News:

After the wealth of news last week, there’s not much this one. I received another really nice rejection and a few form rejections. I submitted some more poems, but sub calls are kind of quiet lately.

Brother and my niece are in town, so that’s fun!

Works in Progress:

I’m editing something that was accepted to an anthology with an as-yet-unannounced table of contents, and I continue writing extreme horror novel In the Dollhouse We All Wait. I should hit 40K words tonight. I think it’ll end up around 70-80K words in the end. I slowed down due to vaccinations, a bad period with really bad period cramps, and now with family in town, but I’ll be back to 5K a day starting Monday and should finish the novel by the end of the month. I’m alternating between loving it and hating it, which is pretty typical, and I think once I clean it up in edits in the new year, I’ll like it more.

Books I’m Reading:

IT by Stephen King
Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire
The First Five Minutes of the Apocalypse edited by Brandon Applegate
This World Belongs to Us edited by Michael W. Phillips, Jr.

Music I’m Listening To:

Halloween playlist

Things I’m Watching:

Unfriended
Haunt
Oculus
Us
Get Out
Jennifer’s Body
Cello
Wishing Stairs
Halloween Wars series
Halloween Baking Championships series
Outrageous Pumpkins series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer series
Scream Queens series
Kitchen Nightmares series
America’s Got Talent series (caught up, WTF with that finale)
Good Bones series

Poem of the Week:

A plague came to the house on Sunday.
It started as fatigue, a slow puddling
faint on the linoleum tile, outstretched
arm reaching for the counter edge or
a phone, but the cat settled next to
the slow, kindling fever drooling from
open mold mouth and dribbling from
mucus-thick nose and eyes and ears.
Wake up from fever dream to fever dream,
condensation on windowpanes from sudden
change in temperature, your hot flashes
their own weather system. Cat left,
too hot and wrinkle-faced against the
smell of you, seeping through pores
and from orifice. Gag, retch, vomit,
shit, a new puddle on the floor.
Burning the wick and melting the fat
from the inside out, fever a fire,
and the day outside sunny and bright.
A plague came to the house on Sunday.