Sometime Lofty Towers
As some of you know, I am back at work on this novel, and it’s progressing steadily, I’m happy to say. It’s sword-and-sorcery, or adventure-fantasy, although I prefer to think of it is a novel, pure and simple, set in that genre. My hope is to finish the manuscript during the winter. I’m about 18,000 words into it.
Sleep of Time
I finished this play at the end of 2004. Friends of mine who know the theater think well of it. I have begun novelizing it and that is probably the route to go because writing novels is something I am familiar with. The story is based on the idea of group reincarnation. (If anyone out there is interested in staging it, you’re looking at three quite minimal sets and a cast of about six or seven people, with some doubling, and some players providing only their voices).
Coven House
This long short story I originally wrote in 1980; the revision from a couple of years ago is still slated to appear in Strange Tales. I’d long wanted to write a good old-fashioned haunted house/ghost story, and this was my attempt. It was not, however, very good. It sat until earlier this year when a publisher expressed interest in looking at it. I’ve revised it, much to the story’s improvement. That led to the idea of reworking it as a play. Keith Huff, a friend and also a writer-in-residence at Chicago Dramatists, is took the lead in his and my collaboration on the stage version, which had a reading at Chicago Dramatists on Halloween 2006.
Magicians
The seemingly endless, tangled history of the David Trevisan stories goes on and on. Originally I wrote Magicians as a screenplay in 1986, after years of trying to get a workable novel manuscript out of the idea of a young man, a divinity student, learning black magic to fight modern-day sorcerers. That first screenplay was read by some producers but, as with nearly all screenplays, advanced no further.
I therefore used that script as the basis for a novel, writing the story in a somewhat experimental style. That novel, too, I called Magicians; it was retitled The Fair Rules of Evil when Avon published it in 1989.
A sequel (The Eyes of Night) came out in 1991, but the pitch for a third novel in what I hoped would be a continuing series was turned down.
There things sat until I moved to Chicago. Here, Joe Bonadonna, a friend who at that time was on the board of the Chicago Screenwriters Network, suggested incorporating elements of both novels into a new screenplay. This we did, collaborating on it. And, of course, we called that new screenplay Magicians. This version placed highly in a West Coast competition and was regarded favorably by producers who read it, but that is where things remain.
These characters make for a good read, though, so maybe I’ll craft another novel one day.