How 2023 kicked my ass (and what I’m doing about it)

Two hip replacements in a single year is no joke, but I am improving and a new novel is coming. Here’s my path back to health and happy productivity in 2024.

In less than a week, I have a follow-up appointment with my surgeon to confirm my recovery is on track. My physio is optimistic and enthused, but then, she is always incredibly upbeat. We are quite the contrast. She’s energetic, and I’m the grumpy old man from Up. I need to change some things, but short of a personality transplant, how?

I have some ideas (and the last one is probably the best)

  • I used to treat people with various pain conditions. I know the rehabilitation process. However, I’m impatient. Particularly on bad pain days, I must remind myself to simply do the exercises without being so attached to results. Rehabilitation of injuries is a little like writing a first draft. I have to trust the process.
  • Particularly after a terrible night’s sleep, I am exhausted of being me. I feel trapped in my body so I have to be gentler with myself. I could worry more, but would it help? I put my head down, have a rest, and do the exercises. It will all work out. Like tinkering with a manuscript, it all works out given enough time. “Enough time” is usually more than I would have hoped.
  • As a chronic insomniac with a busy brain, I don’t panic about missing a night’s sleep anymore. Instead, I sleep when I sleep. Nobody shakes off a double hip replacement in one year easily. When I feel a nap coming for me, I don’t fight it.
  • We can terrorize ourselves with shoulds. I should do more. I should do this, I should do that. But I can’t do it all and I certainly can’t do it all right now. What’s left? Acceptance.
  • Self-care takes many forms. Sometimes it’s a treat, a nap, a ride in the car just to get outside, chatting with a friend on the phone, or giving up for the day.
  • Medications, as needed. Right now, that’s usually nothing more than Aspirin, but sometimes it’s Lorazepam.
  • Once I’m cleared for more exercise, I’m looking forward to that outlet. The aims are to get my cardiovascular fitness back, improve my strength and achieve a higher quality of life. Aside from the stress relief more movement will provide, I’m in training to be able to sit still and write for longer periods.
  • As a news and politics junkie, I have sabotaged my mental health. I feed my busy brain with information I can’t use. I own two bone-conduction headphones, one for day, one for night. I wear them constantly to consume podcasts, audiobooks, and music. Nothing wrong with that in moderation, but I realize now how much is too much. I’m taking the headphones off to focus on reading more and writing more.

    In short, my best and biggest change is to guard my quiet time. I already have a negativity bias. I don’t need to feed it a high-caloric diet of atrocities in the present and fears for the future. Until I get that Iron Man suit, there’s not much I can do about that. So…

    PROTECT YOUR PEACE

    I’m in training to get back to being me. RIght now, I’m plagued with my identity as a patient. Can’t wait to focus more on being a writer beloved by perhaps tens of people!


    My next novel is a tale of vengeance that spans decades. Endemic was about how we change and how we don’t. This one is about how we won’t. Please stand by, and thank you for your patience.

    Looking for a great award-winning novel that’s criminally underrated this holiday season? Look no further. Please add Endemic to your shipping cart.

Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

My Christmas Book Suggestion


In Endemic, the protagonist is Ovid Fairweather, a neurotic book editor who becomes an urban farmer in the viral apocalypse. Guided by her dead therapist, she has to deal with the many dangers other survivors pose, but deep down, this is about how we change and how we don’t.

Endemic has won the Literary Titan Award and earned first place at the New York Book Festival and the Hollywood Book Festival.

Bulletin! This is just in!

“We are excited to inform you the following title is included in the Prime Reading program on Amazon.ca from 1-Dec-2022 to 1-Jun-2023.” ~ Amazon

Endemic is live on Amazon!

So Endemic is in PR now! They said it would be three months, but apparently, this goes all the way to June! In case you’re wondering, the internet goblins can define the situation for us: Prime Reading is a benefit for Amazon Prime members that makes over a thousand eBooks available for borrowing, at no extra cost. You can keep up to ten eBooks at a time and there are no due dates.

Whether you’re in Prime or not, you can still read the ebook, paperback, or hardcover,
May I humbly (or not so humbly) suggest the hardcover would make an excellent Christmas gift? Sure, I can!

Some readers have asked me what the power and the curse is in the subtitle to Endemic. It’s the same element: memory. Our experiences make us who we become. Our memories burn us and forge us.

Thank you, and have a great binge-read.

See the AFTER Life for free

Today is the last day of the free promotion of AFTER Life, INFERNO. This trilogy doesn’t get enough love, but the story of how Artificial Intelligence takes over the world via brain parasites was a lot of fun to write.


mybook.to/AFTERLifeINFERNO

Where it Came From

A local photographer was a fan of This Plague of Days. The parent of two kids on the spectrum, he really dug Jaimie Spencer’s role in the zombie/vampire apocalypse. His hobby was to take pics of local artists of all stripes, so he reached out to ask to take photos of me. I still use one of his pics for my author photo.

When he walked into my chaotic office, he paused, maybe in shock. Surveying my many crammed bookshelves, he said, “This is an interesting creative space. Your mess says a lot about you.”

Me: “Uh…thanks?”

The Seed of the Idea

We started talking about end-of-the-world potentialities, and he told me an interesting story. He had a friend who worked on Toronto’s police force. The photographer said there is a viral research lab in downtown Toronto. The cop swore his priority in the worst-case scenario was “containment.” That meant that if a virus in the vault started infecting the research staff, he’d be tasked with keeping the infected in the lab. If any medical personnel tried to escape the vault, they would be shot in hopes of protecting the city.

AFTER LIFE INFERNO, PURGATORY, & PARADISE is Born

I attended the University of King’s College Foundation Year Program. It’s basically the history of philosophy and the survey course included everything from the Bible to classical literature and modern jazz. We’d sit around entertaining questions like, “What is the definition of the soul?” (My favorite answer: The essence of the whatness of the being.) That’s where I got introduced to Dante. Inferno is great. I didn’t enjoy Purgatorio and Paradisio as much, but Dante’s vision of Hell was fascinating. So, with that loose structure in mind, I sallied forth with my take on weaponized brain parasites escaping a military lab.

Setting it in Toronto, I brought Artificial Intelligence and the future of humanity into the mix. The trilogy puts an infected police officer and a brilliant research scientist on the same side, but maybe not for long. (Wink!)

I love how this story evolves as the AI goes from attacking and taking over humans to learning more about us. When you get to Paradise, the AI is out to invade America and improve us against our will. Humans are a problem to be solved, and the story winds up going to very compelling places.

Get your copy of AFTER Life, INFERNO today and it’s free. Get it tomorrow and it’s still ridiculously cheap!

Or get the whole series as a huge paperback (600+ pages!) or the e-box set here.

AFTER Life OMNIBUS
I've been featured on eBookDaily

Hours and Hours of Cheap Entertainment

I know! I know! I should say “inexpensive” entertainment, but 99 cents is really cheap for great novels that can take years to create. For the next couple of days, I’ve got This Plague of Days in a Black Friday promotion along with a bunch of other horror books.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/black_horrorfriday/u3fmi96fzsOne of many to check out!

If you haven’t taken a chance on an author who is unfamiliar to you, this is your opportunity to jump in and find something to love.

Here’s the landing page for the Black Friday sale:

https://books.bookfunnel.com/black_horrorfriday/u3fmi96fzs

Click a cover, get a book, enjoy!

Literary Titan Reviews Endemic!

Endemic by Robert Chazz Chute follows Ovid Fairweather as she tries to navigate a world ravaged by a disease that turns people essentially braindead. As with any collapse of society, a power vacuum develops, and various individuals group together to seize that power….Can Ovid find a way to survive in a world that aims to take whatever she has left? And can she do it while reconciling with her troubled past?


Ovid endures a great deal in her past and present life. The author does a fantastic job incorporating her past experiences into the main plot points, thus keeping readers guessing and gasping as they read. I would be happy to read more from this setting, and its characters in the future, so here’s hoping there’s a sequel on the way soon.

Endemic is a suspenseful and thrilling science fiction novel with a dystopian twist. Readers will be drawn into the world that at times is almost too real and plausible and left with an eerie feeling of could this happen to me.

To read the full review at Literary Titan, click here.

Literary Titan's review of Endemic


I WANT TO READ ENDEMIC NOW!

Our Alien Hours is here!

While Endemic climbs the charts and gathers more and more happy reviews, my newest anthology just launched. Our Alien Hours is now available on Amazon!

mybook.to/OurAlienHours

The alien invasion of Earth has begun.

The Mortchallin watched us for decades, waiting for their time to strike. A global electromagnetic pulse like no human has ever seen marks their beginning and our end. In this anthology of seven connected stories, you will experience the invasion from the point of view of ordinary people facing fate.

When the alien conquistadors arrive, our actions in the face of death and danger reveal everything about what it means to be human.

Available now in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.

Robert Chazz Chute is the award-winning author of This Plague of DaysAFTER LifeAmid Mortal Words, and Endemic. With the publication of Our Alien Hours, he adds new short stories to his readers’ armory of apocalyptic binge-reads. If you enjoy this one, try the first in this anthology series, Our Zombie Hours.

Managing Pandemic Stress

Do The Thing SMALLER
To order: mybook.to/DoTheThing

Someone once asked me what my books were about. 

“What? You mean…all of them?”

“Yeah. Like, is there a central theme to all your work?”

That put me back on my heels for a moment, but I came up with something. It’s this:

Whether I’m writing science fiction, apocalyptic novels, or crime thrillers, it’s always about the drama of closing the space between how things are and how they ought to be.

This, my friends, is why fiction is better than non-fiction. Fiction has to make more sense than reality. Looking around, much of our new reality fails to make sense. The entire world is under quarantine and the economy is unplugged. Mismanagement abounds. Some policy failures seem indistinguishable from actively trying to kill the disenfranchised. Nope, not kidding. If you count yourself among the disadvantaged, you feel that punch in your heart, head, and guts.

Okay, okay! We get it, Rob! Things are bad. What’s your point?

My dad will turn 94 this year. He often says, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I understand his culture shock, but our existential dread is not unique. The difference now is that more people face existential dread of the same thing simultaneously.

If you’ve ever waited by the phone for test results from a doctor, you recognize this awful sensation. If you’re feeling bored, unproductive, overstimulated, under-stimulated, sad, angry or depressed, you’re not alone. The poor or differently-abled often feel trapped and frustrated, much like this. Many people feel as you do and this is not new to them. Even under normal circumstances, many have difficulty leaving their homes and moving about freely for a variety of reasons. Want to take a ride just to get out of the house? Okay. Lots of people can’t afford cars. A ride on a bus, if there is public transport, can be dangerous.

My point is not that you shouldn’t complain.

Vent if you need to do so. Your feelings are valid. Your broken toe doesn’t feel better because someone else gets their leg amputated. I spread my sympathy around everywhere without holding back.

I want to make a more subtle point:


For all of us, each day dealing with COVID-19 is one more straw atop the camel’s back (and that poor camel’s knees are trembling). For me, it’s the helplessness that gets to me. If you aren’t classified as an essential worker, your job in the pandemic is to do nothing but stay home. Doing nothing is very much akin to helplessness. I want it fixed. I want to fix it. I want people to survive and thrive. I’m sure you do, too. For most of us, we are playing a waiting game. Failing to wait can be deadly, so this is a game we don’t want to lose. The stakes are high and, like you, I’m feeling that nervy pain daily.

So it’s time to revisit something from Do the Thing.

In stressful situations, we’re biologically programmed to flee, fight or freeze. Those could be more useful responses when our species was hunted by evil clowns riding Bengal tigers through primordial jungles.* That’s probably less helpful here.

To better cope with our stress, we want choices, not automatic and autonomic responses.

Here are your choices using 3A Stress Management

In any stressful situation, you choose from the Alter/Avoid/Accept Triad. 

  1. Alter: Change the frame and circumstance if and where you can. Make isolation more pleasant. Find helpful, happy and healthy distractions.

    And ask for support.

  2. Avoid: Get away from threats to your physical and mental health where possible (i.e. masks, physical distancing, isolation, etc.)

    And ask for support.

  3. Accept: Don’t try to control that which is beyond your control.

    And ask for support.

    I hope you find 3A stress management helpful. This is me, still trying to close the distance between an Ought and an Is, even in non-fiction. If you’re searching for more stress management ideas, check out Do the Thing.

Much love and be well!

Rob

* What? Nobody ever told you about the evil clowns riding Bengal tigers through primordial jungles? Jeez. Read a science book, will ya?!

Mental note: Silly jokes can help, too.

cropped-Photo-Credit-to-David-Redding.jpg