S.A. Hunt's Blog, page 2

Writer's Block

I believe that writer's block is a matter of fear and trust: fear of trusting the frontmost words in your mind and putting them to paper, fear of mediocrity, fear of failure, distrust of your ability. Trust whatever your muse gives you. Trust yourself & your ability. Trust the first thing in your head.

​This is what I do: Determine where you want the immediate plot to go This is not a full-plot decision; this is merely to figure out what needs to happen right now, independent of your characters, but you may need to work backwards from the full-plot destination.

If the end of your story results in your characters discovering the lost continent of Atlantis, then how are they going to find Atlantis? A mystical method of navigation--a magic compass. Okay, they need a magic compass. Let's take them to go find that magic compass. That's where the immediate plot needs to go. They'll need a boat to get there, but we'll worry about that in another chapter.

Determine what the characters need to do to get there Where is this magic compass? Well, the characters obviously don't know. So they will have to find someone that does. But they're not going to know any people with specific knowledge--there is no "Master of the Magic Compass." So they will have to go to someone with general knowledge.

Maybe the king's cartographer or grand vizier will know, or perhaps the creepy old hermit that lives in the forest outside of town, everybody says he knows magic, so he might know about things of a magical nature. We'll say it's the hermit.

Look for the most cinematic moment to begin that journey with The hermit lives outside of town, right? Maybe the characters aren't aware of him. So you could begin the chapter in the local tavern. The characters go there to find someone that can give them a lead on where to find someone with magical knowledge. The bartender probably knows, or at least will know who to ask.

Determine the most poetic & compelling way to create that moment It'd be boring to start the chapter with the characters walking into the tavern, wouldn't it? How would a TV show or a movie do it? They might start with a shot of the wood-grain surface of the tavern's bar, the bartender's hand wiping it with a rag. A handful of gold coins clatter onto the screen. We look up--it's your main character. By beginning the chapter with a focus on the bar, we can establish the setting without having to drop a load of scene-setting right off the bat. If necessary, we can subtly pepper the rest of the scene with a few other details about the setting.

A HANDFUL OF GOLD coins clatter across the bar. Caught in the act of polishing the bartop with a rag, the bartender looks up from them, a bit startled. "Well, uhh, hello there. Welcome to--"

"I'd like to ask you a few questions," growls Character.

The bartender smiles. "Questions are free," he says, pouring a tap into one of his frosty mugs. He's a bit shouty, because the tavern is a bacchanalia of singing, stomping, laughing. "A sample of our finest ale, that'll cost you." He plunks the mug down on the bar and slides a few of the coins into his apron.

Begin the chapter Once the scene / chapter is begun, let the characters in your head do what they will. Let them lead you toward the immediate destination you provided in the first step. You can always clarify and streamline in the edit.

Remember, you're not working toward the end of the story. You're working toward the next step of the story. Eat this big ol' story sandwich one bite at a time.

author gothic

author gothic:

a literary agent finally replies to your query. they want a synopsis, the first 50 pages of your manuscript, and the last 10 years of your life.

you buy a book and never get around to reading it. you buy another book you never read. you buy another. three months later your living room is full of books. later that year your house is crammed with books. there are so many books. you are lost in a labyrinth of books. you are lost.

you go on your goodreads' author profile and discover there are nine editions of you. you kindly ask a goodreads librarian to merge all these editions into one. that night you have a nightmare that you are at a banquet, but the only dish on the table is you. you eat every bite. the next morning you feel like a million bucks.

you tell a fan that you put "a little piece of your soul" into every book you write. the countryside is now littered with thousands of your horcruxes. you are unkillable.

they say "write what you know," so you open your manuscript and type "i know the true name of god." your head is filled with deafening utterances in an alien language. you are driven insane. it is Tuesday.

you discover the secret to eternal life: procrastinating your own death.

you find a book signed by Neil Gaiman at the airport & buy it. when you get home you look out the window and see Neil standing in the woods. watching. motionless. the wind tousles his glorious mane. three days later he is standing over you when you wake. "you have my book," Neil solemnly states. no one hears your scream.

"Malus Domestica" Series to be Published by Legacy Fantasy Publisher Tor Books!

Malus Domestica and all its sequels have been picked up by legacy fantasy publisher Tor Books! Yay!

Planned Parenthood

Earlier this year, a public relations rep for the Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood approached me to ask if I would write an essay about my recent experience seeking treatment at the PP clinic here in Petoskey. She loved it, and I thought I would share that essay here with you folks.

I don't blog much because I'm not much of a journaler when it comes to myself, and that's why I only update this thing every once in a blue moon. I tend to live in the moment and I don't feel like the public would want to hear about every little mundane detail of my life. Besides, that's what Facebook and Twitter are for.

As for opinion pieces, when I try to use this medium to express myself on topics like toxic masculinity, police shootings, gender dysphoria, the Big Orange Asshole in the White House, you know, things like that, it tends to attract the kind of people that want to argue with me about those kinds of things.

Aggroverts. Also known as "trolls".

And since I know aggroverts are fucking wrong, and not only wrong, but intentionally wrong, wrong on purpose for the full intent of antagonizing people with weaponized ignorance, and not only that, but dangerously and obnoxiously ignorant besides, I don't feel like expending the effort in ignoring or engaging with them, because it sucks my creative juices out like a--well, like a psychic vampire, which is exactly what they are. That's what an aggrovert is. Extroverts recharge by being around other people. Introverts recharge by being alone. Aggroverts recharge by antagonizing others.

So I don't tend to want to express my opinions here because I just don't have the time or energy for aggrovert bullshit. It's like my last marriage--eventually you learn to keep your mouth shut because it's just easier that way.

​I'm far, far better at chronicling the lives of fictional people, because I can fill their time with far more compelling moments and incidents than my own. Not to mention, the kind of readers my stories tend to attract are the kind of people I'd much rather engage with as human beings, people who share my sense of decency, and of right and wrong. People with consciences. So I don't get nearly as much trolling from them.

Anyway, I thought this thing with PP qualified as a relatively interesting Life Event™, so here it is. I hope you dig it. It might be construed as an opinion piece, and if so, and you don't agree with it, I'm so sorry. Good luck and godspeed, sailor. ________
​
Dear S.A,
 
Thank you for agreeing to share your patient experience with us. XXXX, our communications director has asked me to take the lead on contacting you because we have an opportunity to share your story at an event I’m planning on July 13th.
 
I see below that you (like many writers I know) find your strength in sharing written stories and might find oral story telling a stretch goal. I have worked with several patients to get their stories out into the world, both written, and live. There is nothing more powerful than a story shared in first person that is experienced simultaneously by an audience. Without exception, the folks I have coached to be speakers have come away energized. And, our guests are exceedingly forgiving of non-professional speakers – and in fact prefer them.
 
I would love to talk with you by phone, both to hear your story, and share a few of the possible ways we could utilize it. I’d be happy to travel to the Petoskey region to meet one on one if you would find that more enjoyable. In the meantime, if you would like to share your story in writing, I would be very happy to see it.
 
Patient stories are powerful tools, both to share with policy and lawmakers, the public, and especially with donors. I look forward to working to hearing yours.
 
Sincerely, a fellow writer,
 
XXX

XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX (she, her, hers)
Regional Events Manager
NEW email address: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX@ppmi.org
www.ppmi.org ________
​
You’re probably thinking, what is an Afghanistan veteran doing going to Planned Parenthood for medical care? Don’t you have the VA for that? And the answer would be, it depends on where you live.

My name is Sam Hunt--though you might know me from my horror and fantasy novels as “S. A. Hunt”--and I’m a veteran. Operation Enduring Freedom, 2010. I was a military policeman and a transport coordinator (a glorified airport ticket agent crossed with a 911 dispatcher).

I grew up way out in the middle of the woods, in the Appalachian mountains, miles and miles away from everything. My closest neighbor wasn’t even in earshot, but we got to get to know them at the semi-regular family reunions, because everybody in a mile radius was related to each other. Which, as you can imagine, makes it hard to find a date, Jeff Foxworthy jokes notwithstanding.

So when I said that it “depends on where you live,” while a fraction of veterans can find satisfactory service, a lot of us can attest that many VA clinics are notoriously hard to get in touch with, much less get on a waiting list to be seen, especially if you live in a rural area. And even if you do get on a waiting list, it might be six months to a year--or more!--to get into an examination room. That's bad mojo if you have a serious condition like diabetes, an infection, or suicidal ideations.

​As for me, I couldn’t even get that far. There were three potential VA clinics in my area: one in Anniston, Alabama, where I used to live before my 2011 divorce; Rome, Georgia, which was a 40-minute drive through the mountains; and Atlanta, Georgia, which was more than an hour away in the largest city in the state, with the worst traffic. I first started trying to contact them in 2013 for two reasons: one was the intermittent depression I’d suffered from in Afghanistan, which they’d given me Zoloft for in Kabul. I was trying to contact the VA to re-up my prescription for that. I was also seeking treatment for the back injury I’d suffered overseas.

Neither ended up happening. When I called the VA in Rome, they would just shuttle me through an automated phone system to the VA in Atlanta where nobody would answer the phone, and I didn’t have transportation to Atlanta anyway. The clinic in Anniston picked up, but when I asked about being seen, they told me that the were “full” and were “no longer accepting patients.” How is a clinic “full”? It’s not a Motel 6, or the crosstown bus.

At any rate, I eventually gave up.

In the meantime, I met a wonderful woman on the internet, Jessi, who told me that I might have an easier time getting in touch with the VA up here in Michigan. That was one of the deciding factors in me moving up here to Petoskey last September.

It was about this time that I discovered a tiny bump on my right testicle, but considering how many times in the last 30 years I'd suffered some kind of blunt force injury to my body--particularly my crotch--I didn't think much of it. To be honest, at the time it was so difficult to locate that I had convinced myself that it might just be part of the epididymus, the tubing from the testes to the body.

To my only slightly surprised chagrin, I had the same level of difficulty contacting the local VA, if not even more roundabout of a way. Jessi and I went to what we thought was the VA clinic in Emmet County only to find a non-descript office building full of admin offices. There was a VA entity there, but it was an admin office in the basement, not a clinic, a single guy whose purpose it was to handle things like medical records and disability payments. He gave us the number for the actual VA clinic, but every time I called it, it rang and rang and rang. Nobody would pick up.

So that winter, when the mystery lump on my right testicle started getting larger, I was at a loss as to where to find a cancer screening that I could afford.

In the meantime, my girlfriend and I had been discussing Planned Parenthood regularly, because we had been talking about birth control. I was doing my own research on them, and one day I was investigating them on Google when I found out that the local Planned Parenthood clinic does cancer screenings, including testicular cancer. I was thrilled.

Over the winter I had grown increasingly more anxious about the lump on my testicle as it slowly, so slowly, grew more and more defined--was it cancer? Was it? Did it feel like cancer? I Googled it a million times and every time, I found diagrams and descriptions that made it very much look like yes, I have testicular cancer, just like Lance Armstrong and so many other men, and if I didn’t get help soon it was going to spread to my lungs like this article I'd found on the internet, and I’d develop a cough, and by the time I finally got into a clinic and got seen they’d find out my lungs were riddled with dark masses, and it would be too late to operate, and God in Heaven help me, I was going to die slowly and in agony.

One brisk day a few weeks before the snow started to fall, I hopped on my bike and went to Planned Parenthood in Petoskey. When I got there, the office was closed because they’re not open on Wednesdays. I tried again a couple of days later. This time the office was open.

Here goes nothing, I thought, tromping into the waiting room.

I felt like an interloper, a castaway on the shores of the island of the Amazons in Wonder Woman, here’s a man in our midst, what’s he doing here? A thousand made-for-TV movies from the Lifetime Channel ran through my head, movies about dastardly stepfathers and scheming husbands and sinister boyfriends. I felt like I was behind enemy lines--or, rather, an enemy behind the frontlines. I calculated every one of my movements so as not to seem threatening or untoward, taking the time in the lobby to laboriously pull off my helmet, my gloves, my scarf, and my jacket and let everyone see that I was here, and I had no weapons on me, and, no quick movements. It seems silly in retrospect but I honestly had no idea what to expect, and I am nothing if not self-conscious.

The receptionist seemed a tiny bit bewildered to see me standing at the window. I asked, "Do you do cancer screenings here?"

She said, "Yes, I believe we do," and a serious, official-looking woman came in the front door and went around me, into the admin area. "What kind of cancer screening?" asked the receptionist.

"Testicular," I said, feeling simultaneously gross and embarrassed.

The newcomer entered the office behind the window. "Can you do a cancer screening?" the receptionist asked her.

"I have time, yes," the woman said, and peered at me through the window, sizing me up. I was amazed. I figured I'd be setting up an appointment today and coming back a couple of weeks later. I didn't expect at all to be seen today, much less before the weekend. "I can do it, sure. Come on in." I followed her into the back, where a third woman, very pleasant and conversational, took my vitals.

"Very low BP," said the nurse, in an impressed tone, as she watched the computer screen next to me. "You must be very relaxed."

In fact, I was pretty nervous. Not as bad as I would have been if I'd been there for a blood draw, but still anxious. "No, I just have naturally low blood pressure." I jabbered a tired old anecdote about how garlic makes me dizzy.

"Are you here for an STD test, too?" she asked.

"I . . . don't reckon I am?" I wasn't sure what to say, or if there would be an extra charge, or what. "I don't know?"

"It's no big deal. Just a quick blood draw." Ugh, there it is. The needle stick. She told me how fast the results would be back, and that I might as well get tested while I'm here. I agreed to it.

To my relief, it wasn't too bad and was over in a flash. The nurse left me to disrobe, which involved pulling my pants down to my knees and covering my now-naked lap with a cloth, then lying on my back on the table.

A little while later, the doctor I'd encountered in the lobby came back. "We're just going to take a peek and see if we can find the lump you were asking about," she said, pulling a chair up to the examination table. The cloth still lay across my thighs and as she approached me, pulling on a pair of exam gloves, I had the sudden feeling I'd captured a particularly gnarly insect under a newspaper and she was about to pick up the sports section and tell me what kind of insect it was.

She lifted the cloth, exposing me to the harsh light of day. I felt like the world's laziest subway flasher, and I could tell that it was weird for her too, but she was professional about the entire thing.

I'll spare you the gory details. To sum it up, with a little searching and gentle manhandling, the doctor found the lump I was talking about and soon I was standing at the receptionist's counter, ready to go. Due to the paperwork I'd filled out concerning my financial condition--one bad day away from living in a tent down by the river--the office waived my fees, but requested that I donated an amount of money of my choice to Planned Parenthood itself in lieu. I wasn't sure at all what my fees would have been, but forty dollars seemed both affordable and sufficient.

To my immense and delighted surprise, the doctor that had given me the examination emailed to tell me that she'd managed to contact the VA in Cheboygan and set up another testicular screening. I was amazed. She had been able to get through where I'd found only a stone wall. I thanked her profusely and finagled a ride north from my girlfriend's mother.

The blizzardy, windswept and snowblown trip to the Cheboygan VA proved to be fruitless, because they only made the most cursory effort to investigate my testicular lump, choosing to almost wholly focus on my now-intermittent depression. But after a couple of months of email tag, phone tag, and basically whacking the VA like a pinata, I got them to agree to send me to the local hospital in Petoskey. That January at six in the morning, I hiked through a mile of knee-deep snow wearing half my wardrobe and finally received the testicular ultrasound I'd been begging for all winter.

The results? The lump I'd been terrified of for months turned out to be a relatively harmless "spermatocele," a fluid-filled cyst lodged in the vas deferens. The left testicle was peppered through with tiny “microliths”--stones.

That sounds horrible, but it's one hell of a lot better than cancer.

The STD tests came back clean, by the way, which I'd expected, since you can measure my sex life in the fossil record.

In the end, things turned out well. If Planned Parenthood hadn't been there for me, I probably would have ended up at an urgent-care clinic and paid through the nose for my examination. I don't have health insurance--both because I can't afford civilian health insurance, and because I hypothetically have the VA. Without Planned Parenthood, I might not have been examined at all.

There are a lot of people out there, men and women, who don't have my resources as a service member or my privilege as a white male from a family above the poverty line. People who, without Planned Parenthood, wouldn't be able to get into a doctor's office at all. I can't imagine how much of a pickle I'd be in if I were a woman with a pregnancy with life-threatening complications, or God forbid, a pregnancy resulting from rape.

And that's not even counting the necessity of testing for sexually-transmitted diseases, both on a personal level, and in the broader scope of society. It's our responsibility as a modern nation in a first-world country to maintain a certain level of vigilance when it comes to sexually-transmitted diseases, because HIV and gonorrhea don't know what race or class look like. Geography doesn't even matter to the spread of disease, because to a virus, it's a relay race, a slow-motion marathon, and it goes where it wants to, and where it wants to go are places where people don't take care of themselves and can't take care of themselves.

Poverty is society's autoimmune disease. Poverty weakens and endangers society as a whole, because the inability to afford healthcare creates a back door through which disease and tragedy can get in and do damage to all of us from the inside, regardless of fame or financial status. Planned Parenthood is the vaccine against that. It may not be the only one, but I think it’s the best one.

So that's why I believe in it. That's why I'll put my chips on Planned Parenthood to the end. The far-right can make up all the lies it wants to about abortions, but I know the truth. I know the good this organization can do, and does do, every day, for both sexes, for all sexes, not just the binary, in every place you can find one of its offices. It benefits everybody whether they know it or not, whether they want it to or not. ________
​
Sam,
 
This is exceptional. You’ve painted a vivid picture of what disparity people find in their health care experiences. Your voice and perspective as a male patient is unique and comes through with intense clarity. We will make sure that your story is used in Harbor Springs – and I expect to find other places that it will be a valuable tool as well.
 
I so appreciate your investment and energy in putting this together and see more clearly that asking you to speak or attend a huge event is the wrong use of your talent.
 
I’m percolating a thought that our advocacy team might find this a powerful tool when talking to some of our legislators. Would you allow me a grace period until after the event to connect with them?
 
I want to thank you again for sharing in your own words. You have done a great service to Planned Parenthood. I’m so glad that the Petoskey staff (who are among the most stellar) provide you unexpected and exceptional care.
​
Best,

XXX

XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX (she, her, hers)
Regional Events Manager
NEW email address: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@ppmi.org
www.ppmi.or

You Can't Make a Nazi Feel Bad About Being a Nazi

Recently a friend of mine commented on a post I'd reshared on Facebook about someone punching a man that had been putting up neo-Nazi flyers. My friend told me about how punching Nazis was the wrong course of action, because that just "makes them the victims, gives them the power." Basically, that makes the bully cry, and a crying bully makes you the bad guy.

Instead, you have to ridicule them. Hold up their actions and the things they say to their mothers and coworkers. Dox them, basically, or at least some sideways form of doxing their behavior.

I've done this kind of thing before. It's called "information retrieval"—hunting down trolls' parents and siblings on Facebook, and sending them a private message about their loved one's asshole ways. I did something similar when I was pretending to be Butcherface on Reddit years ago.

But it doesn't work. I've tried it before. They put their real, full names on their racist manifestos because they want to be known for the horrible shit they say. They post pro-Trump memes on Facebook in full view of their parents and coworkers, and brag on Twitter about wanting to hang gay kids. They go on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Talk," pull down their metaphorical pants, and take a great big ideological shit on television.

​All that approach does is throw them into the briar patch. No, don't tell my friends about the easily-Googled racist article I "contributed" to the local newspaper's website under my real name! Anything but that!
And you'll be lucky if they leave you alone. When I did it, they retaliated. They went low, I went high, and they kicked me in the balls while I was in the air.

​Holding the first wave of Nazis up to ridicule or scrutiny back in the 40s didn't do a whole lot. We made a boatload of anti-Nazi ridicule propaganda, like the Disney anti-tank-weapon cartoon Stop That Tank! We made posters of Hitler bent over with a bullseye painted on his ass. We had Bugs Bunny take a whack at him. The Nazis just continued to murder and bloat and kill and advance across Europe until the Allied forces started putting the hurt on them.

Like them, this new wave of Nazis doesn't respond to non-violent methods like shaming and ridiculing. You can't ridicule someone for being or doing something that they are inherently proud of.

Today's Nazi doesn't care that his boss or his mother knows. Half the time his boss and his mother agree with him, if his mother isn't willfully ignorant of his erstwhile activities.

​Who do you think raised him to think and behave that way? They LIVE in the briar patch.
If you don't punch a Nazi—if you don't oppose this kind of fascism and bigotry and lies and killful hatred with all the force you can muster and all the enthusiasm you can array—you make your friends and family into victims. You legitimize their assholery by engaging with it, by playing their game. Nazis killed more than six million innocent people last century—personally, I'm not going to treat them with kid gloves and give them the chance to do it again. I didn't join the Army in 2005 to sit around in a tent and smell my own farts, and I wouldn't have done as much in 1943, either.

When you punch a Nazi, you don't stop.

You don't fucking stop.

​You punch them until there is nothing left to claim victimhood. You punch the bully until the pissing and crying stops. Because if you turn the other cheek and let them continue doing what they're doing, they're going to make sure there is nothing left of you, victim or not.

Look at the people like Trump and Milo out there already, in the public eye, saying and doing these things in front of God and everybody. They possess no shame. They possess no conscience. You can't shame them, because they see no shame in what they're doing. They revel in not having shame. All words do—attempts at shaming them, demands for explanations, "outing" them to their families and coworkers, trying to make them toe the line of decency—all that does is give them power, because they feed and thrive on your outrage, fear, and despair. You can't whip someone that gets off on being whipped, and you can't embarrass someone with a fetish for being yelled at in public.

These trolls—I call them "aggroverts," people who recharge by stirring shit with other people—almost literally eat your attention, like psychic vampires. Extroverts recharge by engaging positively with people. Introverts recharge by being alone. Aggroverts, on the other hand, like it when "libtards" like us express our despair and try to pillowfight them with rhetoric. It's hilarious and satisfying to them.

​They used to call it "lulz." I'm not sure what they call it now. Cuck tears? Who the hell knows.
​
​Hitler didn't commit suicide with Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker on April 30th, 1945 because people were saying mean things about him to his mother. He did it because the Americans and the Russians were closing in on him and when they caught him, they were going to do a lot more than punch him.

Today my friend on Facebook said that punching Nazis may feel good, but it doesn't achieve anything.

But no, it doesn't feel good. That's the thing. Saving lives only feels good after the fact. People don't do the right thing because it feels good to do it—they do the right thing because the right thing needed to have been done. Feeling good about it later is irrelevant. You ever see anybody wade into a river and pull a baby out of a sinking car with a smile on his face?

It should never feel good to swing your fist and hit another human being in the face hard enough to dislodge teeth and break cartilage and crack open sinuses and shatter jawbones. But if that's what has to be done to neutralize a threat—and that is 110% what these goose-stepping, heiling, gay-hanging, black-shooting, Hugos-sabotaging white-as-fuck neo-Nazis are—then you do what you have to do.

And I don't intend to feed them their "lulz" as they load us onto the boxcar after we've exhausted our orange-skin jokes and Joe Biden memes. You talk, and I'll fight, and we'll see which one of us walks out of Berlin.

Armor of Love

​I've never been this head over heels in my life.

It's so amazing to be with someone that you want to be with because they excite you and attract you and fulfill you, as opposed to feeling existentially cornered by the fear of being alone. She's so creative, artistic and intelligent, and sweet, and silly, and brave. She's also utterly beautiful, and I want her every time I see her. I love her so much.

Like any man, I haven't gone blind. I still encounter attractive women in the world when I go out to do things, and I recognize good things about them. I am aware of them -- a man's radar never completely goes away. Being in a relationship doesn't rewire you that profoundly.

But now there's this sort of veneer, this overlay, this tint that seems to gird my mind. Where before I would have longingly admired those women, thought about them the rest of the day, now my eye skates right across them.

​It's like an armor--before, these women would have stuck in my mind like arrows or bullets, but now they just bounce right off. ​My mind is happily full of Jessi; there's no room for anyone else in this mental elevator. A constant feeling of emotional fullness sits inside of me, as if I cannot eat another bite of life. I know that there is a woman waiting for me at home who represents everything I've ever wanted and needed in a life partner, a person who doesn't make me feel as if I can't do any better, but who makes me feel as if I could only do worse. She hits all my buttons, scratches all my itches, dots all my Is and crosses all of my Ts.

Is this satisfaction? Is this what happiness and contentment feel like? _______

I've been depressed for most of my life. Twenty-five to thirty years, at least. Over time it became my personality, my Eeyore emotional baseline. It's why I almost reached 300lb at one point (stress eating), it's probably why I have bags under my eyes and just generally look rather haggard.

Then 2011 came along, my Afghanistan deployment, with the tumultuous divorce, and consequently, my complete and utter breakdown. The Army put me on Zoloft. I had a lot of crap on my mental plate then because of what was happening, but the overarching depression that had ruled my life until then had been beaten back by the Zoloft. For the first time in my life I could see my depression from the outside and I realized that I could look back and see the dividing line between Old Me and New Me, or perhaps "True Me". I could feel the black-wool texture of depression, I could see the shape and weigh the heft of it because it was no longer all that I knew. Old Me was the depression. I am like a fish that has been pulled out of a life of cold dark water into a warm, dry, sun-lit world. I looked down at the waves, and all of a sudden I knew what an ocean was.

Anyway, I told you that in order to tell you this: Jessi is sort of like that Zoloft. She's shocked me into understanding what life was like without her, and I can't imagine going back to that. With her in my life I am no longer lonely, I no longer pine for someone to fill a gap in my life. She fills it so completely and perfectly that she is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. She makes me feel as if I am meant to be here, with her and Jake.

I don't know, I just wanted to express a feeling for a moment. This started off as a Facebook post and got a little long, so I decided to put it on my blog.

Take it easy, folks.

August 26th Sale

It's my birthday!

...Well, not yet. I'll be turning thirty-five on the 26th of this month, August, in the year of our Lord 2016, and to celebrate I'm going to be running a Kindle Countdown sale on my best-selling horror-fantasy novel Malus Domestica.
Beginning the 20th (this coming Saturday) it will be 99 cents, and will go up a percentage every day until the 26th . . . so if you're going to jump on this, the 20th's the best day to do it.
If you already have the book, please please do me a solid and let anybody and everybody know about the sale. This is probably going to be the last one for Malus Domestica, and I'd hate for people to miss out on it.

GO GO Go GO GO GO

Imagine crouching in the rear fuselage of a small airplane 20,000 feet above the plains of America.

The door is open and the almost 200-mph wind shoots into the cargo area with you, howling in your face and whipping your hair. You're wearing a backpack containing a parachute that you're not one-hundred-percent sure is going to hold your weight, even if the thing comes out when you pull the ripcord. All of a sudden the straps and carabiners all over your harness feel as insubstantial as cotton candy.

The instructor is shouting something you need to hear and pointing insistently at the altimeter on his wrist, but you can't hear it clearly over the screaming gale. You only catch every second or third word.

People start jumping out of the airplane, one after the other. The instructor calmly handles them along in a slow conga line, yelling at them as they shuffle past. The air rips them out of the plane with a startling anger and flings them into the stratosphere.

Now it's your turn. You squat in the open door and stare in utter terror at the pale curvature of the Earth. Below your feet, you can see the entire southwest corner of Indiana, and slivers of Illinois and Kentucky, represented in green patchwork shapes, obscured by a cottony screen of clouds. Cirrus clouds lay across the surface of the planet below like the aftermath of the world's most violent pillow fight.

Visions flicker through your mind of plummeting toward the ground, a torn ripcord in your hand, and hitting grass and soil and rock at 118 mph, practically vaporizing your guts and pulverizing every bone in your body. You wonder if it will be an open casket funeral, or if they'll simply deliver your eulogy over a bucket full of you.

"Time to go!" the instructor shouts in your ear. The plane vibrates under your feet and all of a sudden this thing of steel feels like the safest place in the world.

The instructor pushes you into the sky.

​This is what public speaking feels like for me.

Sexless Pink Frog-Apes

​They say that a man is nothing but a miserable little pile of secrets.

Biologically speaking, all a man is, is an unusually muscular woman, with a heavy bone structure and an oversized clitoris, whose ovaries have fallen out into a scrotum made of vulva-skin and is producing sperm instead of eggs. If you don’t believe that, Google Image Search “giant clitoris.”

A man can even lactate if he takes enough anabolic steroids, because it will destabilize his hormones, send him into an estrogen tailspin, and he will spontaneously develop the ability to produce milk.

We all start life as a sexless, pink bipotential frog-ape called an embryo. The ultimate actualization of ambiguity. We all look the same at this stage, and the majority of mammalian animals do as well. If you, as this parasitic Lovecraftian catfish buried deep inside the viscera of a human woman, receive enough testosterone in early gestation, your urinary tract develops and migrates inside of your proto-clitoris, and slowly transforms into what people have decided to call a penis.

When you as an adult practice cunnilingus, you’re licking scrotal tissue that received enough estrogen in the womb to become the labia minora of the vagina. If you’re one of the mythical men that have two brain cells to rub together and you know where the clitoris is, you’re licking a micropenis.

If you were born with an inarguably penis-like penis, and consider yourself a straight man who grew up in a blue jumper and have a masculine name on your birth certificate, when you have sexual intercourse with a woman, all you’re doing is pushing your overgrown clitoris into the open cavity where their testicles would have emerged from, if their bipotential genitalia had received just a bit more testosterone in the womb.

A man is a woman with all the video game character-creation sliders pushed to the max. The gender binary is an illusion created by social conditioning and hormones.

So a misogynist is, at its core, a self-loathing RC car radio-controlled by institutionalized bullshit and a pissbaby outlook, because men are women and women are men and everybody is an FBI agent. —I mean, a human being.

When you think about it like that, misogyny is nothing more than a man slapping at phantoms; a waste of neurons, a waste of effort you could be spending on overcoming this social conditioning and making friends and getting laid and publishing books, and a waste of the very limited time you’ve been given on this planet to make yourself into the kind of significant, worthy, likeable person that a woman, literary agent or not, might want to commit to.


             *      *      *


Why are misogynists?

After that gruesome biology lesson, I don’t think I have to tell you that misogyny is an unhealthy, pointless, counter-productive mode of thought. Half the world’s population is comprised of women. You can’t get away from them. They’re like Visa cards, literally everywhere you want to be. They’re your mothers, they’re your sisters, your coworkers, your boss.

I get it, okay? I don’t empathize with it, but on a purely academic level, I see why it happens. Misogynists: rejected on the dating scene, their manuscripts rejected, rejection all over the place. It hurts. It’s Them vs. Women. Women become the Other, the faceless, antagonizing horde. These men were stung so many times, something broke inside them and now women are just this inhuman mass of bees.

Or sometimes it develops in childhood—some of them have fathers that mistreated or simply had no respect for their mother, or sometimes they have controlling or hateful mothers.

Nature vs. Nurture. It happens.

So if anybody should be a misogynist, it’s me. I have a list of grievances a mile long, starting with my mother, who put me in remedial math classes in kindergarten, which in these country-ass schools meant that Monday through Friday, I shared class space with the Special Ed kids.

Almost all the socializing of my formative years was with the Special Ed class, the kids isolated in their own dingy room down at the very end of a long hallway with flickering, unrepaired light panels: the lazy eyes, the uncombed hair, oceans of saliva, the motorized wheelchairs, the wordless screaming and fit-pitching, the vaguely diapery smell, the exasperated teacher’s-aide.

On top of that, the teacher I had for these classes in high school absolutely hated me, especially when she took over the Keyboarding class. I still have no idea why. She would send me to the principal’s office at the drop of a hat, and when I got there and they’d find me sitting quietly on the couch out in the hall, fuming and confused, they’d ask me why I was sent to the office. I had to answer, “I have no idea!”

This continued until the day I graduated high school. Thirteen years.

Day after day, spending most of my time in the school dungeon fucked me up. Basically destroyed any chance I had at a normal personality or neurotypical range of behavior. It’s probably part of why I have trouble empathizing and socializing with normal people. I still have trouble looking people in the eyes when I talk to them. Public speaking is absolutely terrifying.

(One could argue it’s why I have such patience and understanding when I’m in situations with the physically disadvantaged or mentally ill, but I digress.)

Of course, this addled childhood meant I never had a snowball’s chance in hell of dating in high school. The few girls I dared to talk to existed on a different, higher plane of reality than me. I only existed in two dimensions. I was a paper cutout.

But ultimately I didn’t hold it against them. I didn’t hold it against them, I didn’t hold it against my mother. It didn’t make me a misogynist. Because deep down I’m a decent, conscious person that understood how social castes work. I was an Untouchable.

And my mother was doing the best she could with a severely depressed child who couldn’t do math and didn’t care, a silent sullen kid with PTSD and behavior issues from witnessing constant screaming matches between her and my alcoholic, coke-snorting father. My mom put me in those remedial math classes in an attempt to help me.

Yeah, at the time, it pissed me off, because I didn’t know any better. I resented it.

​But it didn’t make me hate and demonize all women. I used to fantasize about hanging myself the same way my classmates fantasized about being sports stars and actors. But instead of blaming them and Othering them, I blamed myself, I blamed my giant head and ugly face, and the company I kept. People called me “Ogre” and “Frankenstein,” and I didn’t have to be a genius to see why.

No, women are just people, just like men. They aren’t from Venus, they aren’t some sadistic, inscrutable alien race. They aren’t flawless robots put here on Earth to make me miserable. They’re People.

And regardless of what’s between their legs, People are nothing but those same pink mistake-making frog-apes. People have preferences, proclivities, they make choices, and at that age nobody can see past the end of their own nose, so why would I blame them? How could I? I had full situational awareness. I could see my own face in the mirror. I dressed like I had no light bulb in my bedroom. I didn’t talk much.

I grew my bangs long to cover my face. I knew my own flaws, and I loathed them, and I mourned the person I never had the chance to be, but I never hated girls, I never turned women into the Other.

How can I Other something that is me? I only saw them as I saw myself: a person. People.

At the time I didn’t know why I'd been saddled with these flaws or thrust outside the scope of normal human social development . . . but I had the presence of mind to acknowledge it and internalize it and question it, instead of blaming women.

I never got an answer, but that never turned me into a misogynist, because despite everything else, my mom didn’t raise me to be an asshole.


             *      *      *


When I’d finally taught myself to push my reflection out of the way and ignore the shit hand I’d been dealt, and treated women as complex people just like myself, instead of seeing them as hateful, unknowable androids, I got married. After a while I discovered that she was doing meth behind my back. Then she cheated on me while I was out of town. We got an annulment.

After I joined the Army, I developed a relationship with a gorgeous young woman from work. She looked like Tinkerbell brought to life. She dumped me because, even though “the sex was the best she’d ever had,” I wasn’t her soulmate.

I hardly ever got any replies on the dating websites. Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, etc etc. I got ignored just like the next guy.

Several years later, I married another woman and it turned out to be an abusive relationship, with gaslighting. She cheated on me while I was overseas, and then left me. We got an extremely laborious and painful divorce.

That whole period screwed me up bad. It took me several years to recover from that kind of mental anguish and start dating again. I didn’t trust women for a while because I had convinced myself that their unpredictability was dangerous and I was terrified of being driven half-insane again, but I never hated them or dehumanized them.

This was about the time I started writing Whirlwind, which started me on the path to putting my mind back together. Literary therapy.

A little while after that, an amazing person I'll call Coyote blew into my life and taught me it was possible to trust again.


              *      *      *


Fuck it, y’know?   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Women are people. Men are people. We’re all People, we’re all just hanging on by our fingertips, making decisions we hope will be the best possible ones. We are all that same sexless pink germ-monkey.

But I knew that if I quit shitting on myself for being one of the uglier pink germs and focused on improving Me, instead of hating everyone else for not liking a person that was too lazy and stupid to evolve into something better, then maybe I might happen to catch another one of those fish.

I sure as hell didn’t send those women OKCupid messages to tell them they were sluts and that they deserved to die, just because they wouldn’t answer my messages. Who does that? What kind of depraved, undeveloped mind does it require to make a gesture that soulless, childish, and pointless?


             *      *      *


I love women.

I love to listen to them sing. I love the way they look, the timbre of their voices, the glint in their eyes when they’re happy, the passion in their heart when they’re engrossed in something that fulfills them. I love to see them fight, I love to see them win. When they lose, I want to give them a hug and tell them everything is going to be okay, and we’ll try again tomorrow.

If I could be surrounded by women at all times, I would.

My current girlfriend is the best part of my life, and the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. She’s got a mind like a razor, she’s astoundingly hot, as strong as a steel cable, and she’s super-sweet.

She is my mistake-making pink frog-ape, and I am hers, and I love her more than I love myself.

I can trust her.


             *      *      *


If you’re going to hate someone, hate everybody, because we’re all the same choosy, flighty, anxious, prejudiced frog-ape.

If you’re going to cast blame, blame social constructs and blame your shitty genetics or hormones. But blaming the entire other half of the human race and vilifying them as a whole is just setting yourself up for a lifetime of failure, because there is no situation whatsoever where you won’t be negotiating with, or subordinate to, or submitting a manuscript to, a woman at some point.

If you’re going to be a mis-anything, be a misanthrope and live in a cave somewhere up in the mountains. Be a hermit, grow a big ratty beard, and scream at trespassers, “Get away from my gold!” Because at least up there in your one-room shack with your beans and pickaxe, you won’t be wasting our precious time and energy.

​Just don’t overdo it on the steroids.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Sometimes you have to stop and appreciate the little things in life. For some strange reason I have decided to enumerate some of my favorite "little things" here on my blog. Feel free to let me know if you like them too!peeling and eating mandarin orangesrubbing noses with my girlfriendwrestling with a feisty dogthe creepy super-detailed masks in the back of old Starlog and Fangoria magazinesautumn (in particular the first few weeks, the first hints of cool air, the trees turning, the catalyst, the pivot, that feeling of change and relief)checking my email at one in the morning to find a message from someone gushing over my bookspeople being enthusiastic about Halloween, especially kids in elaborate costumes and distant, well-made haunted housesthat feeling of cold pouring down my chest when I drink a bottle of cold water on a really hot daylistening to a woman sing seductively in Frenchriding in the back seat of a Humvee with my squadmates on a training mission on a cool, dry dayin the theater: the hushed, anticipatory period spent watching trailers before the moviewalking with someone through a carnival and listening to the rush-and-clatter of the rides, the murmur of the milling crowd, the smell of popcorn and funnel cakesa notification on Twitter from someone with a kind word to say about my workthe feeling I got when I did really well at the pistol range back in my MP unit in 2006 and the platoon sergeant did an unbelieving double-take between me and my target paper​finishing a book cover and doing something else for a while, and realizing when I come back and open the Photoshop window again that the cover looks boss as fuckthat low burn of adrenaline as I'm preparing to fight a really hard boss battle in a video gamereally good authentic California Mexican foodreally good Italian foodreally good coffeereally good pizzareally good Chinese food (okay, I really like to eat, so sue me)a dim-lit, quiet morning sitting by a window with a cup of coffee, so early that no one is awake, not even the birds, and I have work to do but all day to do itthat feeling of untightening, that freedom and relief, inside my chest when Army drill was finally over for the weekend and I could go homelooking up from something I'm doing, glancing at my girlfriend across a quiet room, making eye contactFerrero Fiesta cakes (chocolate-covered sponge cake soaked in orange liqueur) that have been in the freezerswimming in cool, clear waterthe burn of a well-worked pair of legslying on my side and watching a movie with my girlfriend as she leans back against me like I'm a pillowthe utter exhaustion of collapsing into bed after a long day of hard workhaving "I love you" whispered in my eara long walk in the dark with a flashlight that will let me secretly pretend for just a little while that I'm the protagonist in a horror video gamethe feeling of discovering a fantastic horror novelfinishing the final draft of my own novelhaving friends around to talk to and do things withthe clutching weight of a tiny cockatiel or a lizard on my handa long night playing hilarious games with friends -- card games, board games, video gamesstanding in a big open space, washed by a strong, cool crosswind, staring up at a black sky full of bright stars
And last but not least,
finally thinking of something worthwhile to write a blog post about.