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.