This should explain where my previous Post came from—my opuscula.1
About two (or maybe three) years ago, my good buddy and brother from another mother, F. Paul Wilson, and I were driving through upstate New York to do a gig as instructors in a two-day writers’ workshop being held at Seton Catholic High School in Binghamton. At one point Paul mentioned he was compiling an eBook of all his non-fiction he’d written over the years, and added that he was positively amazed at the massive amount of wordage the project comprised.2 Hundreds and hundreds of pages, he said.
Initially, I was a bit surprised to hear this because Paulie has been such a prolific writer of fiction, I’d never really considered the idea he’d produced even a modicum of non-fiction. I said as much to him and he said: “Yeah, either did I until I started digging up all the reviews, and articles, and essays, and introductions, and appreciations, and afterwords . . . right?”
And that’s when I realized he was dead on—when your writing and publishing career spans fifty years, if you keep at your craft, you’re going to write a lot of things to which you barely gave a second thought. Such as the litany of stuff he’d rattled off to me.
He inspired me to look back into my own files and folders and see if they held a similar trove of oddments. It was one of those projects that never seemed to get onto a front burner, and I spent time on it sporadically over the next few years without getting things into shape. One of the reasons for this was the great number of non-fiction pieces I’d discovered I’d written over the course of my career—and to get everything organized into a coherent book, would require my full attention.
To begin my initial attempts at organization, I divided the book into the following sections: Introductions, Forewords, Afterwords, Appreciations, Articles, Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Autobiography.
Some of the earlier pieces written in the Typewriter Era needed to be scanned and cleaned up. Some of the publications where articles, essays, and reviews had appeared were in such a deteriorated state my scanner had trouble pulling the letters out of the faded backgrounds of the cheesy pulp paper of the magazines. And then there were the cases where I had the entries in my bibliography, but couldn’t find a typescript copy or the original publication. Searches for such things became time-consuming.
As I read over some of the articles and introductions and even book reviews, I was astounded that some of it had been written by me. Especially in the earlier material, the tone and the voice were so stiff and formal (albeit erudite) and not much like my style that has since evolved and case-hardened into an accessible, more conversational voice.
But as the work piled up, I realized I had more than enough material (almost 220,000 words!) to pull together a comprehensive gestalt of my interests, attitudes, and professional knowledge—as well as more than few glimpses into my personality and my life experiences. And, hey, this does not count my 90-plus M.A.F.I.A. columns.
Will any of you find this stuff of sufficient interest to keep you reading?
I have no idea.
My plan is to put it out here on Substack, and see what happens. I welcome comments and observations and you can reach me here: tfmbp@borderlandspress.com.
On other fronts:
I’ve been tinkering with a new novel, but I have to confess I just don’t have the energy I enjoyed in past years, and the writing is slow and sometimes irritating because it is so slow. I did, however, complete a novella (“Timewalker”) for the latest iteration of Weird Tales3 and also sold it to Journalstone Press, who published it as a stand-alone trade paperback.
The other project I just completed was the pulling together of my sixth and final short fiction collection. Entitled Memos from the Abyss, it’s all the stories I’ve published since 2000—plus my usual introductions to each piece. Twenty-two stories and a novella. And it will be my final one because, like many of my generational contemporaries, I don’t write much short fiction any more. Fifty years and six collections is more than enough, I think.
https://www.borderlandspress.com/shop/authors/thomas-f-monteleone/memos-from-the-abyss-by-thomas-f-monteleone-signed-limited-edition/
That’s it for now. Watch this space for news on new projects and of course lots of my opuscula.
opus·cu·la (ō-ˈpə-skyə-lə) n. 1. small or minor literary works. 2. literary or musical works of small size. 3. from the Latin opus.
He has now released the eBook entitled Ephemerata: The Odds and Ends of a Writing Life. You can get in digital format even get a POD real big fat book to hold in your hands
Which seems to be in some sort of suspended animation for the time being . . .