aubie56: Blog

I hope all of you have the happiest of holidays. For those of you who don't celebrate with us, I wish the best for you, too.

This is the latest story that I have posted. The title is a little misleading because the invading aliens look so much like demons to the humans they prey upon. "Alien Invasion" did not express the way the invasion affected the humans involved, so I was stuck with the use of the word "demon." Maybe I should have asked for advice on the title, but here it is.

This is the blurb:
Jim Smalley was a Senior in high school and pretty much marking time until he graduated. He already knew where he wanted to go for college, and his grades were good enough to get him in. Suddenly, his town was invaded by monsters and demons that loved to kill people. By a series of odd circumstances, Jim found the only practical way to kill these invaders, and he was signed on by the local police chief. This is the story of Jim's battle to save his town. 9 chapters.

I hope you like it.

First of all, I want to thank all of the people who sent me comments following my previous blog. Truthfully, a lot more people were kind enough to respond than I had ever expected.

My second point is more of a health report. I have just come back home from almost two weeks in the hospital and rehab. A lot of people, including me, had noticed that my stories had gotten darker and darker over the last six months, and now I have an explanation. For the last six months or so, I have been suffering from a bladder infection that was steadily worsening until it finally got bad enough to put me in the ER.

I have been suffering from what seemed to me to be a strange combination of symptoms: things like dizziness and depression. I had other problems, too, but those were the most obvious. Anyway, at the hospital, I went through a range of tests that all came up negative, except for the bladder infection.

The consensus was that I had been sick for at least six months with the infection, and it was steadily getting worse. I don't know what the result would have been if I had not been treated when I was, but I am feeling a lot better.

It seems that depression is one of the effects of a bladder infection, and I had a major one. Not only that, my wife had gotten sick enough to require hospitalization, and that only added to the depression. She and I both are now home, and I feel a hell of a lot better!

I expect that my stories will lighten up once I have cleared out the ones that I wrote while I was feeling so bad. The moral of the story is that you should not down-play the seriousness of a bladder infection. Rest assured that I will never again do so.

I used to get a nice assortment of emails whenever I posted a story, and I often got addition email during the story. All of that has dropped off significantly. Has my writing become boring?

If the interest doesn't pick up, I may just stop writing. I don't want to do that, but I write because I want people to enjoy reading what I write. If people don't tell me that they read what I write and whether or not they like it, what is the point of writing?

The number of downloads is down from what I got a year ago, and I wonder if that is a symptom of boredom. Hell, I don't know what I am going to do. Maybe this is just a sign of the depression I feel because my wife is back in the hospital.

Well, I'll keep writing for a while longer, but I don't know how long that will last.

I now have 7 stories completed and ready to be posted, but there is a strange coincidence connected with them. Five of the stories involve demons in some form or other. My current story, which involves demons, is not doing very well as far as downloads go, so I wonder if there is any real audience for such stories.

All of these stories are horror stories of one sort or another, though none are like "My Horrible Dream." They are essentially action adventure stories with demons being the villains. I don't know how I got started on this demon kick, but it is sure hard to break away from it. It is just a lot of fun to write about demons.

Frankly, I wonder if there is much of an audience for horror stories. I like them, but how do other people feel? I would appreciate comments on the subject. Thanks.