Behold! Me, dithering endlessly over word choices at my local coffee shop.
For years, I struggled with insomnia. Exhausted after maybe six hours of fitful sleep, my busy night brain interfered with each day’s productivity. Sleep hygiene didn’t really work. Sleepy teas and warm milk? Nope! New pillows? Nah. What has helped me most to get nine hours of sleep each night is THC + CBD + Zoplicone (a prescription sleeping pill.) Working alone, the prescription didn’t work, but between that and visits to the dispensary, I’m finally back on track.
I’m working away on a fresh draft of She Once Made a Man Swallow a Key. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, please do give my many other books a try.
I recently watched Things to Come, a movie from 1936 based on the work of HG Wells. It’s not a great film, but the subtext feels prophetic. The world of the 1930s devolves into a decades-long war that destroys civilization. Warlords take over. Scientific progress is lost. When a movement rises to bring a troubled hellscape back to modernity, those in power resist change. The good guys — in this case, an army of scientists — win. They improve on what came before the apocalypse and build a utopia. However, a hundred years later, angry mobs rise up to bring scientific progress to a halt.
At every tick of history’s clock, some people will try to hold back the hands of time. No matter how good the future might be, they want to return to a time when they thought things were better, perhaps simpler. The worst part is they want to choose for you, not just themselves. I’d prefer to order off the menu myself, thanks. Leave me and that bright, hopeful future alone.
HG Wells never watched a political debate on TikTok at 3 a.m., but he saw the anti-intellectualism coming. That’s been going on for a long time, of course, but the US election year will ramp up the nonsense, and plenty. We have a rough road ahead in 2024. I won’t list all the frets, but you’ve seen the news. You know what piles on the stress. We call it doomscrolling now, but we used to call it “watching the news,” or “being aware of current events.” You’re going to hear a lot more arguing. Don’t expect well-mannered debates on the road to truth, just stubborn parroting of propaganda impenetrable to facts. Motivated reasoning is not reasonable.
You’ll also get exposed to some happy, slappy messages about how everything’s fine or will be. When crises go on too long, misery becomes normalized. The worst is when you point out an injustice and some clod mutters, “That’s nothing new.” Yeah, ya lazy dick! We should have fixed it by now, huh? But we haven’t. I fear we won’t fix much of anything.
Whatever your cause, there’s a good chance some experts are working on it. Just as surely, a bunch of idiots are maintaining the status quo or wrecking the DeLorean’s transmission by throwing Time into reverse.
So, what to do? You’re going to go to bed each night, heave a heavy sigh, and say in a thick Southern accent, “Mama’s had a day.” I say that to my wife each night because we’re going to have to hold on to our sense of humor through it all. I don’t have a solution to the climate crisis, threats of war, or a (legal) way to convince flat earthers they’re wrong. Maybe afflict the comfortable and write letters to whoever’s in charge of the circus? In your off-time, rest and recover.
Here’s my rest and recovery protocol:
Guard your peace from those who would rob you of it.
The usual: Sleep, eat well, and exercise.
Put your phone down more often.
Avoid trying to reason with unreasonable folks. Helping anyone out of ignorance is noble, but fuckwits will just waste your precious time, and time is life.
Watch Stanley Tucci in Searching for Italy. This will reinforce your belief in the hope of a common humanity that is kind, curious, and appreciative.
Binge-watching Modern Family will ease your mind and bring you comfort.
If childhood was a better time for you, revel in nostalgia. I watched an episode of Barney Miller last night.
Read fiction. It will pull you out of the forest fire that is your existence, at least for a while.
Gather with the like-minded and enter the bar back to back, heads on a swivel.
Laugh at determined fools. When reason fails, laughter is often the more effective weapon.
Finally, and most importantly:
Read my fiction. Mama’s had a day, and I need money.
Two hip replacements in a single year is no joke, but I am improvingand 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-conductionheadphones, 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.
For those who missed it, here is the short story: My surgeon implanted me with a new left hip. Arthritis has plagued both my hips for more than a year. It’s a genetic thing. Other members of my family have also had total hip replacements. I will have the right hip replaced someday, as well, but that’s a Future Me problem. Please! Screw Future Me. Present Me is still dealing with the recovery process.
However!
I am getting better. Yesterday I entered our shower for the first time without using a transfer bench. I’ve walked around two stores in the last few days. Those adventures were brief, but I am building my stamina. The improvements feel incremental, but I do notice positive changes almost every day, and I am fanatical about performing all my rehab exercises. (Shout out to Melissa at Old North Wellness for her excellent skills as a physiotherapist!)
So:
I last pounded the keys on my current work in progress on March 30. (It’s a tale of revenge with lots of surprises, strategies for vengeance, and multiple endings.) My ordeal of reengineering my anatomy occurred on March 31. Today is April 30. Tomorrow, I will start writing again. I have been down, depressed, and anxious post-surgery, but I’m still in the game. Please stand by.
Dawn is coming.
~ In the meantime, geez, see all those books to the right? I have a bunch of great stories in my catalogue you will love. Award-winning stuff! Socks and shoes flying off and whatnot! Some may make you ugly cry, but there’s (almost) always a sprig of hope in each narrative bouquet. Click a link, read a book, be transported and transformed.
I’ve known this for a couple of months, but I can finally announce that Endemic has won first place in genre fiction from the North Street Book Awards.They say my story about a neurodivergent book editor overcoming childhood trauma in the viral apocalypse is a “fresh twist“ in apocalyptic fiction.
In addition to a cash prize and various goodies, I received a nifty T-shirt and a certificate.)
This is Endemic’s fourth win. It previously received a Literary Titan Award and first place at both the Hollywood Book Festival and the New York Book Festival.
One of the (possibly dubious?) benefits is a critique of the book via the judges. Note the huge difference in tone between the ominous word “critique” and the glorious word “review.”
For the most part, the critique is delighted and delightful. I had to giggle at one piece of commentary wherein a judge suggested she would have enjoyed Endemic even more if it were a completely different book.Also, in my estimation, the suggestion of a different cover would have hurt the novel.But these are niggles. Reading between the lines, it’s easy to appreciate how different readers will see a narrative through their particular lens . Obviously, they loved Endemic overall.
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.
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.
