Happy 67th, Dallas!

It’s Pearl Harbor Day, which means it is also the real-life birthday of the non-real-life character who has consumed more of my time than any other over the past several years. Yes, it was thirty-nine years ago today that a somewhat depressed Dallas Green celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday in his San Francisco apartment with no one to share it with except a bottle of tequila and the ghost of his dead friend Lonnie.

As for this year, I cannot tell you exactly what Dallas is up to in the year 2019, but I do know that, if he is still alive, he turns 67 today.

I am again spending lots of quality time with Dallas. As of this writing, I have completed the first draft of no fewer than eleven chapters of the next installment of his trilogy. This means I am, relievedly, well over the psychologically significant, albeit arbitrary fifty-page threshold that has always resulted in a creative flow coming much more easily. In fact, at the moment this book nearly seems to be writing itself. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but so far I’m not complaining. I guess I have just lived with this character for so long and with the plot points of this particular book for so long that the first one-third is not quite the struggle of previous books.

The hard part is coming up. I have long had a clear beginning mapped out for this book, and there is also a clear ending as well as certain key moments in between. The rest is an assortment of black voids, waiting for me to find a way to fill in and connect one independent bit with a different one.

The first five chapters take place in June of 1993, and I’m afraid we find poor Dallas again in kind of a bad state, but then things start to look up. For those particularly concerned about his maturation process, I’m afraid that, while he is obviously older, he still seems not to be all that much wiser. Various bits of information are dropped as to what transpired during the twelve-and-a-half years since we previously him.

In the sixth chapter we are transported back to the moment where Lautaro’s Spear ended. We follow Dallas and Ángel to Chile to learn how that turned out. This provides your author an excuse for wallowing in nostalgia, as I immerse myself in my own personal memories of that country, the culture, the people, the Pinochet-era politics, and the pleasures of red wine and pisco.

One problem that keeps cropping up as a result of nailing down very specific dates in the story is that real-life history has a way of intruding. For example, I was well into my writing before it dawned on me that a particular, world-shattering news event occurred on the very same day that Lautaro’s Spear closed on—the day after Dallas’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was the sort of event that could not have possibly gone unremarked-on or could not have had a significant effect on Dallas and those around him. So I had to go back and do some re-writing to reflect this intrusion from the outside world.

As you may gather, this third installment of what now appears to be a trilogy is going to be more expansive the previous two in terms of the number of characters, the number of countries, and the number of years covered. In order not to raise hopes or expectations here, I have tried—and apparently now failed—to avoid using the word epic.

Since this book will presumably appeal mainly to readers of the first two books, I have made a conscious effort to include a lot of what these days is called fan service. I’m not certain, however, this it is not actually the same thing as author service. In other words, I’m including a lot of things that I want to see in the book, while working under the impression that it is also what fans (and I use the term advisedly) want to see in the book.

Anyway, I am getting way ahead of myself. At the rate I usually go, we are still a long way from this book—which still does not have a title, by the way, even a working one for my own use—seeing the light of day. D3, as it is called in my notes, for 2020 or 2021?

In the meantime, if you are stuck for a holiday gift for the readers in your life, I humbly remind you that there are still virtually endless supplies, in both paper and digital formats, of this year’s novel, The Curse of Septimus Bridge. I like to think it is kind of epic too.

Links to sellers are somewhere on this page if you can find them.