Whoops: A Cornell Woolrich Project

As many of you know, new speculative fiction has taken a backseat over the last year in favor of more writing training. I’ve been taking online classes through the University of California at Berkeley toward a certificate in writing.

As a few of you know, I just accidentally posted part of a project for my Mystery Fiction class to my old website. So, here is a quick explanation for those of you who were quick enough to click the link before I unpublished it. I will be using my old WordPress.com site as a backbone for my final project. I accidentally sent the first page out on all of my old promotional channels. The website is titled A Shadow in the Dark and explores the decade of work produced by hard-boiled pulp author Cornell Woolrich during the 1940’s. For those of you who are thinking “I should know that name…,” he is sort of the other guy when it comes to hard-boiled detective fiction.

Everyone knows Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but Cornell Woolrich gets forgotten. Should you know him? Absolutely, but probably from Hollywood since many of his books are out of print. Rear Window? That’s Woolrich. Original Sin? Woolrich. No Man of Her Own? Woolrich. His stories became inspiration for episodes of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse, and many others.

My project will focus on Woolrich’s work during the 1940’s, which was his most prolific decade for crime writing. It will be finished by the end of the semester. At that point, I’ll be sure to drop the link on my site. Until then, I’m sorry about the early peek.

On another note, things are still happening. My story “A Dead Man’s Dirt” is slated for Volume 2 of Let Us In from Time Alone Press. It should be out in the next couple of months. I’ll keep you posted.

I start a class on developing the novel in a couple of days. I’m not sure what project I am going to work on during the class. I’ve bounced back and forth between a couple of ideas. Whatever I choose, I am sure it will be fun.

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