skepticlysm

• Goddamn, this feels like one of those things I should not say out loud in public because the potential for jinxing and shenanigans is too damn high.
• Okay, wait.
• First off, my little sister turned 50 yesterday.
• Fuck, we old.
• (No, I did not forget her birthday. You can ask her yourself if you don’t believe me.)
• Anyway, something also happened yesterday, which is the reason I’ve gathered you all here  … today.
• Let’s take the long way around, shall we?
• Last year, post-surgery, I experienced a period of … hope and optimism.
• You have a NDE, you get the bonus perspective-shift package, whether you want it or not.
• (Someday, I’ll show you all the MRI of my jugular vein before and after.)
• Technically, if you read the lists when I posted them, you came along for the hope-and-optimism ride.
•  Mostly, what I found sitting on the couch, typing lists, and waiting for my body to repair itself, was that I wanted purposeful change in my life.
• I am not really wired for an office job.
• On the one hand, let’s say I’m 95 percent sure I have oppositional defiant disorder.
• (Annnnnd passed that down to my child.)
• And a bunch of other undiagnosed shit.
• I mask a lot. I filter a lot.
• I’m not a unicorn in this.
• Many of you do, too.
• But the job thing …
• I go because I have to.
• Because I have to pay to exist in our world.
• Don’t give me that “work hard and you’ll be rewarded” bullshit, because that is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
• There’s the surface, then there’s the game, and the rules of that game are circumstantial and unwritten.
• Freedom must be envisioned and fought for, and there’s an aspect of it that’s very personal.
• Given choice and options, I’d be doing something else entirely.
• (You see the theme, here? This is why I stopped writing lists regularly. I couldn’t stay out of my negative hole, because I have this need to express my frustration in writing. Better out than in, because too much internal pressure can be caustic.)
• For better or worse, the thing that imprinted on me as a child was … financial insecurity.
• I have let my life and career be shaped by fear of being destitute.
• Well, could’ve stopped that last sentence after “fear.”
• Self-imposed chains on top of the societal ones.
• So.
• I’ve tormented you with the negativity enough.
• How about the fun part?
• …
• Yesterday, I finished the draft of my novel.
• It’s called “The House on Second’s Street.”
• (No, that’s not a typo.)
• It’s about two teens who break into a wizard’s house to rescue a sister.
• Stuff goes sideways pretty much immediately.
• (Also, the house, it’s a Craftsman, btw.)
• The main character is neurodivergent, so she’s not “normal,” but it is definitely not one of those “I’m not like other girls” stories.
• What’s that? Why did I write the MC as a girl?
• I started this as a short story during the pandemic.
• I let the kid read it.
• She said, “Why is the main character not a girl?”
• … Okay then.
• Never tried that before. Why not?
• Neurodivergent is one of those trendy words that basically means the brain’s wired a little differently. On the spectrum, as they say.
• I didn’t do it on purpose.
• It’s just who she is.
• Hell, it never even comes up (specifically) in the prose.
• I’d always read about authors who got surprised by the characters in their stories.
• They’d be typing and the character would do something they had not planned.
• No shit, that happened.
• A bunch of times.
• Some of you may be sitting there going, “Wait, did he say he started this during the pandemic? Dude, that was … a long time ago.”
• Yeah, sorry, I had a brain tumor in the middle there.
• Actually, (consults notes) the brain tumor symptoms started showing up about the same time.
• (I have also written a chapter of a memoir of that experience.)
• (Couldn’t work on that because the novel did not really allow me to be with other stories.)
• The book is odd in other ways, too.
• Like, it does not have the voice you might normally see in my writing, because the story isn’t mine.
• I’m not the narrator, I’m just the typist.
• Or something.
• Two or three weeks ago, the kid decreed that 9-10 pm, every night, would be “the writing hour,” and we would sit in the living room and work on our projects.
• As it turns out, I hate letting my child down.
• She came up with the perfect lever to get me off high center.
• And now the book is “done.”
• The quote marks around that … yeah, first-drafts always need a lot of work.
• More character development, more description, line-edits, add/delete scenes, fine-tune the dialogue …
• It’s not finished.
• But the bones are there, and it has a beginning, middle, and end.
• The odds of being traditionally published are only slightly better than a lottery ticket.
• I’ll do the work.
• I’ll send the queries.
• I’ll hope.
• And if that doesn’t work, I’ll self-publish the damn thing on Amazon and everywhere else and do self-marketing.
• I hope when that day comes, you people will want to read it.
• Stay tuned.
• Hopefully, this is just the first one.
• Thank you for your attention in this matter.
• <.< … >.>

* Borrowed the pic from an Idaho realty site. I do not own it. I’ll have to go find one and take a photo for the cover. Or something. We’ll worry about that when we get there.
** No, I did not use any AI. Fuck AI.