Scott Does Dallas (again)

It’s out of my hands.

I am talking about my book and, no, it is not really out of my hands. It is just that I am waiting for comments, feedback, corrections and general reaction before doing anything else. After the most recent pass, I am happy with it. That is not to say I feel it is perfect. Perfection is an ideal and by definition unachievable. I have too much of a journalist background geared to deadlines for me to get hung up on perfection. At this point my to-do list includes listening and acting on whatever I get back and then undertaking one last pass in an attempt to catch the previously uncaught. Then comes the “easy” part, that is, the technical part that is satisfying in that success can be measured objectively instead of subjectively. I am talking about the formatting, press prep, uploading and business end of the whole book process.

It is something of a relief to have my brain freed up for things like the occasional blog post and spinning ideas for upcoming books. (Unless reaction to this book is such that I am convinced to give up writing altogether and go into full-time subsistence farming.) Next up is still my gothic supernatural opus or what I keep calling (and will most likelyy inevitably regret calling) my Dark Shadows homage. I need something completely different in tone and theme from Dallas’s end-of-Carter-administration exploits. Toward the end of writing the second Dallas book, though, I was getting quite keen to launch into the third Dallas novel. Now that I have had a chance to decompress, however, I do not think I can face into him and his dipsomaniac existence quite so soon again. I am now, instead, tending toward finally tackling my long-planned epic of the lives of multiple charactes in 1980s Seattle. Perhaps the new season of the brilliant but profane HBO sitcom Silicon Valley is infusing me with a need to revisit the world of software people.

A warning. A blog post is not a legally binding contract. Any of these intended plans could be altered or eliminated at any time. Even the third Dallas book is optional. I was perfectly happy with one single Dallas book—until people kept telling me they could not wait for the next installment. Apparently, what I thought was a neat, tidy resolution of the story was, in the eyes of most other people, a cliffhanger. The early word so far from at least one beta reader of the second Dallas book is that it is in even more need of a follow-up.

Is this going to be my curse? Writing an endless series of books about Dallas, trying each time to finally wrap up the series—and failing?

Something to look forward to: I have distilled a playlist of music—to which I listened a lot while writing the book—into an eighty-song five-and-a-half-hour Spotify playlist, which I will make public at the same time the book is released. If any filmmakers out there are looking for a project, allow me to point out that this playlist could easily be adapted into a film soundtrack. Hint, hint.