by Anthony Dobranski
A year and a half ago I began a project with the Forest Hills Connection, writing an old-style serial mystery set in our neighborhood during WWII. The Scientists and the Spy sits half-finished. I am sorry to have put it aside so long – but I will be starting it up – and finishing it – in Spring/Summer 2017!It’s been a strange year and a half for me. A bad infection just after July 4th led to a weakened heart and a lot of rest.
At the same time, I also made progress professionally – a publisher had read the sample of my first novel, a modern-day fantasy called The Demon in Business Class, and wanted the full manuscript. At the time I had made many changes to the manuscript, some of them half-done, like a literary version of a car up on cinder blocks.
What strength I had went to a short hard month of effort, editing and rebuilding the novel, with the help of my wife’s book club and their comments on the draft.
With that done, I tried to return to my lost world of 1942, writing a chapter that started a new series of events.
Then, my second son was born early, and with difficulty, so my family needed a lot of attention.
Also, I got a book deal for Demon. This has been a dream of mine, but it’s now also a lot of work – I had a crash course in modern book marketing this year. (Ed. note: Anthony is sharing details of that in another piece to come.)
It’s only now, that Demon is available and I am finally making appearances to support its release, that I can see how to return to Scientists. Following Marlene Berlin’s suggestions, I am going to do a shortened version of the original story, beginning in spring 2017 and finishing in summer. This will let me get out some more stories of the fantastic work done by the National Bureau of Standards to turn around America’s fortunes in WWII, and put closure to my hero and heroine’s adventure, but within the honest constraints of my new fiction career.
The Demon in Business Class is available in paper and ebook, online at Amazon.com, and at Politics and Prose and politics-prose.com. Here’s the story of how I came to write a fantasy for a smartphone age.