aroslav: Blog

After spending two months in self-isolation amidst the flies, heat, and humidity of Phar, TX, I pulled up stakes and headed for Idaho on May 19. I arrived at Sun Meadow near Worley, ID at 2:00 Thursday afternoon May 28-ten days and 2900 miles. I am so glad to be home for the next four or five months.

I am maintaining self-isolation and social distancing. It's funny to look at a bunch of naked people wearing masks. Most of the time they aren't, of course. Technically, Idaho will stop quarantining as of today and will allow groups of up to 50 but with 6 feet social distancing. That means our gatherings will be out-of-doors, which is great for the weather this weekend but might be chilly for the coming week with temps in the 60s. That's a whole lot better than the 106 it was in Del Rio, TX when I camped on my first night out!

But I'm wearing the mask when I'm away from my immediate site. Why? Well, having nearly died of heart failure just before my 70th birthday last fall, my doctor considers me 'at risk.' I do what little I can by limiting social contact, washing frequently, and wearing a mask. I understand that I cannot depend on other people-even my closest friends-to protect me. Each of them I saw on Friday walked right up to me to shake my hand and welcome me back to camp. I understand the mask doesn't do a lot to protect me, but I've been in six states in ten days, stopping at rest areas, stopping at truck stops, stopping at RV parks. I wear the mask to protect them.

It gives me a real feeling of empowerment that I can choose a simple act to protect other people.

I also have friends on the front lines battling the virus. Nurses, doctors, and even reactivated retired military, functioning as Battle Captain for Emergency Response in the Army and working with the DoD on CoVid-19 modeling. I will not, by God, do anything to make their jobs more difficult.

I'm not going to point out any of the other crap in the world. Even as isolated as I maintain myself, I get enough news pushed in front of me to understand America and the World are really fucked up. You don't need me elaborating on it.

I've been getting some writing done while I was on the road and continue apace. I have two aroslav stories that I'm working on. Adams' Apple is a farce and lampoon revolving around a virus that renders all men in the world impotent. Except one. Fun and games ensue as I manage to lampoon the media, scientists, medicine, politics, the President, bureaucracy, religion, the military, the Secret Service, the leaders of several countries, and the chef in the kitchen. I think I'm just three or four chapters from the end of the story and have been getting edits back steadily from my editors with a few comments from my Sausage Grinder patrons who pay $10 a month to see whatever I'm writing in its raw, unedited state.

The second story is hopefully within ten chapters of being complete. Pussy Pirates is a story set in the Swarm Universe of Thinking Horndog. Of course, when I finish writing in about a month or so, it will go to the Swarm authors' group for judgment on its canon worthiness, so I could still end up with an odd story that is only available on my own website instead of as part of the proper universe. Regardless, I'm sure to be at least three months out on that one.

A couple of days ago, I finished posting Wayzgoose's Steven George & The Dragon. Reading young adult fairytales is not everyone's cup of tea, but those who enjoyed the story were vocal enough that I will probably resurrect an old draft called Steven George & The Terror, a sequel. It needs some work, but it's cute. My immediate attention, however, is on the rewrite of American Royalty 1: Coming of Age. This rewrite is so complete that I will probably repost it as a new story titled Rise and Awaken, a Destiny's Call novel. The general story concept remains the same. An American society that has carefully defined classes, a young man emerging as a leader, and a tension-filled love story between him and his former schoolmate turned advisor and assistant. The way the story is told, the names of the classes, and the kind of relationship the two have are all brand new. And it is significantly shorter than the 112,000-word original.

So, I'm hanging in there, staying healthy, and writing a lot with ideas for more banging around in my head. I hope this finds you well and safe.

Yesterday, Chapter 165 of Double Twist posted ending Part XIII of "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins." In it, we see that Marvel and Hopkins and their entire pod are being groomed for the National Service by promoting Service Reform. When I started this massive story, I made a list of things that could have branched the timelines of the old man Jacob and his new 14-year-old self. One of the pieces that stood out to me most was the effect of having a mandatory National Service period of two years for everyone between the ages of 18 and 21.

Last week, May 6, 2020, the Pandemic Response and Opportunity Through National Service Act was introduced in Congress. This isn't new. In 2017, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, was created and charged by Congress to provide a blueprint for how to expand all forms of service. The new legislation is the result.

"After two-and-a-half years of intensive research, public hearings, and conversations with Americans across the country, the Commission released its final report, Inspired to Serve. The report contains 164 recommendations for promoting and empowering Americans to serve their country.

"Taken together, the recommendations offer a comprehensive blueprint to service for Americans, beginning with civic education and service learning, starting in kindergarten; national service opportunities so accessible and incentivized that service becomes a rite of passage for millions of young adults; and new and revitalized service options for adults of any age, background, or experience." (The Brookings Institute in an article on Friday, May 15 titled "COVID-19 has made expanded national service more important than ever" by Isabel V. Sawhill and Larry Checco)

There are important differences between what has been proposed in Congress and my meagre foretelling of a National Service in Jacob's story. Jacob's story mandated every person between the ages of 18 and 21 to serve for two years, by Amendment to the Constitution. The laws supporting the amendment were hashed together and basically gave the Service over to the Military to manage. That would have resulted in 4 million new service members each year! The new bill proposes to grow AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 750,000 service opportunities over a three year period.

But they cite many of the same benefits I used in Double Twist.

"Many others in both the public and private sectors, both Democrats and Republicans, support using national service not only to help mitigate the coronavirus, but also to enhance disaster relief, provide assistance to hard-pressed first responders, supplement the staffing of many nonprofits serving the poor or unemployed as well as provide high schoolers an option to serve after graduation, at a time when colleges may not be fully open and entry-level jobs may be scarce."

Well, knowing Congress, the whole concept of an expanded National Service will ultimately be amended so many times that we'll scarcely recognize it behind the billions of dollars in relief, defense, corporate subsidies, Wall Street bailouts, and congressional salaries that will get tacked onto it. And if there aren't a bunch of major corporations along the lines of Haliburton or GEO Group, CoreCivic, or Ahtna Technical Services who can see how to make a profit off the National Service, it will never become a reality.

You heard it in my fiction first. Let's hope most of what I wrote was wrong.

There are 30 more chapters of Double Twist queued up to post over the next three months on SOL before we switch over to the last volume in the story, Double Team. My Patreon supporters will begin Double Team next Sunday, May 25.

According to my stats page, this week my Homepage Access Count topped 1,000,000. (That's not all in a week. That's my lifetime count.) At the same time, my blog reached its 250,000th viewing. Wow! Thank you all. I hope you found what you wanted.

According to some of the email I got this week, that wasn't always the case. So, I'll posture myself and do a little lecturing. No. Let's call it sharing what I know because this stuff is complicated.

Last week, I reposted the entire Model Student Series, complete with edits and re-organized books. As a result, the previously three books in the series became six books in the series. If that wasn't enough, Books 1, 4, and 6 bear the original publishing dates back in 2012 and 2013, while Books 2, 3, and 5 bear the 2020 publishing date. So, going to my page and sorting my 41 stories by date does not put the books in reading order.

There are two ways to figure out the order. The first is to access my homepage and locate any of the Model Student stories. At the top of the description, it will have a highlighted link that says Model Student and a number, 1-6. That number is the order of the book you are looking at.

The best way is to click that link. The new page displayed will be the list of all the Model Student stories in reading order. The far left column, which is untitled, contains the number of the book in order.

Why is it so complicated? Because I'm stupid.

When I originally wrote the series, I had no expectations for it other than reading on SOL. But when I released the story in eBook and print, some years later, I discovered the books were just too long for getting people to buy them. So, I broke up the first one into three books and the second one into two books. When it came time to update the series on SOL, I didn't want to delete the original three with all their scoring info, so I just added the new ones and updated the originals. That gives them the out-of-sequence dates.

Okay, so what's next?

Well, I'm not going to do that again! The only other story that would potentially create that kind of hassle is Living Next Door to Heaven and I'm not going to update that story at all. If you want to read it as ten separate books instead of three long serials, you can do that on my website or by buying the eBooks.

I am in the process of re-editing the Wonders of My World series and posting it on my website. I won't be updating it on SOL. The changes are two-fold. First, I've re-proofread everything and corrected any errors. Not terribly significant. Second, I've added in all the photos of my travel and tall tales. Those will only be available in the online format on my website where I can store the photos and keep things together. US Highways will start appearing on that site next week.

There is something new in the works. New to you, that is. It's actually a Wayzgoose book I published in 2011. Next week, I'll begin serializing Steven George & The Dragon under the author name Wayzgoose here on SOL. It's a young adult book, but at 70, I still get a kick out of it. A series of fairytales told as part of a journey by our intrepid dragonslayer. It's a fun read. No sex, like most Wayzgoose stories. However, some of the subject matter gets too mature for children. Think Grimm's fairytales, not Disney's.

Sweltering in Place

Temps here in Pharr Texas have topped 100 degrees three times this week with yesterday hitting 105. I'm looking forward to the relief of temperatures only hitting 90 this week.

Back in the early 90s I was teaching a seminar that included people from Alaska who had come to freezing cold Seattle to get warm. They'd been experiencing temperatures of -90F. We asked what -90 was like. The answer was, "It's just like -60, but faster."

Now I look at the temperature of 105 and can say, "It's just like 90 but faster." As my deceased mother-in-law used to say, "We'll die of heat prostitution!"

Be well, my friends!

If you are currently reading Model Student, Triptych, or The Prodigal, download them! Tonight, I'm going to upload the new version and it might be very difficult to find your place in one of the six books that will replace the three currently on the site. The new books will be approximately the following equivalents:
Current Model Student will become 1. Mural, 2. Rhapsody Suite, 3. Diva. In order to balance the books a bit, Diva will include a chapter or two of what is currently Triptych.
Current Triptych will become 4. Triptych, 5. Odalisque. That story was seriously way too long!
Current The Prodigal will become 6. The Prodigal.
I do not have plans to change or re-release the Triptych Interviews at this time.

In other news: I began posting Wayzgoose's Steven George & The Dragon on my site for Patrons. That means I'll start posting it here the first of May. If you want to join on Patreon to see things sooner, let me know.

Among the things that will be starting for Patrons soon is the re-edited and illustrated US Highways, Book 1 of "Wonders of My World." I'm including photos of my journey around the country. I'm having a lot of fun reliving it remotely since I'm still sweltering in place in Pharr Texas. 92 degrees with an expected high of 97 today. Highs in the upper nineties and into the 100s for the rest of the week. Sadly, it looks like I'll be another month here waiting for things to open up safely so I can travel north.

I'm glad I don't need groceries this week. Wearing long pants, long-sleeved shirt, gloves, mask, and hat can get hot. And no one can see my eyes because as soon as I don the mask my daughter sewed and sent me, my glasses fog up. One of the little things we do in life in order to keep living.

I am getting some new stuff written, too, but it's going a little slower than I hoped. I have eleven chapters of Adams' Apple written and ten chapters of Pussy Pirates in the can. I expect both to be around 20 chapters. The latter will be longer in getting to post because it will need to be reviewed by the Swarm authors for approval as part of the canon. And you know how I love to push the edges of established genres. It could take them a while to brow-beat me into submission. But they'll succeed. I have a lot of admiration for those guys.

I've had some inquiries regarding when book 5 of The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins, Double Team, will be available for purchase. It looks like June 1. I'll post a note as soon as I have it up and ready.

I keep restraining myself from starting something else new. I've always been able to keep multiple projects in the air at once, but I have so many now that I need to try to stay focused on one or two. I think that's partly due to the quarantine and living in isolation. I keep having mental images of that one lone guy broadcasting the end of the world from a remote radio station, unaware that there is no one left to listen to him.

I'm confident, though. We're doing what needs to be done. A lot of the SOL readership is in the group of people considered highly at risk. We're old. I'd like to thank those of you who aren't for doing your part in protecting us. For that, I'll keep writing.

Since the beginning of quarantine, I've been trying to make more of my stories available for free to a broader audience. Most recently, that has included making a run through my published edition of the Model Student series, editing it, and posting it on my website. But I never updated the original version on SOL even to the published version when it came out in 2016. I'm trying to remedy that and have formatted the entire new edition for release on SOL--hopefully later this week. It's hard to believe I originally wrote and posted that story here back in 2012!

I do, however, have a question or two that you could help me with. First, let me explain that in order to make good stand-alone books, and in order to put them in print, I had to make several adjustments to where parts and stories ended and began. So, the breakpoints between stories are not the same as in the current version. Second, I brought out the original Model Student as three separate books, Mural, Rhapsody Suite, and Diva. The original version of Triptych was so long I had to cut it into two books, now called Triptych and Odalisque. The Prodigal continues to stand alone. So there were three serials originally posted on SOL and now they are six books.

The options as I see them.

1. Replace the current three books with six new ones. Each a standalone with the new titles.

2. Use Part divisions to post three as one in Model Student, and two books as one in Triptych.

Your feedback would be helpful.

In any case, the version currently on SOL will be gone. There were some cuts and rewrites of particularly gratuitous scenes to make the story acceptable for a broader audience, and a few names of minor characters were changed to protect the innocent (notably racquetball competitors). So, if you are particularly fond of the stories as they currently exist and don't want to see the changes (if you even care), I'd suggest you download the current books now. They will be changed by this time next week.

Since finishing The Prodigal back in 2013, I have written and posted thirty more books here as aroslav and ten more as Wayzgoose. I am grateful for your continued support and readership.

Just an irrelevant note: I went out yesterday for my bi-weekly groceries and monthly pharmacy run. My truck is getting four weeks per gallon at the moment. I've been having some trouble with ants in the trailer here in Texas, so while I was at the grocery store, I found and bought some ant killer. When I checked out the cashier held the package up and said with a straight face, "You do know this is for insects and not relatives, right?"

I hope you are weathering the storm, so to speak. Be well.

Devon