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Monday. A real Monday, even, weird as that might be. Spent the last two driving all day, so I didn’t get to have my normal Monday. Been good so far (the day is early). Got up, went down and got breakfast. Hit the archery range and shot pretty well for missing several weeks in a row. Did some CPL Tai Chi and that’s not all that rusty. Will dig out the sword later and work on those forms.
All in all, trying (TRYING!) to get back to some semblance of normalcy. Really been off track since we started getting ready for Minneapolis. Travel. Return. Travel some more. Home for a while, I hope. Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
Finished the second Corsac Fox novel last week. Like how it turned out. Also started working on the design and setup of the Kickstarter coming in late November. Commissioning some art. Setting tiers, goals, and wishlists. Trying to keep it compact enough that I can learn, but big enough that it could explode.
[Every time you push the publish button—EVERY TIME—there is a chance that you hit the magic number where the book you’ve put out suddenly captures the zeitgeist and explodes. At which point, you better write a bunch more of them, because fans will have demands and expectations. Write things you love, so you can enjoy making a career out of a throwaway, m’kay?]
Also wrote the third Fatima short story. Not as thrilled with it. Mostly I need to go back and amp up the tension. Story is there. Characters are rich. The tension isn’t high enough for the target audience. Middle of the night I woke up with a list of fixes I’ll work on this week.
Did not sleep worth a damn on Saturday night. Woke up Sunday more or less a zombie in many ways. Did write, but that was a newsletter for this week, and a Milestone article for next. Non-fiction, where I can just let back-brain roll downhill and the words will be good enough for when I do have cognitive abilities to fix things.
Then I hit a blank spot. Seriously. It happens. Write too much, and don’t have any deadlines looming in front of me. Or write too many of one thing and can’t immediately figure out what the palate cleanser is.
Those of you who’ve been listening to me for long enough know that I tend to cycle back and forth. Light/dark. Military/pirates. Space/ground. SF/non-SF.
I have written a bunch of space opera lately. Or at least space adventure, between Marrakesh, Corsac Fox, and Last Stand. Needed a break. Wasn’t sure what it was.
Then, on the drive to the range, writer-brain whispered possibly the most dangerous term.
“Derlyth.”
I have two of them done. Just got #2 back from the copy-editor this morning, which was why it was on my mind. Went shooting to practice my zen, as one does, And to let back-brain marinate on concepts.
Derlyth is a fun character, because he is richly deep. Evil, but only somewhat. And forced to deal with certain things because there are lines that he will draw and not cross. (In book two, he had to end up saving a bunch of rich toffs he rather disliked, because his opponent was a servant of true chaos in the vein of Batman’s Joker, intent on sowing chaos and destruction in his wake. Being an imperialist running dog was about as insulting to Derlyth as one could get. And he had to do it, because nobody else could save the world.)
So I’m about to start book three shortly. Writing this first because I needed some time to digest a few notes written earlier and turn them into enough of a plot that I could write an opening. I do write into darkness occasionally, but it works better (faster!) when I have things mostly worked out to some degree. Or at least can get rolling, then let writer-brain work it all out over the course of the next few days.
Looking at the refrigerator, the Derlyth books are scheduled for release in June. My goal is all three of them at once, while also publishing the sixth Last Stand book (tentative title: Emergency!). Reminder to y’all that I’m planning to publish one Last Stand novella each month next year (I have seven of them done and will likely write eight next), plus at least one other thing. It will be Action/Adventure first, then Corsac Fox Book One in April, then Labyrinth in May, Derlyth(*) in June, and SF for the rest of the year, including Kincaide’s War #2, three Marrakesh novels, Corsac Fox Book Two, and another Science Officer in December.
On the back of the napkin, I’m going to put out at least 32 major titles next year, not counting anything short like collections. I’d ask what the hell I thought I was thinking, but I already knew that. Gotta empty the trunk.
Other news!
Okay, reminder that I’m from Kansas originally. We don’t have trees there, not counting hedge apples that mark farming sections. Saturday night, the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ was walking across the yard from the hydroponics and got me up off the couch when she got in to look out the window.
Across the septic field are trees. Lots of them. All kinds (I don’t know trees unless I can identify the fruit, generally). Sitting on a branch, about ten feet up, was an owl. Maybe eighteen inches tall. Brown. Dark, so I couldn’t see all that much, except when the head rotated and twisted.
Kinda cool. I have had owls around here. Probably seen or heard them less than a handful of times, but that’s mostly because my house is built so solidly that I don’t hear things outside. (Not counting Jimmy, when he races right by my bedroom wall at three in the morning, after God knows what.)
Owls have always fascinated me, but it was too dark to take a picture, so you’ll just have to imagine it. Same with the Snowy Owl I saw several years ago, when she swooped up and landed on a roadsign as I was driving at night. Really cool.
More news: I think I will have to now describe the neighborhood horse as migratory. With all that implies. Haven’t found any poop surprises in the yard over the last week, so he might only come down off the hill in the summer. Or something. Never seen him outside of that, going back several years on reflection. So now the fool migrates as well.
How weird are the critters in your neighborhood?
Shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA

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Had a few conversations recently that got me to thinking about impostor syndrome and how many folks that want to commit art end up holding back.

I know a lot of creatives that can commit all manner of art. Could make money at it. Dunno about a living, because that involves a lot of work, but I started out making $258 my first year selling books.

From there, I decided that I wanted to art for money. As I spoke with various artists, I came to realize how many of them don’t believe that they should be allowed to be successful as artists.

Pardon me, but WTF?

Why are you limiting yourself? Why not at least try?

My first wife was an artist who worked in colored pencil to create lifelike portraits. I turn my head to the right as I type these words and I have a piece she did in 1991 of John Muir, the naturalist.

She’d tried doing commercial art in the 90s and hated it. Mostly, she had to deal with folks wanting her to do create specific pictures as part of advertising. Hated that. Hated people telling her to change things, because she drew it as she saw it.

Instead, she just took commissions from folks to turn one of their photographs into a poster-sized drawing. Enjoyed that. I have a number of her pieces, and the step-daughters have all the remaining originals and prints at this point.

But that was the old days. Today, she might be able to sell her art on-line. Maybe even make money.

For writers, there used to be a precisely specific pattern one was supposed to follow. First, you wrote short stories and submitted them to the lower-end magazines in your genre. Eventually, your rejections would get more personal, with suggestions. Finally, they would buy things. You worked your way up the food chain slowly.

From there, you sold more and more, making a name for yourself. Maybe winning awards.

Then you wrote a novel and looked for an agent to represent you with the traditional publishing houses. (Back when there might have been hundreds, instead of the remaining handful.)

Eventually, you’d get some sort of deal. Advance. Royalties, maybe. Fame.

Today, I know lots of folks that still think that is the only way to do it. They’re wrong, but they don’t generally want to hear that.

That world is gone.

I write. Publish. Write the next thing. I have been struck by lightning twice, but I have also worked my ass off at committing art, to the point that I have fans willing to buy books as soon as I put something up for preorder, sight unseen. To support me on Patreon. To tell their friends about me.

It can be done. You can do it.

It bothers me that I keep running into people who have the potential. And the desire. Except that when asked, they explain to me that they’re not good enough to art.

Seriously? How the hell would you know? Have you tried? Or are you listening to one of your parents, thirty or fifty years later, tell you that you aren’t good enough? (I know a few horror stories about New York Times Bestselling authors who still got that from a parent. Ugh.)

Why do you not commit art? What holds you back from putting it out there and making money from it? I’m not promising lots of money, but we all started with nothing. You will, too. And maybe get struck by lightning.

I had dreams, and a couple of friends or coworkers who might toss $5 in on a lark just because. Hell, I sold early collections off my desk at work more than once.

If you can art, why don’t you? It used to be that costs to get your art out there might be utterly prohibitive, which was why you needed a publisher. Or a gallery. Or a record label.

I’m a few weeks from releasing my first single, recorded as Ward and Rogers, because Paul and I are having fun creating music. My friend Toby just released another single this week. He tours and gigs relentlessly. He wants it. (Inspires me, too, when I hear those voices telling me to stay in bed today.)

Why don’t you? What’s holding you back from writing, drawing, (and/)or recording?

I think that most of you would be happier if you took that risk and put yourself out there. There will always be trolls, but you ignore the assholes and you’ll find fans. I get emails from readers thanking me for some of the things I write. Awesome reviews. (And a few assholes, but we ignore him, except to laugh that he will eventually buy every book I release AT FULL PRICE in order to give me a one star review complaining that my female characters should have been naked bimbos. Seriously.)

Ignore the trolls.

What art do you have in your soul? This is the time when the world needs more art. More entertainment. People are getting to the level monsters at the ends of the various streaming services, and looking for things to make them smile.

Why isn’t that you?

None of my books make me rich. None of them. All of them combined into a thing called a Catalog makes me a nice, middle class living where I don’t ever have to put on pants in the morning or commute to somebody else’s office.

I want to art. I want you to art.

What will it take for you to get past that voice whispering in your ear, so that you decide to art?

And how do we get you there?

So the first eight Science Officer books cover one complete arc of long story story, broken into a number of pieces. When I was done with Hammerfield, I needed a break, because I had told Javier’s story the way I wanted, but always knew that there was more out there. (I have extensive notes on more, so never fear.)

After 8, Javier’s world had changed some, as all of you are by now aware, so I needed to take a different look at things before starting what I called “Season Two.” The result was Book 9 (The Bryce Connection), which is a collection of four short stories introducing new characters, as well as letting some of the others get more screen time and development.

Then I wrote the first of Season Two: The Alien Suns. That is Book 10 (Alien Seas) and is the first novel in the series. From here, I plan on them all being novels. Self-contained so you don’t have to worry about cliff hangars, unless I split 16 & 17 when I get there, like I did 7 & 8.

So far, so good. Even threw in the first ‘Mina Teague novella, and everything is coming out on December 10.

However, I got contacted by Planet Bob, asking if I had any novels that could go into a Space Opera storybundle and offered him Alien Seas as an exclusive, several weeks before anyone could get it anywhere else. (In fact, the pre-order period ends on the same day as the bundle does, so everyone else will be able to read it by then.)

This is your chance to read Alien Seas before anyone else. It helps if you’ve read the first eight, but I think you’d be able to have fun with the story directly without. You’d just be missing a whole raft of inside jokes that will make old time fans giggle when they encounter them. And 9 sets things up by providing backstories for the new characters you’ll meet, but they are all there on the page.

And, because this is a Storybundle, you can get a whole bunch of other novels for one cheap price. Pay what you want for the first four novels, but if you put in at least $15 US, you’ll get all ten, including five exclusives, meaning not available anywhere else.

That’s me, Leah R Cutter, Dean Wesley Smith, Ron Collins, and Planet Bob himself. Nowhere else.

Treat yourself to an early turkey day treat, or maybe get them now and then save them for Xmas day. Or not. Normally, it’s worth holding off, but this is 2020, and you deserve something special that puts a smile on your face. God knows we all do.

So go look at this fantastic Space Opera storybundle and plunk down your money. You will be excited, entertained, and everything else that comes with really good science fiction space opera.

And hurry, because as always, this is a limited time offer.

I don’t do NaNo, which is the National Novel Writing Month. Everyone participating is aiming for a goal of writing a 50,000 word novel in November, which is a fantastic goal for most writers. In the old days, Traditional Publishing (aka New York City) only let you publish one novel per year. I know a number of folks from that world who have multiple pennames as a result. One for fantasy. One for science fiction. One for mystery. Etc. They wrote fast then, but the system wasn’t prepared to handle it.

But pulp writing goes back, obviously, to the pulp era. There used to be hundreds of different magazines, in every conceivable genre, needing new material every month. Writers working those periodicals would work all day, frequently finishing a story at 4:30pm and putting a new piece of paper into the typewriter and starting the next story.

In those days, you could make a living selling short fiction at a penny a word if you were lucky. These days, you’d need to put 4-6 short stories into print every month in order to maintain any sort of income, and there are far fewer professionally-paying markets these days to support you.

But you can write and publish Indie. Create your own company. Do your own covers and marketing copy. Publish your stories.

You are responsible for your own career. People I respect remind me of that on a regular basis.

For me, that means I can write fast, publish regularly, and make a pretty decent living. Without ever having to put on pants if I don’t want to.

A friend was teasing me the other day that I was spending too much time on social media because I was sharing some silly things designed to make people laugh. I had to remind him that I had finished October having written just over 1.2 million words for the year, which included eleven novels and forty-four stories of less-than-novel-length. (Anything under 40k, as it were.)

In those old days, you had strict rules you lived by if you wanted a tradpub career. Those days are gone.

In October, I finished the month with 125,610 words written. I plan on replicating that in November and December, because I’m not traveling anywhere for the holidays this year. (Obviously, right?) Instead of NaNoWriMo, I might write two shorter novels in November. Maybe 45k each. And some other things. Who knows.

I woke up this morning and started a novel, but only because I had finished two more Gunderson SF Crime stories in the last few days and my original goal had been fourteen novels this year and forty shorts. The weirdest part was that writer-brain wasn’t sure what we were writing.

It happens. Not writer-block but story-block. Usually I shift around until I find the thing that makes writer-brain happy and run with it. This morning, I walked slowly through the list of open series I had out there, but none of them were happy-making.

Finally, the answer was “tired of science fiction.” Weird, but okay, I can deal with that. Have some sword and sorcery fantasy. Have some urban fantasy. Have some other things. Stepped through those and writer-brain lit on the next Shrike The Orque novel. (No, I got no clue.)

Blueberry is a short chopped out of the novella Rebels. Wrote both in about 2014, give or take. When I switched to primarily writing SF, all that kind of went fallow. However, I did write a follow-on novel to Rebels in 2018. It cliff-hangared hard at the end, so I couldn’t just publish it without writing the rest of the story arc. Apparently, I have started today.

Barely remember how it ended, so I pulled up the doc and read the last four chapters this morning, just to remember where the hell I was. (That was 35 novels ago, give or take.) Then I picked up the thread and started moving forward. I remember the wider arc I was planning, and have noted, but those notes were maybe ten lines to span two full novels of stuff, most of which was book four and how the final quest ended.

So, technically, I started a novel this morning along with everyone else doing NaNo, however weird that is. Mostly timing, because once I hit pace I will finish this novel in about 12 days, with other things thrown in on the side for reasons. Not sure if I will just write both of them back to back, or insert something between, but apparently I am writing sword and sorcery fantasy right now to round out the year.

Weirder things have happened, ya know.

What are you folks working on for NaNo?

I work from home. Have since March 2018. For me, the sudden “work from home” that everyone else fell into earlier this year wasn’t much of a hiccup. Instead, book sales tended to sag (if you weren’t in one of the subscription services, which saw a boost when people were suddenly worried about expenses). Hoping they will recover in Dec.

But for the last six months or so I have been navigating a new world where we weren’t ever going out to dinner, weren’t doing much shopping, and generally staying away from everyone. Didn’t help when Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) got what we think was a mild case that knocked her down for a few days in April and gave her about a month of brain fog. Hard isolation at that point, but I never developed symptoms.

So what was the summer like? My favorite restaurant–Krain Cafe just north of Enumclaw, WA– went for a while to take-out only, so I would go down on Friday afternoon and get a pair of breakfasts I could heat up, partly to support them and partly to get me out. My regular D&D gaming went away, but I found a different online/zoom group to play with, remote only for a while, although we have met in person a few times.

Mostly, for me, it was never going into town. I have the farm based on studies I did in the late 80s and early 90s talking about the possible fall of the american republic in 2020. (Yes, that long ago the trend lines of what was possibly coming were apparent, if you studied certain things.) I am away from everyone, remote, and generally quiet. 6+ acres, more than half trees and ponds. Fruit to harvest in the summer/fall. Herbs for the garden to cook with. Not survivalist mode, but we went into 2020 prepared for storms that would knock out power and trap us for a week at a time. Coffin freezer with half a pig and other things frozen. Etc. (Seattle, by the way, might have made the news this summer. She would have been able to smell the tear gas clouds from her old house up on Capital Hill downtown. Possibly breathe them.)

But I used to write all morning and then head into town in the early afternoon to run errands. That went away.

Today, I actually got another little bit of normalcy back. Had to run down to drop off ballots at the drop box. (Not trusting the Postal Service as long as those jackasses run it, regardless of what the rank and file can do to mitigate stupidity.) Went by and dropped off recycling as well. (I burn anything paper, compost anything organic, recycle anything we can, and end up going to the dump about every 4-6 weeks for four cans of trash.)

Decided to hit the pawn shop at the east end of Enumclaw while I was down there. They bought out a couple of video stores at some point, and have something like two shipping containers of dvds and blueray to get rid of. Most of it is weird schlock, as one might expect, but I keep a spreadsheet of my video library and a short list of things I’m looking for to fill in gaps. Like having the Fraser Mummy movies 2 & 3 but not 1. Found that today. Got a couple of other oddities, like a double feature of 2001 and Clockwork Orange. Haven’t seen the former in ages and not sure I’ve ever seen the latter, although I have read the English edition (with the extra chapter the American version chopped off the end.)

I have a Synology NAS on an airgapped local network. 4@6Tb drives in a RAID 5, or a metric shit-ton of space, so I have ripped every dvd I still own (after a massive purge I occasionally regret) and then go back to fill it in and buy/rip new disks. We don’t have cable. I hardly ever watch entertainment on the screen (tv shows, sports, etc.). But I do watch movies occasionally, and I have a low trust of the big streaming services. The things you want to watch will vanish one day, because there will peak out at around 20 such services, and everyone will hoard their IP rather than making it generally available.

I can watch whatever I find and own. Better this way. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) isn’t sure what caper she’s going to write one of these days, but her writer-brain has her rewatching all of Leverage, since it is now ripped and she can just pull a few episodes at a time to watch while doing other things. I need to get back into the habit, but there are few tv shows I want to watch. Might buy all of Star Trek TOS and TAS just so I can rip those and work back through them, but that might take me years.

I don’t binge, because in the summer my afternoons are working on the farm. Winter I’m a little more stuck inside, especially this coming one where I expect infection spikes because every time I go out I see idiots who don’t cover their nose. Sometimes, they don’t even mask, but a lot of places have gotten stricter now that the state has started cracking down and issuing fines to businesses.

But, you know, idiots.

So old stuff, mostly to put information in the backbrain. I wrote a book one in a new epic space opera series where the bridge of the massive starship is absolutely taken from the floor plans to Space: 1999, because it was completely different from any other SF I can remember, where they are always either WW2 submarines or TOS/TNG for design. Both work, but that means everyone else looks alike. Sounds alike. Is alike.

Yuck.

So today I got to have an almost normal afternoon. Shopped with my drapery mask on (that’s what the cloth was from in my pile when I needed to sew something that fit me comfortably). Squirted the hand sanitizer as I paid. Brought home three new cases with all manner of weird.

Getting into a new normal, if the old one is forever gone.

What are you doing to build a future instead of lamenting a past?

Seriously. Or rather, not so serious, as it were. When you open an anthology call with a one sentence theme, and challenge people to out-weird each other, the results can be strange. And a lot of fun.

As of October 1, I have put out the open call for Issue #4: “Cloak and Dagger”

However you choose to interpret that, mind you. An Interpretation of Moles should have cured you of expecting stories on rails. We don’t do that here.

1. An Interpretation of Moles
2. I Like My Science…MAD
3. Nuns With Guns

Stories are due in my hands by the end of October 31. We’ll publish it on Dec 1, if all goes well, so there is no slack in the schedule. I expect professional to participate, and I judge professionalism entirely on the ability to respond to email promptly and with the information I need or questions.

I get tired of the [Level Monster Issue]

That’s where someone gets an email needing information, or a response, but cannot bring themselves to push the button and say something. Seriously, there are not many things in this world that I find more annoying than that. When it comes time to publish, everyone had to hit deadlines less than a week apart. I can’t hold an anthology like this. (I can, but choose not to, because either you are a pro, or you are junior varsity. I know some big name authors who let act like pissy dilettantes on deadlines. I won’t work with again.)

Since I announce the BWP Anthologies generally on Facebook for now, I figured I might let people know about it here, in the wider arc of my voice. Or a different audience. Whatever.

If you have questions about submitting, ping me. As with the previous ones, we’re going to have fun. No reason you shouldn’t join us.

🙂

On top of everything else in 2020, I had to rebuild the barn roof. Took the opportunity to clean out the middle bay of the barn itself. That’s the one with a lot of personal stuff, but some things have gone a little wrong.

My Mom lived with me for a few years, back when I was still in Renton and in the process of building out on the farm. When she moved back to St. Louis, she took what she could fit in her car and left me with the rest. It went into the barn until I had the spoons to deal with it.

Moving out here after Donna died meant dealing with a lot of personal stuff. More spoons. She was an artist, so I have some of her drawings, but have been slowly cycling most of them off to the step-daughters to handle for the various grands and eventual great-grands.

This was also the summer we had the wood house restained, inside and out, so I had to take everything down and move it out. Then I got to put it back, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I decided that it didn’t have to go “right back” to what it had been. So we kinda moved into the house again, almost from scratch. Changed things around.

New art on the walls, with a bunch of old art that either went to the daughters (if Donna’s) or hauled off to Value Village to recycle. Books gone away as we moved shelves around.

Then I had to go through the barn stuff, all of which had been there at least six years. My Mother did not pack her boxes particularly well, so they got damp, which meant mildew. It also meant mice climbing in and chewing things. Old books of no particular value, and yucky, so I burned them. Salvaged what I could, but not everything could be saved. Nature of the beast.

Fire is the best way to cleanse some of those things.

As I opened old boxes, I also found a few containing stuff I had either forgotten about, or had been looking for and unable to find because they were back and underneath.

I used to be a prolific letter writer. Found letters from friends dating back to the early and mid 80s. Some of those people I haven’t seen in 30-35 years. Maybe “never heard from them again” after I went off to LA for grad school and didn’t take hardly any connections with me.

You could to that in those days. Just move and eventually the address forwarding expired, so letters were returned undeliverable. Phone numbers used to be geographical, so you had to get a new one when you moved and maybe it was unlisted.

Who knows who might have tried to reach me after 1990 and failed? Other letters from folks I did talk to in the 90s, when I was in California, or later when I left and went back to Kansas, before ending up in Seattle in 1997.

But I had saved a lot of correspondence from old girlfriends. None of it less than 25 years old. Most of them I couldn’t locate today if my life depended on it. There are a number of “And I never saw her again after 1997” in my past.

Those went into the fire.

I don’t have children of my own. I inherited grown step-daughters who are five months to five years younger than me, but they have lives and I’m only kind of tangential to them. They are at least all still friends, twelve years after their mother died. I count that as a win.

So I burned things.

It it liberating, putting things to the torch. All that stuff holds you down, a feather at a time. You don’t appreciate how much it weighs until one day you cast it into the purifying fires and call it done.

“Hey, whatever happened to him?” questions can go unanswered, because only a few strangers from that distant past know how to find me today. And we’re all probably better off not knowing, because then you lose the mystique.

Fire is an agency of chaos, reducing the order of words on paper to flames. That which was because unknown, lost forever. It does not bring me guilt, because I made peace with myself a long time ago, and all I can do for some people is silently apologize and not bother them.

I eventually chose to be happy, but those old letters shined a light on the guy I was 25 or 35 years ago.

But they are not who I am, nor who I choose to be.

They are merely images on a wall.

Pictures of who I used to be.

Faces.

I live in a highly redneck section of King County, Washington. Most people think of this as the Left Coast and Starbucks sipping hippies (not entirely untrue) but if you go by zipcodes, I’m pretty sure this area went red by a significant margin in 2016. I knew that when I bought the property to move out here from where I used to be in the white, middle-class, red districts of Fairwood (a neighborhood of Renton, WA) in 2010.

Part of my reasoning then (and going back as far as 1988 if you want) was that 2020 was going to be a terrible inflection point in US history, for reasons I have discussed in other places and won’t rehash here. Didn’t want to be in “The City” when what I saw coming caught fire.

I got lucky and found this particular property in 2010. The previous owner had died at the end of 2006, and his various kids had been trying to sell it, but there were “issues.” It had even gone so far as serious negotiations from another person, but he got chased off by the neighbors, in a polite way. Another Microsoft millionaire type, set to move out here and “change everything.”

The land is 6.5 acres, at the end of a cul-de-sac. I have a neighbor, E, above me, who originally bought most of his section of land in 1963 and then sold it off in chunks over the decades, especially when she and her husband divorced and he left. I remember E explaining to me one day, early on, that one of these days the Feds would be coming for her and it would be Ruby Ridge all over again. The others in the conversation just nodded and agreed, so you have a pretty good idea who my neighbors on three sides are.

Fourth side are 60s hippies that mostly grew old but are still a little weird. I got lucky when I was getting serious about buying by randomly starting at the Hippie household to meet the prospective neighbors. R & C told me about the guy just south of me who scares everyone, and what to say to him.

Mind you, when I got to the top of his driveway, he was already standing in his front door, pot belly all shirtless and deployed, and I’m assuming a shotgun out of sight. He’s like that.

“You G?” I yell from my truck.

“Who wants to know?” he yells back.

“R & C told me I should come up here and say hello,” I answer. “Looking to buy M’s old place.”

M had put down a foundation and covered it, planning to put a modular home on it back in 1991. But then he found out that the school board would charge him a building levy for that, and he threw a screaming, hissing fit (as I got the story 20 years later). Ended up living for the next 16 years out of a 26’ gooseneck horse trailer, with a 55 gallon drum set in the ground for a septic tank. Really serious, gold-fringe-on-the-flag sort of fellow, if you get my drift.

There are a lot of those folks around here. But you know what I’ve seen in the last ten years?

Gentrification. The Safeway in Maple Valley (town wjhen I go west) started carrying exotic cheeses. When they built a Fred Meyers (kind of like a SuperWalmart with regular stuff AND groceries) it had a huge cheese booth. Wrapped on three sides of about ten feet each, displaying maybe a hundred weird cheeses. That’s my barometer of hipster around here, as you can tell.

Then two plots right around there got developed and a bunch of McMansions got built in the stretch 2010-2016. More recently, a couple of new apartment developments have gone in.

The world in town is changing. I’m still out in the weird, red zones, past a wilderness that can’t be developed because Kent, WA and Seattle, WA bought both sides of the road for several miles and fenced them in. I’m in a pocket that is still trapped in the 1950s in many ways.

But the gentrification progresses.

With the pandemic, nobody can really go out to eat. For a long stretch, all the restaurants were take out only. And we did, supporting our favorites. More recently, they can open, but at half capacity. Enumclaw, WA, the city I usually go to, closed off several side streets and put up pavilion tents and rented tables and chairs, turning those streets into sidewalk cafe seating so that the restaurants on Cole and other streets could serve the same number of folks as before. Hopefully, they’ll live. Some good ones I enjoy.

But it has been ‘food trucks’ that was not on my pandemic bingo card. Usually, they do the fair circuit in the summer, but all those are shut down, so neighborhoods have organized to have trucks rotate through. (I have found some fun new eats that way, and we’ve kept them in business.)

So this last week, Ravensdale, WA had their usual Wednesday Truck event. New burger truck I haven’t had before (pretty good, too). But next to them was a truck doing bubble teas, smoothies, and other exotic drinks.

Exotic to the locals, that is. Normal international fare when my wife lived on Capital Hill in downtown Seattle and we could walk all sorts of places.

I got boba with my burger. Brown sugar, milk, ice, boba. Stir. A hint bland, but that was because they didn’t have any good fruit syrups to add.

But this is gold-fringe, You-Can’t-Make-Me-Wear-A-Mask, crazy hard right wing country. And the bubble tea truck did pretty good business. Not as good as good, old-fashioned American Cheese burgers, even with that weird Waygu meat. But there was a bubble tea truck penetrating the consciousness of this zip code.

Makes me all warm and fuzzy to think about, because it means that the folks moving out here are not white, blue-collar, right-wing voters. The city might develop services. Places. Things.

Enumclaw has a downtown. That’s why I go there. Maple Valley is closer, but it is Generica Suburbia on the highway, and not really a place. Some good restaurants. The library. A trail that has been converted from an old railroad bed.

Nothing like a downtown where you could walk around on a Sunday afternoon. Strip malls and fast food make up most of the city. I dream of that changing, as well, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe another decade.

But this week I had a moment of hope, in a year of suck. Boba, from a food truck, in Ravensdale, Washington.

Will wonders never cease?

August has kind of sucked. Not terrible, but just a drag on all aspects. First we got the house restained inside and out at the end of July, which was lovely, but required me to tear the house apart so the guy could get to all the walls and ceiling. Still not back to normal. Not sure when I will be.

He finished up on a Tuesday having spent most of a week. That Wednesday I started tearing part of the roof off the barn to replace where it had rotted. Hotter than usual, so we worked first thing in the morning until it got hot. Got some writing done in the afternoon/evening, but I was usually just exhausted so I maybe would get a thousand words or so. Took Saturday and Sunday off, but those were both just recovery days because I had no spoons left, after tearing out the old deck, replacing several ribs and the full run of horizontals, and then re-decking.

Monday/Tuesday were spent reshingling the new roof, with Tuesday being the first rain in a month while we’re on the roof working. Wednesday was a recovery day. Thursday we drove to Portland from Seattle and helped my cousin move stuff out of the new house and into a storage unit, after she had messed up her back. We drove back Thursday after a late lunch. Friday and Saturday I was social.

This last Sunday I had a pajamas day. Those are the days I don’t put on anything except my pjs and don’t leave the house. Managed 7500 words to finish off a novel. That was good. Had some bad things happen in the afternoon, and I just kind of all just boiled over.

Monday, I got up intent on writing a new short story in one of my existing universes, and needed to edit the previous story in it. Got the editing done and had no words. None. Not even a glimmer.

Took the rest of the day sideways. Went for a long drive with the music up and the phone set to airplane mode so nobody would text me and use up my last spoon or get on my last nerve.

Did work out an entire new universe I want to write in and planned some stories. The next three issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly that I’m working into (14-16) were Space Marines, Cargo Wars, and Wandering Monsters. Writer brain looked at those and framed a setting, an arc, and I came up with a character to put into all of them sequentially. (Later, it laid out for me a multi-novel space marine arc to write. Go me?)

Tuesday I actually wrote. 4000 words for the first time in more than two weeks. Today (Wednesday) I wrote 5000 to finish that story off. Tomorrow, I plan to start the next one. Friday I am social again, so might not get many words done in the morning and will circle back in the afternoon. Same with Sunday.

For a guy that thrives on averaging 4000 words per day over incredibly long stretches, I am more than 13,000 words off my accustomed pace. Until this today, I wasn’t sure I would hit my usual 100,000 words for the month. Just above 90k right now, after generating 16,500 just since Sunday morning.

Last year, I had a stretch about the same time, but for different reasons. This year I am just emotionally exhausted, and that’s taken a physical toll. Some of you have seen my other blog posts to see how far out of true I’ve gotten. Hip and lower back are hurting today. Again, physical response to emotional.

I can say definitively that I have made changes. Will continue to make them. Have cauterized a number of people out of my existence this summer who were too negative or offensive. Done dealing with that. And those people. Forever.

Have had too many drama queens who thought that I gave a shit because I hadn’t just jumped in with both feet to just destroy them. Have come close with a few of them, just because I’d be doing the world a favor to shatter a couple of those people into jagged, little bits of pain that I didn’t have to ever deal with again.

Might, yet. Folks have forgotten to be nice to one another, and I’m largely tired of their drama. The difference in 2020 is that I’ll just write you off and never talk to you again.

Keep that in mind when you are an asshole to people who didn’t deserve it. Like me.

Oh, and keep that shit away from me because I won’t lose any sleep if I destroy your entire psyche, one of these days. Doing the universe a favor.