Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 3

9 December update on IN HER NAME: RED LEGION

I caught up reading through all the chapters I’d written on In Her Name: Red Legion. Tomorrow I’m going to start in on finishing this story - finally!

IN HER NAME: RED LEGION update

I’m about halfway through reading over IN HER NAME: RED LEGION, which tells of what happens to Reza Gard after he leaves the Marine Academy in CONFEDERATION. Then I’m going to hammer out the last few chapters and get this thing done…

Join Me For A ‘First Contact’ Read-Along!

You may have already seen me post about this on Xitter and Facebook, but starting Monday, 11 September, I’m planning to start rereading the In Her Name series, starting with First Contact - and figured I’d invite you to join in if you like!

I don’t have anything formal or terribly structured in mind: I’m just planning to read a chapter or two each night and invite folks to toss out questions, comments, tomatoes, etc. Basically, it’s just to have some fun and dive back into my own personal favorite universe and bring anyone else along who’d like to go.

First Contact is FREE as an ebook from all the major e-retailers, so grab a copy if you don’t have it already!

See you Monday!

Alexander’s Passing

For those who have read my Harvest novels, you’ll recall that one of the main supporting characters was a big tuxedo Siberian cat named Alexander. What many don’t know is that Alexander was based on our own beloved Sasha (a diminutive of both Alexandra and Alexander), a Siberian cat who came into our lives as a tiny kitten a little over fourteen years ago. Sadly, Sasha suffered what we believe to have been a stroke in August 2021 on our way from San Antonio to our new home in Idaho, and was left in such condition that, heartbroken, we felt compelled to put him down.

Alexander’s character in many ways was faithful to Sasha: he was rambunctious, often a pain in the butt, and contrary as any cat could be.

But he was also a very loving and faithful friend, who spent many an hour curled up in my or my wife’s lap, purring contentedly or just sleeping away. When I was working at my desk, be it writing or working on something else, he would often come and lay right up against the back of my iPad in its stand, his big head just over one side of the keyboard, so I was pretty much compelled to pet him every time I tried to type. But he never let us forget that he was descended from ferocious hunters: even in his elder years, he would periodically charge around the house, singing the song of his people.

At night, he would often make a peculiar circuit of the bed, hopping up on my wife’s side, marching around her pillow, down between us, across my feet, then up on my left side where he would slowly stalk toward my pillow. Then he would do a slow turnaround and stick his tail in my face, then meow that he was hungry (yes, he could be an asshole). He would also prowl the house in the middle of the night, yowling just to hear his own voice, I think, then sleep and snore most of the day.

It’s hard to say all there is to say about a furry companion who was with us for fourteen years, and even now it’s hard for me to write this without tearing up. Sasha (and his sister Nina) came to us when he was so tiny that he could easily fit into my cupped palms, and grew into a big cat of 17 lbs in his heyday. But over time he became diabetic and had some other medical problems, which I suspect contributed to his demise.

I’ve had to put a lot of animals down over the years, or bid goodbye when my parents had to have it done: that’s an unavoidable part of life when you grow up around animals as I did. Dogs, horses, and more. Sadly, saying goodbye never gets easier, and that was certainly true with Sasha, as I held him lone last time before he strutted across the Rainbow Bridge, tail held high, yowling loudly for all to hear.

The post Alexander’s Passing appeared first on Michael R. Hicks.

If It Costs You Your Peace, It’s Not Worth It

If it costs you your peace, it is too fucking expensive.

– @ImSpeaking13 on Twitter

I debated a lot about what to write in this post, or whether to write it at all. But I came to the conclusion that the message was too important not to share. @ImSpeaking13’s tweet, above, really cut to the heart of it for me: settling for a shit sandwich simply isn’t worth it. This is where “the grass isn’t always greener” chorus begins, and there’s some truth to that. It’s also true that making major life changes for a lot of folks, particularly now during an ongoing global pandemic, isn’t an easy proposition. But the greater truth, I think, is that if you never look for something better, you’re certainly never going to find it.

This particular story is rooted in the last posting of my career in DOD, when we moved from Hawaii, where I’d enjoyed another great assignment, to take a position in San Antonio where things at work went down the crapper during the next 11 months before I finally pulled the plug and left. I resigned two years before I could get my full retirement. It was that bad.

Before I get into this sob story, here are some things to keep in mind. When I started this new position, I had about 28 years with my employer. I’d performed a variety of work roles, including managing teams and branches of up to about 30 or so people. While I’ll be the last to say I was perfect in any way, I’d accomplished a lot over those years and accumulated a great deal of experience and expertise in my focal areas, and had the achievement awards (and promotions) to show for it. I like working hard and being challenged, partly because I absolutely despise being bored, but also because I loved my work and generally enjoyed the heck out of it. I was also coming off of an assignment where the organization I was leading pulled off a huge success, one of those “No one believes we can possibly do this, so by God we’re gonna do it” things, so I was on a bit of a professional high at that point and was really looking forward to kicking some butt in this new job.

So, you can imagine my reaction when I came to my new position in San Antonio and found that I had literally nothing to do. Nothing. Zip. Nada. And there were a few other people there from our organization who had been there longer, and who also had nothing to do. I found out from my new boss not long after I arrived that she’d been frantically hiring people to make a recruiting quota set by our Big Boss, and that she’d succeeded! Go, team. The fact that she hadn’t parceled out any work to us and had no plan or intention to do so (she was an utter control freak) didn’t seem to register.

Okay, then. I reached out to her and some of the other folks in senior positions (we were a remote enclave from the main organization located elsewhere in the country), asking for mission, for work, and giving ideas for things my team (I’d been brought in as the new chief) could work on. The responses fell into three general categories:

Patronizing pats on the head (sort of “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure something out eventually and let you know”);Being told, even if nicely, to go pound sand; orBeing completely ignored (literally no response).

Now, if I’d been the sort of person who had been looking for the perfect position to just sit and fuck off while collecting a generous pay check, this would have been Nirvana. But that’s not me. I want to get shit done, I want to help move the ball down the field for whatever project or program I’m working on. But I had nothing to work on, and by the very nature of the work and workplace, you can’t just go off in left field and do whatever you want. So, I had nothing to do, and as I mentioned earlier, neither did the other folks who were on my team, beyond imaginative make-work.

This may not sound like a big deal to some; there are certainly far more toxic environments to work in. But being left for months with zero to do, especially after having had an otherwise full and, dare I say, pretty darn exciting career, is absolutely caustic to your self-esteem and self-confidence. It’s sort of like the frog in the pot paradigm: you’re dying as the heat is turned up, just very slowly.

At that point, I absolutely hated going into work every day, hated every minute I had to spend there twiddling my thumbs, felt my perishable technical skills slipping away, and felt completely and utterly devalued. I got to the point where I pulled out some of my earlier evaluations and notes I’d written at various points in my career on things I’d done, just to reassure myself that I wasn’t a completely useless piece of shit.

In September, one of the other folks on my team landed a really cool job with another employer and made good her escape. In October, I was finally able to help grease the skids for two other folks to go take rotations in other offices, which they should have started the better part of a year earlier. So they were safely out of the Twilight Zone for a good 18 months, or as long as I could keep them in other offices where they could actually do something useful.

Of course, that also meant that for a few months I was the only one on our team in the office; most of the other folks were transients coming through to work on short-term projects before disappearing again.

Finally, in December, after continuing to whine and complain in an effort to get something to do, I was at last given some actual work. HUZZAH! It wasn’t what I had been told I’d be doing in this job (the vacancy ad was essentially a lie, with more lies piled on during the interview, to get people to fill empty positions), but at that point I would’ve been happy to count the bristles on a toothbrush.

However, the wheels soon enough came off the wagon. The details are immaterial, I suppose, but some things happened involving one of the team leads in the mother ship whom I was trying to support, and five-plus months of frustration came boiling out in mid-January (2021). Actually, that’s a lot more melodramatic than the actual event: I sent an email to this clown and a handful of other folks saying 1) I didn’t agree with their assessment on some things I’d been given to work on, and why; and 2) I had nearly three decades of experience doing this sort of thing and wasn’t going to be treated like a fucking noob, in so many words.

Now, before you say, “You should never send an email in anger” (which I agree with), I confess that I sent it after thinking about it for a full day. I wasn’t angry when I sent it; I was disillusioned and disgusted. I had been marginalized and ignored by my parent office for months, and I was just sick of it.

What came next was no shock to me: I got a verbal paddling from the new boss who took over in November, I think it was (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” – The Who). I’m not one to walk away without at least trying to make things right, regardless of who might have been in the wrong, so I did the only thing I could to make amends by apologizing to those I’d offended with my email. However, like my earlier suggestions and entreaties, that, too, was ignored. I found out later from a coworker at the mother ship that at that point I’d been totally blackballed.

I wasn’t at all surprised. One of the things my new boss told me during some of the exchanges we’d had during this period was that I was “a valued employee.” For anyone who’s current on their corporate buzzword bingo, “valued employee,” especially when used by an incompetent supervisor (which, in my humble opinion, was the case with both bosses while I was in this position), means you’re considered a total shitbird.

From that point on, the only work I was given could mostly have been done by a semi-conscious high school intern, and I’m really not exaggerating. Most of it was literally cutting and pasting junk from one Excel spreadsheet to another; I kid you not.

When management complained that there was so much reporting to do and we didn’t have enough people to release, I volunteered to help: I’d been editing since the late 80s and started releasing somewhere around 1993; just in the previous three years in my other assignments I’d hit the “go” button for over 1,500 reports.

Silence. They didn’t even bother to reply.

At that point, I started looking for options to curtail my assignment there and try to get a position in another office. But here’s where the Big Irony started: I was told explicitly that I wouldn’t be released from my organization early (I had a full two years to go at this point) because I was occupying a “priority” position, even thought I effectively had nothing to do. I would have happily paid any moving costs out of my own pocket, but that didn’t matter. I was stuck.

Time ground onward, just like I was grinding my teeth, and at least one stupid thing or another happened every week, and sometimes every day. If you’ve ever heard “Synchronicity” by The Police, there’s a line that goes, “And every single meeting with his so called superior Is a humiliating kick in the crotch” – well, that was pretty much my reality, although it wasn’t generally garbage from my supervisor. It was just dumb, stupid, idiotic crap that was really bringing me down.

Finally, some really stupid crap came up during the first week of April that was the final straw. I don’t even remember now what it was; I just remember thinking, “Enough is enough,” and I decided to resign. Again, keep in mind how low someone has to be to consider resigning only two years short of their full 30 years for retirement. The good news, however, was that I found out that I could get a postponed annuity and all associated benefits for my 28+ years when I turn 60, which is only five months after I would have been able to retire with 30 years. So even if I couldn’t get a job that paid anything close to what I’d been making, I knew we could manage to squeak by for a couple years until that kicked in and we had some more options (note: Federal retirement under the FERS system isn’t going to leave you with much).

Then came the rest of the Big Irony that I’d mentioned earlier: when I told my boss that I was going to resign, he basically said, “Well, sorry to see you go – good luck.” Now, remember when I told you that they wouldn’t let me change to another office because I was in a “priority” position? Sure, they would have had to swindle some other poor schmuck into taking the job, but at least they could have kept my experience and expertise within the larger enterprise. But now that I was going to resign, it was no big deal, even though they would still have to fill my position?

Again, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve seen this phenomenon all too many times over the years, and at that point I didn’t care. I just wanted out. At 58 years old, I was damned if I was going to spend two of my remaining years sticking a pen in my eye for eight hours a day, five days a week, on top of the time I’d already wasted there.

As things turned out, just before I was planning to punch out, I landed an absolutely amazing job that I’m going to be starting in a few weeks. But even had that not happened, leaving my old employer was absolutely the right decision.

Just as a brief side note, I wanted to touch on some of the advice I got from family and friends while my wife and I were wrestling with the decision to leave my job (she was all in favor, FYI). Most of them were like, “stick it out, two years isn’t so long.” A number of them then proceeded to tell me what turned out to be utterly heart-wrenching stories of what they’d endured toward the end of their careers, in some cases putting up with a bloody horror show for years before they finally retired or walked away. Seriously, some of their experiences were just so awful that they brought tears to my eyes. And they were telling me to just keep jabbing that pen in the eyeballs and stick with it. Lordy.

Look, I’m not into giving up easily or just tossing in the towel. But I’ve spent most of my adult life as an analyst (some folks have even thought I was a pretty good one), and my Spidey Sense was screaming “SCREW THIS!” There’s bulling through difficult times to reach a specific goal that’s important to you is a different case. But my modest annuity wasn’t worth another two years of servitude in a place I hated and that hated me.

The moral of the story is that if you’re in a crappy situation with no solution in sight, do what you can to change it. If you never look for something better, you’ll never find it.

I also realize that not everyone can just up and leave like we did: we were lucky enough to have savings set aside that gave us some breathing room, we didn’t have young kids to worry about, etc. But my point stands: even if you can only make tiny changes at a time, do what you can to move yourself toward a happier place, where you can find your peace. You’re worth it. Remember: you have value. You matter. Your happiness matters. And don’t let anyone ever tell you it doesn’t.

The post If It Costs You Your Peace, It’s Not Worth It appeared first on Michael R. Hicks.

Automatic Investment Management Spreadsheet Template

For those who may be interested, I’ve put a spreadsheet together to track your trades for the Robert Lichello Automatic Investment Management (AIM) system. I’ve added a few bells and whistles to it, but the underlying math is right from Lichello’s original AIM system.

So, here’s the link to my AIM Spreadsheet Template as of 7 March 2021. Remember – USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Here are instructions on how to use it, and I’ll be adding a YouTube tutorial soon to step you through the process:

COPY the template sheet to create a new sheet for each stock you takes position in. Then change the title of the sheet and the header row to the stock symbol (e.g. AAPL for Apple).Row 1 is your entry row. Fill out ONLY the cells marked in yellow: Date (when you purchased the stock)Stock Price (the price per share you paid); Shares Held (number of shares that you bought); Stock Value (this will auto-calculated from Shares Held * Stock Price, but just in case you need to make a manual entry)DO NOT change the other cellsRow 2 is your first buy/sell row. These are the ONLY cells you should update on this and all subsequent rows:DateStock PriceActual Shares Bot (“Bot” = bought or sold)IMPORTANT: for a sell, make sure you put a MINUS (“-“) sign in front of the number for Actual Shares Bot; for a buy, just the (positive) number.BEFORE you enter the buy/sell information in the third row, duplicate (copy/paste) the entire row into Row 4. That keeps all the formulas intact for later transactions. Then enter your transaction information for Row 3. Repeat that copy/paste action for each new transaction row.If you find you accidentally messed up a row(s), you can always go back and copy Row 3 from the template to fix any rows from 3 on. Note that Rows 1 and 2 have different formulas in some of the cells – don’t use either of those to repair any later rows.

The post Automatic Investment Management Spreadsheet Template appeared first on Author Michael Hicks.

Fake Audible Version of FIRST CONTACT

A reader alerted me today that someone by the name of Ethan C. Leal published an audiobook version of FIRST CONTACT to Audible and the other Amazon platforms. This individual did this without my permission or rights, and I’ve contacted Audible and asked to have it taken down and (hopefully) any purchases refunded, and I’ve also contacted what looks to be the miscreant on ACX. I’m not going to provide any links to it, but you can tell it’s a fake by the cover, and because the quality of the narration is crap. The ONLY legit audio content for FIRST CONTACT is what I’ve put out in my sadly neglected podcast. So if you happened to buy the pirated version from Amazon/Audible, please inform them and ask for a refund and to take down the audiobook. Grrr.

The post Fake Audible Version of FIRST CONTACT appeared first on Author Michael Hicks.

How About a Teaser for RED LEGION (In Her Name, Book 10)?

Since you’ve been so patient and it looks like I might actually finish RED LEGION before the sun explodes (although prayers and exhortations are still welcomed and appreciated!), I wanted to reward those of you who haven’t seen any of the draft yet with a teaser! I published these (and more) chapters on Wattpad as I was working on it, but not everyone uses that platform and a lot of folks haven’t had a chance to get a taste of what’s coming, should they so desire.

So, I made a PDF of the RED LEGION Teaser, and you can also read it on . As a reminder, when it’s published, the book will be available in Kindle, Nook, and other ebook formats. I’ll keep you posted on that…

Also, please feel free to share the teaser if you like – that’s what it’s for. And enjoy!

 

The post appeared first on Author Michael Hicks.

A Virtual Around The World Overlanding Trip?

Are you in for helping me plan an around the world overlanding trip? While travel isn’t an option for most of us right now, that doesn’t mean we can’t at least imagine ourselves out on the road (or however you like to travel), heading off for exotic locations. And that’s exactly what I’m looking for!

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that my wife and I love traveling in the RV. The happiest I’ve ever been in terms of where I’ve lived was when we were able to take long RV summer trips while I was writing full time (2011-2016). While we’ve been going a bit stir-crazy in lock-down during the pandemic, I really, really miss being out in the RV, which has been one of the biggest downsides to moving to Hawaii back in late 2018.

We really miss being out in the RV…

Before COVID-19 hit, we were just about to make a permanent change of station (PCS) back to the mainland, to San Antonio. In addition to looking forward to taking the RV out, we had also decided to prepare for post-retirement (February 2023!) overland travel across as much of the world as we can.

If you’re not familiar with overlanding, I think the definition from Overland Journal says it best: overlanding describes self-reliant adventure travel to remote destinations where the journey is the primary goal.

While we have no intention of giving up our “glamping” in the RV (which we intend to go full-time in after I leave work), we decided that we want to be able to get farther off the beaten track than The Beast could manage. To that end, we decided that – when we’re through the pandemic – we’re going to upgrade the Jeep a bit and buy an Opus OP2 adventure trailer (which is pricey, but awesome as heck) to be our overlanding home when we’re out on our overlanding trip(s).

I don’t want to dive into all the hardware here (although if you want to talk about it, please feel free to comment!), but want to instead focus on destination ideas for travel planning. And that’s where I’d like your help:

What are the coolest, most interesting places you’ve been or would have loved to see in your travels – on or off the beaten track – that you think should be on a “must see” list?

I know the list of places worth seeing is probably endless (we already have the U.S. National Parks on our list, of course), but that’s part of the fun! And it doesn’t matter what country or locale: everywhere is fair game! Seriously, I hope to work as many amazing places into our future travel plans as I possibly can. If things work out like I hope, I’ll see if I can actually plot out an itinerary of what we come up with that I can share with you.

So please post a comment with your ideas – my wife and I would love to see them!

The post A Virtual Around The World Overlanding Trip? appeared first on Author Michael Hicks.

Reading of In Her Name: First Contact, Chapter Two, Part Two

This is the second half of the author read-along for , chapter two. Captain McClaren and his crew have their hands more than full as a boarding party of Kreelan warriors swarm through the compartments and passageways of the survey vessel Aurora…

The podcast is now available on:

Anchor.fmSpotifyApple Podcasts (Note: only the first episode is showing up here; have to get that fixed)BreakerOvercastGoogle Podcasts (Android only)RadioPublicPocketCasts

So, if you enjoy it, please feel free to share with your friends!

The post appeared first on Author Michael Hicks.