down when Traci opened the flue, and lacking a 60-plus year old man in jockey shorts, she bagged them solo and buried them in her recycling bin after a brief ceremony. Creepy, crawly gross stuff, very vivid reminders that we deal with the unexpected as it occurs, and that most often, dead bats in a fireplace are the open door away from the real terrors of a sick friend, a hairless Brittany, or a failing economy. Yes, we’re working on the next Monkeewrench novel, even as we happily keep plugging away on “Return of the Magi”, the Christmas book we have always wanted to write. We put magic in it, because beneath the cynicism, the frustration and the doubt, we can’t stop ourselves from believing in magic. It comes when you least expect it. Like bats.
