The Outsider: Blog

The final chapter of A Charmed Life posted this morning. Thank you to all who have taken the time to read, comment, and/or recommend the story.

The sequel to ACL will start posting in a week or so. Like ACL before it, it is finished and won't leave you hanging. I will post the chapters as I have with ACL.

Other, stand-alone stories will also post in the near future, some in the Enfield Undrowned universe, some not.

I continue to work on a third Knox Family story, and have plans for a fourth.

I would like to wish all of my fellow Americans a great Labor Day weekend, wherever you might be. Stay safe! There's no reason to meet my compatriots in EMS this weekend...

Chapter 49 of A Charmed Life will post on Monday. While other chapters in the story have had difficult scenes, Chapter 49's last a bit longer than just a scene or two. It might be rough for some of you to read. It's nearly a decade since I wrote this chapter and it still affects me.

As the advisory at the start of the chapter will say, violence to young children and its aftermath is coming. I don't want to give too much away, but Jeff has to deal with it afterward. It won't involve his family directly; they help him as he tries to cope with the memories and emotions following the ambulance call.

I finally finished submitting all the chapters of A Charmed Life for posting. Two chapters will continue to post each week until near the end of September.

As a new and inexperienced writer back in 2016 (and someone who had failed my first semester of senior English in high school), I was extremely lucky when Graybyrd pointed out multiple errors in my first story. If it hadn’t been for him the story would have been poorly received.

I received word from Graybyrd’s wife today that he passed away last weekend.

We never had the chance to meet in person. He lived on the West Coast while I live outside Boston. We shared a few similar experiences in EMS, though his life experiences were much more varied than mine have been. Still, he was able to guide me without taking over authorship of my stories.

Rest well, Graybyrd.

When I originally wrote A Charmed Life, I didn't have a good handle on consistent chapter lengths. The first ten or so vary from ten to forty kilobytes. Triggers my OCD at times...

As a result, I've decided to post chapters 4 and 5 today to try and even out the per-update size. There will be two other similar updates coming before things even out. Once we reach the point where chapter lengths are more consistent, I'll go back to one-chapter-per-update mode.