Today's Theme: People Hiding In Other People's Houses

Happy accidents play a certain role in writing. While working on Locksmith’s War, I tried to type the words “hiding in the attic” (a phrase which the character in question was texting) and it came out “hiding in the attack.” I realized this was exactly the sort of mistake a phone’s autocorrect would make, so I threw it in and made it part of the story. (That’s why Chapter 6 is called “Hiding in the Attack.”) Something similar happened while I was trying to write a scene in Altered Seasons. This was how I intended it to go:

“Anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

“So you’d tell the Nazis where to find Anne Frank?”

Gus actually stepped back a pace at this point. His eyes went wide.

“Believe it or not, there are some philosophers who’d say you should,” said Pratt. “They’d say it’s your job to tell the truth, and what other people do with that information is their responsibility, not yours. You know why’d they say that? Because they’re really bad philosophers!”

Every single time I rehearsed the second line in my mind, it came out “So you’d tell the Nazis where to find Ayn Rand?” Which doesn’t make any sense, but which would be the perfect verbal screwup for an overbearing man trying to score points in a debate, especially if he were making an effort to intimidate and overawe the other party while at the same time giving the corpse of Immanuel Kant a good kick in the junk. In other news, I’m doing a promotion of Locksmith’s Closet this week, and both it and Locksmith’s Journeys are down to 99¢. Results so far have been less than impressive, but it’s early. The weird thing is that I’m selling as many copies of Journeys as Closet, which is the opposite of what happened during the last promotion, when I was actually trying to sell Journeys and ended up mostly selling Closet. Now maybe I’m bringing the existence of Journeys to the attention of people who read Closet and liked it but didn’t know it had a sequel, but why would you click on an ad for a book you’ve already bought? Finally, here’s another very short Reenie the Giant Christmas story. This one’s called “Venison.” (And I just now realized how bad that sounds. Don’t worry. No reindeer were harmed in the making of this story.)