Hello folks! It’s been roughly a month since you received a transmission from the Counter Contagion Compound, so I think it’s time to check back in and talk about how things have been going in this time when everything is on fire.

The last time I posed, my county had 1,904 cases. That number is now 4,068. So that jump of nearly 1800 cases in two months has now been bested by a jump of 2164 cases in one month. We went from (roughly) 30 new cases a day the last time I posted to (roughly) 72 new cases a day! And that’s just my county. My neighboring county has had increases so bad (they’re approaching 6000 cases) that the CDC was called in to investigate why it’s increasing so rapidly. That’s 36,259 cases in my state so far. It’s a scary time to be around.

It’s only within the past week or two the the surrounding town have finally passed required mask ordinances. The plus side is that people seem to be mostly following it? Which is better than the weekend of the 4th when I had to go into a store because it was unavoidable and only about one-third to half of the folks inside were wearing masks. Of course, the efficacy of the mask ordinance will be determined by how well it’s enforced both by businesses and law enforcement (I feel a complicated way about that, but that’s for another time).

My mom came up for July 4th, and we had a socially distanced cook out — I grilled and we set up a table outside in front of my apartment where we had a lot of individually wrapped foods, hand sanitizer, we wore masks while getting food, and we all sat way back from each other and the table and visited while we ate. It was nice to see my Mom after not seeing her since Christmas.

Folks have, of course, moved on from posting about the protests on social media. There are still a few folks posting about it, but it appears to be mostly business as usual now. I really hoped this would be the moment where we saw real change, and I suppose real change could still happen — it’s slow, behind the scenes work, largely uncelebrated — but I fear that with the visibility of the protests in the media and for the broader public waning, it’ll fade into the background the same way gun control has. There are still protests happening — Portland is currently receiving a lot of visibility in some squares, but I know there are still some happening across the country. Portland in particular has seen unmarked government vans with unidentified federal agents whisking people away…so…add that to the 2020 bingo card I suppose. That’s a glib reaction, but don’t misunderstand: I’m terrified. Of Covid. Of the sheer overreach of militarized and executive power. Of the likelihood of election tampering. I’m terrified. I’m also exhausted.

But that’s enough doom and gloom. Let’s talk about other things.

What I’ve Been Writing

I’ve recently joined a writing group with some online acquaintances, and it’s been a really good experience. We alternate work shopping weeks, and I fully intended to have something ready to workshop by this coming Tuesday, but some Day Job things have interfered and my story isn’t done.

Speaking of my writing, I’ve been hard at work on it. I’ve had a really hard time making myself sit down and actually write. There are a whole mess of stupid brain blocks that ADHD causes, from thinking if I don’t write X amount it’s not worth it, to simply not being able to make myself do the thing, to thinking that I need prep and recovery time or otherwise I don’t have the time to write. All of those are silly. All of those are ADHD messing with my thought patterns.

What to do, then? I have printed out a month of July and I have given myself a minimum of 100 words. Just 100 words. That’s literally all I have to do. Less than half a page. If I get 100 words, I get a sticker on that day. And weirdly? I really want that sticker. And even if I think, “aww, I don’t wanna,” I still have managed to sit down and get 100 words in. In fact, every time I have sat down to write, I have gotten way more than 100 words. One day I got 1400. One day I got 444. But each day, I get a sticker for reaching my 100 word goal. I feel a bit silly that this has worked so well, but it helps.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a sticker yesterday because of the aforementioned Day Job stuff, but I had a 4 day streak, which I haven’t had in a while. I plan to get back to it this afternoon.

My current WIP is an odd little story based on a prompt we got in the workshop about writing something in 2 parts in which a significant amount of time passes between part 1 and 2. Between that and going online to find a random title generator, the idea clicked in place pretty easily.

After I finish this draft, I plan to revise “Tempest” and I have a neat idea for another story — a new angle on a story idea I had a while back. I thought the idea was a little too predictable, but I thought of a neat way to approach the narrative that should be fun. And unfortunately “I Read the Stars Like Braille” has been shelved again. I just can’t crack that egg, yet. Some ideas just may be too abstract to work, I guess.

What I’ve Been Reading

I stalled out on Stamped from the Beginning. It’s an amazing book, but July has been incredibly fucking busy, and I didn’t have the brain space for something both educational and heavy. I’ve been listening to writing podcasts mostly lately — Josh Malerman is incredibly charismatic in interviews. The dude seems like he’d be a blast to get a beer with.

So I’m about halfway through Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby. I saw it described online as Baby Driver meets Oceans Eleven, and that’s a pretty solid comp. It’s extremely well written and super engrossing, so I can’t wait to finish it out. I also finally got in copies of Mexican Gothic by Siliva Moreno-Garcia and Savage Legion by Matt Wallace, so those are going into the TBR pile, too. My TBR pile recently has grown quite a lot as I try to support a new local bookstore and pre order books to help out authors. I wish I could read faster to keep up, ha ha.

What I’ve Been Watching

Nothing, really.  I watched the movies for our next episode of Eerie Earfuls, but other than that, I’ve mostly been watching Schitt’s Creek and Bob’s Burgers and letting my mind veg out.

What I’ve Been Doing

Hoo boy. Here’s where ALL the updates go.

I’ve been working on Ozark Book Authority stuff a lot recently, but July has been our online writers’ workshop event that was originally supposed to be in person. Rather than doing a bunch of events every evening for a week or taking up a whole weekend, Brooke suggested we spread it out over the course of the month, have a few live streams, and also do a few uploaded videos that folks can just watch on their own time. It’s been going great, but I’ve also been super busy.

I created a nice and unnecessarily epic intro for our uploaded videos. It’s ridiculous, and if you haven’t watched one of our videos, you should check out our YouTube video and revel in my absurd glory.

I’ve had to do a bit of audio work on the videos we’ve received from our authors — mostly making sure that the volume of the video was loud enough without distorting — plus occasionally dampening some room hiss or cutting out mic pops.

When i haven’t been working on editing together videos, I’ve been live streaming the panels. They’ve all gone very well, and it was cool to see some of the folks I’ve seen on occasion through the conventions again.

What else besides that? Oh man! Two big pieces of news.

The first piece of news is that I am part of a new team that will be working on taking over the Monsters out of the Closet podcast to save it from ending when the current admins finish out their season. I’ve talked to most of the folks on the team, and we’re all super stoked to jump in and get to work. I, personally, have had a ton of ideas that I can’t wait to dig into. But that’s all I can really say about that for now.

What I can talk about is launching my own short fiction podcast as well. It’s called Frightful Fictions, and the image at the top of this post is actually the logo for the podcast.

I mentioned it on Twitter a few days ago, but I haven’t really promoted it done much pomp and circumstance partially because our first NEW Eerie Earfuls episode is dropping Monday and I don’t want to take away from that, but also because I don’t feel like I have much to promote yet.

Fright Fictions will be a monthly horror short fiction podcast releasing on the 2nd Monday of every month. I will be posting it on the same feed as Eerie Earfuls for now, but I’ll also be providing free e-formats of the stories for accessibility.

There were a few reasons I decided to do this:

1. Since Eerie Earfuls is moving to monthly, I wanted to have something to fill in the off weeks that wasn’t as intensive on an audio editing level
2. I’ve been wanting to be more productive and get more writing done. I’ve seen how having monthly Patreon stories for Kameron Hurley and Tobias Buckell has really pushed them creatively, and I think have an actual end goal instead of just “write more stories” will give me more drive to get things finished
3. I love voice acting and audio editing, and wanted to give myself the opportunity to do more of it through a means less intensive than Eerie Earfuls
4. I want to put my work out there. I love horror, and I want to see more m/m queer horror in particular.

Kameron Hurley has said on Twitter that she’s noticed her short fiction skills improving due to having to put out so many ideas, and I that’s exactly what I want. I want to have a deadline to force me to stop worrying over the same story for months at a time, and I want to prove to myself that I have more than just a handful of story ideas.

I’m sure some of my stories will be better than others, but I really liked what Josh Malerman said recently during his interview on Ink Heist — if he writes a lesser book…okay, cool, but if he can pull of the next one, he can make the last one look differently in retrospect because people judge a writer on the whole body of work, not just a single good or bad story. So I want to start making a body of work.

As I said, part of the idea behind this was to have something to put on the Eerie Earfuls feed between episodes so it wasn’t just one update a month. Folks can subscribe to the feed, and if they like both shows, great. If they don’t, then they can listen to one or the other and ignore the rest. If this ends up being well received, I may make it its own feed at some point, but that’s a lot of money that I don’t want to spend unless I know the idea has legs. I suppose if it’s received poorly…I’ll have things to think about. Such is art, right? It’s about risks and putting yourself out there.

I figure if I’m consistent about getting things written and released, I’ll eventually combine the stories together into a collection and maybe self publish them and put them up for sale online. Like, you can get the individual stories and audio dramas for free, but if you want to support me, buy this book, kind of thing? Maybe I can make an audiobook out of the podcasts as well or something. I dunno, that’s all future stuff. Right now, I’m just excited to have a writing related project I can put my back behind instead of floundering in vague goals and good intentions. And if this fails? Eh, fuck it. I’ll keep practicing and improving my craft until I reach the level I want to be.

I say this with far more confidence than I actually feel. I’m incredibly nervous about this. There are few jokes I identify with more than John Mullaney’s joke about how he wants everyone to like him, “Walking around with you is like walking around with someone who’s running to be mayor of nothing.” Oh look it me.

I don’t have a specific launch date yet. I’m softly aiming for August 10th, but we’ll see if I’m ready by then and how well I recover from the rest of July.

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And that’s all I have for you this time around. Is that enough? It feels like a lot. Exciting things happening on the personal front. Exciting things happening with the writing front. It’s been an exciting month. I hope this doesn’t come back around to bite me like a monkey’s paw, but I kinda hope August is less exciting? A little less excitement please. I just need sleep.

Anyway, how has lockdown been for you and your families? Done anything you’re proud of and want to share? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Comment or or hit me up on Twitter. You can also email me using the About page. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!