News:

No writing news, but we did have a pretty gnarly storm hit our neighborhood early Tuesday morning. I sleep with earplugs, so storms don’t usually wake me anymore, but this one did, and the way the wind and rain sounded against the window wasn’t right. Never heard it like that before. Usually, storms have a tendency to go around us, for whatever reason, but this one’s hail patch went right over us, and the part of it that eventually had tornadic rotation went over us before coalescing, which might account for the strange wind. All in all, could have been worse, but it gave us a pretty good scare at six in the morning, with straight-line and rotating winds around 80 mph.

The neighborhood lost limbs and sometimes whole trees, there was some structural damage around us, and the lawns and streets still look chaotic with twigs and leaves. After that storm, we’ve had more pass through, but nowhere near as strong. We still have humidity that puts us in a good position for these storms, but the first was so powerful because we were so hot as well as humid, and all these fronts have pushed that ahead of us. We’ve had about seven inches of rain since Tuesday, but there’s pretty good drainage around our area, so no flooding, and although power flickered, we were lucky enough not to lose it.

Works in Progress:

The weekend before, my period hit me hard not with cramps, except that first night and morning, but with intense fatigue. I pretty much fought falling asleep the whole time and wasn’t able to work.

I’m still working on my novelette/novella May Cooler Heads Prevail. I’m not even sure what genre it is, other than speculative—maybe fabulism—so I have no idea what I’ll do with it, but I’m just seeing where it’s going. Hope to finish it and the next short story before next Friday.

Books I’m Reading:

Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

Things I’m Listening To:

Fumbling Toward Ecstasy by Sarah McLachlan
The Blacklist playlist
YouTube ambient videos

Things I’m Watching:

Insidious
Shivers
The Wicker Man (1973)
Scary or Die
The Frighteners
Fantasy Island (2020)
Summer Baking Championship series
Under the Banner of Heaven series
CSI series
CSI: Miami series
CSI: NY series
9-1-1 series
Will Trent series
Transplant series (finished)
Jeopardy Masters series (finished)
Bake Squad series (finished)
Home Town series (finished)
Murder, She Wrote series

Poem of the Week:

accuse me of willfully lying,
of cleverly applied deception,
glitter, wax, and rainbows
obscuring your perception,
but perhaps you might consider
your own baffling misconception
that my face came this way—
what cunning self-contraception.