News, Updates, and Minor (Major) Ramblings

August is almost over, and I had this post in my drafts since the beginning of the month and did not post it. Love how my brain operates. Just a quick check in this time around. I have paused on my Fate Unseen edits to do the edits on the first book of my new novella series IFL Tales. I definitely just made that up since I don't have an official name for the series. I currently have a name for the book, but I might need to change it because there are a number of books titled with same thing, and that's a sure way for my lil ole novella to end up buried even though it's not going wide for awhile. Anyway, I created a cover few weekends ago, and got a two thumbs up from one of my favorite people who I can trust not to bullshit me, which is exciting. I'm not sure if I've gone over what IFL Tales is about or what this first novella will be about, but I'll hold off on going into them because I want to be in my third round of edits before I do that. By that point, I k...

It's been 9 months since I've posted anything, and my goodness am I sorry. I've been in such a hole and have been trying so hard to dig myself out of it that I've completely let everything slip away from me. Which, in all honesty is a disservice to the people who are out there waiting for me to come out with something new or pick up on one of my series. While I know I have no obligation to put out stories and what not, it does make me feel shitty. At least from a reader's standpoint. As a writer, I know I can keep writing for myself because I've been doing that for decades now, but as a reader to get invested in an author and have them just vanish is a little upsetting. So, I want to apologize for the vanishing act and I will try to get better at it. Let's talk about a huge thing though. I didn't realize how many people followed my author pages on Goodreads, Amazon, and Smashwords. It's not a big number or anything, but there are a number of people f...

Goodness it feels like June flew by, but not really. I think I owe it to those two weeks I had off from work. During one of those weeks, I went to Mass to visit some friends, and it was a bit of a culture shock. Back in 2016, Mass legalized marijuana and this is also the same year I happened to move out of the state. When my friend and I got into the Springfield area, there were cannabis dispensary billboards everywhere. It was SO wild, but like I loved it because I'm pro-marijuana. Then on top of that Springfield got a casino, which I knew about, and when they announced it, I thought they were going to build some gigantic skyscraper thing and mess up all of Downtown Springfield, but nope. They actually didn't do a bad job. The building blends in with the other ones, which have been there since forever, and it's pretty nice. Honestly, if it weren't for the signage, you wouldn't know there was a casino there. I did do a bit of gambling. I had managed to break even, p...

 I rang in the new year on my death bed. I contracted a sickness, maybe the flu, from my youngest nephew which had me incapacitated the first week of the month and at my sister's house a week longer than I wanted to be. He tested negative for Covid and my at home test came back negative, so I don't think it was Covid. Anyone else having a hell of time getting tested for the virus that's running amok in world? Seesh.

January came and went. It was pretty wild. The Capitol was bumrushed by terrorist. We got a new president that doesn't look like a bottle of Sunkist gone wrong, and some other things happened, but I cannot recall them. We had some losses too. Larry King, who I didn't know voiced the bar wench in Shrek (thanks for that Tumblr). Cloris Leachman who was always a delight onscreen, and lastly, but certainly not least, the iconic Cicely Tyson. Her most memorable role for me, at least recently, is when she was on How To Get Away With Murder , but that woman was an icon who had bigger and more memorable roles than that. I know I've been MIA for the last couple of months. I just didn't have it in me to do anything author related. Blogging, the newsletter, writing, editing....none of it appealed to me. Blame it on the holidays, or what, but I just wasn't feeling it, so my holiday break turned into something much longer. However, I did move into my own place at the end of Dec...

Hopefully by the time I have posted this the US will have figured out who their president is. I'm sure the number of people that voted for the Orange Stain™ will get swept under the rug and people will proclaim this country has risen like a phoenix from the ash, but minorities like myself will realize that it will be nothing but a crock of shit. I've become bitter about this country, and I would apologize, but why? All right onto why I'm here—announcements all around! I finished The Adventures of Swift this week. Like actually finished writing it, and not that kind of finish where you still have like two more pages to write, but you say you're done because it's just two pages. No one else does this? Just me? Of course. It came out to 48k words, and hopefully by the time editing is done, it'll be at the 50-55k mark. Each episode doesn't go more than 10k words, and you would think that would cheat the story, but not really. I actually have a little wiggle roo...

Here is June's second blog post of the month. Yes! I did it! This blog post, however, is going to be a little different because I updated you all a week ago on my writer and book things, and nothing has change there. I'll plug the usual bits at the end, but the meat of this post is something else. Today, I'm going to talk about the critiquing of fictional work that portrays marginalized communities that is written by a person from a marginalized community. This falls in the #ownvoices category of things if you follow the literary world of Twitter. The idea to write about this was sparked by a tweet I failed to capture, but it provoked an excellent question and I wanted to pose it to my readers as well as anyone else that happens to stumble upon my blog. I think I'll start this off with my own personal example, and go from there. In 2016, I entered a screenplay I had written into a diversity competition for screenwriters. I knew it was probably crap, but I wanted t...