This is a year of milestones. Because of working the grocery shopping gig and trekking back and forth from home to where I’m house-sitting (a little farther than the last place where I house-sat), I crossed 100K miles on my car. Miss Emma may be getting up there in car years, but she’s doing well, all things considered. Can’t say the same for the one driving her and the milestone quickly catching up to her in the next few months. I feel like I’m starting to fall apart; human body maintenance is even more demanding than car body maintenance.

News:

Nothing this week. I’m taking a few months off from working the Shallow Waters themes. I wasn’t happy with the last story. It was fine. Fine. But it didn’t excite me or make me proud. That tells me to step away for a bit. Still reading the finalists every month, though. It’s a lot of fun.

Works in Progress:

I started the We Follow You in the Dark rewrite. Although things were a little shaky to start out with, because there were still some questions I hadn’t answered yet in my head, I think I’ve ironed those things out. I’m looking forward to how the character changes will alter the story, which is a good sign. I think any clumsiness in this rewrite can be fixed in the edit.

Got a rejection on that short story collection. That kind of hurt, even though I was expecting it. The longer works always hurt a little more. I’ve been getting a lot of rejections lately in general. Doesn’t help that the horror short story market has contracted, which means more people are fighting for fewer anthology spots.

Books I’m Reading:

The Jackal Man by Russell C. Connor
Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman (finished)
The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson

Things I’m Listening To:

Let’s Hear It for the Girls playlist
Halloween playlist

Things I’m Watching:

The Whisper Man
Nope
Ready or Not
The Closer series
America’s Got Talent series
Hawaii Five-O series
The Rookie series
The Following series

Poem of the Week: (throwback to Sept 2022)

i cannot emphasize too strongly
the catastrophic slide of civilization
that was always a tenuous veneer
and now slips down the face of it
like wax in a climate crisis
a collective effort undercut
by an individualistic myopia
and a sense that freedom
never meant sacrifice
on every level but rather
from the undesirables
of which there should be none
in no world is the eagle
more important than the ant