Green Mother joins The Box and the two are doing fine

It's so weird...I'm writing this book The Box now. It's going good. Half finished with the first draft. All nonlinear and disconnected in a connected and linear way, about the love and hate and indifference between Eddie and his evil princess, his holy darkness, Anita. I've been enjoying interlaced chapters on mind-blindness, superheroes, a deep cold colder than cold, trees and streams that act as translators for what poor Eddie can't say, a trio of hair-brained but brilliant thinkers who have been studying Eddie and Anita to discover the source of all love...Just all kinds of fun. But then a strange thing happened...

...I started writing another novel.

Still writing The Box, but now there's this fun little traditional horror novel going on over here at a second work station that just popped up out of nowhere.

This horror novel's called Green Mother. Started it yesterday and have most of the first chapter lined out. And I'll just tell you, it's straight up folk horror set in the deep, dark hills of Eastern Kentucky. Also, the thing is, it's pretty traditional. Nothing incredibly fancy, no modernist or postmodernist brushstrokes, no Monsonic experimentation. I guess what I'm saying is, it's nothing more than flat out fun as hell.

I'd been hoping a book like this would come to the surface. I've written gritty realism, what a lot of people call country-noir, crime fiction, regional literature, and then, of course, glittering and enjoyable surrealism, magic realism, certain levels of short-form horror (such as this story published in Lost Balloon in 2018 and this one published in Occulum in 2017). 

But man oh man Green Mother is like a carnival, like one big horrific festival, a folk festival!, where all the carnies and performers want to gobble you up. It's patently beautiful in that it's absurdly fun to write.

Whenever I can't think of a good way to close a post, I just write this and then stop...

Dear Mortality

If you've had the bad luck of being told by reputable doctors you may not live to a certain age, then you'll know what I'm mean when I say the actual, physical design of your brain is changed from dealing with the news.

I'm 49 years old, will be 50 in April. Doctors told me in 2013 if I didn't quit smoking there was a alarmingly high-percentage chance I wouldn't live to see my 60s. I'd had a massive heart attack that later required triple-bypass heart surgery in 2017. 

For a month and a half, I was able to stay away from the Marlboros. Then, small step by small step, I started to sneak to smoke. At the time, our budget was tight, so I couldn't spend money on cigarettes or it would be noticeable to our bottom line. I'd eventually have to confess to explain where the money had gone. 

So I found cigarette butts in public places.

Yep, nicotine creates a powerful addiction. The last time I did it was about three days before I finally admitted I had started smoking again. I was on my way to work at about 4:30 AM and passed Walmart.

The parking lot was abandoned, a strange state to find the superpower retailer. I took the next turn and drove to the parking lot and walked to the front doors to find in the ash tray receptacle (don't now what they're actually called) a nearly full cigarette someone must have lit as they were going in and tossed out soon afterwards. I picked that thing up and smoked it, cherishing every fine second, giving no thought at all to what kind of sickness I could be exposing myself to whatsoever.

I'm still that addicted, and my last cigarette has to be before midnight on April 22.  

I break from writing THE BOX (Novel in Progress) to say this...

Worked at the job yesterday for 13 hours. The job, the journalism. Worked six more hours today on a roofing project my father-in-law has been tackling by himself for the past week. Alone, just him, 63 years old, ripping away old shingles, removing felt, nails, re-felting, nailing down new shingles, and, during the in-between, replacing rotted boards with newly sawed and fitted wood. 

By himself.

My faith says I must, and my heart, my striving for honest devotion to loved ones, demands it of me. So six hours today, until 3 p.m. He was working when the sun went down shortly after 7 p.m., and had started two hours earlier than I had, a chilly 7 a.m.

I guess I needed to say it. 

When I pulled into the driveway, I limped, half bent, up the hill to my house, a tired we've all known, the kind when all your brain can register is tired. I'm tired. It can provide no other output then. I slept from 3:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. when my beautiful cat, Cleopatra, woke me, overdue for her supper and not pleased that I'd made no move to help her out with that. Who knows how long she sat beside my paralyzed body before at last deciding to begin meowing and bumping her head into my chest?

I never mean to transform Bent Country, my first online home, the first time my words were sent out for consumption or deference, I never mean to make it hardly more than a public journal. It just goes that way sometimes. Writers and friends tell me I need to make my personal life more accessible to my literary community, that it humanizes things. I don't know about any of that, I honestly don't, but Bent Country is the only place I feel half-comfortable doing this. Facebook, Twitter, these things scare me, probably second only to the deaths of my loved ones. It's a selfish fear, but nonetheless.

Here it is, an hour out from midnight, and I dread sleeping again because that time travel only puts me right back to morning and pulling on my workboots to go again to the roof. I'll eventually break down some early hour of the morning and give in, grit my teeth and prepare for teleportation to another morning and afternoon working.

I'm still tired, and I haven't had enough fluids today; my face is flakey with dehydration. I should drink water and go to bed.

Typing to be not thinking.

Just finished my entry in the daily journals I started about five years ago. It's all very precious. Moleskin notebooks - seven of them now full - and it's alarming to see that a lot of what's in there is about writing. Well, not alarming. Writing is a big part of my life, but it's like there's not much else going on. I go to my job as assistant news director of this little tv station here in Eastern Kentucky and do these same little stories over and over and over. I'm burned out at this point but too old to start over with anything. I'd like to get a job teaching where I got my undergraduate degree here in Pikeville but there's someone on the English staff there who hates me and not for good reasons at all; in fact, I should hate them because of what they did to me ten years ago. All of that from a decade ago will never leave my mind. My writing career was actually going in that "taking off" direction and they murdered all of that. I mean I'm satisfied now and couldn't be more thankful for my place in letters. I have a fantastic publisher, the writers who know me generally like me and my writing. I've put aside my need for a larger readership. I really only write now for myself. There's a sad thought that's been lodged in my brain for the past couple years. I'm 49 years old and was told if things didn't change (and they haven't) that I wouldn't live past my 50s. These people who told me were doctors. Cardiologists. Heart surgeons. I'm not playing around. I may have only about five years left to live. I'm not scared to die, but knowing it will possibly be so soon is making me sad about the finality of it, never getting to see the people I love again. It's just a sadness that's on me now and it won't be going away. Nothing to really say here this early morning. Just writing to be writing; talking to be talking; typing to be not thinking.

Re: The Old Invisible manuscript

I finished a novel called The Old Invisible a couple weeks ago. I can't tell what I think about it. I don't think it's bad. It's just that I wrote it fast. It took me about six months, maybe five. 

It's the longest book I've written (about 330 manuscript pages) and it's, of course, set in Eastern Kentucky, but it's not exactly the kind of regional literature of mine that's often tagged as Grit Lit. 

It's gritty because it's set in EKy, but there's a mountain witch and she's the main character. I like writing about witches. And sometimes other kinds of monsters. Horror writing brought me into the writing life (many thanks, Stephen King, from one of millions who can say the same exact thing) and that'll always be with me. I'm glad of it. Thing is, it sometimes leaves me unclear what my overall intentions are with a book I'm writing.

Then I remember it doesn't matter.

But there's still the matter of this finished novel I've got here in a folder on my Google Drive. 

Do I make another folder called "Trunk Novels" and put it in there? Do I call the folder "Shelved Novels" or something else? Why do I think about any of this?

I don't know why I think about it. I have a lot of folders in my Google Drive and all of them are about to my writing; folders for short stories, for novels, for prose poems, for essays, for notes, for outlines (very very recently began doing some outlining, since it happened organically in order to keep track of where the hell I was while writing my novel Oblivion Angels). There's others, all of those also about writing.

Off course.

So I don't know about The Old Invisible. I'm worried about sending it to Adam to have a look at. Adam Van Winkle is a publishing wizard. Founder of Cowbody Jamboree Press, he's published nearly all my books now in print, as well as tons of other books by solid as hell writers all around. When I send him a manuscript, I want to make sure it's worth his time to read.

I'm going to do something I've never tried before and that's put the manuscript aside and give it time to breathe, as they say, then go back and see what I think of it after a couple months. 

I'm bad at that kind of thing; impulsiveness has both worked in my favor and against my better interests. Against, me, though, far more often than not. So I'm going to give it a try. 

The time when I was almost kidnapped, raped, and probably killed.

Just told my sister about this childhood incident from when I six years old. It was published as fiction, but it's entirely autobiographical, except I told it from the POV of the predator.

Here is the link to "The Scout," published in 2021 at Schuylkill Valley Journal Online.

Three stories recently published

I've had a few stories published lately that I'm proud of and proud of where they were published. Below are the links to those stories, and the publication that put them out there. I'll also soon have a story appearing at BULL, sometime in November, I think.

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Harm May's Vegas Money - Porchlight

Flush - Grit Quarterly

The Dress - New World Writing Quarterly

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