AS I PLEASE XIV

Wednesday has rolled around at last, and as it rolls toward its conclusion it leaves behind the crushed remains of your humble correspondent, who spent hours writing a blog for you today, only to be unable to finish it before exhaustion overtook him. In the interests of keeping my promise to resume posting twice weekly, however, I offer these scattered thoughts and observations instead:

* My sixth novella, WOLF WEATHER, is now available for purchase on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. This is my first expedition into horror- fantasy, and I greatly enjoyed writing it. Some stories come upon me quickly and are written just as quickly: others percolate for years within my mind before being served. This one falls in both categories. The vague ideas I had were old residents, but the speed with which they came to life once I scribbled the first few lines of story -- on a whim, and not meaning to seriously produce anything -- was impressive and a little alarming. I say "alarming" because there are times when a writer feels as if he is creating something out of his own materials, which is a proud but laborious sort of feeling, and other times when he feels as if he is a mere conduit for creative forces flowing through him. That one's humbling. And kinda scary.

* Kinda scary....While hiking in the woods on Monday evening -- beneath an orange sun shrouded in smoke from the Canadian wildfires -- I encountered the leg of a young deer laying on the path at my feet. Hoof and shank, just sitting there with some bones jutting from the fur. I stared at it in wonderment. How the hell did the poor thing lose the lower part of its leg? Foxes are too small for such a job and there are no wolves in Pennsylvania. Perhaps it was a coyote. But they aren't common in these parts. At any rate there was no body, just the leg, so I suppose it might have been dropped by whatever animal tore it off in the first place. If it was an animal.

* When I lived in California, wildfires and the resulting smoke and poor air quality were an aggravating part of yearly life. When I moved back East, however, I thought I'd left them behind. Wrong. The huge wildfires burning in Eastern Canada are supplying the local air with enough particulates to make my eyes water, to say nothing of the mess they leave on my windshield. I guess there really is no escaping climate change.

* In regards to California, I just had a go at my journal for the year 2010, and what struck me first and foremost was how miserable I plainly was at the time. I was working my first real gig in the entertainment industry, and getting a brutal education in how hard, unfair, and unstable the business really is. At the same time, I was plainly reveling, in a rather a shallow and sniveling way, over the fact that I was in the entertainment industry, which just goes to show you that people in abusive relationships can live for years on crumbs.

* I just finished Lois: Chronicles of a German Nurse, 1945. This is a highly readable if somewhat appalling account of the end of WW2 as witnessed by a war-widowed nurse witnessing Nazi Germany's collapse firsthand. Her description of the behavior of Soviet troops in Germany -- looting, raping and destroying everything in their path -- is so strongly reminiscent of descriptions of the Russian army in Ukraine that it struck me as rather eerie...the way history repeats itself.

* Speaking of history repeating itself: while looking at that 2010 journal, I had to laugh at descriptions of my workout routines, diet and weight. Nothing has changed. I'm still fighting the same battle against the same 5 - 10 lbs I was back then -- or for that matter, ten years before that. I suppose that is actually a small victory. At least I'm not one of those guys who has grown unrecognizably fat in middle age. I wore 34" jeans in 1993, and I wear 36" jeans today. That's not too terribly shabby.

* On the other hand, after two years of growing out what was left of my locks in a vain attempt to recapture my youth, I finally bit the bullet and had my barber shave my head the other day. Well, not shave-like-Kojak: just run clippers at 2.0 setting over my skull. This proved insufficiently short, so I had her try a 1.5, and that did the trick. Actually, I like this look quite a bit. It's liberating, and a lot easier than trying to plaster ever-diminishing strands of hair over ever-increasing amounts of scalp. Part of being 50, in my case anyway, is learning to adapt to the fact that I am, in fact, fifty. The urge to compete with previous versions of myself never goes away, but I am steadily battering it to the edge rather than the center of my mind.

And now my mind needs rest. On Saturday I will roll out the blog that should have posted tonight, which may or may not include an update on my next novel, EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS, tenatively slated for release in the fall of 2023. In the mean time, here's a link to WOLF WEATHER:

Wolf Weather