S.A. Hunt's Blog

A Short Story From The World of MALUS DOMESTICA - "The Paper Man"

THE ONLY REASON CIDE PEACE WAS there to see the dark, inky mass gathering at the edge of the ocean at four in the morning was because he happened to be three things: a newly-minted platinum rap star with a face tattoo and enough money to afford the Frank Lloyd Wrong glass-and-steel eyesore perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific; a popular enough rap star that his party had been almost two hundred attendees strong; and drunk.

Which was why he was standing on his back balcony, clutching a handle of bougie booze and swaying to the rhythmic roar and slash of the water against the beach below his new house.

All he wore was his fluffy white bathrobe (stolen from a swanky ski resort two years prior) and a pair of boxers, but the alcohol braced him against the wind’s cutting edge. He leaned against the aluminum banister, one bare foot on the kick rail, knee pressed against the glass, and watched the sea throw itself against the shore.

To be honest, on a cold, lonely night like this one, it was terrifying to look at. Intimidating, even through the prism of bourbon.

Night loomed before him and above him like a wall of starless perfect nothing, as if he lived on the edge of reality, and beyond was simply eternity, an absence of civilization and wilderness both. It was California until it wasn’t, and after that was no Hawaii, no Japan, just endless, unfeeling void.

Some wet black bulk materialized between the arcs of foam, the darkness becoming more solid with each passing wave. Reflections of his deck torches shimmered across its surface. Beached whale? Peace wondered, staring at it. He hoped it wasn’t going to rot and stink up his property. The last thing he needed was to wake up with a major hangover to the smell of decaying sea life. Fuckin’ barf city, right?

“Earth to Peace. You still there?” asked his manager. The Bluetooth piece in his ear inserted Jacquelyn Brittel’s thin, high voice into his head.

“Sorry, Jackie, what?”

“There something more pressing than this discussion?”

“No, I just—thought I saw something weird. In the water.” Peace turned away and leaned against the cold rail, letting his eyes dance aimlessly across the gleaming angles, staring without seeing at the hamster-maze monstrosity he lived in, a sprawling jumble of boxes and lights.

From out here, on the edge of his enormous back deck, the place looked like a terrarium for a dinosaur. Closer to the back door was an outdoor conversation pit, where five or six unconscious bodies glowed in the light of a guttering fire. To his right was a big peanut-shaped hot tub with an island in the middle, silently shoveling great white clouds of steam into the early morning.

A few people lingered around the periphery—three sleeping men and a woman on her belly with her top off, and a girl sitting in the corner wearing a soaking-wet T-shirt, nursing what looked like a martini.

Peace nodded what’s up at her. She replied with a toadlike belch that made his skin crawl. “Fuckin’ gross, puta.”

“Hell yeah, baby.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“So if me and my girl—” she began, tauntingly, and vomited an arc of neon green into the hot water.

Peace shook his head.

By now, half of the party-goers had found their way out of the house, some of them picked up by Ubers and Lyfts, some of them in their own vehicles, wending their way through the hills back to the distant glow of L.A. Tiny motes of light carried them back to humanity and warmth and home. The remainder lay sprawled across the property in various states of undress and sobriety, many of them unconscious.

They were there to celebrate Peace’s debut album topping the charts that summer. Something about the scene made him feel like a victorious warrior, one of those Greek 300 century guys in the strappy chanclas and red capes, just back from a huge battle, drinking away the night.

“Well, I’m glad there’s something out there that can keep your attention for longer than five seconds,” said Jacquelyn. “We need to talk about your DUI before your goldfish attention span wanders somewhere else again.”

“Do we?”

“DUI.”

“That’s—that’s what I meant. Do we need to talk about that?”

“Yes,” said Jacquelyn. “You get another one, you don’t get to go on tour with Fi Fitty 6 and the Ahegao Kings. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah, yeah, bruh.”

“I’m not your bruh, Alexavier. You need to level up your dating game, by the way. You keep robbing cradles, you gonna be in the news with Diddy and Epstein. You can kiss your career goodbye. You’re out of school now—”

“Man, I know, it’s been, like—”

“Time to grow up. You’re out of school. Old enough to drink, going by the slur in your voice. You’re in the—”

“That stuff ain’t gonna hurt me, Jackie. Shit. I’m bulletproof.”

“I can think of a few OGs under the yard that might beg to differ.” Jacquelyn sighed. “As I was saying, you’re in the big leagues now. It’s time to get your head in the game. Do you want to end up like one of these guys you read about halfway down your Internet home page on a Tuesday morning? ‘Lil Shitbag, dead at 23, thought he was too cool for a seatbelt and wrapped himself around a tree,’ wait, who was I talking about? Who cares, here comes the next guy.”

“Damn, yo—”

“You know you wouldn’t be my first dead client signed with a label, right? Y’all play too much.”

“Damn. That’s harsh.”

“Listen. If that’s what it takes,” said Jacquelyn. “Alex, I told you I liked your music and believed in you. And I told your mom I’d keep an eye on you. Don’t fuck it now. Dial it back. When you got gray pubes and bags under your eyes, you do what you want. But for now, I make the plays.”

When he’d made his first serious forays into exercising his talent for rhythm poetry on TikTok, he’d agonized over his rap name for months. His mother Teresa was the one that had inspired his final decision, although not quite in the way she’d expected.

“You rap about serious stuff, baby,” she’d told him one night as they sat on the back porch passing a joint back and forth. “Like, mental health, tragedy, depression and shit. Along with the money, the girls, the parties.” Gentle chuckle. She wore a ratty old T-shirt and a pair of jean shorts. “I think that mix is gonna take you far, Zavey. Little boys rap on boats about money and bitches. Your stuff is real-man shit.”

“Alpha male shit?” he’d asked.

“No,” Mom had said in disgust. “Take that alpha male Internet crap and throw it away. Throw it in the garbage where it goes.”

“All right, Mama. What do you think, then?”

“Something to do with peace.” She took a deep draw off the joint and held it for a moment. “Like, inner peace,” she added, and blew a plume of skunk into the night.

“Or a side piece,” said the boy. “I’m America’s side piece. Like—I’m fuckin’ hiding in America’s closet, you know what I mean? I’m fucking America while all those ‘rap gods’ gone at work.” He crowed laughter. “Hell yeah.”

Mom laughed. “No. Come on.”

“Peace? You talking about peace? I wanna talk about the peace you feel when you—” he began, paused, and took the pass from his mom. Suspended in thought for a second, he pinched the joint, pulled a long draw off of it, held it, coughed, let it out. “You know, when you finally decide to do it. Suicide. Heard that when depressed people figure out how they wanna do it, you know—this serenity comes over ‘em, right? They’ve given themselves permission to let go.”

“Baby, that’s dark. That’s fuckin’ dark.”

“No, that’s double Nintendo.”

“—What?” His mother squinted in confusion, and perhaps, annoyance.

“Like, when a word means more than one thing.”

“Entendre? Double entendre?”

“Yeah, that.” Peace pointed. “But like, suicide peace and side piece, put together. The same thing. ‘Cide peace.” Resolute acceptance of death—multiplied by laying pipe on the downlow, Jody-style.

Had a certain samurai somethin’-somethin’ to it.

“Still think it’s a bit much,” said Mom.

“What about ‘Menty B’?”

“Minty Bee?”

“Short for ‘a mental breakdown.’ Like when you get off work and you go cry in your car before you go home.”

Mom made a face. “I think I like the other better now.”

“I know my business.”

Two years and a lot of Internet research later, he would title his debut album Ring of Death. The cover art was an action shot of two roosters in a cock-fighting arena somewhere in the favelas, surrounded by an audience of howling fans. In a stylish juxtaposition, the title was in Japanese instead of English: messy, bold calligraphy in blood red that looked like the chickens’ claws had slashed the kanji into reality itself.

“That’s fucked up, little-man,” said Mom. She slid to her feet and got out of the chair. “But you do you, I guess. You always did.” She gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Goin’ to bed, I got a early morning. Good night. Don’t stay up too late.”

Shame and pride mixed in his chest, somehow swelling and contracting at the same time, as he realized he finally had his rap name. But it didn’t pass mustard with Mama.

“Good night,” he said, kissing her knuckles like a knight. “Soon, you won’t have to get up early no more. You can sleep in all you want. In your big bed, in your big house.”

“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

Two and a half years after the birth of his moniker, Peace chuckled into the chilly Pacific night. Hot tub steam wreathed his body like the breath of a dragon. “That’s what I like about you, Jackie. That’s what my mama liked about you. You don’t give a shit, do you? You a rough rider, ain’t you?”

“Already I can see that’s what it takes to keep your arms and legs inside the roller coaster,” said his manager. The sound of rustling, and the rhythmic chime of an open car door. “Look, I’ll call you tomorrow—err, later today I guess—when you’re more sober. We need to make a game plan.”

“Yeah, sure, okay. I’ll call you when I get up.”

“No, I’ll call you.” Jackie amended herself. “And you better keep your phone on and your ringer on. If you don’t pick up, I’m going to assume you’re OD’ed or something. And I’m sending the police to do a wellness check.”

“Fuck no,” wheezed Peace. “I don’t want no pigs up in here. 1312 all day.”

“Then stay your ass home or call an Uber.”

“All right. Damn.”

“Congratulations and good night.” She hung up on him without waiting for an answer.

“Good night to you too,” he said into a dead phone.

Turning back to the banister, Cide Peace peered into the darkness once again, looking for the shiny black mound he’d seen wash up on the beach. But to his mild surprise, only the tide lurked there, pushing cascades of pale foam onto the fudgey brown sand.

Must have imagined it. He went into the house.

“Where you going, Peace?” asked a redheaded girl lying on the leather couch watching something on his big flatscreen and sipping a White Claw. She wore a pretty green sarong.

“To take a piss.”

“Take a Peace,” the girl said, slurring.

“What’s your name?” asked Peace. “Hey, you’re fuckin’ hot. You look like that Disney bitch with the bow and arrow.” He glanced at the TV. “Star Trek? Yo, that nerdy shit is all right. You smart or something?”

“That’s what my friends say. Mina.”

“That’s your name? Mina?”

“Yeah.” She seductively tugged her sarong up to reveal that she wasn’t wearing a bottom to go with her bikini top. “You into girls like me?”

Peace recoiled. “Oh shit, you Steen’s trans friend, ain’t you? Burger said you might be coming to the party.” He shook his head, trying to project good will as well as he could through his alcohol-induced haze. “Naw, baby, I ain’t into that,” he said, walking away with an awkward grin over his shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong, trans rights and all, just ain’t my game. You all right though.”

“Aww,” said Mina. “Cool, cool.” She covered herself and went back to watching TV. “Is it okay if I crash here? I’m too drunk to drive home.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Peace climbed a few stairs out of the hardwood living room, bare feet swishing across the lush carpet.

“Thanks,” said the girl.

Down the hallway, he passed an open doorway leading into one of his four guest rooms and spotted a guy and a chick passed out in each other’s arms, naked and swaddled in a haphazard nest of blankets. He took a moment to be a gracious host and pulled the door shut, and continued on.

Some surfer-lookin’ guy he didn’t recognize lay on his back outside the master bedroom, dressed in purple swimming trunks and one sock. Peace didn’t have to check to see if he was still alive, because he was snoring loudly and had both legs bowed up like a baby waiting for a diaper change, his heels touching.

“Bro,” said Peace disdainfully, gently kicking his leg.

“Is it good,” murmured the man. “Bring it down. Put it in a box.”

“Bro,” said Peace, taking his arm and turning him on his side. “Sleep on your side, bro, I don’t want you to puke and choke to death, okay? Look out.”

“Mmh,” said the man. He shrank into the fetal position and went back to snoring.

Luckily, no one had commandeered his bed. He had a California King memory foam mattress, a simple slab of soft foam on a skeletal steel platform frame the size of his childhood bedroom. The room itself was enormous, easily the size of his family’s old apartment. He plugged his vape into the USB cable snaking out from behind the nightstand, and stepped into the bathroom.

Lights flowered into being, triggered by a motion detector. Drunkenly brushing his teeth, Peace admired himself in the huge mirror, studying his physique.

Twenty-two-year-old Cide Peace—real name Alexavier Barrera—was tall and stick-thin, a gawky jumble of elbows and knees. His tan body was covered in dozens of cheap tattoos, his head shaved into a cottony black mohawk framed by twin tattoos of a bird wing. Thanks to the cover art and the tattoos, people were already calling him ‘Birdman of Rap-catraz,’ painting him as this tortured Ghost Dog-style warrior poet cloistered away in the tower of a prison, penning lyrics and tending to his birds.

Cheesy, but it worked. He leaned close to the glass and inspected his teeth. “Maybe get a grill. Is that still a thing?” he murmured to himself. “I should buy a sword. Where you get a sword?”

“Mmmllehhhgh,” said the thing in the corner.

Adrenaline arrowed through his heart as Peace’s eyes refocused over his shoulder, where a bizarre figure crouched in the background. Water still ran into the sink as he spun and backed against the marble counter in horror.

Hunkered down in the shadows on the far side of the toilet was a creature Peace could only describe as “an alien with body herpes”—a short, but still somehow spindly humanoid with a pot-belly and skin like a half-ripe tomato, bilious green mottled with dull demon-red.

Its face was a parody of a man’s, with leering bloodshot eyes, a flat nose, puffy cheeks, and a mouth that stretched rubbery lips from ear to ear. Crusty blisters and open sores littered its nude goblin body in slow agony.

Nestled in a Spanish-mission-style alcove, the toilet was one of those expensive Japanese-style affairs with a bidet and a control panel by the rim. Shared space with a short shelf full of books he’d never read and probably never would, unless the Internet went down.

Uncoiling from between the goblin's teeth was a fat, serpentine tongue with which it seemed to be cleaning the basin of Cide Peace’s fancy new toilet, slopping that long wet sliver of pink meat all over the piss-speckled rim and curling underneath the inside.

Looked like a pervert eating yogurt without a spoon.

Speechless, Peace’s first thought was, did somebody slip me acid? He didn’t remember seeing any. But then he thought, I ain’t never had no trip like this. This some weird-ass Labyrinth shit.

“What?” he managed to say, finally, in a high, breathy squeak.

“Eeeeggghhh,” said the toilet-licker.

“What the fuck?” Peace elaborated, his initial panic beginning to subside. He crept closer, the travertine tiles warm under his cold bare feet. “Bro. What the hell is this weird shit? What are you? Why are you licking my toilet? Bro, that’s gross as fuck. What’s wrong with—”

Still making a feast of the inside, the creature embraced the rim of the bowl like a drunk. “Grrelllllgh,” it replied with a guttural moan, and gurgled something in a language he didn’t understand.

“Bro. Is that Chinese?”

Before he could say anything else, the toilet-licker burst out of the alcove and rushed toward him in a scuttling all-fours chimpanzee run, ass high in the air.

Falling, Cide Peace screamed shrilly and pedaled backward, pushing himself away as the thing clambered over him and pinned him with cold, waxy hands; that fat, slimy, blue-stained tongue threw itself at his face and whipped across his cheeks, wrapping around his skull. To his surprise, despite the suspicious grit on its taste buds and the abhorrent texture of its gluey saliva, there was no smell of anything other than the fresh, clinical tang of the chemical bowl cleaner.

Like doing Jiu Jitsu with a third-grader in an airplane lavatory, interjected his frantic caveman brain, and he fought maniacal laughter.

With his eyes and lips clamped shut, Peace shoved at the creature, fighting its rigored, slippery old-man hands, and peeled its tongue from around his head. One last kick and it sailed across the bathroom, smacking the tile floor with a boney crash.

“Eeeeuuughh!” it cried in its pitiful, froggy voice, tongue thumping wetly between the two of them.

“Fuck!” screamed Peace, and the lights went out.

Every bit as enthusiastic as the fans at his shows, he began clapping frantic applause, trying to trigger the motion detector. “Nooo! Come back on! Noooo!”

Stuttering back to life, the lights flashed on and off and on in seizure-inducing bursts. He stopped clapping, but they continued to flash, giving him a frenetic view of the bathroom, chopped into a series of moments.

To his surprise and relief, the toilet goblin had vanished.

“Jesus,” said Peace, scrambling to his feet. Unconvinced, he remained that way, fists clenched, just waiting for another attack.

None came. He was alone.

Letting out a shuddering breath, he stepped over to the sink and began cupping water all over his face and arms, trying to wash off the thing’s disgusting saliva. Had he imagined all that? He wanted to think so. Peace glanced over his shoulder at the toilet and felt mild shock to see no wet spots, no puddle of toilet water, no blue stains, nothing.

“Bro,” he said, leaning down to cup water into his face with both hands, again and again, splashing it all over the floor. He didn’t give a damn. “Bro.” He tore a towel from the nearby towel rack and held it against his cheeks, burying his face in the clean softness of terry cloth. “Bro.”

Looking up from the towel, he realized he was still not alone. The toilet goblin had only been the opening act.

Standing behind him was the tallest human being Peace had ever seen, a towering man in ill-fitting slacks and a crimson button-up T-shirt, so tall he could not see the man’s face in the mirror, easily eight feet tall. The arms jutting out of the oversized red sleeves were long and thin, impossibly long, pale thin branches, with fingers that hooked back into their palms like the legs of a dead spider.

The man’s enormous spider-hand rose, dipped into his red shirt pocket, and brought out some sort of colored paper. The other hand came up and separated the paper into two distinct pieces of what appeared to be Kleenex—one a deep arterial red, one a rich, oceanic blue.

These he held out to Peace’s reflection, and grunted a soft, low question in another language. Some part of Peace’s mind registered it as Japanese, although he couldn’t tell you how.

Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the rapper turned around to regard his new guest. The first thing his eyes landed on were the twin sheets of tissue paper.

Second thing Peace witnessed, as his eyes traveled upward, tracing the slender, cadaverous limbs into the frayed sleeves of the man’s old, threadbare, blood-red work shirt, was the man’s face: his upper lip had been wrenched around the side of his head so that his mouth was stretched paper-thin across his left cheekbone, revealing a row of jagged yellow molars. His left ear was somewhere behind his head, and his right ear lay sideways across his temple.

Through his right eye-hole, Peace could see the cartilage of the man’s nose, a glint of white mired in the red-brown of old carrion. The other eye-hole was pulled like taffy into a thin three-inch slit along the side of his skull.

Unseen eyeballs rolled sightlessly, underneath the skin.

The dead man asked his inscrutable question again, gazing blindly down at the owner of the house. His bottom front teeth stuck up out of the comical ruin of his mouth in an underbite of dirty piano keys.

“I don’t know what you want,” Peace said, his heart pounding. “I don’t speak that. I d-don’t speak Japanese, bro. What do—”

The dead man reiterated his question, his voice susurrant but stony, like a shovel sliding gently into dirt. He held out the red and blue tissues a bit more insistently. His fingernails were filthy, chipped spades.

“I don’t—” Peace shrugged, terrified, now half-screaming in an exaggerated stage-whisper. “You want me to take one?” He snatched the blue one. “Fine, okay, we’ll go Crip. Look, I picked Crip. You be Blood.” He studied that warped, diabolical dead face. “Are we—did I do the right—the right thing? Are we cool?”

For what could have been a full minute, the dead man stood there holding the red napkin, and then he tucked it back into his shirt pocket.

Cold relief washed across Peace’s scalp. “Was that right? The right choice? Okay. Cool.”

Not cool. The dead man’s hands rose, titanic clutching hands, slow and then slower, to frame the boy’s face as if to say how beautiful you are, and the dead man inserted gentle thumbs into the corners of Peace’s mouth. Dirty, foul-tasting thumbnails scraped across back teeth with a hollow, blood-curdling rattle.

Then he began to rip them apart, to split Peace’s face and tear the skull free like the rind of an orange.

Down the hall, the screaming woke up the man and woman in the guest room.

"Christ,” grumbled the woman, sandwiching her head between two pillows. “Fuckin’ tweakers.” ​🧻

The Girl That Used to Love You

I FOUND THE GIRL that used to love you," he said into the stillness and the dark.

This was the magic language of these healers, spoken by teddy bears and velveteen rabbits and other such well-loved dolls and stuffed animals, little synthetic shamans as they were. A Morse code carried through conduits of dream and memory and powered by love. Distant, half-glimpsed nodes of secret communication that seemed to transcend time, like telegraph poles at the bottom of an ancient ocean.

Communion with the ancestors.

Sometimes it was the only way instructions and well-wishes could be passed along, and such a coming-of-age ritual was important, even if for no other reason than simple continuity.

It took a moment, a long moment, for the voice to come drifting back to him through the years. As teddy bears go, thirty years isn't long--but to us humans, it was a long time indeed, and the other voice was scratchy, like an old radio.

"Oh? Is that so?" It sounded like his own, like an echo.

Which made sense, as they were one and the same, but not quite--the same brand, the same name (Stanley), manufactured by the same factory, in 1986--but this one had been kept in mint condition by a collector for all that time, while the echo had been loved and loved, until his hair had been hugged flat and one of his eyes was missing and some of his stuffing was gone, and the distinctive red-and-yellow bowtie had been lost.

At the end, he smelled of the salt of tears and sweat, which meant that he'd done his job. All this knowledge flooded through the link as the now-bear heard the then-bear, like a handshake, and for a brief instant, they were one.

"Yep."

After that, the now-bear wasn't sure what to say, only that he'd been quite eager to share the good news. He looked down at his own bowtie, still new and satiny.

"I can't believe she remembers me, after all this time," said the echo, the then-bear.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "She told her husband about you after they'd seen one of us in the window of a children's clothing store a few months ago. He tried to buy that one when she wasn't looking, but they weren't willing to part with it. He found another on the Internet and bought it--me--for her. And after a long ride in a mail truck, here I am.

"I'm in pretty good condition," now-bear continued. "So I should carry on for a pretty long while. I can't help but feel as though I was saved for just this time, and just this place. I always knew I had a purpose that wasn't just sleeping in a plastic bag."

"Well," remarked the scratchy voice. "How is she, then? I shouldn't like to think too highly of my skills of comfort, but how is she?"

He looked over at the grown woman asleep next to him. The now-bear was wedged between the pillow and the wall, in a cozy little space at the corner of the bed. In this soft darkness, he couldn't see the sparse white hairs that had sprouted at her temples, but he could smell the coconut shampoo, and hear the low, oceanic rhythm of her breathing.

"Brother bear, I think it's been a hard few years without you. She cried when she saw me, and cries half the time she holds me. I don't know when you last saw her, but I can tell that time and the world have not been kind to her."

"What a shame," said the echo, faintly, bleakly.

Now-bear concentrated on the dream-channel, afraid of losing the voice. "But I'm doing the best I can to heal her. I can feel it working."

"Oh dear," said the echo, "my little girl. My dear sweet little girl. I had hoped that after all that frightful behavior she had to witness from her father, that she would have had an easier time after my watch had ended. I had to fend off so many nightmares! A bear wouldn't believe! But it sounds as though things didn't get much better."

The now-bear sighed. "Well they must have, hadn't they? Or perhaps I might not have found my way to her. She's been through a lot, but circumstances must have improved. The man takes good care of her. No bruises. I haven't heard any shouting. She is in a good place now."

Silence. Now-bear hesitated fearfully, but the echo returned. "I'm glad." The relieved smile in his voice was unmistakable.

"I'll take good care of her too," said the now-bear.

"Thank you," said the echo. "I helped her as long as I could. Protected her from the things that lurked in the dark corners of the night. Caught the bad dreams before they could trouble her. Gave her a safe place to go when everything got to be too much. I'm happy to know that one of us made it long enough to . . . to . . . ."

"Hmm?"

"I did what I could. I only hope it was enough."

"Rest now," said the now-bear. "I'll carry her the rest of the way."

"Thank you," repeated the echo.

That was the last he heard from from the old guard. The now-bear settled in for a long vigil. A fan at the end of the bed oscillated quietly. Light washed across the clapboard ceiling as a car drove by, rumbling up the street. Soon, the sun would be up. But for the next seven hours, he had a job to do. And so very late though he was for his shift, the little old bear meant to do it.

​

It's Been a Long Time Since I Rock and Rolled

Good news, everybody.

First, let me catch you up. It's been a hot minute. The past couple years have been an odyssey, to say the least.

Releasing during the first year of the pandemic, the Malus trilogy largely fell flat on its face. I met my boyfriend and my gender transition continued on.

Meanwhile, a producer from Stargate SG-1 optioned a Malus Domestica TV show, with himself as show runner. The book series got a shot in the arm with a Germany release through Blanvalet-Verlag, but though the original series still lingers in the American library system, it's largely vanished from most bookstores.

Demoralized by flat sales - or at least my publisher's constant radio silence - I focused on the day job. I ended up working security at a ski resort, and in my downtime tinkered with Outlaw King 4, The Sky My Grave, and a horror podcast for John Carpenter - a horror story about a girl with fibromyalgia who gets trapped in a Michigan religious college during a blizzard and summons a "biblically accurate angel" to help with her chronic pain, resulting in a slasher/whodunit between a Skull-and-Bones faculty cult and a body-hopping cherubim.

(Canceled because the producers said it was too much like Netflix's Midnight Mass, a gothic drama about vampires taking over an island off the coast of New England. Go figure.)

The podcast fell through as soon as I started making headway on it, and then NBCUniversal passed on the Malus TV deal and the show bit the dust. Soon after that I lost my day job, which started a chain of homelessness that put me in my boyfriend's hometown, Traverse City, Michigan.

Here we are in 2024. I'm living with my guy in one-half of the garage of an old house with three other families, writing my books. I'm currently working on the fourth volume of the Malus Domestica series, The Sky My Grave, and tinkering with Outlaw King 4 in the background.
It's been a while, a long while, since I updated this blog. For that I apologize.

I don't usually have much to say that doesn't get said on my social media. And outside of the occasional rash of oversharing, I've never really been one for banging on in a blog.

What would I talk about, really? Writing tips? Half of people don't care about that, and the other half think I'm full of shit and itch to tell me just how much. I don't have the time or the heart to argue with people who insist on misinterpreting my advice. Failure is a better teacher than I am.

The lion's share of my self-expression comes out in my novels, and not much happens in the meantime. Being broke makes it hard to have adventures to talk about, or make TikToks about.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for things you'd like me to talk about! Or if you have any TikTok suggestions! Meanwhile, I wanted to let y'all know that I'm still hard at work, harder than ever before--I'm actually working on three books simultaneously.

Currently, I'm serializing two of them - Malus Domestica 4: Eat The Weird (Die Hexenjagerin: Iss das Seltsame), and my 1980s-inspired space epic The Sky My Grave (formerly known as Hellbent).

❦

The Sky My Grave

Three centuries since the bombs fell, and Earth is buried in an eternal winter. Enforcers called the Hounds of the Cu Chulainn patrol the snowy wastes in engines of war made from the road machines of the Old World.

The Hounds set a trap for a notorious train-robber and capture Sergeant Traveler, a former enforcer presumed dead after a botched mission. Instead of executing her, the Hounds sell her to the galactic government and she is swept from the frozen Earth to chase pirates across the stars with a crew of misfits.

When she discovers her prey is a cosmic death cult, she must make a choice that will change the galaxy forever.

❦

Malus Domestica Part 4: Eat The Weird
(Die Hexenjagerin 4: Iss das Seltsame)

As notorious witch hunter Robin Martine continues her quest, a coven of Norse witches summon an avatar of the Kraken - an unstoppable goliath bent on tearing her apart.

Meanwhile, the FBI - led by hard-bitten Agent Agatha Morgan - tightens its noose around her neck. Tangled in this war are small-town cop Koyeti Grey, the demon-hunting Browning brothers, fledgling mage Wayne Parkin, and even Satan herself.

When an accident turns the town of Blackfield into a treacherous battlefield and Robin begins to feel the call of blood again, everyone must band together to fight the Krakenstein - or die.

❦ If you want to follow along as I put these two epics together, come subscribe to my Patreon! Five dollars nets you regularly-updated chapters of The Sky My Grave, while $10 gets you both TSMG and MD4: Eat The Weird!

Grab a seat at my campfire and help me tell my stories. If I don't do the work, these worlds will perish - help me keep them alive! SUBSCRIBE!

Deleted Scene from "The Hellion: Malus Domestica Part 3" - Releasing Sept 15 2020

In just a few weeks, the third book in my Malus Domestica series, The Hellion, is releasing nationwide from legendary publisher Tor Books.

I'm proud of this one--it's a rip-roaring chase story, packed with action and secrets.

"Robin Martine has destroyed witches all across the country, but since her confrontation with the demon Andras, Robin has had to deal with her toughest adversary yet: herself. While coming to grips with new abilities, she and her boyfriend Kenway make their way to the deserts of rural Texas, where new opportunities await.

"Something lurks in this isolated town of Keystone Hills: a dangerous gang ruled by a husband who wields an iron fist over his wife and daughter. Robin vows to protect these Latina women from harm, but may be underestimating how powerful Santiago Valenzuela is... and how his shapeshifting powers may pose a threat to everyone Robin holds dear."

To whet folks' appetite for Hellion, I'm posting an "excerpt" to my blog--this passage is actually a "deleted scene," a chapter removed from the final manuscript while we were cutting for length. Luckily, on my blog we don't have to worry about wordcount!

This deleted scene takes place before the events of the novel, in the town of Keyhole Hills where everything eventually goes haywire for our I Come With Knives protagonist Robin Martine and her beau Kenway. Here we catch up with amateur rock-climber Tracy as she ventures into the Texas badlands to commemorate a lost loved one...where she discovers the night holds more than memories.

And don't worry--there's no spoilers. Even if you haven't read the first two books, there isn't anything here to ruin them for you.


​AN ANIMAL HOWLED SOMEWHERE out in the Texas desert. Tracy combed the darkness below with her penlight, scanning for the telltale sign of eyeshine from her perch halfway down the side of a mountain. Ropes and carabiners blew against sandstone like ship-rigging, thrumming and clattering. The wind blowing out of the south was damp and reeked faintly of fish.

Rain was coming, and it had ambushed her out of nowhere. One minute it was warm and dry, and the sky was shredded gauze on the brow of a purple sunset. Ten minutes later, she was below the heavy bruised belly of a pitch-black darkness. The sun became a blade of soft red light to the west, peeking underneath the edge of the stormfront as if it were the lid of a Dumpster.

Silent heat-lightning wriggled across the horizon, pink and ominous. Probably one of those windy-dirty tropical storms coming up across the Gulf of Mexico. From the looks of it, she probably had about an hour or less before the bottom fell out.

Another howl answered the first, closer this time.

Sounded strange for a coyote. None of that crying and yipping you hear from the little dog-like critters; this was full in the throat and steely, confident, a rising siren-like ooooo-oooooo! in the distance.

Tracy reached the bottom of the bluff and half-galloped, half-slid down the hill, skidding in gravel and sand.

Scraggly mesquite trees stood over her camp, a flat place in the foothills some sixty feet above the desert floor. Her tent was a two-person vinyl dome with criscrossing rods and a red raincover. Ten feet away was her campfire, a ring of stones around a pile of dead embers. Four tent spikes jutted out of the ashes, supporting a cooking grille. Her canteen cup and coffee pot sat on top of this, both with lingering traces of lunch.

She scrambled inside the tent, zipping the flap shut. Slipping out of her boots, she sat on her sleeping bag and listened for the first droplets of rain.

Digging in her pack, Tracy shined the penlight all around until she found her little Coleman battery lantern and turned it on, hanging it from a loop on the ceiling. Stark white-blue light made her shadow sway to and fro on the tent wall.

Metal glinted from a crevice between an MRE and a balled-up pair of socks. A gold ring.

The wind whispered soft threats in the mesquite over her head as she dug out her wedding band and put it on, holding it up to the light. The counterpart to this ring was six feet under a neatly-kept Houston lawn and a marble gravestone. “Wish you were here,” she said, not for the first time, and began detaching her climbing gear.

Out of the harness, she slipped into her sneakers and took the lantern. In her pack was Nathan’s knife, a wicked black tactical blade he’d bought on Amazon the summer he died. She grabbed the knife and a couple of napkins and stepped out of the tent into a swirl of rich, cool air, slipping the cold steel and her penlight into her pocket. No rain hit her palms when she held them up. Tracy made her way into the brush, dry chaparral rasping against her thighs, and put the lantern down on the sand in front of her.

Pulling her jeans and underwear down to her knees, she squatted in the darkness. Urine spattered into the sand behind her heels.

When she was done, she wiped with the napkin, balled it tightly, pulled her jeans back up, and made her way toward the remains of her campfire. She tossed the wadded-up napkin into the ashes, startling something that had been licking soup out of the canteen cup.

A brief glimpse of a sandy canine face.

She held the lantern high, just quick enough to catch a coyote’s hairy hindquarters loping into the night. “Yeah, buddy,” she called after him. “Get outta here! Nothing for you here.”

Tracy retreated to the tent, where she sat lotus-style on her sleeping bag and opened the MRE. The tactical knife lay next to her thigh. “Why, hello there,” she said to the candy waiting inside the package. As the first soft drumming of the rain began, she pulled out her little tablet and watched an old black-and-white Danny Kaye movie for a while, eating peanut M&Ms.

This would be her third trip to the Keyhole badlands since Nathan’s accident. It wasn’t the same without him, but these movies always made her feel better when she watched them out here because Nat was so much like Danny Kaye—similar face, similarly earnest mannerisms. He had a grave in Houston, but somehow she felt closer to him out here in the sticks, climbing all over the rocks and hiking the Ma’iitsoh. Since his death, their yearly constitutional had evolved into a sort of communion, a spiritual walkabout that served to push back at the stress and grief.

Her eyes were getting grainy when she heard her canteen cup rattle against the fire stones.

She unzipped the front flap halfway down and shined her penlight through the gap. A pair of doubloon eyes shined back at her from the campfire.

“Get out of here, you,” Tracy told the coyote.

The startled animal danced away, trotted in a wary circle, then came back to the campfire and resumed licking the cold soup out of the aluminum cup. Oh, what the hell. He ain’t hurting anything, she thought. She could wash the cup in the morning. “You’re being a butt-head,” she told him. “I think I’ll call you Soupy. Like Soupy Sales. What do you think of that?”

The coyote looked up at her, licking his lips, and went back to the canteen cup.

“You’re going to get rained on.”

Soupy didn’t care. He braced the cup with his front paws so that it stood up and he worked at it, his nose deep inside.

A stick broke in the darkness.

The coyote looked up from his plundered dinner, searching the brush, ears standing on end.

“What is it?” Tracy asked him. “You got some friends out there?”

Soupy glanced at her, then went back to eyeballing the night. A low growl reverberated deep in his furry body, and his hackles stood up, the fur around his neck filling out like the mane of a lion.

Rain kicked up tiny sprays of sand, beading on the dry ground.

With a snarl, part of the night threw itself into the camp, and a massive black shape with gold-green eyes laid into the coyote, knocking down the cooking-screen. Ashes clouded the air. White teeth sank into the coyote’s neck and he cried out once, a pitiful scream.

Tracy’s stomach dropped into her guts and went as cold as well-water. Vibrating with adrenaline, she zipped the flap shut and snatched up the knife.

She stared at the vinyl flap as if she could see the great black shape through it. Lights—the lights! She turned off the lantern and tablet, and the tent became a vague gray dome around her. Was that a bear? The quiet storm tapped insistently on the tent’s rainguard. There aren’t any bears out here, are there? she thought, gripping the knife. Black bears, maybe? …There are bears in Texas, I’m sure…somewhere. But here? There’s nothing out here but scrub. Sand and scrub.

Motionless, Tracy sat listening in the dark. Listening for anything—another rattle of rocks and pans, the rustle of sagegrass, anything . . . .

Fat droplets continued to tapple on the tent’s raincover, lazy, subtle pops and claps. The mesquite over her head did little to shade her from the rain, but the wind was picking up, producing a constant white noise. Tracy held the knife out in front of her as if whoever was out there might be dumb enough to throw themselves on it.

“Who’s out there?”

A face pressed against the fabric of the tent wall, casting a large smear of shadow on the gray dome. The shape breathed in the scents embedded in the vinyl—smoke, girlsweat, plastic, bacon, the mustiness it had gathered sitting in Nathan’s parents’ cellar.

Tracy scrambled backwards against the opposite wall, still brandishing the knife.

“I have a c-cellphone,” she told the face burring across the vinyl. “I already d-dialed 911. The cops’re gonna be out here in a few minutes—” All four of her phone’s service bars were gray. “Goddammit, goddammit, come on.”

Something growled behind her.

Throwing herself to the other side of the tent, Tracy pressed her body into the space where the wall met the floor and turned the knife around, blade down.

Sharp points pressed against the tent fabric where she had been sitting just a second before, and then pushed themselves through the wall as easily as a knitting needle through a sweater. Tracy shook as the claws cut slowly through the fabric from the top to the bottom, ripping a four-foot opening.

Her heart flared with adrenaline and she screamed, “WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?”

Pink heat-lightning. A shaggy silhouette the size of a horse leered in at her.

“You come any closer and I’m gonna stab you.”

Reaching into the tent, the shape snagged her sleeping bag and pulled it out into the night, and her tablet and phone along with it, dragging them all through the hole in the wall. Tracy turned and put the knife-point through the tent behind her, tearing open a hole and pushing herself through it. She wriggled through, squeezing out onto the damp sand as if the tent were giving birth to her.

At the last moment a claw tried to clamp around her leg, but she kicked at it. Talons ripped through her jeans, tearing into the flesh of her calf and slicing down her ankle.

She scrambled to her feet, stumbling down the hill, almost falling headlong into the chaparral. When she got to the bottom, she already had the penlight out, lighting her way with it. The road leading to the Ma’iitsoh trailhead terminated in a large dirt cul-de-sac hashmarked with tire-ruts, where her 4-Runner was parked. Electricity relay towers marched into the distance, a dozen skeletal scaffolds forming a single-file line of T-shapes against the clouds, leashed to each other by powerlines.

She had already opened the driver door and stuck a foot inside when she realized the tires were flat.

“Fuck!” she shrieked, slamming the door. “Fuuuuuck!”

Tracy pointed the penlight the way she came and saw only a vast expanse of brush and sand. The sky flashed pink for a brief instant, revealing low toothy mountains in the distance, as sharp against the clouds as black paper cutouts.

Ghostly eyes floated in the grass, faintly luminescent like a pair of will-o-wisps.

Lightning flashed again, and this time it was accompanied by a shotgun burst of thunder that buzzed the windows in their frames. Tracy pulled the next door open and clambered into the back seat. Hauling it shut, she hit the lock button and all four doors engaged with a TUNK!

Outside, the lightning continued to strobe across the sky, illuminating the trailhead parking like a rave. Tracy stared in awe and terror, her breath fogging up the window. Her heart throbbed in her neck. She wiped at the glass with a handful of napkins so she could see.

The shape stepped out of the grass.

Padding slowly and confidently across the dry dirt on all fours, it didn’t look like any Texas animal she’d ever seen before. It was long and low, and moved in a slinky, lazy way, its back drooping, each shoulder shrugging with every step. Its head was oversized and heart-shaped.

Green-gold eyes gleamed at her.

Tracy wedged herself into the floorboard and turned off the penlight. She waited, rainwater drying in her hair, gripping the knife in both hands, ready to stab again. “Shit,” she hissed in the darkness. Even if her tires hadn’t been flat, she realized, she ran off and left her goddamn car keys in her backpack, back in the tent. “You are so stupid.”

Nothing happened for a long minute.

The minute stretched into two minutes, then five. Where the hell is it? she wondered, as the soft patter of rain built into a steady drumming on the car roof. Did it give up? Did it leave? As if to answer her question, the rear end of the 4-Runner dipped precipitously and then shook, the frame groaning, the back bumper crackling and creaking as the beast put weight on it.

It was trying to get the back door open.

“Oh God, please go away,” she whispered, fingers aching, hands shaking.

Silence fell over the car again—well, what passed for silence under the constant drum-roll of rain on the roof and windshield. Tracy lay in the floorboard listening to the hollow roar, slowly relaxing, the fear subsiding, the pain in her leg fading. It reminded her of sitting in the back of her mom’s Hyundai as they went through the automatic car wash twenty years ago, pink-and-blue suds frothing across the windows.

The car-wash memory turned into a bizarre stage play about blueberry smoothies, and then it was about Thanksgiving and all the actors were from her third-grade class back in Virginia, and they were all dressed in horrible little-kid versions of cabaret costumes, like some kind of weird Moulin Rouge. Except she was twenty-seven and butt-naked on a stage with a bunch of kids, and the scenery was real, it was made up of real trees and bushes and log cabins, and when she turned and peered into the background she could see birds flying over distant fields and men on horses. And even though she was naked, she managed to pull off the play without a hitch (even though she had no lines and there was a cat wandering around the set asking for treats in fluent English, which was distracting). The audience’s applause turned into falling rain. She opened her eyes and realized she’d dozed off.

Pulling herself out of the footwell, Tracy eased up into the backseat and looked through the 4-Runner’s rear window.

All she could see was the faint suggestion of sand and dim clouds, all shredded by shadows and dappled by the rain beading on the glass. The important thing, though, was that she didn’t see the animal. Peering through every window, studying the dark desert in every direction, she couldn’t see it anywhere out there.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not waiting for me,” she told herself, lying down in the seat.

Hiding out there in the grass.

Waiting for me to come out.

The 4-Runner’s frame groaned again. The entire vehicle shifted subtly, and the sheet of metal behind the moonroof produced a musical pung! as it bent inward under a great weight.

Tracy’s heart thudded. It’s on top of the car.

Anger boiled up in her chest and she shrieked at the ceiling, “Get off! Get off my goddamn car and just go away!”

The moonroof imploded in a crash of safety glass and rainwater. A hairy claw reached in at her, tearing holes in the seatcover and ripping her shirt. Tracy screamed and unlocked the door, shoving it open.

Hooks caught in the waist of her jeans as she wriggled out of the car and fell into the mud. At first she considered hiding under the car, but there wasn’t any room—sitting on four flat tires, the 4-Runner’s undercarriage was only inches above the mud.

Crawling, and then running, she sprinted for the power scaffold silhouetted against the clouds.

The mud was already as slippery as cake icing. Her right foot slid out from under her and she collapsed, winding herself. Rolling over, she got up on her hands and knees and looked over her shoulder just in time to see the creature leap down from the 4-Runner’s roof.

Lightning flashed and the world went dark again.

Wet sagebrush raked against her jeans. The line tower creaked and the cables sang a low, trembling dirge in the wind. Behind her, heavy, pounding footfalls came rushing through the chaparral. She found one of the massive concrete bases at the bottom of a tower leg and clambered on top of it, monkeying up the steel brace.

Cold wet claws slammed into the muscle of her ass and tried to haul her backward, tearing her back pocket loose.

Fresh blood ran down her leg. Tracy hugged the scaffolding tight and kept climbing, sobbing in earnest, the storm blowing nettles of rain into her face. She focused on the climb and tried to ignore her ravaged legs. Hand over hand, her knees hiking high—this was the easiest free-climb she’d ever done, nothing like the chewed-gum handholds on the wall course back in Houston, or the precarious jagged sandstone in the badlands. The entire tower was handholds and steps, nothing but geometric angles and straight lines. Just like climbing a jungle gym in some playground. In seconds, she was forty feet above the desert. The creature that had chased her out here was far enough below that she could cover it with her hand.

Wind and rain beat the hell out of her, howling through the steel struts. Pink and blue light flickered in the clouds.

She could get struck by lightning up here, of course. But her odds were better with Zeus than with the thing currently pacing in circles underneath the relay tower. Tracy stared at the creature. It was looking up at her. Its eyes were black pits in its white face, like holes punched in a drawing.

As she watched, it folded claws over the edge of one of the concrete blocks supporting the tower and pulled itself up.

Rain needled her face. Tracy kept climbing, slow and methodical now, shuffling up the diagonal struts of the steel skeleton. Then she was halfway up the relay tower, standing on a beam and hugging another, soaking wet. The wind threatened to shove her out into empty space. She pulled Nathan’s tactical knife out and pointed it at the creature. It grinned, or at least she thought it did, a garbled thrust of flesh and fur with a wrong, cavernous mouth.

“Nice pig-sticker.” It leered up at her.

“I’M GOING TO STAB YOU,” she screamed down at it, rainwater dribbling from her lips and chin. “GET AWAY FROM ME OR I’M GOING TO STAB YOU.”

Before she could react, it leapt the width of the relay tower, flinging itself into the adjoining lattice of girders. The whole structure shook and suddenly it felt as if it were a fragile Erector set, Tinker Toys just waiting for an excuse to collapse. Then the creature threw itself back the other way and landed belly-first on the girder Tracy was standing on, trampolining it up and down. She wrapped her arms around the nearest strut and screamed in terror, her eyes squeezed shut.

When she opened them again, the thing was directly in front of her, its head easily three feet across. Green-gold lizard-eyes in a birth-defect face. Still grasping the strut, she leaned out and slashed at it with the knife, coming up short.

The creature didn’t move.

She swung at it again, clinging to the strut with her fingertips. This time the creature twitched back, almost earning a cut across the bridge of its crooked nose. Lips curling, it snarled at her, and rainwater gurgled down yellow teeth as long as her fingers.

Lightning burst across the sky, clarifying her tormentor’s warped face for just an instant. Teeth flashed in the rain as it lunged for her and she flinched away.

Her foot slipped. She dropped the knife, throwing out her hands to save herself but it wasn’t enough.

Her fingers raked across rivets and chipped paint and she fell, tumbling end over end through the ribs of the tower, banging and somersaulting, a human Pachinko. Brush and sticks snapped under her body and she hit the desert floor with an airy WHUMP, knocking the oxygen out of her lungs.

A fireball of pain twisted in her belly as her diaphragm seized up.

Raising up on her elbows, she tried to roll over and get up, but her feet seemed to be tangled in something. She choked on rain as she stared through a film of blood at her legs and realized they weren’t snarled in the brush—they were unresponsive.

Her back was broken.

The creature landed on its feet nearby with a ground-quivering thud, rustling the chaparral.

“No,” grunted Tracy, rain beading in her eyelashes. “Please.” She dragged her useless legs, clawing at rough bark and pushing wet sand with the heels of her hands, scouring her wrists and elbows like pumice.

Dry twigs crackled, parting to reveal the rain-soaked creature.

Straddling her broken body, it pressed its bristly snout against her cheek and inhaled the scent of the blood streaming out of her nose and ears.

“Why?” she asked, sobbing, rain in her eyes, in her mouth, in her ears, in her nose. The beast’s great slavering nose pressed her ear into the mud. Its breath reeked of cheap beer and rotten meat. The mud tasted like salt and nothing.

“Because I can,” the creature said.

That hideous maw closed over her face. Teeth pierced her skull. A terrific crunching noise like the planet had cracked in half.

The night rained on without her.
Preorder THE HELLION

​Coming Sept 15
​

Samara's GCS Prep Fundraiser

Hi, I'm Samara. I'm a horror novelist, and an Army vet.

For a year, I spoke with legions of professionals all over Michigan trying to pinpoint the cause of the depression and anxiety that have plagued me my entire life. At long last, I finally have my answer. My diagnosis was gender dysphoria, and I received a prescription for estrogen.

Now I am happier than ever—my depression is gone, my self-esteem is through the roof. Now for the next step—the Big Surgery. Fortunately, insurance covers that.

What it doesn’t pay for is hair removal. They say puberty makes you “grow hair in funny places.” If the doctors do this surgery without hair removal, it’s going to grow in some very NOT funny places.

​Once I get over this obstacle, I can take it from here. It would mean everything to me if you could all just reach down with one collective hand and help me up.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter.

25 Writing Prompts / Story Ideas!

Hello everyone!

To celebrate tomorrow's Tor AMA with Kit Rocha and Camilla Bruce on Reddit's /r/Fantasy subreddit (3pm EST), I decided to compile all of my contributions to Reddit's /r/WritingPrompts subreddit here in a tidy little list. I hope this collection will inspire you to write your next bestseller (if it does, you better dedicate it to me!). 1. You discover that the pristine mascot costume you found in the gym's storage closet is indestructible.

2. “They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but that road is a two-lane highway, you know? Now, most folks have a guardian angel, but I'm here trying to to earn my freedom. I'm your guardian demon.”

3. You're driving home from work when it starts raining actual cats and dogs. Unfortunately this is the leading front of Hurricane Fido.

4. Mad Max ran out of water crossing the salt flats once known as Pennsylvania. On the 3rd day he found a haggard man pushing a rusted trolley. “We have water in Scrap-Town Scranton, yes,” said the man, leaning on the Interceptor. “But don't touch mine. It has DWIGHT SCHRUTE written on it. Comprende?”

5. New York City is being attacked by a kaiju monster, a grotesque cat the size of a building . . . and the only thing that can save the city is your faithful family pet--Clifford the Big Red Dog.

6. After killing Bill, the Bride lived on, raising B.B. to be an even better swordfighter than she'd ever been. But she knew this day would come. California Mountain Snake, now the Blind Samurai, drew her sword from its cane. “I seek my revenge on the one who took my eye.”

7. The Joker had stopped laughing. “I think I finally pushed him too far,” he said as Gordon and Bullock marched him into the precinct jail. “Nygma, Oswald--Bats is killing all of us.” The last thing they saw before the lights went out were words gouged into the cell wall. 'HE'S MINE'

8. You realize that your multiple personalities have started a prank war with each other, and you are caught in the crossfire.

9. “I applaud your efforts,” said Vader, “but the Emperor's death will cause an unprecedented power vacuum and destabilize the galaxy, resulting in even more widespread tragedy.” Luke smiled and sat on Palpatine's throne. “Then we'll just have to make them believe he's still alive, won't we?”

10. A bakery assistant discovers the hole in each of his latest batch of donuts is a transdimensional passage.

11. “Mario Bros. Detective Agency,” Luigi muttered into the phone. A hung-over Mario lay on the office couch, wishing he was dead. “Looks like we've got another trip to the morgue,” said Luigi, hanging up. “The Hammer Brothers struck again.”

12. Everybody's personal phobia is how they died in a previous life. You visit a clairvoyant to find out why your phobia is so bizarre and irrational.

13. “Wednesday! Pugsley! Gomez! You'll never guess what I found at the auction house today!” cried Uncle Fester, pulling a golden box out of his pocket. “They call it the Lament Configuration.”

14. You discover you have a superpower: altering probability. You use it to benefit yourself (100% chance of finding $1,000 in your bank account, etc), but one day you find out that it works by directly reducing the probability of other good things happening elsewhere.

15. You are Patient Zero in a viral plague that turns people into... exact duplicates of you. And only you know yourself well enough to end the epidemic.

16. You're not like most hunters of supernatural creatures and beings--you're a gourmand, and have made it your life's quest to taste and consume every ghost, vampire, mythical beast, and cryptid.

17. Everyone always knew the zombie apocalypse would happen one day. They just didn't know it would be their reflection-selves from the world on the other side of the mirror.

18. Standing on your front stoop, you hear screaming in the direction of Toontown. Your neighbor runs past, terrified. “The storage tank at the portable-hole factory exploded! IT’S FLOODING EVERYTHING!”

19. “Sir, the subject is isolated because this isn’t your usual case of multiple personality disorder . . . he's contagious.”

20. A midwestern community discovers their suburban neighborhood is infested with termites that have evolved to eat bone.

21. Your important, expensive Amazon purchase is so mis-routed, it ends up on the doorstep of an 18th century French family.

22. A goliath beast stalks the neon landscape of a cyberpunk city, a cybernetic hunter-killer under the collective imperative of a Twitch chat, who watches everything unfold through its eyes.

23. You arrive for your 9 AM appointment only to realize that the dentist treating you is Sasquatch.

24. After recovering from a brain tumor, you've developed a form of synesthesia that allows you to taste music. You become Food Network's first traveling music critic.

25. The collision of bosons at the CERN particle accelerator managed to damage the temporal flow of Earth, resulting in "time-weather." Twenty years later, you've found your calling as a time-storm chaser.

Owlbears and Teacups, Part 2

Part 1



​7.
​
​So I stared at the half-feminized face in the bathroom mirror.

I didn’t see a factory robot. I didn’t see a potential assailant. I didn’t see a ghost. I didn’t see one-note Adam, the ugly, hairy, depressed lump-of-shit “ogre” and “Frankenstein” and “Undertaker” whose only redeeming feature was being able to perform manual labor for money.

I saw S. A. Hunt, the attractive, complex intellectual who looks good in an empire waist and choker, who wrote all those books and has lots of cool friends and spends their days writing in the local-hangout coffee shop.

I saw Sam, the graceful cryptid that loves ducklings and good coffee and rainy days and mellow folk-rock music from the 60s.

I cast off the worthless husk of my old one-sided lie of a facade, and found the child of Aphrodite and Hephaestus looking back at me, a rock-and-roll demigod with black-painted nails and anvil fists.

I finally made eye contact with my soul for the first time.

And it was exhilarating. Intoxicating. 8.
​
Meanwhile, a molar in the back of my mouth next to an old wisdom tooth socket had been slowly deteriorating over the last few years into just a broken stump, and finally started to hurt in earnest, a sharp, electric, bone-deep ache that reached up into my eye socket. As the months wore on, it got worse and worse until it became unbearable, only alleviated by so many applications of clove oil that the corner of my mouth blistered. I had to go to a dentist.

During my search for a therapist the previous autumn, I had somehow accidentally managed to end up with some surprisingly good health insurance, so I tracked down a dentist and had the tooth extracted.

A side effect of getting the insurance was that I also landed a primary care physician, and I was finally able to make an appointment to see a doctor and get a checkup—the first physical I’d had since my days in the Army almost ten years ago. Hopefully, I told myself, if I made an appointment with my new primary care physician, perhaps I could somehow talk them into referring me to the endocrinologist at MacLaren Hospital.

That didn’t happen. I think I mentioned it during my appointment, but with my anxiety and my tendency to be shy about advocating my own issues, it sort of got lost in the discussion about my health--kind of like yelling to be heard in a noisy bar--and by that time I had just about written it off as a long shot, so I didn’t push it.

Plus, I got the feeling that the doc wasn’t familiar with transgender issues, maybe even uncomfortable, and was kind of reluctant to even talk about it.

However, I was finishing up my physical when my new PCP mentioned they had a therapist on-site, an honest-to-God mental health counselor, a woman no less, and that it might benefit me to visit them. “Now, I’m not saying you’re crazy,” the doctor reassured me. “Anybody can benefit from seeing a therapist.”

“Does my insurance cover it?”

“Yep!”

Excitedly, I agreed. I’d been wanting to see one for the better part of two years ever since things had gone south with Jess (too little too late, I guess, but better late than never), but now I had a secondary motive—hopefully I could find a way to hormone replacement therapy through proving myself to the therapist.

From my research into the process of becoming transgender that there were certain documents called a “letter of informed consent” I knew I would probably need to achieve HRT—basically an affidavit swearing that you, the Patient, are consciously aware of the side effects of the transgender process, you’re not being coerced into the process, and you still want to go through with it. And I figured that if I could prove my gender dysphoria and non-binary status to the Alcona therapist, I could at least get somebody on my side in the uphill battle to come.

That didn’t quite prove to be the case, but the therapist was at least positive about my decision. My primary care physician pointed me in another direction in my HRT quest: the local Community Mental Health office. I wasn’t sold on that, but I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I didn’t chase down every lead I got.

To my surprise, the paperwork I received from my PCP after my physical contained a diagnosis of “gender identity disorder,” which I didn’t agree with, considering gender identity disorder was obsolete; it had been removed from the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, and I didn’t consider my feelings to be a mental illness.

​At any rate, my gender dysphoria issues had been recognized by my PCP, with very little pushback, so I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Meanwhile, I was still taking the ProEstro black cohosh supplements, buying them when I could afford them, but the facial feminization had worn off and I considered abandoning them because I didn’t see the point when they were no longer contributing any visible change. One nice side effect, though, was that my mood had significantly improved, and it was definitely tied to the supplements. Kate could always tell when I wasn’t taking them because I had a shorter fuse, thinner skin, and a more solemn temperament.

An odder side effect was that after seeing myself with feminine features, I could more easily recognize my masculine features, and I could see the handsome side of me better. My self-image and self-esteem went up on both sides.

A rising tide lifts all ships, they say. 9.
​
The day I went to CMH was a femme day, so I was wearing eye makeup and one of my black T-shirt dresses with a pair of leggings. “. . . We don’t do that here,” the receptionist told me coldly but confusedly, looking at me like I was Mork from Ork.

“Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “Thanks? I guess?”

I left.

​Can’t say I was surprised. Around here, CMH is who you call when your mentally-ill neighbor is running around naked in ten-degree temps with a kitchen knife, talking about how the government keeps untying his shoes when he’s not looking.

​Not who you go to for gender identity help. 10.
​
Around that time, we scheduled Petoskey’s first annual Pride Walk.

Not a whole lot of people came to that first walk—about thirty, including two dogs. We assembled in the plaza in front of the Crooked Tree Arts building to get ready to walk through the downtown tourism district.

My partner Kate had purchased a bulk box of little rainbow flags on Amazon and we passed them out to the assembly, along with bottles of water from a cooler.

Jake and his mother Sherry sat at the periphery of the throng, Jake in a wheelchair, holding a rainbow flag. Jake is a slender boy with glasses and an undercut, seemingly small for his age, with the punkish je ne sais quoi of a teen protagonist from an 80s horror-adventure. I knew him from Roast & Toast; I’d seen him working there for quite a while, and we’d become passing acquaintances. But what I hadn’t realized until just then was that he was a trans-male. Vivid mastectomy scars peeked out from under his sleeveless shirt, like the scars of fresh war wounds.

After the Pride walk, we all connected on Facebook, and Kate told me they and Sherry had spoken about the process the Howards had gone through pursuing transgender therapy.

Apparently, three hours south of us in a little town called Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, was a “gender services clinic,” owned and operated by a counselor, psychotherapist and patient advocate named Deanna Heath. Jake had undertaken his personal journey there, and after accruing a couple years of experience of the process by his side, Sherry was all too happy to be our sherpa. 11.
​
Are you wondering if you were given the wrong gender label at birth?
Have you decided it is time to explore gender transition and make a decision about whether or not to go ahead?

These issues create difficult situations in every area of life, relationships, work, health, family and social life. Through therapy these issues can be explored and your path can be developed.

Areas of identity, especially gender identity are issues at the heart of who we are. Our practice provides comprehensive services for those exploring their gender identity and those on the path to transition and beyond.

We provide referrals to trans friendly professionals such as physicians, attorneys, speech therapists, surgeons and more so you are assured a positive experience as you transition. Advocacy is an essential part of what we do.

At Greater Michigan Gender Services, we offer in-office consultation, coaching and therapy sessions, referrals, advocacy as well as online sessions using a web camera.

We help you sort out your place on the gender spectrum and determine if transitioning is an appropriate course of action. If it is, we can assist you through the various stages of the transition process.

Benefits while attending therapy:Clarity about your gender and what action to take, if any.Knowledge about the various stages of the gender transition process.Self-awareness related to how your transgender identity fits within your individual identity.Referrals to physicians for hormones, electrologists and laser specialists for hair removal, speech therapists for voice feminization and masculinizationReferrals to surgeons for facial feminization and gender confirmation surgeries, along with top surgery for female-to male patients.Issuance of carry letters.Direction to hair stylists and make-up artists.Guidance in movement, voice and wardrobe.Recommendations for internet sites, films and books to further your personal gender exploration and transition.Coming-out guidance for friends and family, at school and on the job through letters, presentations, and one-on-one conversations.Screening and treatment for psychological and emotional issues that may co-occur with gender dysphoria.Sense of well-being, as the gender therapeutic process moves forward. Deanna herself holds a Clinical Master of Social Work degree from Michigan State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Sociology from Central Michigan University.

Her professional website says,

My work experience includes 25 years in hospice and health care along with experience in college student issues, adoptions, the court system and facilitating loss and grief groups. My training and my work experience have provided me with wide ranging experiences which are very valuable in my work as a therapist.

I’d found my Holy Grail.

Emailing Deanna through the contact form on their website, I gave her a rundown of my situation and goals. A couple days later, she emailed back to set up an appointment: Tuesday, September the 3rd. Four in the afternoon.

And, I was incredulous to discover, my insurance would pay for everything.

A miracle.

The ball was finally rolling.
12.
​
In the meantime, I had continued to wear feminine clothing and shave my arms and chest. I purchased a pair of silicone A-cup breasts from Amazon, and wore them on the days I felt like “going femme.” Something about them felt natural when I looked down and saw them resting under my shirt, and the weight of them on my chest. Evidently they made pretty good pillows too, as my partner Kate had developed a habit of lounging on my new chest while we watched TV.

You might notice that I didn’t say I shave my legs. Shaving my legs is generally not a good idea, because the hair is so coarse, and when it starts to grow back the next day, it itches so bad my digging leaves sores, and I get ingrown hairs. Lotion does nothing.

Over the summer, I bought an epilator, but man, that shit is rough.

An epilator uses a rotating barrel covered in dozens of tweezers to pull hair out of the skin at power-drill speeds. It’s like shaving with a belt sander. And it doesn’t last—over the course of a couple of days, I made it all the way from my ankles to my knees and it only took a week or so for it to start growing back. I will definitely have to take advantage of the gender clinic’s hair removal offer.

It occurs to me that you might be thinking, “you’ve mentioned ‘going femme,’ but what about ‘going masc’?”

To answer that, it might be prudent to tell you how I started dressing femme in the first place. Like I said earlier, it started with the Halloween leggings I bought at Meijer. Not only were they comfortable, but in retrospect I think I was experiencing the “gender euphoria” I mentioned before, in a small, incremental way. “Micro-experiencing,” you might say. I began to consider it “stress relief” to get home, get out of my clothes, and lounge around the apartment in my leggings, and I think now that the pressure-valve feeling I got was the gender euphoria coming in a little bit every night.

In order to facilitate my femme days, on the days I dress masculine, I don’t do any upkeep. Basically when I “go masc,” I go back to the way I was until this year, and present as a man. It’s all about how you want to “present.” When you go to a job interview, you want to present as a sleek, competent professional. When you go to your next boxing match, you want to present as a natural-born gladiator, ready to beat some ass.

These days I consider dressing like a guy “slumming it,” because I’ll be honest with you, one thing I’ve learned this year is that guys have it easy when it comes to their appearance.

Guys don’t have to worry about buying a hundred types of makeup (eyeliner, shadow, brow pencil, mascara, foundation, concealer, lipstick, blush, etc, plus beard concealer for me) and spending time putting it on with a brush set they also had to buy; they don’t have to worry about different underwear fabrics (wearing Spandex too often can cause a yeast infection) or buying different types of bras (different kinds of support, different fit, different style - sports bras aren’t as nice or sexy as lacy, soft ones, but you don’t want to go jogging in lingerie) . . . and, you know, that’s not even getting into the feminine products like tampons, which thankfully I don’t have to deal with.

No, when I go masc, I just slap on a T-shirt, joggers, and sneakers, and call it macaroni. Yankee doodle dandy.

Sometimes I don’t even bother doing anything with my hair. I don’t shave, and I just wear a T-shirt, sneakers, and pants—usually a pair of “joggers,” sometimes a pair of jeans. All black, of course. But the point is to let my face rest. If I shave every day, it gets to the point where I’m really digging to get that subcutaneous hair, the hair I can only feel if I stretch my cheeks, and it gives me serious razorburn.

Makes my face blotchy, makes the beard-shadow worse, and I despise having a beard-shadow. On the days I go masc, I want to code as masculine, and pass as a guy. But on the days I go femme, I want to code as feminine, and pass as a girl. And having that blue-gray dirt smear across my face makes it nigh impossible.

Hopefully the estrogen will do something to my facial hair. It most likely won’t stop growing altogether, but it might be easier to deal with, easier to pluck or wax. As an assigned-male-at-birth, most of my body hair is coarse and rooted deeply, especially my facial hair. My mustache and beard have heavy, bulbous roots a quarter of an inch long, and require a considerable amount of force to pull out, even moreso than the hair on my head.

To further the comparison to Dungeons & Dragons, I’m trading a couple points of Strength and possibly Constitution for points in Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma. One of the effects of estrogen therapy is that I will not be as strong as I used to be.

I’m okay with this, because at my age—two years from 40—and at this stage in my life, I’m already not as strong as I used to be. And my female side doesn’t need this strength as much as I did when I was perceived as one-hundred-percent male. So I’m happy to give it up.

Estrogen will make my skin softer, and redistribute my fat, changing my silhouette and the shape of my face. Hopefully this means I’ll lose at least some of my gut and regain it around my hips, thighs, and ass.

Another effect will be a smoother temperament and reduced anxiety, the effect I discovered while taking black cohosh. I won’t be nearly as irritable or generally angry—things roll off my back easier, I’ll take things more in stride. I don’t lash out or experience a loss of control anymore, and that will certainly be the case when I start HRT.

It will also eventually cause me to develop breasts, which I am more than cool with. I mean, seriously—I’ll have my own boobs, real ones, not silicone. All mine.

There are other effects it will have, as well as other procedures I’m planning with Deanna, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable discussing them in this blog post. You are more than welcome to ask me any questions you may have, though. I am an open book.
13.
​
The next couple of weeks leading up to my appointment passed at a crawl, but finally, the day came. We set off from Petoskey just before lunchtime, with a pitstop in Charlevoix to switch cars, and then we were on the road in earnest.

Since Kate’s car wasn’t quite reliable enough for the road trip, we borrowed their mom’s vehicle, a snazzy new Ford Escape with all the bells and whistles, including GPS, the most important tool in our road arsenal. I’d loaded my iPod with podcasts to listen to on the way out there, but we ended up listening to music instead, to free up our attention for the GPS director.

The drive was nice. Mostly interstate, with a few turns through our satellite towns—Charlevoix and Gaylord, chiefly. Since we had a little extra time to get to my appointment, we stopped at a gaming store in Gaylord called “Geniehobbies,” where I bought a copy of Monster of the Week. Pretty amazing place, lots of cool stuff, and a large game-play area upstairs, with a secret mini-painting room in the back that looks like a Mafia backroom-deals table, dark and secluded. Apparently there’s a pretty sweet indie bookstore in town called “Saturn Booksellers,” but we didn’t quite have time to check it out at the time. I should be doing a signing there this winter, though, so I’ll get in there eventually!

Rest of the drive passed without incident, and as we came into Mt. Pleasant, I was struck by how idyllic the town looked in the afternoon sun. Lots of browns and beiges in the architecture, bread-colored bricks paired with angular metal and glass, and with the low skyline, it all came together in a very satisfying mid-century-modern way, like a transplant straight out of the Seventies or Eighties. Sort of looked like the set of Halloween or Stranger Things.

After we found the gender clinic and parked, we realized we were hungry and still had a little time, so we walked around the neighborhood and found a co-op grocery store to buy something to snack on.

Then it was time.

The gender clinic was in a suite in a stately-looking building, accessible through a lobby of marble, where a fountain burbled quietly under a skylight giving us a glimpse of a listless white sky.

The next thing I noticed was that one of the office windows was a counter window with thin bars across frosted glass, and a hand-painted sign that said STAMPS, or something of that nature. On the other side of the glass, I could see books and a potted succulent. Apparently the gender clinic used to be a post office.

Kate sat in the waiting room with their laptop to work on a project, while I wandered into the receptionist’s office to confirm my appointment. For some reason they seemed surprised to see me, as if I’d never had an appointment at all, but then Deanna Heath showed up and everything worked itself out. They took down my preferred name and pronouns, then I filled out a medical-history questionnaire in the waiting room. No, I don’t smoke and never have. I don’t do drugs.

“Sam?”

Peeling myself off their leather couch, I wandered back into the office, where I was ushered into what looked like a small Victorian sitting room. The subtle grandeur of the lobby had filtered into the building’s deeper recesses, and washed-out sunlight seeped through a window high in the wall. I took a seat on the sofa and an attractive young counselor relaxed in an armchair in front of me.

What ensued was basically a recap of my life up to that point, with a focus on my decision to come here, the discoveries that had led me to realize I was non-binary, and the traumas that had helped shape me.
14.
​
It began with the recalling of how a man central to my life had at one point told me I should have been born a “nigger girl,” because I wasn’t working hard enough to meet his standards. He and I were digging up chunks of limestone the size of footballs and basketballs, and throwing them into the back of a pickup truck.

I was seven or eight years old.

Never forgot it, not even a little bit. What he told me has reverberated in my head at least once, every day, since.

In retrospect, I think perhaps I have resisted my recent revelations, and my recent changes, and my true nature, for so long . . . and fought so hard, and pushed so far, and did so much, and sought so much recognition for my efforts at presenting a straight, hard-working man to the world because I didn’t want him to be right. I didn’t want his disdain and disgust to be validated. I was the man of the goddamn house. I worked off 74 pounds in Basic Combat Training in 2005, and ruptured a disc in my spine just before going to Afghanistan in 2010, pushing myself past what he told me that day. I have worked my body half to death my whole adult life trying to stay ahead of his insinuation that I was unworthy of being.

One day when I was little, I was lying on my bedroom floor drawing happily, the light off, facing away from the door. Mid-afternoon sun drifted through the windows.

Suddenly the room shook and I was four feet in the air. It had happened so abruptly I didn’t even realize what was going on until I was on my feet. He had wordlessly stormed into my room, grabbed the back of my shirt, and yanked me bodily up off the floor. He started yelling at me about not having done my homework.

It scared the hell out of me. He scared the hell out of me, all the time. My heart-rate is going up just typing all this out.

He died in a car accident the year I turned fourteen.

“You’re the man of the house now,” someone told me at the hospital.

At his funeral, I cried on my biological father’s shoulder. I sobbed. For a very long time, I had no idea why.

Even beyond the fact that I had taken on that rebellious, self-absorbed aspect of a teenage boy, I was not given to crying at funerals—I’m still not, honestly, I’m usually clear-eyed and wandering around looking for other people to console. And I was especially not given to considering my father a source of comfort. He was traumatizingly abusive, an enormous, bearded Harley-riding biker in a motorcycle gang, a drunk and a cokehead, the reason why he and my mother had divorced when I was six. He is one of the reasons why I can’t handle being around erratic people, or men shouting angrily, and why I can’t handle loud, sharp noises.

He is one of the reasons I have PTSD at 38 years old. Not Afghanistan, my father, the “man” who should have been the bedrock of my fucking childhood.

No, it must have been tears of relief.

Over the next couple of years, I did my level best to comfort my widow mother on her darkest, loneliest, most devastated nights. And it never once even occurred to me to use him, or his death, as an emotional weapon against my younger brother and sister. I love all three of them, and I never would have let my feelings about him erode our relationship.

But I had been absolutely terrified of that man. And the disdain he had for me as a young man has been chasing me into the grave ever since.
15.
​
The Japanese have a concept called “kintsugi.” It refers to the practice of rejoining broken crockery or pottery with gold.
​Wikipedia says,

As a philosophy, “kintsugi” can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of “wabi-sabi,” an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.

Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of "no mind" (無心 mushin), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life. [...]

Kintsugi is the general concept of highlighting or emphasizing imperfections, visualizing mends and seams as an additive or an area to celebrate or focus on, rather than absence or missing pieces. Modern artists experiment with the ancient technique as a means of analyzing the idea of loss, synthesis, and improvement through destruction and repair or rebirth.

Masculinity represents a poison that’s been sickening me since I was barely out of diapers. It has been the wedge, the crack that’s been separating me down the middle my entire life, eroding my male side, forcing me to repress my female side.

So, yeah, I’m done being a “man.” I’ve had enough, thanks. My life has been a series of being failed by men and a society domineered by men, and my quest to, at first, meet their demands, and then to push myself beyond them. And out of guilt and fear, I’ve very nearly destroyed my body and my soul in the process.

I wanted to be a better father than Joe Hunt, but I never got the chance. So I try to be a good father to the people around me. The youths in my D&D group. The authors struggling beside me. The queer kids in my social circles. My friends, both offline and on.

These are the things that I told the therapist that day at the gender clinic in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. I didn’t need or want that overwhelming physical strength any longer. It’s time to kintsugi these two halves back together and restore the real me, the best me, the non-binary me, the worn-out and battle-scarred me, the Me who is both of these genders, and become my true self, who I should have always been: Sam the gold-veined owlbear, who knows what they are, and what they are capable of.

“You won’t be as strong anymore,” the counselor told me, explaining the effects of HRT. They had agreed to give me a letter of informed consent and set me up for estrogen. “But from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you won’t need it.”

Evil is Not Mental Illness

Mental illness is not shooting up a theater. Mental illness is not shooting up a garlic festival. Mental illness is not white supremacy. Evil is not mental illness.

PTSD isn't crawling across the floor, screaming orders to imaginary soldiers and throwing imaginary grenades at imaginary Viet Cong.

Compulsions aren't voices that tell you to kill people.

PTSD is having to get up and walk out of a restaurant because the band is playing "Hey Ho" by the Lumineers and the shouting is making you panic.

PTSD is lying to your spouse about trivial mistakes in absolute terror, because your ex taught you that owning up to anything gets you abused and screamed at.

PTSD is being terrified when your significant other behaves erratically, because you're convinced they're going to hurt you.

PTSD is a kicked dog. PTSD is not violence. It is fear.

Compulsions are spending two entire days sitting in your apartment, using tweezers to laboriously pull each individual hair out of your entire mustache, regardless of the fact that it hurts like hell, because you hate having a dark stain across your face. Because you feel ugly.

Compulsions are constantly checking your auto mirrors and getting out of your car at every traffic light to look underneath, all to make sure you haven't accidentally run anybody over.

Compulsions are not voices telling you to shoot people. They are feelings that make you need to perform tasks even if you don't want to, even if they hurt you or inconvenience you.

Mental illness is not a bully from a Stephen King novel, sitting in the dark, having conversations with invisible demons about how much they hate women and want to shoot them. Mental illness is not kids sitting on internet forums talking about involuntary celibacy and "roasties".

Evil is not mental illness.

Evil is your neighbor. Evil is your son, your brother, your father, your classmate, your teammate.

Evil is lonely, isolated men radicalized by toxic masculinity and religion, whipping each other into a frenzy on the internet, tricked and emboldened by a hateful old white supremacist in the White House and his gang of fascist mobsters into doing their death-squad dirty work for them.

That's what evil is. It's not mental illness, no matter how much that trailer-trash Richie Rich currently squatting in the Oval Office blows Nazi smoke up your ass.

​And it's sure as hell not video games.

2019, the Year of the Pants, or "My Pants are Full of Words"

I completely missed my twenties trying to be a responsible adult man trying to be like everybody else, and paid dearly for it.

​These days I'm playing catchup discovering who I am and what I'm capable of, and I've found an amazing little town full of friends that help me do it. Ironically enough I'm doing better now that I'm playing it by ear and committing to the crazy than I ever did before.

I always say when it comes to writing, I hate using an outline. It always comes out cramped and stiff, and forced. So I pants everything I write, which means I write "by the seat of my pants"--I start with a vague goal and just wing it until I finish. It always turns out more natural and authentic, more lush, with better pacing, and I'm better able to find interesting and engaging things and incorporate them into the story.

Seems like living life sort of works the same way for me. Which in a strange way makes a lot of sense. I've spent most of my time on this planet wondering why it felt like everybody else was born with an instruction manual for life, and I wasn't. I never had an outline. It was so frustrating and confusing--and when I tried to do what I thought I was supposed to do, and tried to follow some "plan" based on what I knew of the world, it consistently blew up in my face and came out sideways.

They tell you to write for yourself first. Write what interests you, not for someone else, not for some inarticulate "somebody" in your head or some reader out there--write for yourself. Write to make yourself happy, and readers will follow. So that's what I do. And that's how I started living--for myself, instead of trying to emulate the people around me and please the people I thought I was supposed to please.

So I guess in the end, what I had to do was start pantsing.