Stultus: Blog

I've been in and out, two weeks total in December. At least it's not my heart or anything else serious!

I've been a good boy since my major heart attack a few years ago, and lost quite a lot of weight. After my wife of 32 years recently passed away I decided to get really serious and I started going to my local gym 5-6 days a week for an hour a session. Lost more weight and started feeling 'good' for the first time in maybe a decade! But I needed new gym sneakers, and they gave me a blister on my right foot... which got increasingly infected, despite four rounds of antibiotics. Finally they had to remove my right toe and put me under IV antibiotics, so I wouldn't lose the entire foot. That seems to have worked! I can already walk without pain.

Home and able now to do stuff that I couldn't do for over three months (more like three years, it feels), so I'm slowly getting caught up with stuff for the first time since my wife passed away. Over twenty crates of her stuff all now out the door and donated, another 20+ still to go! A nice 40-something gal has been helping me out and we chatter constantly about AD&D, anime, cats and fantasy stuff. Damn, I'm not looking (yet) for wife #3, but if I was ten years younger, I'd be all over her!

When I was in the hospital, I resolved that I was going to get a few SoL projects cleaned up and posted, asap. I'd posted my True Ghost stuff memories awhile back, but the death of my wife added a new interesting little bit, so I added it to that account. Next, I took a large collection of Reddit DMs about cucking and cheating wives and molded them into a brand new true story of my first wife. It's taken me several weeks to get this account to where I'm happy with it, and it's meant to be a vaguely cautionary tale. Cucking, hot wife, swinging etc is not for everyone. Mistakes were made. Oddly, the Ex and I are rather closer these days, emailing and texting from different states regularly. Almost friends, even. Maybe lessons can be learned and the power of forgiveness is very powerful.

Sitting in a hospital bed being woken up for vitals every two hours, gives you a lot of time to think. My plot outline for the continuation of Bad Prince Charlie had a problem, but I worked it out by brute force while I was bored to tears. Same with some chronology problems in Now is All we Have, fixed and ready to go again. I need first to finish clearing out the late wife's estate stuff... a work in progress, but I can see a window opening to where I can get back to writing fiction again. That would be very, very nice.

2025 has been my worst ever year of my life. Worse by far than the 1987 divorce drama. Wife gets sick(er) first of the year and became a near invalid, she passes in July, August I get this year's flavor of Covid and cough my lungs out for two months, then my toe infects my left and entire foot starting in October. It's now the ass end of December before things in my life started improving, lol. Hoping for much better in 2026.

Alex

I'm still recovering from my major heart attack from a few years ago, but no other new medical issues have popped up. I have about 30% heart function left, which limits my physical activities and my usually now too-low blood pressure also limits days when I'm still reasonably 'smart' enough to be an author. The fog is more concerning, and I now suspect I had a slight stroke also, when I died three times in the OR. Today, things are no worse at least.

Also, for the last several years my wife's own health has been more iffy than even usual. She almost died back in the early 00's but we were both too stubborn to quit... but for at least the last year, I've been nursing her at least as much as she was tending after me. The stress alone was really killing my latent creativity and write for others, when too too much needed to be done here. Late Friday night she died reasonably peacefully in her sleep. We had been married for about thirty years, and known each other since high school. I don't consider her replaceable.

I've still been working on various stories a bit, so give me another six months or so get my solo senior semi-abled life into some sort of order and I can probably arrange more writing time... I've never been a sit in front of the TV sort of retired person.

Words of condolence and creative motivation are as always greatly appreciated.

I posted up a new story for the Halloween contest and the voting is over, so I can 'announce' it now. I finished (and posted) two chapters before the entry deadline and I have the next chapter done, and the final chapter in-progress...

But with a voting score of 6.15 (WTF???) I'm not sure it's worth my time to add anything to this.

I've also started work on the final 'Dragons of the Night' chapters, but at the moment I'm not sure when I'll find the motivation to finish it.

I've been working on Halloween stories for the last two weeks and decided yesterday that I was going to also compile some 'True' Ghost & Paranormal stuff together for the annual Halloween 'True Story' thread on Reddit. So I started listing various items of non-fictional weirdness together and then sorted it out chronologically, so it makes at least some sense.

I might also send the 'bigfoot encounter' bit off to Buckeye Bigfoot for her to read. I didn't think much of the encounter at the time, but compared to most of the 'bigfoot crossed the road in front of me' stories I've heard lately, this story might be a bit more interesting to some listeners.

A couple of stories, like the Alcatraz school trip, I've written about before, on FARK and as comments on several paranormal and High Strangeness discussion boards. At least one of these true stories has also been the topic of discussion on someone's YouTube channel podcast (with permission), but this is the first time I've tried to compile everything all together, in one story.

This story, "My (True) Ghost & Paranormal Stories" is not a fictional one, like the nearly 100 other tales that I have posted here (under several author names). This one has has the additional added benefit of being entirely and completely true.

Last year's hard brush with mortality has made me want to just kick back and tell other's about just a few of the various weird things that have happened in my life, just so that the stories might be remembered, and not lost entirely to time. And what better time to tell 'weird ghost stories' than Halloween!

There's quite a few episodes of WTF-ness listed, but given time, and a clear head, I could easily double the size of this account... but I probably won't. Anything else would probably be too 'meah' to be worth the time to either write or read. I think I covered the main most interesting bits.

Again, these are just a few things that I figuratively and literally wanted to get off my chest before I check-out for good (not soon, I hope). Think of this as telling stories at night with friends around a campfire. You don't need to believe me, but remember some of the weirdest tales are true ones!

More stuff (Halloween) to be posted soon, and the next chapters of a few other pending things have their wheels slowly grinding now too.

Having a day or two to think again about things, and reviewing what I'd posted, I've made a few tweaks today to the 'My (True) Ghost Stories' tale. For starters, I cleaned up a few typos and added more details to several of the encounters (like the bigfoot stories) - things I'd forgotten to add when originally writing this. It's pretty complete now, so I won't add anything new to it from now on.


The next (long overdue) chapter to 'Now is All We Have' is posted. Now, I'm back to working on more Halloween stuff. I had a decent day today and got about eight hours of good writing time in!

Still recovering painfully slowly from my major heart attack. More bad days than good ones still. Even on a day when I feel OK, I tire out extremely easily. My apologies.

I've not been entirely idle. I've been working on "Now is All We Have" intermittently. I've got a few chapters sort of done... but I've wanted a really good day, when I'm not huffing and have a clear head to do a final last review.

Keep nagging me - I've got way too much that needs to be done!

I'm working on ideas for various Halloween story contests (here and elsewhere) and have just enough done that I'm feeling positive about getting at least one of them 'done' and posted somewhere. Meeting the deadline for SOL's contest is going to be a tricky race though. I need at least one 'above average' day and about ten hours of accumulated writing time this week to finish it. I have a very bad history 'just missing' story deadlines, here and at Lit.

A more sure bet is my finishing a Halloween story for Nancy at the Buckeye Bigfoot Youtube channel. She wanted some Sasquatch fiction for a special show, and I've got a pretty decent story idea that's right in her wheelhouse. :)

I suppose I ought to start planning now for Christmas stories too, including my serial 'When the Hunter'.

So much to do!