Blog

Reading Time: about 4 minutes

Time to catch up on current events, just so I force myself to post something here for the first time in far too many weeks.

I’ve reconsidered my Patreon page. It may be because I really needed to, or it may be because I just felt the need to do something after so many weeks of spinning my wheels. Probably a bit of both. At any rate, I’m pulling After from Patreon back over here to the blog. I’ve got eighteen chapters up over there, and not a single subscriber. /shrug. Granted, I haven’t pushed it very hard, but I’m very leery of overdoing the promotion side of things. I suppose I need to get over that if I want to sell any books. I’ll leave the account up for a while until I decide exactly what I expect from it.

In Plain Sight is actually finally at the editor. I’ll start cover work on that shortly, then I’ll release it right after Discoveries.

I’ve been lost these last few COVID-ridden months, planning and re-planning and re-re-planning Red Dirt Justice. I still have a bunch of great ideas for stories, but I started chasing world-building plot bunnies, and almost turned it into a Bright-like urban fantasy thing. I played with that idea for far too long, then realized not long after the George Floyd protests that I’d turned into too much of a cop-worshipping series, which was never my intention. I’ll probably change which story I do first though. And I still want to do an urban fantasy kind of story; I’m just not sure how I’ll do that.

We’re not alone in having our lives upended by COVID, I know, but we’ve been fortunate. One daughter was going to dance in Cinderella, but that was canceled. Her younger sister was going to visit Hawaii with her Girl Scout troop, but once they announced a two-week quarantine, the troop postponed the trip to December. They recently changed the trip completely; they’re visiting San Diego instead. The cookie-selling season was cut short as well, which will affect the funds they raise for next year’s trips. But I suspect they won’t be taking the smaller, shorter trips they usually take during the fall, so things may balance out. And I was supposed to have gone to the Writers Police Academy this past weekend in Raleigh, but North Carolina pulled back on their reopening plans, so at the last minute, it went virtual. That’s a difficult format for me to work in, so I passed. I’ll attend the next edition, next year in Wisconsin.

I’ve been masking up when I go out, for the most part. A friend in Ohio printed this mask for me, which was handy. He sent it with some shock cord for the strings, which worked well enough, but they were short, and I’ve got a fat head, so it hurt a bit. I finally switched to some elastic (which was really hard to come by), although someone else suggested the rubber band tourniquets that lab techs use for blood draws. I wish I’d thought of that before my gross sewing job. Such is life.

A combination of COVID-induced cabin fever and being the first stand open in the area gave our church our best fireworks season ever. For all intents and purposes, we sold out, for the first time in the seven years we’ve been selling fireworks. Our returns fit in the back of a minivan with room to spare. The first year, it took two 15-passenger vans.

I haven’t been out on the bike in months. It’s going up for sale, and I’m going to get something a little newer and a little lighter. Sound familiar? Ah well.

I finally started reading again. I’ve recently read Bring the Jubilee, an alternate history story around the American Civil War, as well as The Black Ice, the second Harry Bosch book. I feel like I’ve read a couple of others over the years, but can’t recall which, so I’m going to use Hoopla to work my way through the series. I may watch Bosch on Amazon; I’ve heard good things about it.

My wife and I worked our way through Madam Secretary. We really enjoyed the writing and the casting. Lots of great chemistry between the characters, which isn’t that surprising considering that several members of the cast had performed together on Broadway.

So how’s everyone else these days?