Mid-July Coughing Season

Why this isn’t completely about rants.

So I’m hot.

I don’t mean like the hot that has young sexy Twitter followers with their cute little selfies and cat memes all wanting me to send pictures of my trouser snake to them. I mean, the damned fan doesn’t work right; I’m recovering from my COVID jab, and I want to sleep, but Robert Frost is a bastard of a taskmaster.

In Anglais, miles to go before I sleep.

Everything is so pretty and formed. One must write the cute thing to be a blurb, another lovely thing to become published, polished notes of love and adoration, quite deserved, to those that follow and read me.

But sometimes, I just want to write and talk shit like we’re kicking our heels up with a frosty one at the bar.

That’s why this newsletter exists. Because sometimes, I like to bitch, and I’m taking you with me.

If you’re brave enough to follow it, I’m brave enough to take the filter off. You’ll learn a lot about me. Like the fact that I wanted to do a good bit of writing for my two current WIPs, Offerings for Arianrhod, which is almost finished, and the rewrite of Transgression Junction that I lost to the winds of time.

I wrote that one back in 2006, and the small press is now gone, the book has vanished, and some outfit in Indonesia somewhere wanted me to pay them money without a guarantee that it was even my book. I have the cover lovingly etched in my mind. It was a simp paradise.

I’m sorry. It was. He got the girl, and they lived happily ever after following a story so boringly Nora Ephron that it was entirely across the pool table from reality.

“I can rewrite it!” I thought. Fifteen years later. The reality was too Robot Chicken. It had to be honest. I’ve discussed the real story in another book that is not entirely completed yet.

This one will hurt. It’s like eating a jalapeno-covered pepperoni pizza. Lovely, warm, sexy with spice and pleasant dreams. Only to have you praying to gods you don’t even worship twelve hours later whilst clinging to the one remaining porcelain god for dear life as it rips its way out of your ass and onto the page like an extra monster in the set of Aliens.

So it will hurt coming out. But it will be the truth, and I owe you that much. I’ll be dealing with painful realities in several ways that need IKEA Swedish Meatballs just to keep down right.

I’m a little afraid of it.

Love brings the greatest fears out of all of us if we’re remotely sane. For everything that love is, she has a set of talons on her.

I have no idea where all the players in the story are, and frankly, I no longer care. I’m never going back there. I’m hunkering with the armadillos on this side. I’m confident I’ll pontificate on Texas more in the future. You can just about bet your ass on that one.

Tonight, it’s almost 5 AM, and I’m in my prime time, or at least near the Tonight Show portion of it. It’s Evans Honey for the moment. I have Proper Twelve, but after that asshole demonstration the other night, I’m cool. Evans, it is.

I was turned onto Evans Honey by my brother-in-law about four years ago, and I had the pleasure of mailing him a shipment of new whiskies to try from Sip Whiskey. It’s a good service, but you’re going to pay for the shipping because you can’t just mail a bottle of whiskey in this country.

I don’t mean just the Republic of Texas; I mean all these United States.

I’m taking in the tunes of bands like spice rack and sound butler, kind of a new jazz that I can’t complain about. Slipknot just wasn’t cutting it tonight. It has a groove, it’s soft, and it pulls a slow emotion from you that makes the blood pressure go down.

If I didn’t make this obvious before, I tend to make musical soundtracks to all of my novels. Offerings is complete. Junction is, for the most part, just not glued in on the order yet.

I’m finally recovering from the second jab. I got Pfizer. The first one was a little un-fun, but this second one made me sleep all day Saturday, hate Sunday more than usual, and love Monday like an ex-girlfriend. Much better tonight.

I had a dream that I argued with Gordon Ramsay last night, which seemed to be the thing that broke the bad juju from the shot. I don’t know. I just know he got in the window to heatedly discuss an issue with me (which he was certainly within his rights to do), and he was not a dick about it, just passionate. I had somewhat publicly put forth a point of view he either was not prepared for or did not fully understand until I diametrically refuted his compulsion to shred me.

I won the argument for those at half-speed.

That’s not an insult. If you’d asked me Monday afternoon to name seven planets, I’d have happily (okay, not that damned happily) rattled off the Seven Dwarves.

And fought you on it.

Things are improving, and I hope you are too. I mean it! Do better. Feel better. And screw those folks that say you can’t. You deserve good things.

Till next time, probably tomorrow:

</rant>

SJ