News From The Front

Blistering day of work today, punctuated by the odd power nap and even odder news articles to cleanse my mental palate, or maybe soil it so much my eyes for the work became fresh...

In any case, I finished The Big Reggae Story I've been trying to do for three years. Originally, it was an alternate history quasi-SF piece that switched lives with Bob Marley and Samuel R. Delany.

It didn't fly. I'll leave it right there. Chip Delany is a polymath and a prodigy. I'm not. I couldn't pull that one off.

But the core premise was sound, and an interesting riff in America in the Fifties about Sun Records down in Memphis, that was sound too. I needed a set of lives closer together to switch, to make the story truly sing. Then I discovered Jackie Opel, a Barbadan transplant whom many reviewers called 'The Jackie Wilson Of Jamaica.' And the premise for 'Higher And Higher' was solved.

5500 words and one power-nap later, I woke and fired up the Facebook demon, to hear that a story I truly, truly believe in that got roundly rejected has been tentatively accepted in an anthology. So maybe there's hope for "Higher And Higher" as well.

Back to work. More to come.