Long Night's Journey into Day

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we think marathon running should be confined to moments when the British are coming! Let Mercury do the running for you. Slow it down a notch! The race is to the steady, not the swift.

Princess the faerie and I are here today with great news.

A real, live publishing house has agreed to publish my novel, Gray Magic! This is not just some vanity thing I'm doing on my own to make myself a millionaire. This is editors who believe in the work. It will come out in an affordable, durable paperback edition, as sturdy as that copy of Mists of Avalon in your local library. You know, the one that's been read by every woman in town.

Gray Magic is set in the Middle Ages. It's about the Knights Templar. And I started it a decade before The Da Vinci Code came out, so it's no rip-off of Dan Brown. It just has a similar theme, done in a completely different way.

If you know anything about the Knights Templar, you probably know that they were Crusaders and bankers with enormous wealth who were suddenly arrested, detained without legal representation, tortured until they confessed to bizarre, unreal things, and then burnt at the stake if they recanted their confessions. These men were held in impenetrable fortresses for years and years. Many went mad. Some committed suicide.

Gee, what did I say I was writing about? Is it Guantanamo, or France of 700 years ago? The latter, bearing chilling similarities to the former.

This is absolutely bizarre, but the 700th anniversary of the Templars' imprisonment will occur this coming Saturday. While I am at the Faerie Con. Coincidence? Nope. We at "The Gods Are Bored" do not believe in coincidences. Let's call it serendipity and hope it means that the ghost of my central character is indeed looking in upon me to help get his story out.

As the process of producing Gray Magic continues, I'll tell you a little bit about the plot and characters, just so you know it's the kind of thing you'd like to stuff in the old beach bag and read at the edge of the pounding surf. I studied fiction writing with John Barth, but I am no John Barth and never was, and never ever will be. This book is something that anyone can read. It's an adventure story with a moral and more than one nod to faeries and the Old Bored Gods.

Princess went with me to New York yesterday to review the contract. She thinks it's swell. So do I, because I've been working on Gray Magic for 15 years, it's gone through about 10 drafts, and after that long I bet I could have taught at least one monkey to type War and Peace perfectly.

So you know it will be good.

Faerie Con is just days away! Come, please! I'm going to get to meet Brian Froud! I'm so excited!

For once there's good stuff going on. Pinch me and wake me up.