I hope you all enjoyed the most recent update to the Yaz series. Its not over. I can't promise speed to its update. My world got turned upside down over the past few years, and the recovery has been slow, to say the least.
I received a few comments that the last chapter of Yaz was too "business" oriented. Sorry for that. But it will be a part of my writing, because the story of Yaz is not a story of a pedophile meeting a lolita cumdumpster. Its a story of two unusual people who were made even more unusual through the circumstances of the lives they led. They are intelligent, iconoclastic, and driven by greed, and a desire to create.
Their story has elements of romance, and elements of sex. But the story is how their life evolves organically from their meeting, to their falling in love, to their deciding that riding around the midwest in a semi truck selling shmates to bargain hunters was not the future they wanted for themselves or their family, and finally to trying to meld that dream into a life that includes having a family.
Their age difference is a complication to the story. It is not the story, even if it is a significant element. However, and this is important to consider, it is not just a complication to their love life. It is also a complication to their work life, too. While my main character sees Yaz as fully mature, she isn't. She is very mature, but she is not as mature as somebody who has spent 40 years running a business. She sees the world in more black and white terms than it really exists in. She is a little impulsive, a little petulant. A little, well, childish.
She is, in my opinion, a little too emotional to fully run a business. Which isn't unusual, really- a lot of business people let their emotions guide them too often, usually to their peril. But she's growing up a little at a time, as teenagers and young adults do. Which is why you see occasional shifts in her personality, as her adulthood and her childhood teeter on the see-saw.
All of that is part and parcel to the nature of this story. The expansion of the business, and their lives, is as much a part of this story as their love. I hope to write a story justifying publication, although I doubt it will ever be published beyond here.
I am working on another book. I think I will post it here, but it will not be here permanently if I do. A variation will be eventually published under my real name, and I don't want it directly connected to me. If the business aspect of Yaz makes your eyes glaze over, don't read it. It is not a sex story, a love story, or a fictional story. It is a story I have been carefully researching on the state of American malls and their adaption- or lack thereof- to the changing times vis a vis the internet, big box retailers, and changing demographics.
I have been spending tons of my times driving throughout the country examining and recording details about, so far, nearly a hundred different malls. It does take my time, but those of you who would actually like to read my ranting and raving about the idiots that mismanage businesses, might find it interesting. I won't post it, however, if nobody is actually interested in reading it!
Excuse my bastardization of the most mediocre of famous playwrights, but I'm obviously a piece of work.
Some life motto. Too short to rush? Then how, dear reader, do I explain I Walked 47 Miles Of Barbed Wire?
It starts out pretty good, in my humble opinion. And then when I get towards the end, it was like I was rushing to post on a schedule because... well, I was. I wanted to post it that day, and was so enthralled with the first half, and then the hour came that I needed to pick up my wife, so I wrote this bullshit excuse for an ending and posted it.
I apologize. I have broken off the story where the first chapter should have ended, and will present you with a second chapter that I don't find so embarrassing.
Yeah, I know the story wasn't too good. It wasn't out of my usual place. It was out of that dark place in my head that I lock up and try not to look at or remember. I'm a flea marketeer now, yeah. But I didn't start out that way. I had a profession. Fresh out of school, I was making a good six figures a year doing precision repair work on intricate mechanical devices.
Then I went on a bender, a really bad one- it wasn't over losing a business, it was over losing a wonderful girl. I remember one day waking up just like Yevin, in a cheap apartment. And I remember going through a pile of Seagram's Gin magnums looking for a drink, I was so hung over. I remember the days of drinking away my hangover. I remember all the puking, all the DTs, all of shakes. I remember the fucking hell my best friend put me through drying me out.
And I remember my first day sober. I remember trying to go back to work and realizing that I had so much nerve damage, I couldn't do that kind of work anymore. The life that I had been living before I started drinking was over, just as surely as if I had been shot with a bullet.
With love from my family, and love from a girl who I have been with for many years now, I picked up the pieces and found something else to do with my life. But this is a different life, a second chance at living. If my friend not realized where I had fallen to, I'd probably be really dead.
So drinking is a subject very close to my heart. Not to say that I don't drink, but now my wife keeps a really close eye on it. Its the drink I have to remind me that I've really beaten it- that I can stop after a predetermined amount and not continue.
So yeah, it was a sucky story. But it came from my heart, and my horror.
I was wondering if any of you wonder what my life motto is. Its a simple pair of phrases, each seeming contradictory of themselves. As follows:
"Life is too short to rush, and too important to take seriously."
And its not just a motto I speak- its the very words I live by. My wife, who is the sole and event horizon of my life, thinks this concept is utterly nutty.
Oh yes, I do have a wife. We are eminently happy, even though we don't have a sex life. You wouldn't either if the woman you love found sex extremely painful. But I digress:
She always gets very stressed out about everything. It must be done on time, right now. The world will end if its not done this very second. And no, its not pussy whipping me- she usually does all her chores with this attitude. She lets me accomplish mine as I see fit, so long as they get done. Which they do.
Today is almost over. I worked like a dog on my store. It won't be back to relive. If I rushed through it, I wouldn't have gotten to get the most out of it. But I did. If the work we had to do didn't get done today, there is tomorrow to do it in.
This morning, as I was laying in bed, I chose to cuddle up to my wife and snuggle with her for a while. Because I felt like doing it. Because I enjoyed doing it. And because if I didn't do it then, I would have one less chance to do it before I die.
So tonight, or tomorrow, when you wake up next to the one you love, remember that you only have one chance to live this moment properly. You won't get it back. It will never happen again. Don't think you'll have time to tell them you love them, or to cuddle with them, or to enjoy yourself.
Uh, what got me on this? Well, a few years ago I was hit by a succession of cold/URI/Flu type illnesses that left my lungs scarred. I dry cough all the time. I hack and wheeze. They come in bursts, and if they last more then a few seconds, I get light headed. Tonight it happened as I was climbing the very steep stairs in my 1905 vintage townhouse. I blacked out and fell- forward, thank god.
I'm not an old guy- I'm in my late 20s. I ran a marathon when I was 18. If I hadn't done that, I'd never be able to. I raced cars in my late teens and early 20s. If I'd never done that, I wouldn't be able to anymore. But I did these things. Because life is too short to rush, and too fucking important to take seriously.
You don't have to go back and read over it, and perhaps if you did, you wouldn't notice it. I changed it to eliminate the implication that the location the narrator is in at the present is a flea market.
I am a flea marketeer by profession, and I am coming to realize that I wouldn't want my worst enemy to still be in the markets under the current conditions, let alone allow my character to be. I am not spoiling the ending, or even deciding the ending yet particularly. I just want to leave my options open.