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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 The Midnight 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:

Only the Monsters Can Save Us: Claude Debussy Meets Godzilla August 2018

Standing on Zanzibar July 2018

The Quatermass Experiment: The Shakespeare of Sci-Fi Television April 2018

Deep Pockets, Abyssal Regions: Kong ‒ Skull Island (2017) February 2018

The Midnight Games and Why I Wrote Them February 2016

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 20^th 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.

Ok, back to work. Wishing you all a great 2018 –

Don’t you hate people who claim to be hip enough to have websites, but then never update them?

I must raise my hand, guilty as charged, since I haven’t updated my site in nine months.

It has been a busy time, with me balancing my first-ever teaching jobs at Wilfrid Laurier University with finishing my PhD in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. I just now feel that I’m coming up for air.

Meanwhile, thanks to Stuart Broomer for his review of our trio CD, The Phantom Hunter, in The Whole Note. Any musician is lucky to be listened to and written about by this elegant and insightful writer.

On June 15 I successfully defended my dissertation, Outside the Empire: Improvised Music in Toronto 1960-1985. Thanks to my committee: Ajay Heble (supervisor), Daniel Fischlin, and Frédérique Arroyas (who stepped down for the defense, and was replaced by Christine Bold). Also to the outside examiner, Jack Chambers, grad coordinator Gregor Campbell, and David Prentice and Maureen Cochrane, who showed up to offer moral support. I believe that SETS director Ann Wilson, whose office is next to the examining room, paid us a great compliment when she remarked that she had never heard so much laughter coming out of that room during a defense.

The PhD process has been long: I entered the program in September 2011. It has been an intense period: besides university work, I published my first novel (Commander Zero, 2012), as well as the third edition of The Battle of the Five Spot (Wolsak & Wynn 2014), and The Midnight Games (Poplar Press, 2015).

This summer, I am doing some playing with Chris Palmer, and waiting for Connor Bennett to get back from Ottawa so we can reconvene the trio. I am talking to a publisher about a book adaptation of my dissertation. And I am working, whenever I can, on a sequel to The Midnight Games – motivated, mostly, by the readers of all ages who told me they enjoyed that book. Thanks!

Although I need to focus on finishing a dissertation, I have had more arts activity than I deserve. Friday December 16 at 8 pm, Connor Bennett saxophones, Chris Palmer guitar and I are launching our CD “The Phantom Hunter” at the Gift Shop Gallery on Rebecca Street in Hamilton.

Meanwhile, I am so pleased to have won the Hamilton Arts Council’s Kerry Schooley Award, presented to the author who “best captures the spirit of Hamilton,” for The Midnight Games. Gary Barwin was kind enough to say that, now having been in academia for a few years, I was starting to sound “professorial.” At least, I think he was being kind. I certainly think I look professorial!

October 25, 2016 – 

An email from New York City reminds me that the written word never stops working. David Mulkins writes from the Bowery: “Just had wonderful conversation with Charles Mingus’ son, Charles Mingus III, who contacted me to compliment your Windows on the Bowery poster on the Five Spot.”

Mr. Mingus was responding to the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors’ show “Windows on the Bowery,” 64 window placards celebrating the Lower Manhattan neighbourhood’s many contributions to American history & culture. I wrote the texts for two of the placards. Mounted at the Bowery’s Cooper Union’s Foundation Building and inside the Bowery branch of the HSBC Bank, the placards can also be seen at each of the celebrated historic sites. The 325 Bowery placard (#54 on map) celebrates the Tin Palace jazz club that operated there in the 1970s, and at 5 Cooper Square (#59) can be seen “The Hippest Place on Earth: Five Spot Jazz Club,” the original site of the club which from the 1950s until the 1970s presented Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Billie Holiday, Ornette Coleman and many others.

Charles Mingus III with the Five Spot Café poster, text by David Neil Lee. Photo by Alfonso Iandiorio.

Thank you Charles, and David Mulkins. Maybe there is some point to writing books! Meanwhile, I am marking papers for my fall TA position, and waiting to hear back from my committee about the first draft of my dissertation. Will they think it’s okay, with a few tweaks … or will it be back to the drawing board!

Hope you are all having a productive autumn ….

June 22, 2016 I get to speak at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Pender Harbour Reading Centre. We lived in the Harbour from 1991 to 2002, and the reading centre was the first library our boys ever went to; it’s an invaluable, volunteer run resource for this rural community. The reading will be at 4:00 pm at our former neighbour Chrys Sample’s Francis Point B&B.

Friday, June 24 I will be at the People’s Coop Bookstore in Vancouver, reading with a poet I have long admired, Tom Wayman.

Then I hope to hear some of the Vancouver jazz festival before heading to Kelowna for a signing Saturday, July 2 at Mosaic Books, 1-4 pm. Then I stop at Winnipeg for a July 7 reading with Matt Cahill and others at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Before I leave for the coast I get to play in this year’s Something Else! Festival in Hamilton. Thanks to Cem Zafir for moving to Hamilton and making all this possible!

Not only did John O’Neill at Black Gate Magazine write a generous review of The Midnight Games, he invited me to write a Black Gate blog post about it.

OK, back to working on my dissertation on Toronto Improvised Music for the School of English & Theatre Studies at U of Guelph  ….