Imaginary Friends

And I posted it on this very blog back in October of 2011, before I even started writing The Freezer . For some reason, it's better than any of the four (or five?) queries I've written since then. What do you think? (Yes, you.) THE ORIGINAL, PRE-WRITING PITCH, BACK FROM THE DEAD: The world is about to die a violent death at the hands of a rogue planet. The last escape ships have gone, leaving billions of people knowing the exact date and time of their demise. Society is coming apart at the seams. Violence is spreading. Food is disappearing. There's one month left. Thane Ryder turned down a seat on a spaceship to stay with his six-year-old daughter Mandy, and he intends to make her final days happy. He'll stay in his home and refuse protection. He'll feed his enemies and treat them like friends. He'll plant a garden, clean the house, and teach Mandy to ride a bicycle. He won't pick up a gun or show any of the fear gnawing away at his insides. And

Thane Ryder would move mountains to keep his daughter happy, but it wouldn’t lengthen Mandy’s six-year life. A rogue planet is on a collision course with Earth. Only a few thousand people will escape on ships destined for a new world. Thane’s wife Dawn piloted one of the first ships. Thane and Mandy were supposed to follow on a later flight. But the Evacuation Authority disqualifies Mandy, dooming her to die with everyone else. Torn between a wife whose distant vessel has mysteriously lost contact, and the daughter who needs him more than ever, Thane decides to stay. If shielding a child from the troubles of a dying world is difficult, keeping her from seeing his despair is impossible—almost as impossible as their dream of seeing Dawn again. But Mandy knows Thane helped build the big interstellar ship that carried Mommy away. Why shouldn’t he be able to build a much smaller ship for only the two of them? Glad for the distraction, Thane plays along with her plans and builds a sp

It's March 14th. 3.14. Celebrated mostly as another excuse to eat pie. Unlike some novelists , I don't have a degree in math. I did make it through college calculus, though, and I really like numbers in almost any form besides homework. So when I went looking for the number of known digits of Pi, I was astounded and pleased to find that there are 12.1 trillion known digits—and they're all available for download ! Of course, encoded as ASCII text, that would be about 12 terabytes of numbers. I don't have nearly that much disk space. Or time. But the downloads are broken up into nice 100,000,000 digit chunks. I downloaded the first one, used Excel to strip out the line numbers, and used TextEdit to search through it. (Because, while Excel will handle 1,000,000 rows, that's literally all it will handle, and it gets dog slow and uses 2 GBs of RAM.) Of course, I had to make a pie chart. Big surprise, eh? Each of the 10 decimal digits occurs approximatel

I sent you a query this morning. It's labeled "Query 4" in my Scrivener file, so I must be getting better at writing queries. The previous novel I queried got up to "Query 6" before I dared send it out. I don't like this query process, but I appreciate that I'm one of many thousands of aspiring writers, and this is an efficient way for you to sort through our manuscripts. Writing novels and writing queries are very different things. I'm better at writing novels. But the query I sent isn't bad. Now I'd like to say what's not in the query. The Freezer  is my fourth novel. It took me two years to write and revise, far longer than the previous two novels. This one was really difficult, and I'm not quite sure why. But I do know that I put my heart into it. I let my voice come through. I put every writing skill and piece of advice to use at one time or another, including killing my darlings. The result is something multi-layered and m

The Freezer is finally ready to go. A few lucky literary agents have already been queried. While I was working on this manuscript, my family lived through pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird diseases, a mom with a ruptured tendon, surgery to repair it, another surgery to fix the results of the first surgery, a dad going on many more business trips than usual, a drive to Ohio, a construction project, a month of houseguests, and for the last week or two, the baby's been teething. That's my excuse for why it took so long. I've probably forgotten a few things. But our baby is lots of fun, even when he's grumpy. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of being a dad. Now for the next novel... p.s. I didn't write "The End" at the end of The Freezer . It didn't seem appropriate. It rarely does.