Stultus: Blog

The next 'When the Hunter' chapter has been finished and uploaded to SOL! Working on three other things atm, but probably nothing else posted up this week. Holidays are usually dead around here for readers.

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Several small bits of updated minutia.

The next Chapter of 'I'm Going to Make It..." is written and just needs a final lookover. I'll try to do it this evening, but it might not get posted until next Saturday or Sunday, or maybe just wait until after New Years to post, so that some other 'Incomplete' project can be updated next.

In a wonder stroke of luck, I found a completed draft for the next pending chapter of "Under a Baleful Sky'. I knew I'd written it, once, but thought I'd lost this draft over a year ago in a copy/pasta error that overwrote this. Well, it's unlost again now. Needs a final proofing, so maybe post it right after Christmas or soon in January?

Oddly, I thought I had 3-4 pages of my Christmas serial "When the Hunter' done but lost as well, but I found an older draft that had at least the first page of this saved, so I now knew exactly what I was thinking and starting to write. Much more cheerful then about this, I sat down last night to proof this lone page and then wrote the next four pages of this draft as well. I can finish this, I think in one or two more sittings - so there is good chance I'll make the Christmas deadline for this.

No such luck with the next 'Dragons' chapter. Nothing found on any of my backup archives except a blank chapter heading. Same with 'Across the River'... nothing but a blank page, so this will take longer to be updated. I do have my outline for these later chapters, but thinking about a slight tweak. I won't even look at this again until January, sometime.

Since I haven't been a regular at SOL for awhile, with my other RL issues, I noted that my SOL blog has been severely truncated to just the last two years of posts being available now. This lost my 'author's notes' on nearly all of my prior stories. To make up for this, I noted that there is an easier way now for authors to comment on questions, etc posted at the end of each story. So, I've gone one by one and checked 95% of my posted stories and included a very short historical background or a few final thoughts for each tale. Not nearly as comprehensive as the lost blog entries, but enough. Enough to encourage maybe more of your own comments, as well.

Haven't looked at my new major project this week. I've been a good boy and concentrated solely on 'Incomplete' flagged stories.

My original off-site Author's Blog is still DOA. Google took over control of that site and I've been utterly unable to login to it for about two years now. Someday I'll rebuild it...

Looked also at my Pending and Story Ideas folders. 179 items in Pending and 270 items more in Ideas. Lord help me!

More progress!

I mentioned last week that I'd accomplished @ fifty pages of a brand new story, but I also didn't want to let older 'Unfinished' stuff lay Idle either. So...

Before I took my extended break from writing, I'd finished my story notes for the next part, Chapter Six. I'd even done a first draft of the first two pages of it, when I let it set. I'd look at it, every couple of months and mutter 'this is shit... need to completely rewrite this', and let it sit some more. About six months ago I did the rewrite of those first two pages, and while an improvement, it needed more work. So two nights ago, I when I wasn't quite in the mood to work on the new big project, I saw the shell of this pending chapter and started to tinker with it again, frankly not expecting much.

Six hours later, this new chapter was 'done'. To complicate the matter, yesterday I added at least a dozen more new pages for the next chapters Six and Seven! Today, for a couple of hours this afternoon, I've proofed over Chapter Five again... and posted it to SOL! IF I can get Chapter Six looked over and finished this week, I'll try to get it also posted this weekend, but no promises.

Reminder - I'm flying without a safety net right now, with no external advance readers or editors. I think all of my old cast and crew have retired.

Anyway, this is definitely progress... especially since this is also my prime allergy season and my head feels about the size of a watermelon this week, lol!

Oddly, with the return of cooler weather, my legacy pain issues have actually been slightly reduced - against every expectation. I managed a few hours of editing to an on-going story that's been parked for entirely too long. This triggered an extreme outburst of productivity where I was able to devote a couple of days (and a few more late nights) in churning out feverishly forty-nine pages of all new prose! It's still rubbish and needs two long review and cleanup sessions to be remotely publishable... but it's a nice change from the recent status quo. The story is an absurdly long one, novel length (and less than a third done so far), but I just needed to get it kicked out of my head so it could deal with other, older projects.

I'm currently, I fear, editor-less. I had a fairly large number of advance readers and few folks good at proofing and hunting my endless typos. Most have in the last year of two begged off future work. So to simplify matters, I think I should just start clean and solicit a few good external eyeballs, other than my own.

Contact me via PM here, if you're in the mood to claw through my oddities and help render them into a better order. If we're all lucky, I could have a chapter ready for posting sometime around New Years, or shortly thereafter.

One of Winston Churchill's greatest ever quotes!

Well, 2021 seems from this vantage point to be pretty near a mirror image of 2020. Saints preserve us! Wife and I are both still long term unemployed. Too young still for social security and too old to get hired at real jobs anymore. Take the alleged glass ceiling for women/minorities and triple it - no employer will touch a job hunter in their 50's or 60's, regardless of skills or experience. So we're working multiple part-time side gigs to keep the mortgage paid and the lights on.

Time for writing still - almost nil. Health (especially chronic pain from 4 orthopedic surgeries) remains an issue. No meds - decided a year or two ago that I'd live with the pain rather than live like a zombie on oxy. It's do-able... but challenging. At least I can think straight again.

I want to write / I sort of NEED to write... but making an extra dollar or three still sort of dominates my computer time. I've thought about putting in a shameless plug for my eBay & Etsy sale pages, but I'm still very leary of breaking the firewall between RL and activity on a 'Sex Story Site', not that my stories are particularly sex-filled.

Several long-time readers of my strangely peculiar stories have suggested that I set up a Patreon page. Sure... but my issue with this is deciding what sort of 'value' my members would tangibly receive. I suppose you could receive early chapter reads, and I could mandate then that I'd have to dedicate a minimum amount of new writing time per week in compensation. It still doesn't entirely make sense in my head - give me your thoughts and ideas on this: what would make it work for you.

I took an hour this evening to review story outline notes for several things and to reshuffle my to-do queue a bit. About three weeks ago I managed six pages on a new story, but it already needs a complete redo. Of course all of the usual 'old/incomplete/pending' things desperately need attention too. Maybe that's something that Patreon members could do - vote for priorities.

For now, I'll just keep buggering on - getting out of bed in the morning and trying to get a few useful things done each day :)

for making the shitjob of a year 2019 look in retrospect like a golden era :/

I'm hanging in there... doing sort of alright, but feeling a bit overwhelmed. Wife and I both unemployed at home due to COVID and now hustling side gigs to keep the lights turned on. The current madness, with more protests and outright senseless rioting has just taken an overall bad situation and just made things worse. No one remembers history. I don't think they teach it in schools anymore (other than evil white men = bad). Burning down your own city rarely improves the economic situation, even years later. I recently read a report that even 40 years after the LA Watts riots, that most businesses never returned to the area. Same after the Rodney King riots... economic activity permanently decreased in that area. Politicians unhelpfully telling the mobs to 'burn it all down - we'll rebuild' are being comically disingenuous. It won't be any sort of long term economic improvement.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. - Aristotle

In 1969 the Hong Kong Flu came along and killed at least as many people in the USA as COVID has so far, if not far more. No social distancing then, no radical lockdown closures of the entire economy, no radical government reaction or over-reaction. We survived (as we have every other prior pandemic) by developing our herd immunity and keeping calm and carrying on. Not so much now... when it's better to close millions of businesses and put a hundred million people out of work instead :/

Good job politicos (of both blue and red states)! You've destroyed at least half of the small businesses of this country... but bailed out Wall Street (again) and made AMAZON so obscenely rich that they now have a virtual monopoly on all retail sales. Time for some old fashioned Teddy Roosevelt 'Trust Busting'... but no politician of either party has the balls to try it :(

I also wonder why Minneapolis, which hasn't elected a Republican mayor or city councilman in over two decades, is suddenly blaming the President (and everyone else other than themselves) for their own civil mismanagement?

Politically, I'm an evil Moderate... hated by both liberals and conservatives, but I have just enough sense of Reason left to know that when politicians start violently pointing the fingers of blame around at everyone but themselves, it's because the #1 main problem is visible every morning in front of their own bathroom mirror.

Bring on the guillotines, sure, but only if we can purge the herd of politicians of BOTH parties... equally! No... it won't cure the stupidity, but perhaps we'd at least enjoy a bit of different idiocy for awhile.

Anyway, the world is too strange right now for me to deal with, so I'm mostly trying not to! I'm avoiding the news, or at least as much as I can, but what seeps though doesn't improve my depression. I'm also really needing to focus all of my non-sleep hours for wrangling every little bit of extra income I can, so if I steal a few writing hours I then feel guilty about the time lost or 'wasted', when I should have been posting new sale items on eBay or Etsy instead.

Health issues... about the same. Long term pain/blood sugar issues all about the same, but can't get into my GP's office nowadays due to COVID fears. Stress/Depression issues probably worse, but I get up out of bed in the morning and carry on anyway.

I'm very behind on answering reader emails, 95% of which are 'when is the next chapter of series XXXX?' Short answer: damned if I know when.