My small town protest

 
    I live in Ashland, Ky, which is a medium sized city in Kentucky (pop: 21,154) but surrounded by smaller towns like Russell (pop: 4000). Ours is a deep Red state but people who hate tyranny and the abuses of power going on in our country do exists. I'm a crazy leftist so I could be here all day saying what I hate about Trump but let's say I dislike deportations without trial to countries where we're paying to hold people indefinitely, the Medicaid cuts to pay for rich tax cuts, the cuts to foreign aid, and those damn tariffs.

    The "No Kings" protest is one of those things that are trying to show America that Donald J. Trump is someone who does not have a mandate to do the things he does. Only together all at once can you make a loud enough noise to actually make a difference. The fact it would happen on his birthday during his expensive parade misusing money that could be used to help Americans during these times of cuts was especially symbolic.

    Well the story begins with the fact that I wanted to attend this protest because, well, if I didn't attend this protest then any political beliefs I profess are just so much talk. You can't really claim to be an anarchist or progressive if all you do is talk smack on the internet. That's not activism, that's just being a troll. Everyone can complain on the internet but it takes the absolute BARE MINIMUM of effort to show up to a protest.

    I had multiple choices of places to go for my protest and considered Huntington because it was where I went to college. It would be a thirty or forty minute, which is nothing except for the fact that I am terrified of highways. Much to my surprise, though, there was one that was in my own city (okay, Russell) and I believed that I could do that one and if no one was there then I would go to the one in Huntington. I was annoyed it wasn't at my college, though, I shouldn't have been surprised since that isn't the kind of liberal activist school that loves progress but instead money.

    Unfortunately, the internet site that said where it was going to happen was rather frustrating in its directions and just said "outside the IHOP." I knew where this was because, again, I was going to the local one but it was weird they didn't say something more concrete. Still, I showed up and hoped there would be a modest crowd.

    Aiding me in this agenda was my nieces, all three of them from my wife's side (I have a niece from my late brother as well but she lives in Colorado). I have very little craft skill so they took the poster board I bought and made some very good signs. Notably, I wanted "NO KINGS, NO MASTERS" and "TRUMP IS A VILLAIN" for simplicity. They went a little further with their own that they wrote on the back including, "TRUMP IS A RA_IST" that isn't really my bag. They couldn't attend because their mother would kill them and also had made plans that couldn't be rescheduled due to not knowing about the protest.

    There was no one, which was not a good sign. Still, I decided to stay and hoped someone would show up. The stated protest time for this was only two hours and the worst I could do was simply display my niece's homemade sign for the good folk there to gawk at. I also debated going to Huntington anyway for what I hoped would be a larger gathering.

    One thing I did get as a benefit, though, was that I got a sense of how other Kentuckians who weren't as terminally online as myself were feeling about Trump. In this case, they had decided to join the protest because while they'd never been fond of Trump, it was the fact he was going after migrant workers they knew and businesses that employed them. The cruelty and pettiness of the administration was straight in their faces. Still, seeing only the three of us show up was something deeply deflating and they were debating going over into Ohio to another larger city (Ironton, population: 10,104). Given these numbers, you probably think that Appalachia is inhabited like Fallout's America with only a general store and some burnt out building frames. You'd be half-right.

    At this time in other cities, there were crowds of eighty thousand or more so I wondered if it was really worth it but saw, to my surprise, another couple arrive to join my one-man protest. They were from a neighboring church to mine and disappointed in the crowd side just like mine. We were a bit early but didn't have much faith things would change. 

    They did, though!

    While we were waiting for nothing to happen, much to our surprise, we started to hear a chant and discovered that the protest was going on! We just were at the IHOP itself and it was at the roadside where all the cars were passing. We were not alone! There were actually hundreds of people who had showed up that we couldn't see because we'd come in through the other side of the IHOP and the parking lot was full!

    An eccentric collection of people were present including a lady dressed as a Handmaid with the white bonnet and red dress. There was rain but the nice couple traded an umbrella for one of my signs. A lot of cars honked their horns in support and some shouted obscenities at us. In the end, it was a good experience. I was a part of something greater and I'm glad to have done something, however small.

New Years Resolutions 2025

Some mistakes were made for 2024 in terms of trying new editors, expanding some projects while not paying attention to others, and also attempting to do some licensed fiction deals that didn't pan out. However, 2025 is a brand new year and I have a lot of plans to make it up to my fans. Among these will be the audiobooks for MOON CITY VICE, BRIGHT EYES, SPACE ACADEMY VAGRANTS, and TALES OF CAPES AND COWLS.

I also will be returning to my classic series with the fourth and final Cthulhu Armageddon novel, CTHULHU'S CANYON, and the revival of the Supervillainy Saga with THE RISE OF SUPERVILLAINY. I also hope to maybe do a couple of United States of Monsters novels that will harvest ideas that fell through for my licensed fiction including a brand new Peter Stone novel.

Do I regret all of my choices for 2024? No, not in the slightest. I got a lot of valuable information out of my experiments with new genres and I think the LORDS OF DRAGON KEEP trilogy told me a lot about how the LitRPG genre worked. I also noted that moving to Kindle Unlimited wasn't a bad idea for my older series.

Perhaps the best decision of 2024 was combining my urban fantasy books into the United States of Monsters books and my science fiction books into Futurepunk. Basically, I feel like they're now much more readily available and fans can now appreciate how intertwined a lot of my writing was from the very beginning.

Reviewing this year has been hectic and I fell behind several times due to the fact I wrote 2 1/2 novels that wiill never see the light of day for licensed properties that rejected them. I wish I'd devoted more time to it because I absolutely love BEFORE WE GO BLOG, GRIMDARK MAGAZINE, and EPIC INDIE as places that have done their best to promote other authors.

I also never would have gotten through this year without the help of such amazing friends as Eric Malikyte, David Niall Wilson, David Hambling, David Dodd, Hunter Blain, Matthew Davenport, Steven Ott, Susanna Sharp-Schwacke, Frank Martin, Gary Noon, Jenn Caswell, Susan Boss, Noah Chinn, Crysta Claire, Bobby Dee, Sarah Mussett Arnette, Antonio Marchena-Rodlen, Melissa Watt Hayden, Jeff Jones, Gary Noon, Allan Batchelder, and so many others. My dear wife Kat gets elevated above them all. You are all fantastic.

I hope I can pay you all back for your aid.

My New Years resolution is to keep doing what I love and to make the stories I'd want to read.

My reaction to the reign of President Omega

Weirdly, I feel like singing the theme from Star Trek: Enterprise. No, seriously.

It's been a long road
Getting from there to here
It's been a long time
But my time is finally near

I will see my dream come alive at last
I will touch the sky
And they're not gonna hold me down no more
No they're not gonna change my mind
No they're not gonna hold me down

Cause I've got faith of the heart
I'm going where my heart will take me
I've got faith to believe
I can do anything
I've got strength of the soul
And no one's gonna bend or break me
I can reach any star
I've got faith
I've got faith
Faith of the heart

    The election of Donald Trump was something I was not necessarily overly worried about. I voted against him after voting for Bernie then Hillary but I figured that he was mostly a gross jerkass but wouldn't be able to do much. I underestimated not just what he'd do in office but also the depths of what the man had done in the past. Mafia ties, money laundering for dictators, cheating workers, rape allegations, and other serious crimes. The media had treated Donald J. Trump as a buffoon and he should have been treated as a criminal.

    It was even stranger because both my parents reversed longstanding opinions of the man in order to vote for him. I mean personal opinions of the man that just weirded me the hell out. My father had recommended against letting Donald Trump build a golf course in Lexington, Ky due to his history of cheating his partners. My mother was a friend of Marla Maples and knew of the domestic abuse as well as cruelty the man displayed to his closest family. In that way, maybe I too was suffering amnesia because I should have been scared from the beginning. Now I'm left knowing that one of the last things my father ever did while alive was voted for that man.

One of the books that helped me get through the crisis.

    Donald J. Trump immediately started doing things that not only offended me from a moral standpoint but endangered the people that I cared about in my real life. My wife is disabled with fibromyalgia and needed the help of the ACA in order to make sure that she wasn't rendered destitute for treatment. Twice she's had to have serious surgery for broken legs that didn't recover remotely as well as they should have. Getting insurance for these and other preexisting conditions was impossible without government aid.

    It wasn't just my wife that his hostility to the ACA threatened either as I knew other friends and loved ones who couldn't survive without it. I'd been blessed growing up with decent health care and insurance but I knew lots of other people who simply could not afford it. That was in addition to Donald's attack on the rights of trans Americans and other highly vulnerable people. The fact so many evangelicals rallied around him as he stood for nothing but attacking immigrants, Muslims, LGBT, and others made me sick. It was not the Christianity I'd been raised to believe in and seemed like a mass insanity. Yet, none of the people I knew seemed to care about anything he did until he was putting children in cages. Even then, it was often blamed on Obama who didn't have a blanket separation policy.

    If you think I'm exaggerating, it gets weirder because I was there on 4chan when Qanon was created. I had mostly left that site since I was always more interested in gaming than racism but I knew when people started the internet game about "Q." For those unfamiliar with the particulars, he was a fake spy that would give puzzles like the fucking Riddler that people would decipher while indicating Donald Trump was waging a secret war against the pedophile Illuminati. It's fake, obviously, and was always meant to obviously be fake. It's about as believable as the Slenderman and every bit as obvious. Yet, increasingly, people actually came to believe in the nonsense. I'm talking about millions of people who were terrified of internet fanfiction.

I recommend reading this article if you want to know how people monetized it too. 

    I did my best to ignore the increasing craziness of the country but it influenced both my mental health as well as my writing. Gary in the Supervillainy Saga gradually moved from being my celebration of Spider-Man, Batman, and the Dresden Files to being something more overtly political. He became an anarchist and vent for a lot of my distaste for how the country was going. The United States of Monsters dealt strongly with the racism and poverty as well as general hostility the world seemed to feel. Even Agent G, which is about as cyborg assassin, suddenly became about corporate manipulation of the masses via scapegoats. 

"It's not real! It's a message board game!"

    The issue was doubly frustrating because I live in Kentucky, where it honestly feels like any vote I make is going to be utterly worthless since it is the state of Mitch McConnell. That proved to not be the case when we kicked out Governor Bevin, a man who literally stole money from teacher's pensions and tried to exacerbate the opioid crisis for financial gain. He also pardoned a few pedophiles and murderers on the way out. Mitch McConnell obstructed every bit of legislation that came out of the Blue Wave of 2018 while also protected Trump from the consequences of his actions. I never thought Trump would be removed via impeachment but I'd hoped it would wake up people to just what a bad dude he was.

    I sought refuge in media to try to help things make more sense. Really, not nearly enough of it seemed angry about what was going on. I became a fan of Trevor Noah and John Oliver. I started watching The Good Fight on CBS All Access, which was the only show that seemed furious about the things happening around us. I also enjoyed Remember Bowling Green by David Niall Wilson and Patricia Macomber. That's kind of a beautiful Discworld/Doctor Who-esque story that expressed just a bit of the frustration I was feeling. I wished it had a sequel and recommend people pick it up. You can check it out here if it intrigues you.

    The sheer bizarrity was the more depressed and uncertain I felt about my future, the more Donald's popularity seemed to go up. There were plenty of people who went from supporting Donald to thinking of him in messianic terms that confused the hell out of me. This included some people actually faking miracles (a greater blasphemy I can't think of) in order to make Donald Trump look better. All of this happened before the coronavirus pandemic too.

    I actually didn't expect to hold the coronavirus pandemic against the President. After all, a plague is something you can only prepare for, not prevent. Yet, the bizarre and disturbing stories coming out of the White House shook me to the core. Insane tales of stealing supplies from Blue states for Red states, bidding wars, throwing out pandemic plans, hostility to testing, and seemingly irritated with attempts to actually fight it. I caught the coronavirus in March and suffered through it but what struck me as insane was how easy this would have been to contain with the right measures or at least reduce the worst effects of.

    I never hated the people who voted for Donald. Mind you, it took reading Mary Trump's book for my mother to change her opinion on him despite voting for Obama in the previous election. However, it felt like they were living in a separate reality from the rest of us. He didn't seem dangerous to them and often seemed just quirky rather than scary. He was an exaggerated jerkass billionaire game show host and Pizza Hut guy versus the guy who used to have goons kick out people from their homes so he could tear them down like Daredevil's Kingpin (and that's the legal stuff). Not the guy who admitted, under oath, that he robbed his own children's and veteran's charities to fund his campaign. We were on two different worlds (seperate ways--Journey).

    The election itself was one that I was terrified about. I hadn't wanted to vote for Biden. I'd supported Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, and even Harris over Biden. Yet, you go to war with the army you had. I was hoping for a Blue Wave but it ended up being more a splash. For 70 million Americans, everything that happened wasn't a reason to kick out Donald J. Trump. I couldn't sleep or eat much during the entirety of the four days of the election. I checked for updates constantly and was terrified the Supreme Court would side with him in throwing out mail-in ballots. Yet, now, the whole thing is apparently over. Donald's allies abandoned him and this whole nightmare ends with not a bang but a whimper.

    Good.

Well this week has been a real crapfest part II (6/12/2020)

Month #1
Month #2
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 1
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 2

An update on my housing situation:

9:00 am: I am summoned back to my house to hear that my plumbers need an additional day of work with the excavator to remove all of the broken piping underneath. This will double the costs.

11:00 am: They admit that they finally got contacted by the gas people that, thankfully, there is no gas main.

11:30 am: They find a gas main. Apparently it's not on the records.

1:30 pm: The damage turns out to be the holy tree has not only destroyed the sewer pipe but our neighbors sewer pipe they helpfully fix (for free apparently) as well as our water main, which is probably poisoned. It's just we didn't notice because we drink bottled water. They manage to replace all of that.

2:00 pm: Everything is finally fixed. But the entire yard is destroyed and the tree has to be completely torn down. The Lorax is sad. Oh and can we pay immediately our $8,000 bill?

2:30 pm: I've been trying to get in touch with my insurance people the entire week so I drive to them and find out their office is shut down. They are now all working at home and haven't left a forwarding number.

3:00 pm: I have to go to my mom for help in order t contact the insurance people, which is very embarrassing and requires listening to a lot of people before she finally puts me in touch with the people I need to do. I must promise to visit more.

4:00 pm: I make numerous trips to bring back stuff to the house so it'll be an easy leave of the hotel tomorrow. Also doing a bunch of laundry at my mothers because I can't exactly use the basement.
Then I remember I have ANOTHER contractor coming to visit me at 5:30.

5:00: The contractor arrives early and checks out my bathroom above the sewage. In a completely unrelated problem, the toilet is on rotted wood and will have to have the base replaced. Notably, I had the bathroom repaired earlier this month and they said this was a problem but I'd tried to take the cheap way out--shame on me.

6:30: I come home and Kat reminds me I was supposed to get dinner. I go out again.

8:30: Somehow it ends up taking two hours. Day over.

   

    Needless to say, this is a pill of a week. I'm glad that the sewer system is fixed in my house but that doesn't actually help with the bathroom as its rotted support means that the fixing is not nearly over yet. Ironically, virtually every single problem in my house stems from the downstairs bathroom. I've mentally decided that it must have a Moaning Myrtle-esque ghost inside it.

    Ugh, even Harry Potter has been ruined by this week. I actually wrote Joan Rowling to say she needs to really re-examine the kind of message she's sending to her readers. I doubt she'll read me as I'm (measured by Twitter followers), .03% as famous as she is. However, that still doesn't mean its not disappointing.

    As for the rest of the past couple of weeks events, it's more than I can really take in. I don't live that far from Louisville and the death of Breonna Taylor hits closer to home than George Floyd's. However, my wife regularly visited Minneapolis to hang out with her favorite author, Pam Godwin. So she's been glued to the set, watching the city she dreamed of moving to descend into chaos. A couple of years ago, a white supremacist killed an elderly black couple in a Kroger I visited before (and only did that because the church he planned to attack was locked).

    Given the subject of these protests are police brutality, you'd think that final bit wouldn't be relevant but it is as there's a lot more going on than just the police's response to minorities. Much of the South's Civil War memorabilia (I refuse to call them monuments) has been vandalized and I'm pleased to see that. My ancestors were Confederates and they were assholes for fighting that cause. Several times in my life, I've considered going down to Stone Mountain to clean off the graffiti someone put up on the mountain of Confederate faces.

    Despite my Gary-esque political reactionary nature, for me, the best way to deal with this would be to create a national bureau of policing. It would provide guidelines for police handling of suspects, investigate police brutality, and also keep a registry of the past behavior of officers. Sadly, under the current President, that's not going to happen. Defund the police is a pretty good slogan but I have a different perspective on them than perhaps other parts of the country.

    In Appalachia, the vast majority of "ethnic" crime is white supremacy based. We have Neo-Nazis, Hell's Angels, white militias, and KKK-derivatives doing the vast majority of organized crime. Justified got some complaints for depicting our murderous meth-dealers as racists but it's about the only show on television that shows it like it is. The police still deal with them, though, and they wouldn't go away without them. As I said to someone on the forum, "Whenever I talk about Nazis in the modern day, people assume I'm being hyperbolic. No, I mean the swastika tattooed psychopaths who will kill you if you don't fit their ideology. There's a dozen of them in every city in my state and some closer to low hundreds."

    The fact so many people are willing to risk infection in this time of plague goes to show how deep the emotions are running (and justifiably so). I really don't know how we're going to reach November but I hope that it will result in the voting out of both Donald J. Trump as well as Mitch McConnell. I would have preferred Charles Booker of Louisville to be Kentucky's Democratic Senatorial candidate but I'll settle for Amy McGrath. Either way, whatever pushes out the Evil Turtle. As for the Cheeto? Well, I think he's done no matter what. If he can lose my mother's vote as a die hard seventy-year-old Republican, he doesn't have a chance with the rest of the nation.

    Good luck everyone, stay safe.

Well this week has been a real crapfest... (6/8/2020)

Month #1
Month #2
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 1
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 2

     While the rest of the world suffers much worse problems, I feel like I'll just share my home improvement ones. WARNING - this will contain gross subject matter, bodily waste, and grievous harm to a household.

    I was made aware of our problem when I went downstairs this Friday and found that our entire basement was flooded with blue fluid. There was also an odd smell to the place. That should have been my first clue our situation was utterly screwed. However, I tried to fix the flooded drain and got no effect as the smell grew worse as well as the flooding increased to become ankle deep. My suspicion was the blue fluid is our toilet water from the use of an antiseptic bar in the back.

    Well I called the plumbers (not our usual people because they were closed) and they said they could come at nine in the morning. The problem of our flooding was doubly problematic because a lot of clothes were soaked as the basement is our laundry room and I couldn't get them all into baskets before it happened. I am usually a person who stays up until 4-5 and then sleeps until noon since I work at nights on my writing.'

    So, I tried to go to bed early and in the end didn't get to sleep except for an hour, so nervous about missing the plumber and having the disgusting ooze down below. The plumbers did arrive and confirmed that our toilet was leaking all of its flushed contents into the basement. Our pipes were devastated by roots and will need the entire front yard ripped up to have them replaced. Oh and the pipes were also massively full of waste as well. So this is a huge expense and will take multiple days to do.

    Mind you, it also took all day to even reach all of these conclusions so about 3:00 pm I was in a state of half-mad lunacy as I couldn't sleep during all of this as I was required to supervise every little detail with these people. I appreciated the fact that they wanted to know what they were doing was approved by the owners but I wasn't in the best headspace that.

    Now it's a decision to whether or not I should use the house insurance to pay for all this or out of pocket. Anyway, they were certain that it was going to be something they could resolve by Saturday at 10:00 am so I spent a second night staying up the entirety of the evening in terror of missing them. So when it hit 11:00 am, I started to wonder if anything was wrong.

    My wife had made the initial phone call to the new people (I have yet to learn their names) and didn't know which number on her phone was theirs. It didn't help that I hadn't caught their name in my two days of sleep-deprived lunacy. So I eventually cycled through them until we found them. It turned out that they actually weren't coming due to the fact the city had to approve their actions as well as map to our sewer line. No, they would be coming on Tuesday at 9:00 in the morning so I had yet another day of sleeplessness to deal with.


    You can wonder if this would be a problem as we still would have to use the bathroom in the meantime. The plumbers reassured us this would not be a problem and that our basement would not refill with leaks while they waited for permission to fix the pipes. I could tell even when they told me this that they were anything but certain about this. It was also problematic in the fact that all of the restaurants nearby are closed so I couldn't use their restrooms. Also, my wife is disabled so it wasn't like she was going to go anywhere else. Yeah.

    The answer to this unfortunate question is that, yes, the basement started to fill once more with unfortunate smells as well as toilet paper. Lovely. It gets even better that our toilet is also loose and there is a sinking in the tiles. I'm going to contact a general contractor to see if its possible there's water damage [there is] and that our entire bathroom may have to be ripped up [it will be]. Thankfully, at least we have insurance. Somehow, though, I suspect this problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Thank goodness everyone else is having a good time this week!

    Oh, right.

My coronavirus story so far part 2 (4/25/20)

Month #1
Month #2
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 1
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 2
Hey folks,

    I thought I would give yet another update on my self in our second month of lockdown as April reaches its conclusion. While I always knew, intellectually, that this was going to be a marathon rather than a sprint--the days are starting to wear down on me. It's kind of funny that I was always someone who stuck at home and didn't go out much but still manages to feel like its pressing in on us. My wife is agoraphobic with social anxiety so this was something I thought she would be able to handle well but she's terrified every time I go outside. Basically, she thinks I'll end up attracting something terrible while trying to handle the daily essentials.

My quarantine pen.

     Speaking of which, "essential workers" is something that really puts things into perspective. As much as I admire healthcare workers during this horrible crisis, I also note that it's the clerks and grocery store clerks as well as the truck drivers who are keeping people alive during all this. They are definitely essential because none of us are living on self-sufficient farms these days. Aside from doomsday preppers and hardcore survivalists, I don't think anyone can avoid going out for months at a time to restock.

    I actually did try to stock up on various supplies left and right to make sure we'd be fine for a month or so. Yeah, that was a big failure. I think I actually went out more than I usually did because no sooner did I think we were stocked up then we ran out of something else "essential." It doesn't help that Amazon and Post Office shipping has slowed down to a crawl. I ordered some masks on April 7th and am still waiting for those. A toilet paper order we placed also got cancelled after waiting a month (thankfully, that shortage didn't turn out to be nearly as bad as perceived).

    But yes, I do think essential workers are heroes. They're the boots on the ground that are keeping us alive during this crisis. However, they didn't volunteer to be heroes and a lot of them are working the job because they're terrified of losing their house or apartment during all this. I've always been as economically Left-leaning as you can be in a house that raised me seriously with the belief the communists were going to kill us all (and it is a stupid-stupid evil system). To me, this really does illustrate we need a lot more rather than less social protections. Even if you're a die hard fiscal conservative, you should believe now is that "one in a million time" to cast aside those beliefs for the duration of the emergency.

They aren't even medical masks.

    Still, it is crazy how zigzagged people are taking it in my state. In the local Krogers, we have everyone wearing masks and gloves while you have to go in a line to take one of their sprayed down carts. However, the Big Lots next door has none of that, just some tape on the ground to tell you where to move. One day I went to Krogers and everyone was wearing a mask (I had a t-shirt around my face) with it looking like an Umbrella Corporation laboratory. Another day, everyone was going about their business as normal.

    The toilet paper shortage has at least ebbed. It's got plenty of people price gouging on it online but if you go to a few stores, you're bound to find enough rolls to get you through. My wife bought a $60 set last month and almost did it again before I brought home two packages of Ultra Gentle Charmin to satisfy her fears. Hand sanitizer is still impossible to find in any stores I visit but hopefully that will change as well. It's the paradox really. Toilet paper is rare because people are hoarding and people hoard because toilet paper is rare.

    Weirdly, I've been less concerned about politics than I was before this crisis. For me, I've just sort of dismissed the Federal government throughout all this. Instead, I've been constantly checking updates on the science of everything. I've been hoping and praying that a successful treatment would come out whether it was Trump's hydroxychloroquine [nope], remdesivir [probably not], or antigen-filled plasma [jury's still out]. The disappointments there have been heartbreaking because we can't stay closed until a vaccine and the numbers of deaths just keep going up.

    Job-wise, I'm still okay because writing hasn't stopped being a thing I can do. I've released THE FALL OF THE HOUSE which is the end of my Red Room trilogy and a prequel to the United States of Monsters books. I also finished my PSYCHO KILLERS IN LOVE book that I think people will love. It might also end up in stores too. Currently, I'm plotting out THE HORROR OF SUPERVILLAINY and working with Michael Suttkus on the second Morgan Detective Agency book, BRIGHTEYES. I actually wonder if I should put the coronavirus in the books that take place in 2020 but am unsure how I'd even manage to deal with such an issue.

    Writing turns out to be actually pretty hard when you're under self-quarantine because your mind is perpetually distracted from anything not coronavirus related. I've also been listening to the reports of people less fortunate than me. Yesterday, I had to help an old woman who'd had her social security check stolen get shelter for a week. A good friend of mine is in quarantine away from his family because of geo-political bullshit. Other friends are putting up their entire family because they lost their jobs. My mom is also deluging me every day because she's bored out of her skull without church to go to. I admit, I feel a bit guilty trying to play through the entire Yakuza series. 

    So, another day goes by as I hope for this nightmare to end. I've got it much better than people who have lost loved ones and family to this. I also have it better than those who are terrified of where their next meal is coming from. Certainly, I'm riding out this disaster better than some. I may even have already survived the coronavirus since my "unidentified respiratory infection" in February turns out to have been something that could have well been coronavirus now that they've determined it entered the country much earlier. Still, it's a miserable situation and I feel like it will get worse before it gets better.

My coronavirus story so far part 1 (3/19/20)

Month #1
Month #2
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 1
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 2
Hey folks,

    I thought I'd give an insight into what's going on in my life while things are happening across the world. I'm self-isolating here in Ashland, Ky, which isn't that much different from the rest of my life since I work at home. On the other hand, my family wasn't too well-prepared for the corona apocalypse so we were out of canned goods, food in the freezer, and essentials that would potentially come in handy with the mass shut-down ordered by Governor Steve Beshear.

    So, it became something of a odyssey going across town and trying to do shopping in order to find things that people were hoarding. Toilet paper was obviously a thing, so were paper towels, disinfecting wipes, and so on. But even regular food was a thing that we were worried about. In the end, I ended up stocking up as much as I could without figuring I was looking like a lunatic.

    It may have taken three or four stores but it seemed worth it. My wife also ordered about 60 rolls of toilet paper but that would take a month to get here from Amazon. Amusingly, I ended up giving away most of what I acquired to my 70-year-old mother who, of course, can't go shopping for any of that.

    There's a bit of a nagging feeling about the virus that I should also share. I actually caught a "flu-like bug" at the start of the year that didn't respond to any treatment, left me with a horrible cough, kept me bedridden, and was tested as definitely NOT the flu. I ended up with it for more than a month before getting over it.

    In the back of my mind, I kind of wonder if I actually had the corona-virus and just never realized it. The likelihood of it traveling all the way from China to Kentucky before it was in the news is small but its in the back of my head. I find it helps to make me think I'm through this but doesn't leave me any less worried about the after effects.

     It's hard to explain just how empty and desolate Ashland feels with the corona virus. My favorite restaurants are buffets (usually Chinese buffets) and they've been all shut down. Some of them, possibly all of them, won't be reopening because you can't stay closed for months and we don't know how long this state of emergency will last. The biggest concern I have isn't the virus itself but the long term effects it will have on people who can't afford to have even a single paycheck delayed, let alone cancelled.

     Pretending this is like a vacation is something that can only go so far but it's something that I'm trying to do in order to work my way through the problem as best I can. I'm planning on catching up on all of the horror movies I've been meaning to watch over the years: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), Sleepaway Camp (1985), Hellraiser (1987), and Phantasm (1979) so far. I've also re-watched Re-Animator and Friday the 13th Part IV (I had to on Friday the 13th). Ordering the Shudder network has helped a bit and I'm considering also renewing my subscription to DC Universe. "Stream out the Apocalypse" might be a hashtag I should put on Twitter.

    I'm luckier than a lot of people because I'm relatively healthy, just overweight, and that I don't have to worry too hard about financial matters for at least a somewhat reasonable period. Even then, I contacted my stockbroker and he was someone who stated that no one should be investing anything right now. The damage done to people's retirement plans and ability to care for themselves when they can't work from the home like me.

    I'm writing three novels simultaneously right now with Psycho Killers in Love, The Horror of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #7), and A Nightmare on Elk Street. I feel like that I have to address the plague in the books that take place in 2020 but that could severely disrupt the stories. Thankfully, Psycho Killers In Love takes place in 2000 back before the coronapocalypse.

    It's about 12-18 months until there's a vaccine and we don't have enough tests to begin to start isolating where the packets of corona virus outbreaks. Social distancing is really because we have to isolate everyone because we don't know who has it or not. On the plus side, there's been some successful treatments of the virus with Bayer-produced ebola treatments. Really, no one wanted to know ebola treatments are probably the best thing for this but it's good to hear we actually do have treatments--just it's unlikely to be available to people for months as well. Time is the enemy.

    In any case, that's what's currently going on with my life and my handling of the crisis. I don't know when the emergency measures by the governor are going to be lifted. I don't know if the American economy can survive this or individuals in it. But I'm trying to keep a brave face for my family and stay strong for my loved ones. Besides, again, I have a bunch of writing time and time to watch horror movies I've missed out on. Bright side.

Cute but Fun Story

Waking up this morning at 7:30 due to the fact it could be anywhere from 8 AM to 12PM when I would receive my couch and chair, they arrived at the shockingly appropriate time of 9:00 AM with my chair.

"Awesome, where's my couch?"

"What couch?"

You would think this would be the punchline for the joke but we're still in set up mode as the delivery men were mostly worried I'd blame them but I wasn't. So I went to call Big Sandy about it but they don't open to 10:00. However, they made some calls and my wife made some calls and we got answers.

Two in fact.

1. It came in late. [not true] So it didn't get put on. [Again, lies]

2. It is a mix-up at the warehouse and they should be blamed.

[Not true]. They will call us back immediately after it's fixed. [Not true]

Waiting until 12:00 PM with my wife having her hair appointment, I went down to get myself some Chinese food and noted that it is in the same block as the Big Sandy Outlet. So I went inside there

."Hey, where's my couch?"

"What couch?"

Still not the punchline.

It turns out that the Big Sandy Outlet was never called by the warehouse [neither was the warehouse] and were mortified that their customer didn't get their couch because, at the end of the day, they actually would like people to keep buying from them.

They asked me to sit down (in a big comfy chair - thankfully, they had a lot of those) and went to investigate the couch I didn't get. It was noticeably about 10 feet away from the floor model of the couch that was identical to the one I bought and wanted for my living room.

They were very polite before admitting the person who my wife had contacted and who had sold me the couch and said they would get right back to my wife and me--had gone home for the day.I was starting to get irritated at this point.But after many many minutes, they admitted that he'd filed the paperwork wrong and not actually ordered the couch or written down that I'd paid for it [though this argument was not very convincing as I had the receipt].

Faced with this, I went to get lunch...next door...and returned to hear that they HAD FOUND MY COUCH! Or just actually placed my order.It will arrive tomorrow at 8:00AM to 12:00PM.

*cue laugh track*