Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 6

Books of 2021

I read 51 books last year, beating my goal of 50 by … that’s right … one. I read a lot of good books, and there were a few stinkers. This is my annual post where I recount the best and worst of the year. If you’d like to see them all, you can click right here.

It was the year of two literary giants for me. The first is Wallace Stegner. I’d read his The Big Rock Candy Mountain several years ago and liked it pretty well. Later, I read The Spectator Bird and it was okay. But Angle of Repose kept...

Good Riddance 2021

This was a horrible year and I can’t wait to slam the door on it in 32 minutes.

Back in March, my 18-year-old dog Bubba had to be put to sleep after being with me for 16 of those years. We’d been dealing with cancer and fluid around his heart and lungs for about a year, and then the poor guy lost control of his bowels. It was a hard decision, but I had to let him go. He was a damn fine dog and a great friend.

Then I lost my job. I was the last teacher hired, literally starting work the day...

The Teacher: A Novel

My first literary novel is available now!

It’s been a busy autumn for me. My most recent horror novel, Mother, was released in October. In November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month and produced a 61,000+ word novel called Yes or No, and then, in early December, came my first mainstream literary novel, The Teacher.

The Teacher is about a middle-aged educator named Andrew Clausing. He teaches at a low-income diverse high school in south Oklahoma City. He’s the department cha...

Shift in Perspective

When I was a younger man I couldn’t imagine writing in any genre other than horror. Now I think I had to make up boogey-men back then because I hadn’t experienced the real monsters of loneliness, depression, and loss. There’s nothing scarier than the human condition.

Steven E. Wedel

The above is a post I just made on social media. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. This year I finished my second literary novel, revised the first one I wrote, and am 34,868 words into my third ...

Mother Wants You

Last November I participated in my first National Novel Writing Month. This novel Mother is the result of that. It’s my first horror novel in quite a long time and I’m pretty proud of it.

The idea for this story has been with me for at least 30 years, but I never felt ready to tackle it. The details were always sketchy, though I knew the main idea and stuck to that when I finally set down to write the book.

Mother is about a dozen high schoolers and their teacher who go looking for a m...

The Cardinal’s Visit

It’s been a week since Mom passed away. It’s been a difficult week. Planning a funeral is hard and attending it is even harder. But there has been one incident that is a positive and has been on my mind for a week now.

Mom passed on Saturday evening. I drove home on Sunday afternoon. When I got home, I went through the house to the back yard where my dogs were. I fed them and was sitting on the porch petting Bear and telling him what happened and why I had been gone so long, when something ou...

Tribute to Mom

At about 5:45 p.m. on Saturday, September 4, 2021, my mother’s long battle with COPD came to a sad and inevitable end. With it came the end of an era for our family. There will be a tectonic shift in the structure of our world with the passing of our matriarch. Today, as we balance on the edge of what was and what will be, between memories that bring tears and those that bring smiles, I’m looking back at 55 years with the woman who made me what I am.

Beverly Ann (Anderson) Wedel was one of th...

Adventures in Online Dating, Part 3

It’s time to talk about the biggest issue I’ve had in the world of online dating. This is the one that makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me, or with everyone else. Invariably, women say they want a man who can and will communicate. If you’ve ever received an e-mail or text message from me, you know I’m a little on the wordy side. (Short story markets pay by the word, ya know.) Communicating in writing is my medium. I’m not an introvert there at all.

Without fail, every woman fro...

Plugging Into the Divine

I have always had a fascination with the sea and the stars. As a child, I remember studying the stars from our backyard on the east side of Enid, Oklahoma, watching them twinkle, trying to decide which were stars and which were planets, looking for the constellations … the things kids do. I didn’t know at the time I was only seeing a tiny fraction of what was there.

I wanted to see the ocean for years, but there are no oceans in Oklahoma. In 1990, my then-wife and I drove to the Oregon coast ...

Stopped Watches

With the start of school and the return of the necessity of wearing long pants, I wanted to strap on a wristwatch again. But alas, all three of my wristwatches have dead batteries, as do both of my pocket watches. This made me think back into the last century when I got my first adult watch*.

Back in those days, watches had to be wound every morning. I wanted a watch for a long time and finally got a silver one. I think it was a birthday gift. I know I was in elementary school and from the sn...