Busy, Busy, Busy

Now is, for many, not an easy time to focus up and deal with reality. We’re all fighting our battles and trying to maintain a façade of normalcy or, at least, functionality, even as we get polite emails from Canadians regretfully informing us they’re boycotting American entertainment juggernauts like me and, I presume, Disney+.

The way I choose to stay functional is community support in my little hometown of Beloit, and by writing stories. If you’re reading this, you probably like stories. Maybe you feel like you really need a story right about now. Maybe to make sense of what’s happening, or maybe to get away from it for a little while. Whichever, I hope I can help you out so you can sally forth again, refreshed and inspired, to help the suffering and give hell to oppressors.

In that spirit, the first thing I put up today is a new chapter of The Moon–Silver Crown. Chapter Three introduces Obo “Slits” Garrune, alluded to in Chapter Two. We get to see him gossip and reminisce. We also find out how he got his nickname. We do not get to see him fighting the powers that be, but trust me, we get there.

The second thing I put up is The Elites. It’s a story about high school, told in the voice of a high school student named Crissy. (I put a lot of work into getting her voice right.) Crissy gets to hang out with the cool seniors, who are all beautiful and smart and athletic even though she is (according to her own unreliable narration) none of those things. (If you read between the lines, Todd totally has a thing for her, she’s just oblivious.) She, and they, are trying to solve a couple mysteries concurrently. She wants to know if her older sister’s death was really an accident. The cool seniors want to get to the bottom of their town’s plague of zombies, vampires, psychic powers and horror movie tropes.

It’s a fun story. I got to make up titles for a bunch of fake movies for them to discuss, of which my favorite is The Undying Nightmare of Chickenboy, fourth in the Chickenboy movie franchise.

Third, you can now read And Then I Awoke, a story of the Dreamlands as crafted by Lovecraft and popularized by Kij Johnson. It’s pay-what-you want, down to zero dollars and has a thoroughly unpleasant bard behaving amorally. It’s interesting. Also much shorter than The Elites.

Keep in mind, if you pay five bucks a month to subscribe here, you get all that month’s Moon-Silver chapters along with whatever short or medium-length tale I also post. It’s a deal. Trust me.

With all that said, I’m now off to self-promote, followed by some self-care. You take care of yourselves, too, okay?