A Blog Post From Mirkwood: Self-Publishing.

July 5, 2019July 6, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

So, for those who are unaware, this year I have tried — with many errors, sidetracks, and bad assumptions — to improve my marketing skills. And it has reminded me more than anything of how Bilbo Baggins felt when Gandalf left him with a bunch of dwarves who didn’t particularly like him at the western edge of Mirkwood with no more advice than STAY ON THE PATH. He had no idea what he was getting into, only that he could not turn around and go home.

By the very nature of this beast, however, this journey is different in one significant way. Unlike Bilbo, who was traveling only with a few folks just as lost as he was, I am traveling on a winding path, and a VERY heavily populated one. I am forever coming within shouting distance of those who are VERY much more experienced than I am and who talk about traveling through this forest all the time. The major areas I have tried to earn about this year, in the approximate order of success I have had are:

1) submitting to agents
2) self-publication
3) networking with fellow authors, and
4) creating audiobooks.

In the course of all of these things, I have encountered some of the following issues:

1) Good information is hard to come by in all of these areas. It’s not that it isn’t there; quite the opposite: there’s TONS of it! So much of it, in fact, that my specific questions get buried and washed away in avalanches of people who want to sell me stuff, or who really want to talk about what they know, or who really want to talk even though they don’t really have good advice, or who MAY know what they are doing, but are terrible teachers and communicators.

2) VERY few people, even in places allegedly set UP to answer questions, will actually take the time to answer questions. It’s hard to blame them; they’re not getting paid to do it. But almost always, if I post a question, they will respond with links. The internet being what it is these days, 90% of the time the link is to a video. VERY often, that video is over 10 minutes long. More often than not, that either leads back to 1) or on to

3) The instructions/videos I encounter are often designed for and by people who already know all or most of the jargon/acronyms, so while the information is often good (I have sat through hours, mining through the dross for some actual nuggets of useful information) I usually can’t understand half of it. And videos are AWFUL for my style of learning. I am a fast reader who loves to cut to the chase, but I am doomed to slog through hours of meaningless foliage. “Well, why not just read through the online manuals?” I hear you say? Because those manuals were written by and for people who know most of the jargon/acronyms, and they are not indexed. It is incredibly frustrating to have a single specific question that could be answered in seconds, but can’t be because the people who have the answers either will not respond, or deliver the information in vague or highly technical terms.

4) Finally, many people I encounter who could actually be helpful are operating at a high enough level that they have literally forgotten how overwhelmingly hard all of this is for people like myself that are just starting on this road. At my level, all of this is overwhelmingly hard and confusing. And all that is discouraging. Extremely discouraging, especially when you are constantly encountering people for whom it is seemingly as easy as breathing and who, to hear them tell it, were NEVER as confused or thought it was at all difficult.

Now, Mirkwood wouldn’t be complete without its share of monsters, so let me explain about the monsters I’ve encountered along the forest path. Besides the foreigners along the path who will baffle you with technical jargon or leave cryptic puzzles for you to solve on your own, you will encounter thieves, trolls, elves, and spiders.

Thieves: Probably the easiest to spot and avoid, these are the people who swear to you that they will explain it all if you will just pay their low, low price to join their platform. After all, you gotta spend money to make money, amirite? They are selling maps to the forest, bay-bee!
Well, if you’ve found one that works, good for you. But I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t already an established name that recommended one.

Trolls: There are people out there who will actively discourage you. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find one pop up in response to this blog post. They’re the ones who will tell you that if you’re finding this hard, you’re just too stupid to be in this business. Often they’re the ones who have self-published 20 books that are selling really well, they will tell you. Funny how you’ve never heard of them…

Elves: Elves mean well. At least, they kind of do. Elves will tell you that they can help you, REALLY they can, but only if you ditch that freeware you’re using to write/self-publish/record and buy THEIR ONE PLATFORM. You’re not pinching pennies, are you? Only a few hundred dollars. Elves also answer every question with a 40-minute video link. They offer so much help, but its never… quite… helpful.

Spiders: Spiders speak authoritatively on everything, but every piece of advice they give you wraps you up tighter in huge strands of NOPE. Before they’ll answer your question, they want to know everything you’re doing, and you are ALWAYS doing the wrong thing. They’re like a combination of an elf and a troll: they want you to do everything their way, and you suspect they don’t really want you to succeed. They really want to be that voice of authority, though.

So why am I writing this? Perhaps it’s because it’s the advice I wish I’d been able to give myself a few months ago. Because back then, I was really hoping that all of this would be easier. It’s not. It;s been a lot harder than I thought it would be. It HASN’T been without successes or without learning. But what have learned has been dearly bought, with a lot of time and effort. And I want you to know that if you’re there, it’s okay. It’s just part of the journey. Keep going.

Update 7/6: Decided to post to the “Audacity Users” group on FB about my specific question. Specified please no video links as answers. First answer: “I should be able to just say “compress (minimally) and normalize” and you could take it from there. It almost sounds like you’re in over your head – submitting recordings before you know what you’re doing.”
Folks, that right there is a “spider.” Answers in jargon and then criticizes you for not knowing it, while not elaborating on what you should know.
And of course, it may be appropriate to say, “You don’t know enough about what you’re doing to ask that question yet,” but if you really want to be helpful, that should be followed by: “And here is the minimum you need to know about what you’re doing before asking it.”

Short Story Release: “Whoever Is Not For Us.”

July 3, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

Received confirmation today that “Whoever Is Not For Us” will appear on the Mysterion website on July 8th, but for supporters of their Patreon it is available NOW.

Here is an excerpt, just to whet your appetite:

(Sorry for the lack of paragraph indents, but WordPress is particularly stupid in that regard).

Whoever Is Not For Us
by
Scott Huggins

The sparking hell of Main Engineering shuddered and rang like a cymbal under the blows of magnetic grapples impacting the outer hull. Marine Captain Manuel Stolz spared a single glance for Commander Ellerbee and her mate frantically working on the drive bomb.

“How long?” he said. His voice echoed in his combat suit helmet, unnaturally loud.

“A couple of minutes,” grunted Ellerbee. The Navy engineer’s hands were moving too fast for him to follow.

Too long. Stolz switched to his Marines’ channel. “Perimeter check.”

“Conrad, hatch secure.”

“Olivett, hatch secure.”

“Plekhanov, hatch…” The lights went out with a photoflash and Plekhanov’s voice was swallowed by a roaring hiss. The boarders were through the stern perimeter, moving with a precision inhuman and terrifying. Their lasers strobed the compartment. Ellerbee’s suit sprouted holes: superheated air and flesh jetted out, knocking her body back into Stolz, smashing him into the bulkhead. Conrad slammed the butt of his rifle into the helmet of the attacker that appeared suddenly behind him. Then he leveled it at the thing’s belly. He and the alien fired at the same moment. They exploded apart from each other.

Stolz’s reflexes and enhancement took over. Riding the tailored hormones like a roller coaster, he tucked and bounced off the bulkhead, rolling back to fire his puppetcutter. The focused EMP seared through the Brainsucker’s circuit-neurons, severing the connection between host and parasite, and his target spasmed and went still. Then Stolz was through the hatch, into the weapons bay. Scanning. His bulky gun’s screen showed nothing. He sealed the hatch and moved again, bouncing from wall to wall. His back itched, but no infinitely hot finger reached out to stab him between the shoulder blades.

They wanted him alive. Wanted them all alive. It was their way.

He dogged the hatch behind him and turned forward. Then he heard the shout. “Manuel, stop!”

He stopped. He didn’t remember letting the gun go, but it hung before him in microgravity.

Zanne’s voice.

Numb, he reached for his holster. So even this prayer would be denied him. He’d had nightmares about this moment, had planned for it. And prayed it would never happen. The weight of the weapon filled his hand with heavy and final comfort. He focused his eyes on it, and the comfort drained away.

His laser sidearm was burnt clean through. He’d never noticed the hit. And the hatch behind him was beginning to glow red. The Brainsuckers were burning through. He was trapped, with Zanne on the other side, coming for him, and he could not kill himself.

All Things Huge And Hideous: Edits Done

July 2, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Short blog post today. I am happy to announce that All Things Huge And Hideous has been returned to the publisher for edits.

I less pleased to announce that my laptop is limping along sadly due to the catastrophic failure of its battery, and it is now effectively a desktop until such time as the new battery arrives. Oh well.

How To Get Me To Stop Watching Your Movie.

June 28, 2019June 28, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

As readers of this blog are aware, I periodically go back and watch movies that intrigued me when they were released, but that I missed for some reason in the theater. So it was with A Simple Plan. As always, spoilers be here. Sort of.

So the movie opens up with Bill Paxton in the company of his brother and his brother’s buddy, who were obviously runners up for the title roles in Dumb and Dumber. They go out hunting and find a crashed Cessna or similar with 4.4 million dollars in it. After a brief debate, they decide to hide the money for a little while, see if anyone comes looking for it, and then split it, with Bill being the money holder.

So far, not a terribly bad idea. But then. Oh, but then…

Having got away with the bag of money, Bill and his wife decide that they have to put some money back so that people won’t believe any of it was stolen. Now, why? If the cops don’t know where the plane is, it’s a fair bet they don’t know what was on the plane. They wouldn’t necessarily be looking for money. Could be looking for guns. Drugs. And if it’s the criminals whose plane it is looking for you, that won’t work anyway: they will know exactly what was on the plane. So, you’re putting your whole secret in extra danger to do something that will not matter a damn.

And then, rather than simply sneak out to put the thing back in the dead of night, Bill decides to have Dumb stand watch for him while he puts the money back. Inevitably, Dumb is challenged by some old fart on a snowmobile, gets in an argument with him about whether he saw a fox and hits him. Dude dies.

Firstly, that situation smacks of The Hand Of Fate. Basically, the universe isn’t letting these people keep this money, and it’s not JUST because they’re too stupid to keep it, it’s because Fate will inevitably contrive to make sure they are always seen, followed and in trouble. Arguments that shouldn’t ever happen. One-punch kills.

Of course, now we panic, which is the dumbest thing in the world to do, and Paxton says, “We have to make it look like an accident!”

IT ALREADY DOES LOOK LIKE AN ACCIDENT, YOU MORON! No one saw the fight except you. All you have to do is call the cops! “We were changing a flat tire when Old Man Grumpy came up on a snowmobile, fell off and hit his head real hard! We tried CPR! Get an ambulance quick! I think he’s dead!” No one’s even going to ask if you hit him. But without thinking of this, they load Grumpy onto the snowmobile and point it toward a bridge.

Now, Old Man Grumpy wakes up (not REALLY dead! There’s Fate again) and tells Bill “Call the police, your brother hit me!” At which point, Bill, deciding the old man has to be kept quiet, strangles him.
Again, leaving aside the whole murder thing, we have a solution in search of a problem. What was wrong with saying, “Thank God you’re okay! I’ll get you to a hospital! By the way, here’s $1000; leave my brother out of it — he’s an idiot?” Or hell, let Dumb serve a few months for assault and tell him to keep his mouth shut if he wants his share of the money.

And THEN, Bill goes home to his wife (who wasn’t that hot on keeping the money in the first place) and confesses to murder, and she’s basically, “Well, you only did what you thought you had to.”

Oh, sure. I mean, I’d totally understand if my wife was asking me to cover up murder for 4 million dollars and risking us both going to prison for life. And then, in the crowning idiocy, the wife discovers that the 4.4M was a ransom payment for a kidnapping and they get second thoughts about keeping the money. Uh-huh. Because murder was excusable, but keeping someone’s kidnapping money is just WRONG.

I couldn;t stand it anymore. I’m sorry, but I can handle your evil smart protagonist; I loved A Clockwork Orange. I can handle your good dumb protagonist, a la Of Mice And Men. But evil dumb protagonists just make me want to stop watching unless it’s being played for laughs. You can’t drink that piss straight.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

June 26, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

One of the reasons that Deep Space Nine was my favorite of the post Original Series Star Trek is that the writers got to make some pretty bold moves. One of the boldest and most insightful, I feel, was their choice of what to do with the Mirrorverse from one of the Original Series’ strongest episodes.

In the Mirrorverse, the Federation was the Terran Empire: a bloodthirsty, dictatorial and ruthless state. And Vulcans were pretty much Romulans. During their brief sojourn in the Mirrorverse, our own universe’s Kirk tried to convince the Mirrorverse’s Spock to try overthrowing the Terran Empire in favor of a Federation. In DS9, we got to see the results.

Turns out that Mirror Spock had been quite successful at the overthrowing the Empire part. Unfortunately, that merely left the Empire in enough trouble that its subject peoples plus the Klingons and Romulans had easily conquered Earth and made humanity into a slave race. And they were still enslaved about a century later.

The Original Series had made an unwarranted assumption, and it is one that uneducated “revolutionaries” make to this day: that when an oppressive system is toppled, freedom and justice will naturally follow. They do not. To establish them requires hard work, and it is not often hard work that the “revolutionaries” are equipped to do. To take a few examples, it must have seemed to the Aztecs’ subject races that the Spaniards — whose God, notably did not demand human sacrifice — were their liberators. The French believed that toppling the nobles, and later the king, would bring them equality, liberty and brotherhood. What they got was the Committee Of Public Safety, the Reign of Terror, and Napoleon. Aleksandr Kerensky had a chance to establish a Russian Republic when the Czar’s oppression was overthrown, as did Yeltsin when the Soviet Union fell apart. They were succeeded by Lenin and Putin respectively, and the only thing better about Putin is that he isn’t using starvation as a tool for mass murder, as far as I know.

Overthrowing oppressive systems isn’t very hard, even when it isn’t easy. Not replacing it with an enemy that’s even worse is the trick.

Iron Lensman

June 24, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / 4 Comments

Every now and then I have the impulse to do a little literary criticism, although I can usually control it with prescription medication. But the other day I was watching Iron Man II (I really watched the MCU out of order) and a parallel struck me that I haven’t heard anyone else talk about before, so you lucky readers get to hear me ramble on about it.

The Lensman series, by E. E. “Doc” Smith was one of the seminal works of Golden Age SF, appearing in Astounding magazine from 1937-1948, and later reworked in the 1950s as a series of seven novels. Roughly, the titular heroes, the Lensmen, were an organization that fought crime on a galactic scale. Their lenses amplified their psionic powers, and no person who could be corrupted by wealth and power could wield a lens.

The length of the series, the poverty of the plot (which generally just featured the Lensmen going up against more and more powerful foes, armed with ever-more esoteric and larger superbattlefleets) and Smith’s excruciatingly awful prose meant that the Lensman series never saw release as anything approaching a major motion picture, which is on some level a relief and on another a profound disappointment. I always thought the series might have some hope in the hands of a really awesome screenwriter. But the themes he launched were a major influence on Star Wars (incorruptible psionic supersoldiers, anyone?) Other than that, it’s hard to find a direct heir to Smith’s style of storytelling.

And then it hit me that Tony Stark is pretty much a lensman par excellance, updated for the modern world. There are several parallels: like many other writers of that generation, such as Asimov, to whose Foundation series Smith lost the 1966 Hugo for Best Series, Smith’s lensmen are trained and expected to function as scientists, and frequently make discoveries and invent new weapons and vehicles. This whole thing struck me as i watched Tony Stark invent a new element under the guidance of his father’s notes to replace the palladium in his arc reactor heart. Like the lensmen, Tony Stark relies on a scientistic talisman that grants him his power, but it is always clear that his real power is in his willingness to do the right thing. Also like the first family of lensmen, the Kinnisons, Tony Stark gets a big helping hand from his father’s legacy of great genes and connections. Finally, by Civil War we see that Tony Stark is also concerned, as was Smith, with the idea of oversight. There is a major difference here, since the lensman’s source of power was also his shield against corruption. Tony Stark loses faith in himself and his fellow Avengers, but it’s interesting to me that this lack of faith is ultimately shown to be misplaced when he goes up against Captain America. Who also has his own “lens” made for him by Howard Stark, in a sense. The shape is even similar.

Although I really liked the conclusion of the major arc of the MCU, I’m going to miss Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. I hope that another generation of lensmen — whatever they are called — comes quickly.

The Mirror In The Man

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

Tolstoy opened up Anna Karenina with the observation that happy families are all alike; that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But he got it exactly backwards. Only happy families are glorious in their uniqueness, because they’re the ones who are actually growing and producing individuals. It’s the unhappy families who are all alike, locked in a kind of spiritual trench warfare against themselves.

But it’s not surprising that Tolstoy got it backwards: that’s the instinctive thing to do when you’re looking in a mirror. Happy families look alike to those trapped in unhappy families for the same reason that rich people all look happy to the poor: poverty is so overwhelming that they can’t imagine being rich and still being miserable. Unhappy families look different because the words and the drama change while remaining monotonously the same. It is always the same people upset about the same things that they will never let go. From outside, it may look new: from inside, it always feels like, “not this again!” I remember the endless fights between my grandmother and grandfather. It was always a different issue but always, always the same: he was never doing what she wanted him to, or listening to her. And it was impossible for him to because what she was saying was never exactly what she was thinking, so why should he have even tried?

And the reason for this is that when God gives us a family, he gives us, in a sense, a mirror: another person who sees us from the outside and displays our virtues and our flaws to us. In fact, there’s two types of mirroring going on, and it’s hard to say which one is more intense, the active or the passive.

The active mirroring is easy to define: it’s when the people around you criticize you and react to your actions. They tell you they don’t like the things you love doing, or they do like the things you hate doing. When you do wrong, they let you know you’re wrong. And sometimes even when you do right, they let you know you’re wrong. They’re mirrors, and what’s more, distorted mirrors, but with some semblance of truth.

The passive mirroring is more subtle, but also more constant. We all have things we hate about ourselves. And because we’re all human, our family members will share some of those traits, reflecting them back at us. Talking too much. Slurping food. Hogging the biggest share of dessert. Passive-aggressively ignoring chores.

And our instinct in both cases is usually to smash the mirror for what we see in it. To attack and attack until the mirror shows us only what we want to see. This leads to knuckles cut to ribbons, and our image being smashed. It is far harder to do what we must: to change ourselves in response to that which we hate to see.

Of course, in any family, you’re not the only mirror, nor the only person. Sometimes, you also will be attacked for what your family members see in you. And while you may have to stop the attack, it’s vital to remember that they’re really not attacking you. They’re attacking the mirror, and trying to destroy the terrible image of themselves that they cannot bear. Because if they can make it your fault, it doesn’t have to be theirs anymore.

Oh, God, protect us in our families from our urge to break mirrors that have done nothing but show us as we are.

Movie Reviews Far Too Late: House. Or, The Worst Horror Movie In The World.

June 19, 2019May 21, 2020 / G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

Not the hit TV series starring Hugh Laurie. The 80s horror-schlock film starring George Wendt and some guy who was utterly forgettable as the protagonist.

So, every now and then, I get the urge to do something completely silly. Make random recipes off the internet, see how well I remember the lyrics to whole musicals, vote Libertarian, etc. And one of the things I do is watch old movies on Netflix or Amazon that I thought looked intriguing once upon a time. This is how I came to watch House.

I remember previews for House from the 1980s. It was billed as a comedy-horror or a horror-comedy. I also really like the haunted-house conceit. So I decided to give it a try and see if it was material for a cult classic.

What I found was, in fact, material that I shall use if I ever want to teach a class entitled, “Writing: How Not To Do It.” A brief catalogue of its sins will be listed below, because a comprehensive one would be longer than the film. For the hard-of-thinking, this will contain what would otherwise be called spoilers, but this film is so far gone it really can’t be spoiled.

The Junkpiled Protagonist: Our protagonist is a writer (gosh, wonder where that came from?) who is traumatized by, in no particular order, the fact that he is suffering from writers’ block, possibly brought on by his son who has disappeared from his front yard, his wife who has divorced him because of the missing son, and his Vietnam-induced PTSD. The effect is that this guy has so much shit to deal with that it’s impossible for us to care about any one issue.

The Incoherent Backstory: Apparently, the son disappeared while playing in the yard of the titular House, while I guess visiting there, because the House belongs to protagonist’s crazy aunt, but the whole family was to all appearances living there when the kid vanished. It’s implied that he either or both was kidnapped by people in a car streaking away or vanished from the House’s swimming pool before his father’s eyes.

The Endless Red Herrings: The car streaking away turns out to be only the first of myriad fake clues strewn all over the plot. Also included are Bosch/Daliesque paintings done by the aunt, endless scenes involving a medicine cabinet, a love interest that never materializes, strong hints that protagonist is completely delusional and hallucinating literally everything in the movie, and to top it all off, LITERALLY EVERY MONSTER IN THE FILM BUT ONE.

The Wandering Plot Monster: So we see the protagonist move into his aunt’s House (the same one his son vanished from and that he seemed to have been living in before) right after she has hanged herself, and despite getting fairly convincing evidence that the House is haunted — like, the ghost of his aunt appearing and saying, pretty much, “The House killed me.” — does nothing about it. Just sits and tries to plow on through his memoir of the Vietnam War despite the fact that his publisher has told him it won’t sell, and despite increasing but halfhearted attempts by the House to kill him. The fact that the protagonist looks very much like Ted from Airplane! with a perm does not add to the gravitas of these scenes. Closely related to this is…

The Idiot Plot: This is pretty much the whole film. Our protagonist kills humanoid monsters and buries them in broad daylight in six-inch shallow graves in his backyard. He completely ignores apparitions of his son begging for help. Despite the fact that the House’s clock loudly rings midnight right before monsters appear in the closets, it takes him two or three times to get it. Despite the fact that he’s a soldier, it takes him most of the movie to figure out that he might want to use guns. Despite the fact that his own son vanished in the House, he allows his sexy neighbor to use him as impromptu unpaid babysitting so she can go out clubbing and leaves the kid alone in a room of the House, from which he is promptly kidnapped by shapeshifting spirits, which he already knows the House contains. Through all of this, he continues to behave as though the most important thing is plowing on with his story of how he lost his pretty-much-an-asshole buddy in Vietnam.

The Horrible Climax: In the end, it is revealed that the cause of his son’s disappearance, the mastermind behind the House, is the ghost of his old war buddy, who has never forgiven protagonist for — get this — NOT killing him in Vietnam when he was wounded. Because protagonist went to get help instead, leaving his buddy to be carried away by the VC, who tortured him to death. So his spirit apparently decided to get revenge by invading protagonist’s aunt’s house, and kidnapping the kid to the jungles of Vietnam in another dimension, which can only be reached from inside the House.
So, EVERYTHING else in the House — the creepy distorted woman he killed, the baby kidnappers, the Lovecraftian closet-monster, the animated tools — all of this was just incidental. We never find out how long the kid was kidnapped for. Enough time for a divorce, for great-aunt to put him in a spooky painting, and for her to commit suicide. Of course, she blames the kid’s disappearance on the House from the beginning, so apparently it was haunted before Evil War Buddy Ghost got there? And I guess it was just a great place for him to take over? He’s actually a pretty knowledgeable and subtle strategist, this guy.

The only way this movie ever got made is that it was during the Great Eighties Horror Boom, when studios were desperate to mimic things like Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday the 13th Part Billion. And the production values are so low that I kept expecting to see Made In China stamped on the rubber suits. I’ve literally seen these mistakes made and avoided by high-schoolers. Take these lessons to heart: this film is not “so bad it’s good.” But it is bad enough to learn some lessons from.

General Update And Writing News: Cons And Publications And Jobs, Oh, My!

June 17, 2019June 18, 2019 / G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Okay, so the blog has been on a sort of soft hiatus for about a month now, for various reasons, and I have high hopes that is coming to an end. I’d really like to thank everyone who’s stuck with reading it. The hiatus happened for various reasons, exciting and mundane, including…

The End Of The School Year: Yes, with three children in elementary school, this process requires a bit of readjustment to the way the house functions, so I’ve been transitioning back into the role of Full-Time Dad.

Next School Year: Just to complicate matters, I once again have a Real Day Job. I accepted a position with a local private school teaching World History, a job I truly love. So while that’s a lot of fun, transitioning to that new job takes a LOT of time.

DragonCon: In the interim, I have learned that I will be an Official Guest of DragonCon, appearing on at least two panels and probably more. In addition, I will be hanging out at Bard’s Tower signing copies of my forthcoming book All Things Huge And Hideous, from Superversive Press! Stop by and say hi!

More Professional Sales: Also, I have been polishing up my short story “Whoever Is Not For Us” to appear next month on Kristin Janz’s and Donald Crankshaw’s Mysterion website,and just sold (of all things) a 76-word short story to Jaleta Clegg’s anthology Beer-Battered Shrimp for $5, which works out to 6.5 cents a word!

More Unprofessional Sales: While it’s not a pro sale, I also received news a couple of weeks ago that StarShipSofa, one of the most prestigious semi-pro markets out there, and one I have never cracked, has bought one of my original stories, “Wheels-Up Time.” So that’s awesome news, and I’m honored to be working with Jeremy Szal.

So a lot to be grateful to God for, and hopefully, we’ll have some more Dear Stabby and things coming up later.