January 8th, 2021: My father has died. It happened this morning, an hour before sunrise. Last Saturday, January 2nd, Dad went to the hospital with symptoms in line with a mild-to-moderate stroke. At first, we believed the great distress he’d felt at the passing of his sister — our beloved Aunt — a few days... Continue Reading →

December 23rd, 2020: It’s been a week of putting things in order and trying fresh approaches to old problems. In coordination with my wife, I’ve rearranged the household schedule to accommodate my writing with fewer distractions. Primarily this involves clearing weekdays for heavy drafting and editing by transforming our weekends into shared days for chores... Continue Reading →

December 16th, 2020: This week didn’t beat me down or come with negative surprises, and that’s a welcome gift after the last few. The calm allowed a return to shifting my writing gears towards finishing and publishing novels and novelettes in the coming year. In support of that goal, I made a major decision over... Continue Reading →

December 9th, 2020: It was a weird week with stretches that were fairly nerve-wracking. Things started with an ear infection that pained me for several days. Then I was notified via snail mail that new funding had become available for pandemic unemployment. While that’s a great thing, the government keeps changing its story almost daily:... Continue Reading →

December 2nd, 2020: My wife and I had a good socially distanced Thanksgiving, and fun with our Marvel movie marathon. I was rested and wanted to put in some writing after that, but a chain of unrelated problems and annoyances that required my attention and time started over the weekend. Nothing huge and terrifying, and... Continue Reading →

November 25th, 2020: It was a mixture of self-care, chores, panic and planning this week. The self-care and chores were part of an effort to address issues contributing to my stress and high anxiety that resulted in panic attacks last weekend. I cleared my head by taking a few days off and then tackled some... Continue Reading →

November 18th, 2020: I got The Forever Halloween to a completed sixth draft Thursday night, finishing it at almost 10,400 words. This became a seventh draft after my wife’s proofread and a sweep with an editing tool on Monday. I sent copies out thereafter to a handful of people that were interested in reading it,... Continue Reading →

November 11th, 2020: A lot happened over the last week. Nationally, we had an enormous, tense and drawn out election that still isn’t fully resolved… but is resolved enough that I’m very happy with one result. ;-) On the personal side of things, my trio of problems from last week are no more: My wife... Continue Reading →

October 28th, 2020: I’m neck-deep into writing a short story, and I must finish it by Saturday! I started last Thursday, and there has been heavy revisions and editing as I go… but the inspiration is flowing. :-) It’s unfinished at 4,300 words with three of its five planned scenes done or mostly done. I’m... Continue Reading →

October 21st, 2020: I finally got the draft done for the Arium Kickstarter commission on Sunday. Working to craft five short adventure seeds was a much bigger challenge than I thought it would be when I signed on to do them back in August. Being assigned the peculiar writing theme of “Gonzo” for open-ended role-playing... Continue Reading →

October 14th, 2020: A lot of the past week was spent working through the loss of my friend that happened last Sunday. Wednesday I felt emotionally clear enough to write about our friendship and posted it as a eulogy on Facebook. It reached a lot of mutual friends that didn’t know he’d passed, and some... Continue Reading →

October 7th, 2020: 2020 continues to be relentless. On Sunday, a friend with a long history of diabetes and kidney failure died. We hadn’t seen each other in person for a few years, but we’d done a lot together prior to that. We read bad vampire books aloud by his campfire. He was at my... Continue Reading →