Is the pandemic state of suspended animation starting to thaw? I have accepted Scott Thomson’s kind offer to put the recording we made with Germaine Liu and John Oswald on Scott’s Bandcamp page. A Hyphen in Reverse. I originally thought of it as a CD but I couldn’t figure out what I’d do with a CD – sell it at “gigs”? There is space on Bandcamp for a “cover artwork,” however, and thanks to Maureen Cochrane for her help with this, and everything else.
Wishing all the best to our friends in the U.S.A. on this pivotal day! If you need a bit of levity, Hamilton Public Library asked me to do a reading for their Virtual Storyteller series. I agreed immediately – like a lot of writers these days, I’m more desperate for attention than ever – and read them “A Rope Ladder to the Moon,” which they edited into a very short (2:11) video.
Wolsak & Wynn took this opportunity to announce the upcoming (June 2021) publication of the book that “Rope Ladder” comes from, the Midnight Games sequel The Medusa Deep. The book has a great cover from the artist who did The Midnight Games, Rachel Rosen. Questions or comments? lee.davidneil@gmail.com.
The thing about writing books is, it takes a long time. My Midnight Games sequel, The Medusa Deep is now scheduled for spring 2021 so I am working on a third book to make a trilogy.
Early this year the FB page Cha: An Asian Literary Journal announced the existence of a new book, The Flock of Ba-Hui, based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, by the Chinese writer “Oobmab” (spell it backwards). I ordered a copy and wrote a review of the book for Black Gate Magazine.
There are occasionally chances to play double bass. Whenever we get the chance, I get together with Hamilton musicians, guitarist Chris Palmer and saxophonist Connor Bennett. We have been getting together via Zoom, and given the chance to play in IICSI’s (the International Institution for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph) online IF Festival in August, we did our best to offset the technical handcuffs of online collaboration by recording ourselves separately; Connor Bennett mixed the tracks together and with visuals added in real time by Andrew O’Connor, we offered Pandemic Assemblage #1.
My novel The Medusa Deep, sequel to The Midnight Games, is still scheduled for this fall – I’ve got my fingers crossed that Wolsak & Wynn will be able to issue it then! Like everything else, publishing has been slowed to a crawl by COVID-19 / aka the coronavirus. Since books seem to be all about text (they aren’t really), you might think publishing would be relatively immune, but books are really about bookstores, readings and launches, browsing shelves and listening to word-of-mouth, about holding an object in your hand that came to you from other persons that you talked to and interacted with, so the book trade has been hit hard.
The Medusa Deep, in continuing the story, transports the imaginative world of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” to present-day Hamilton, Ontario (this time, Nate also goes to the BC coast, and points beyond). It is also about an individual confronting not only the alien and strange, but the terrible power of crowds and misplaced faith, and the ways in which the need to survive becomes the need for power, and then somehow that need changes character, changes shape, and becomes something terribly evil. With this in mind, writing in this particular place and time, it is hard to create fiction that keeps pace with actual events.
Chainsaws: A History just came out in paperback, and Harbour was able to get me on the Hamilton TV station CHCH on March 11, just before everything really started to lock down (in the video I announce a signing at Epic Books, for example, that didn’t happen and may never happen). For my own reading, I am ordering a few books from my local indie booksellers, but as long as social movement is stopped, publishing is stopped too!
I’ve got to thank Harbour Publishing for the new edition, and for taking on Chainsaws in the first place. Harbour is also now distributing my novel Commander Zero, since its original publisher has ceased operations. For technical reasons they can’t include it in their catalogue, but if you contact them, they can provide the book!
If you write books you can go for months, and even years, with very little feedback from the outside world. You may have put out books that had really positive reader, critic, and sales response but, naturally, soon the enthusiasm moves on. If you want to get it back, your only hope is to write a completely new book. And writing a book is a big job.
With this in mind, this summer I was very pleased to be in touch with three different publishers about upcoming books.
• The Medusa Deep. Response to The Midnight Games was so positive that Noelle Allen (publisher of Wolsak & Wynn / Poplar Press) and I immediately began to discuss the ways in which it might become the foundation of a trilogy. I’ve drafted a sequel, and Noelle and I have agreed on the revisions that will make this manuscript publishable. I’m just about (October 2019) to finish this new draft– although a publication date will depend on Wolsak & Wynn’s upcoming publishing schedule.
• Chainsaws: A History. I’ve always thought of Chainsaws as a homage to the small-town and rural culture that was so much a part of my upbringing, and that still informs so much of how I see the world. Since it came out the book has only been available in hardcover, but Harbour Publishing contacted me this summer about doing a new, paperback edition. I have managed to slip in a few small but (I hope) helpful revisions. The paperback edition of Chainsaws: A History will come out in February 2020.
• Outside the Empire: Improvised Music in Toronto 1960-1985. This is a projected book adaption of my 2017 PhD dissertation. It is also under negotiation with a very supportive academic publisher. But my own teaching (a new vocation for me) and other writing commitments have stopped me from seeing the revisions through to completion. If anyone’s interested, check in again in a few months and I should be able to say something more conclusive! The best way to contact me is via email: lee.davidneil@gmail.com
My apologies to Midnight Games readers who are wondering about a sequel, or sequels. As soon as the book came out in 2015 I had to buckle down and complete a PhD in Literary Studies and Theatre Studies in English at the University of Guelph. Among the program’s teaching and writing duties, I also had to write a dissertation, which is in effect a good-sized book. Once I got all that out of the way, I was lucky enough to get a few jobs sessional teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus. All this has taken time and energy, plus some getting used to. It has taken away time and energy from the task of turning TheMidnight Games from a standalone novel into some kind of continuing saga.
As of this date, however – March 2019 – I’ve completed a complete rough draft of a sequel to The Midnight Games. I’m halfway through revisions and hoping to get it into good enough shape so that it can come out in 2020.
The Midnight Games, of course, offers a kind of alternative present; the exciting and sometimes scary thing about the present day is that it offers us a range of alternative futures. At the end of the novel a new element enters the story– an airship, SORCERER, erupts out of the continuum threshold at the penultimate ceremony and vanishes into the night sky over Hamilton’s north end.
To continue the story of Sorcerer I’ve been doing some serious research into airships. They are an efficient and viable means of transportation, and there’s a company in Winnipeg that’s trying to launch a commercial freight business, using airships to ferry freight to Arctic communities. This month, there was a conference in Toronto promoting the commercial use of airships. I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find any periodicals who were interested. And two days after the conference, I can’t find anything about it in the Toronto papers.
So let’s think more about alternative futures – futures we’re allowed to envision, and futures that some people would rather we not think about!
I’ve just had an enquiry from an art auction house about the Artists’ Jazz Band, and I see that a Gordon Rayner show is coming up at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Rayner was a founder of the long-lived improvising ensemble, made up primarily of abstract expressionist artists, the Artists’ Jazz Band (AJB). It turns out, however, that I never posted on this website that my article on the AJB “’We Can Draw!’: Toronto Improvisation, Abstract Expressionism, and the Artists’ Jazz Band” can be read online as part of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation.
When The Midnight Games came out, John O’Neill asked me to write about the book for his online magazine Black Gate. Then he was kind enough to ask me to write more Black Gate posts – essentially on any subject I wanted, provided it was related to the magazine’s central concerns with imaginative literature.
It took me a couple of years to do this – among other things, I had to write a 300-page dissertation for my PhD – but early this year I finally took up the Black Gate initiative. Having written about the script of the first Quatermass TVserial, I plan to write about the other two 1950s Quatermass scripts as well, and I have a few other ideas on the go.
My latest post just went up, and if you’re interested, here are links to the others:
Looking forward to performing at Silence in Guelph on Friday, May 18 as part of Wolf Lake Tones – A Night of Poetry and Music. I will be playing double bass and cello with poets Madhur Anand, Gary Barwin, and Phil Hall, along with Georgia Urban playing saw – what fun! – as well as singers Megan De Roover, Shannon Kingsbury, Brian Lefresne, Liane Miedema, Sue Smith, and Carey West (all as voices of birds), for an “improvisational exploration of the interconnection between the human and the non-human, between language and the environment.” Next month I perform in Hamilton’s Something Else! Festival June 13-17, with a quartet of my Phantom Hunter collaborators Connor Bennett and Chris Palmer with percussionist Jesse Stewart, as well as with Gary Barwin again, in a trio with bassist/banjoist Victor Vrankulj.
I’ve recently posted the second of my Black Gate blog posts. The subject of this one is the iconic 1950s BBC-TV serial The Quatermass Experiment.
I’m approaching the conclusion of the first draft of the sequel to my 2015 novel The Midnight Games. Just WHEN it will be published, I don’t know – if I can get the draft to Wolsak & Wynn in June, we’ll figure out when it can be scheduled. This will be the second book of a trilogy – it takes our protagonist, Nate Silva, to the west coast where something sinister and alive, brought to Earth in 1946 aboard the Nazi spacecraft Oberth A-7 (shades of The Quatermass Experiment!) waits to escape from the bottom of a BC inlet. The book’s working title is The Medusa Deep.
Thanks to John O’Neill at the online magazine Black Gate:after John read The Midnight Games back in 2015, he asked me if I would be interested in occasionally writing for Black Gate. I agreed, and then didn’t write a darn thing, since I was in the final convulsions of PhD completion.
Now that the PhD is done, I sheepishly asked John if the offer was still open, and he graciously agreed. He’s done a great job of designing my initial post, “Deep Pockets – Abyssal Regions.”
Over the Christmas holidays, as I figured out what I was doing with my Midnight Games sequel, I read books by Rafael Sabatini (who early in the 20th century, wrote popular historical adventures), watched a couple of movies based on Sabatini’s books, and also watched the new King Kong movie Skull Island. I was prepared not to like Skull Island, but I found it set me thinking about the early monster movies I used to see on TV, and the worlds of imagination those films opened up for me – including some of the books that they led me to read.
