Sometimes I Write About What I'm Writing

Things I'm working on:

Novel - THE BOX (172 pages in)    

Difficult to describe but I tossed a lot of stuff in here, mostly about ex-wives and ex-lovers and ex-lives. Was once titled FOUR STUDIES OF LOVE.

Novel - THE OMEGA PROJECT: A BISHOP FORD NOVEL (40 pages in)

This is the first mystery novel in a planned series featuring my journalist-turned-detective Bishop Ford.  Each title will do that thing that mystery/thriller series do with similar titles all set like this...The FILL IN THE BLANK Project: A Bishop Ford Novel. This first one is about a serial killer who thinks she's a werewolf.

Novel - GREEN FATHER (47 pages in)

I like folk horror. I've written several short stories in this genre but never a book. This one sees David Eversole move back to his hometown in Eastern Kentucky from the central part of the state when his grandmother dies. He finds she had been part of a cult based deep in the hills of Caldwell, Kentucky.

Prose Poetry Collection - I MISS THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA (14 pages in)

A collection of prose poems, which will be my fourth collection of poetry once finished. If I finish this one finished this year, it will be the second completed in that time. Alien Buddha Press released my third, Shark Life, earlier this year.

I've been fairly prolific, relatively speaking, since my first book, The Same Terrible Storm, came out in 2012. By about this time next year I'll have had fifteen books published since Storm appeared. But the above breakdown of my current projects should explain why. 

I've never been able to sit down and start a book and write only on that manuscript until the thing is done. I've just not been able to take that road. I will say, though, that having three novels going at the same time is pretty new. Usually I've worked on a novel, a story collection, and a poetry collection simultaneously. But it's all for the same reason: I get bored and burned out writing on the same story for too long without having another to jump to when that happens. Somewhere inside I'm missing that mechanism.

Fin

.

Bits #118

I have a novel coming out from Cowboy Jamboree Press soon. I'll post more about that as it goes along. Folks say it's a good one. I wrote it fast - like really fast - so it kind of blurred by me. I know it came easiest of my books, even the shorter flash fiction and prose poetry collections. But I'll be talking more about it over the next several weeks.

-

Had a strange week at work. I'm the sports director at a media company and just took the job about a month ago. That was during our district and regional high school basketball tournaments and it went by like a flash; our engagement numbers, money made from our social media, all that went through the roof. And I stayed busy. Now it's baseball season and things have slowed down. I can't adjust to being in the office with not as much to do. But I guess as problems go, that's a good one to have.

-

My stress levels have improved as my faith in God has grown stronger. Two or three events in my life in which it's undeniable that God came to me with help over the past two years has boosted my faith to new levels. It's a lot to explain, and I have testified to this a lot lately, but it's maybe enough to say that I now, for the first time in my life, truly have 100 percent faith that as long as I live my life as a Christian to the best of my abilities every day whatever happens - good, bad, or otherwise - is part of the path I'm supposed to be on according to God's plan for me. I don't dread things anymore. I don't start to break down every time it seems like my life is unraveling. It's strange but beautiful, and a complete 180 from how I lived the first 50 years of my life. If only I could have had the courage and conviction to come to this sooner in life. Ahh, but that, too, is how this is supposed to work for me. Like I said, no worries, no stress. I wish this for everybody.

-

I've been making a massive attempt to read the books I own. I own a lot of them. All of us writers do. I buy books like some people buy loaves of bread and so I've accumulated so many I'm beginning to think I won't get the chance to read them. Which is alright and everything, but I'd really like to, right? I wouldn't have bought them otherwise. So instead of doing what I planned, which was my year of reading only Big Books (think Vollmann), I'm instead starting to read as many of my shorter books in order to take as big of a chunk out as I can over the rest of the year. Wish me luck, because it's hard to stay away from those big max-style novels; they're from another planet. One that tickles a part of my reading brain like nothing else. But to get very many in, I'll have to devote an entire year (maybe two) only to those books. I'm a horribly slow reader, no matter what techniques I use. I can't scan as in speed-reading. I want to read all the story, not just the high points or whatever people do when they speed through like that. 

Today I Did Nothing

I have a hard time when things are slow, work-wise. I get antsy. I roam around the room. I smoke way way too much. 

It's never with my writing my books; I do fine there. I've been blessed by God to have never suffered from writer's block. Okay, okay...don't get mad at me for saying that. It's just true.

Some days are slow. Maybe a paragraph. But I never go a day without writing, even if it's only one terrible paragraph I know I'll be deleting tomorrow, or ever later in the day.

It's the work I do for a living. Unlike most authors I know, I don't teach. I taught for four years at a community college back in the mid-2000s, but that was 090, 100, and 101 classes, with some GED and Literacy classes thrown in to fill out the day. 

It wasn't mind-numbing like people say, not for me, anyways; probably because I strayed off the curriculum, would take a day I intended to be about the actual use for the semi-colon and instead talk about Stephen King's daily writing habits. I did that. I did.

Later - from about 2019 to 2023 - I taught online in a Master's of Fine Arts degree program. It was COVID time and those jobs were easier to land. 

But the remote work was never a living. It was extra money and generally took up more of my time than I had anticipated. 

Point is, I'm working now as the sports director of a media tv and broadcast company. Sports are big here in Kentucky, and so during basketball season and football season there's plenty to do. But baseball, softball, volleyball, and other "off-season" seasons can become a dry time for coverage.

And here I sit trying to think of feature stories to keep content flowing. Some recent segments have been about a statistics keeper, a score keeper, who has been doing this for one school for 47 years. Another was about a young man who is the tenth ranked archer in the state but has never been bow hunting, an odd sort of detail for someone that good with a bow and arrow. The one I'm trying to nail down now is a feature on a sort of "small town, big pride" kind of thing. Think the movie Hoosiers and you'll get the idea.

It's all slow. I've drank five cups of coffee (it's 1:02 p.m. here at the job). I've smoked six or seven cigarettes since getting to work. I've left my desk more than a dozen times and walked outside and stared at the sky, felt some cool breezes, and returned to my desk. I've talked five or so times with my reporter, trying to job loose some ideas. 

It's slow, and I'm not used to that. Most of my life I've made a living as a news reporter, and news is rarely very slow. There are dry periods, but nothing lasting as long as an entire high school baseball season.

It's how I ended up here, writing at Bent Country this afternoon. And so now it's time to get back to pacing the floor and smoking and drinking coffee.

My injured heart hates me. 

The 1985 Chicago Bears

Here I am watching the Bears / Packers wild card game thinking, "Why can't we get a good quarterback?" That's foolish of me to think; Caleb Williams is as good a quarterback as we'll likely see for another fifty years. 

(Now we're down two scores, which means, well...we're screwed already, several minutes before halftime, even.)

I've been a fan since 1985 - the Super Bowl Shuffle Bears with Walter Payton, Mike Singletary, Ditka at coach, Fridge Perry with the goal line TD, all those guys. It was the last time we won a Super Bowl. I was nine-years-old. I got a Payton football kids uniform from the Sears catalogue for Christmas that year, complete with helmet and pads.

(Green Bay Peckers just scored another touchdown, by the way).

Really trying to keep going with this blogpost, but I'm feeling pretty down with a full six minutes left before halftime. And don't tell me Williams is the comeback kid; if you're good in a playoff game that means you know enough to pile up points before the half. If you're constantly having to come back only to win by only a few points. It's too stressful for a newly old man.

I'm out. I'll see ya'll again soon. My apologies.

Exciting Publication Announcement

I've written here several updates on upcoming books I'm working on or may soon have published, but following up on one from a month or so ago, I have some new news.

A new short story collection of mine called Fallujah Boy was slated for publication with Cowboy Jamboree Press in May, but after talking with Adam Van Winkle, CJ's ultra-talented top dawg, yesterday and today, that has now changed in a wonderful flip.

Shortly after I submitted Fallujah Boy, I then sent Adam a manuscript of a novel I had just finished called The Old Invisible, which I've talked about here before at various stages. I wanted to know what he thought, and asked only one thing: is it any good?

The book came quick, which is unusual for me, and I felt unsure in some ways; I genuinely needed Adam's eyes on it to give me the insight he's so often provided time and again over the past decade.

I was ecstatic yesterday when he emailed saying the novel was great, even saying then and there he'd like to publish it. 

So we chatted a bit about this and decided on a different publishing schedule that includes both the novel and the collection. Instead of releasing the collection in May, Adam is going to publish the The Old Invisible in May. The collection, Fallujah Boy, will then be released sometime in 2027.

Let me tell you, my relationship with Adam and Cowboy Jamboree Press began in 2016 with the publication of my second novel, Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic, and things have only improved since. I know folks may get tired of me touting Adam and his press, but, honestly, I've not done so nearly as much as both deserve.

Just know this: if you have the good fortune of landing a book with Adam at CJ then you have a guy in your corner with a towel on his shoulder, a bottle of water in hand, and more than willing to step in the ring in your place at the drop of a dime.

Autumn Years: A Prose Poem

Fifty in April and haven't taken great care of myself over the past three decades. This quickly adds up to losing a step, wrinkles crawling their way across my face, skin hanging from my neck, pictures from last year are time capsules opened 20 years later just today.

A Complete Unknown and Highway 61 Revisited and others

Tried to keep it up with this novel-in-progress...Can't manage it. I like writing novels and all but I miss writing my lyrical, purple prose, prose poetry. I found out I'm happiest writing when I'm hunkering down and writing at a sentence level. It feels like I'm better at that. Either way, the happy outweighs whatever else I might be able to do with a novel. I've written five of them now and that's five more than I thought I'd write. I do kind of dislike that I've written 90 pages on this last one, but, who knows, there may be sections I can revisit and pull from for other work?

Just watched A Complete Unknown and thinking now I should actually listen to some of Dylan's songs - at least Highway 61 Revisited. The final scene in the biopic might have been conjecture, creative license, and it might have been overdoing it some, but I liked it. Maybe it happened; I can't know, I'm pretty sure. TC is becoming one of my favorite actors, especially since he knighted (The King reference) Joaquin Phoenix as the Strange GOAT. Or something like that - strange or crazy. I think strange. For the record, he said Denzel was the GOAT GOAT. I'd mostly agree, except Denzel has kind of a John Wayne acting method going...no matter what movie he's in he's sort of just playing himself.

Ordered a bunch of books with my bunch of Amazon gift cards. It's that time of year. On that note, they're all hard copies. I've spent the last three years buying only Kindle, and it's been nice with the instant gratification and all that, but I miss holding a new book in my hands. So there you go. Important updates all around.

Alright, let's go write something and then read something and then go to bed.

Bent Country's Top Ten Books of 2025

I've let go of preamble here in my fifth decade wandering here on the earth. Here are the ten books that hit me the hardest over the past year, in particular order /

1. 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers

Had wanted to read this one for a long time, and it didn't disappoint. The characters are vivid and unforgettable. Best of all, it's set in the South but doesn't rely on it; it's not one of those books in the South where people say after reading it, "The setting was just like a character." It doesn't have to be in order to be a wicked good setting. This book proves that.

2. 

Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin

Discovered Sorokin by doing nothing more than scrolling through "You Might Like These" type of thing on Amazon. I can't remember which book where this was listed like that, but I'm glad I came across it. Sorokin is fearless, but he's not for everyone; if you're easily offended, or possibly not easily offended, just normally offended, then do not read this book. Ever.

3. 

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

If I hadn't read Sad Cafe and Sorokin this year this would be the one. I guess the order of these alone says that, but I wanted to restate it. How did Kincaid manage to write really short short stories and only a handful, at that, and manage to write a book that would be a career-maker for anyone who would have written it? Just a perfect book.

4.

American Kings by Seth Wickersham

First football nonfiction book I've read and I immediately corrected that by starting Wickersham's other football book Better to Be Feared. This book will not appeal to folks who ain't sports fans, but if you are, then it's a MUST read.

5.

Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

I worshipped this man's books while growing up. They are by far and away the best children's books ever written. He might have had a dud I'm not aware of, but I didn't read about it in this book. And, yep, it touches on the badness the man became infamous for later on. All of it interesting.

6.

Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

Read this to finish up the Lonesome Dove set. Loved it. Plain and simple. Oh, also, you'll like it even if you don't like reading westerns.

7.

Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin

My introduction to Sorokin. My jaw legitimately dropped several times within the first quarter of this book. How did this guy write such shocking material and pull this off, write this amazing novel? I generally can't stand fiction that has large political platforms, but Sorokin approaches that so brazenly and bravely and with such a straight punch, messy and insane and with a knee in a what some would consider the gutter but is anything but.

8.

Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry

Just really dig Larry. His writing is pure and without irony or all those other little social motives that turns my stomach after enough of it. Sometimes you just want to sit around a campfire, have a couple hotdogs, and listen to a guy who can tell it straight and true and, well, perfectly.

9.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes 

I honestly thought, at around page 50 of this novel of all novels, that I had become lost in a new universe, and not in the lost-in-the-fictive-dream sort of way. I listened to it on Audible and there would be long periods while driving that I drifted away, staring at passing billboards or thinking about the last time I ate. Then, at around the halfway point, it all started to happen, whatever that IT was. I know this: what came together for me right then has never came together so solidly for me while reading any other novel. By the time I finished, I knew I'd read the first novel ever written. It was like waking up inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Can't put it anywhere but here in the list, though, because realizing you've just read the first novel ever written doesn't mean it was as enjoyable as some others.

10.

The Life of Rocks by Rick Bass

If I were to pitch an Obvious Shirt for Rick Bass it would be this: Rick Bass Crushes Short Stories. Some writers just know pacing, the elegant rise to the the climax, how to add a brushstroke or two to a character's heart perfect enough to break yours, setting, and all the rest. They put their arm on the table, tap a vein, and what comes out are stories like "Pagans." 

Three Studies of Love / Green Mother

I once again changed the title of my novel-in-progress. It's now called Three Studies of Love, but that may change before long, too. I'm having more trouble titling work than I used to.

Also, I've taken a break from writing it. It's too painful to work on for large stretches the way I have my last few books. It's painful, hard to write so truthfully about such difficult things. 

Love is the most significant subject we can give our attention. And I'm writing three intertwined sections for the novel that can be best summed up like this: 

Love Lost

Love Destroyed 

The Absence of Love for Lust

It's just too hard to work on right now. I started it the first of September and wrote just under 150 pages and then cut t to 90 pages during a single two-hour work session and then set both those drafts aside as what I've started calling "pull drafts" and started over. I'm 20 pages in now and I'm just exhausted. And sad and grieving and guilt-shattered and overwhelmed and dragging my confidence along like a broken toy. 

But I always keep a couple novels or collections going for times like this, because a lot of my writing is dark and stormy. I picked up one back up I'd started last year called Green Mother. It's a folk horror novel set in eastern Kentucky. And, best of all, I don't find myself crying uncontrollably while writing it.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

What, you all think about things other than reading and writing?

Ahh, here again in my little room in this profound space of darkness wavering like fire.

Right?

Hello, dear readers. We should get together for a card game soon.

This novel...Oh, this novel of mine. I'm reading maximalist novels these days. Recently finished Gaddis' JR and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and now reading the second book of Karl Ove Knausgard's grand set of five novels My Struggle.

I do not write these kinds of novels. But I'd like to write one. Just one, not many. It's outside my comfort zone by continents, so I want to push there, precisely because of this.

But I'm not good enough to do it, unfortunately. Still going to do it, just not well. 

It seems...crazy?...It seems crazy to commit that amount of time (it took me four years to write my first published novel Brown Bottle before it was put out in 2012) to something that cannot turn out good. There's some reasoning to it.

I'm well into my publishing career...Wait, check that...I'm far on the other side of my publishing career. When you're 49 there's an occasional mind check you have to do. I'll be 50 in April and my health has been failing rapidly for the past five years. I'll only be able to write a few more books that have something to say, and then it's writing for the honorable sake of writing, which is great by me. 

I have one book slated for publication in May and another completed novel in my publisher's hands now. There's two books, if they publish the novel. So those few books left with something to say is possibly already 33.3 percent in the bag (I think...I recall some grade school teacher saying that was the percentage on a third. But I'm disgusting at math).

The third book will certainly not be the big novel I'm going to write. The Oubliette will not be the one; I can say that with confidence. It's going to be short, likely right at 200 pages. So the maximalist novel will be the last one I write. 

Pretty fatalistic, I know. It's what it's, though.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

The Oubliette

I've changed the title of the novel I'm working on from The Box to The Oubliette. Sounds pretentious but it's what it's.

The old title was one of my favorites when I came up with it before beginning the book. It happens like that for me. I think of a title and then the story or novel comes, and the whole thing's taken a different direction and that road was leading more and more away from The Box.

I had 143 pages finished when I sat down to work on it last week. When I got up after a four-hour session, it stood at 90 pages. The entire fabric changed in that session; I've never had that happen with any piece of writing.

Once those pages were cut, I decided to set the 90 pages aside and use it as a well and started over at page one. So now I'm on page 21 but the road to the end is so much clearer. I have a renewed interest and, with this as potentially my seventh novel written, I'm getting more comfortable with the form. Never thought that would happen, if I'm being honest.

I wrote ten or so short stories while finishing my last novel, The Old Invisible and I struggled to keep those under 15 or 20 pages. It was like I was a horror writer sending in solicited stories for anthologies. Ever notice those things are 20 or 30 pages each? It's a thing. But that wasn't my goal.

I wrangled it back in and now I've had a handful of stories published over the past four maybe five months, so I'm glad that I didn't get permanently suspended and left with the knack for only writing novels. Also, I finished several others besides those recently published to include in an upcoming new story collection.

/

If The Old Invisible and this one, The Oubliette, were to be published, I'd be sitting on seven published novels compared to four short story collection and one collection of prose poems. I do have a fifth short story collection that will appear from Cowboy Jamboree in May called Fallujah Boy and Other Stories, which will bring the story collection total to five, so I guess I'm keeping pretty good pace in both forms.

Sounds like a lot of bragging. Maybe it is, I'm not sure when I search my heart of hearts. But I can say this: I don't talk to anyone in my everyday life about even being a novelist or short story writer or prose poet, an author. Not at all, ever. It makes this little space I've pecked around in since 2009 important to me in that way.

My readership here is small, intimate, with zero engagement, much the way it was in October 2009 when I could only offer text because I wasn't savvy enough with blogging to even know how to link text to other websites, etc. Or, for that matter, paste photographs. Being here, writing here, feels like 2009 again, when it was all new and exciting and I was far more unknown than I am now. And I'm not saying I don't want engagement, I'm only saying that sometimes it lifts some of the constant awareness a published author keeps balanced across their shoulders.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song

I was four when I started writing stories. Mom said I would take a piece of college ruled paper, fold it in half, turn it sideways, draw a picture on the front (usually of a boy's face), write a title beneath that (something like The Boy), and then open it to write the story on the two inner "pages" (something like The boy cried love Mom), and then present it to her as the book I'd written for her. She kept each one. I counted them a couple weeks ago. There are four dozen such books, give or take.

I was thirty-two when I first started sending my stories out to journals and magazines. Now I'm forty-nine and I've had a lot of books published - novels, story collections, poetry, memoir - but it's still the same. I'm still writing books and handed them to people hoping they'll like them.

/

Mom has my twelve published books on a shelf in her living room. But the shelf doesn't start with my first published book, the 2012 short story collection The Same Terrible Storm. No, sir. It starts with those handcrafted, often crayon-based titles from 1980. 

The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song.

And that grounds me.

It does. It grounds me every time I see them. 

More lately than ever before, I've needed something to do that, to pull me to the side, ease me into a chair, put an arm around my shoulder, and say, "Here's why you do this. Here's why you do this thing you do by yourself in a quiet room unsure if anyone will ever read what you've written." 

I have to be told, "Don't forget how it felt when you finished The Sun or The Tree and handed it to her and how happy she was to see it, to read it, to hug you when she was done."

I need to know that the reasons I do what I do remain as pure and honest as when I first started. Because if I lose that uncontaminated clarity, the last word I'll ever write will be this one.

My short story "Flipped" appears at BULL today

My short story "Flipped" appeared today at BULL. This has been one of my very favorite journals for more than a decade. Thank you Ben Drevlow; there is no other like you.

"Flipped"

Stumbling Stones: The Story of My Friend

I went to see a play tonight, my first. 

Stumbling Stones: The John Rosenberg Story is about my good friend, and many, many peoples' good friend, John.

I can't relay to you here all that John's done in his life, but it's probably enough to say that he and his family were survivors of the Holocaust. That is, his immediate family, though he, his brother, and his parents were sent to an interment camp before finally boarding passage to New York City.

JOHN ROSENBERG

He's a champion here in Eastern Kentucky. When he got here in 1970 he started foundation for free legal representation for poor people who couldn't afford attorneys. He was also instrumental in getting rid of the broad form contract that enabled coal companies to steal land from hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of Appalachians. Companies in the late 1800s bought mineral rights (for the extraction of coal) from land owners here and later came to collect.

The law gave these fuckers a shield for a long time, but thanks to Rosenberg, the broad form contract is no more. 

John was also one of the civil rights lawyers who was in Mississippi during what would be called Mississippi burning (later made into a film of the same name) that began after three voting registration workers were murdered there.

I could keep going with how important John is to me and to everyone here in my hometown through his achievements as a lawyer and civil rights activist, but the main thing to know about John is that he is a good person, truly good, during a time when the very idea of a good person has been so distorted it's no longer recognizable under the same definition.

How much impact does John have on how I live my life? After the play, I went to McDonald's (only because Hardee's was closed for some reason at 9 PM on Saturday night). Just before pulling up to give them my order, I thought I should throw out my cigarette. I shouldn't smoke, but I also shouldn't throw my butts out the window. I never think about it when I do - never. I won't lie. But I did tonight: I thought about how I shouldn't litter. There is only one reason why I worried about that tonight.

John Rosenberg.

That's what John, now 94, does better than anybody I know. He makes you want to be a better person in every respect. 

Some news and some thanks...

I've had the good fortune to see some stories published or accepted this past week. I'd like to share that news with you.

A new story of mine called "Ghosts" was published today at Cowboy Jamboree Press. 

Also, another of mine, "At the Speed of Sound," will soon share space with others at The Argyle Literary Magazine. The story will appear in the magazine's Issue #6, due out in mid-December.

Hawkeye, a fine literary journal that's going to leave its mark, has taken a story of mine called "A Lying Wonder" for its inaugural issue; it will appear later this week.

I've mentioned this here once before, but my story, "Flipped," is due out in November at BULL

These have lifted my spirits lately. I've worked in a vacuum for a few years now, so it's been nice to get on Twitter and also write here to reach out and reconnect with many of my friends, while also finding new ones. 

Writing is a lonely profession, something none of us need to be reminded, but a few years is too much time typing and putting together sentences to make books with no movement in the literary community. I appreciate these editors, and all of those who know who you are, who have been engaging with me in the last while. I love you all.

Too Proud to Say Anything, also Read and Watch

During the day, Monday through Friday, now and then Saturday, and sometimes ?why? I'm assistant news director at Mountain Top News.

Lately this has meant filling in for our former sports director no longer around. My part has been to write the sports report for our Daily Show. Two minutes. I have to come up with enough sports news to fill a two-minute read spot.

Deadline was a few minutes ago for Monday's show. I got it in, but I almost forgot. Problem was, I's about to write some on The Box when I remembered I had to do it. So I do it. Now I don't feel like writing fiction. But I still want to write. This is my mind on a Sunday night. Any night. Every night. I just usually want to write fiction.

Anyway, here we are. 

I have a secret about the folk horror novel I'm writing, Green Mother; it's a secret I will never tell. But I enjoy teasing people. However few come here to read this blog. Don't care if it's just one. I will tease.

Couple things quickly, without doing my usual rambling:

Watch Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

Read Clarice Lispector.

If you live with a cat, pet her or him now. They probably want you to but are too proud to say anything.

Read Michael Wehunt.

Read Adam Johnson.

Watch Life is Beautiful

Whenever I don't know a good way to end a post, I just do this...

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.