My life, of late, and my writing

 I've been busy of late as my wife Nancy has had some health issues which kept her in the hospital for almost a week. She has GERD, complicated by Addison's disease, and a nasty hiatal hernia.  This last time, she had what turned out to be a TIA (transient ischemic attack), which is sort of a ministroke that leaves no damage.  After the test, she learned her TIA was very minor, but they discovered a minute aneurysm on the right side of the brain, which had nothing to do with the TIA. The aneurysm is small, but the doctors will monitor it, and it is unlikely to be an issue. 

I also had a CT scan of a stent splice in my descending aorta. It's a monitoring issue as some stents have leaked in other people's cases. But I'm A-OK and won't need another for 18 months. 

So, as you can see, I've been preoccupied. I have a short story, "The Gargoyle Lover," in the anthology Spectral Spectrum from Wicked Shadows Press.  It's a chapter I cut from my novel "Prairie Gods" because it didn't work well into the story. But when I changed the protagonist to the young transwoman in the book, it stood out. I'm happy with it.

I have another short story with the publisher, a former chapter from the novel. I rewrote it to fit with the theme of another anthology and changed the protagonists into characters who are not in the novel.  It's called "The Nokken," about a Scandinavian supernatural spirit that seduces and drowns young women.

Finally, I completed a novelette (10,000 words) from fragments I'd written in my writer's group.  The fragments, actually, with just a little tinkering, became very coherent. It's called "Demon Rider," and it is about a young woman hunting a demonic feral stallion in a herd of wild horses.  The main character is based on a woman I knew who frequented a coffee shop in Norman, Oklahoma.  She was fascinating as she knew lots of things--knowledgable women are attractive to me--and she rolled her own cigarettes and smoked them in a short holder.  Her father was the publisher of  Southern Living magazine, who spoke at the Writers' Short Course at OU.  While she was fascinating, her father was not a good speaker. I imagine he was a better writer.

I have to say it's one of my better stories.  The heroine is interesting to me; she has a villainous opponent to challenge her.   I also learned of the various "magical" ways people, such as the "toadmen" in England, can control horses.

I'm also now working with Amazon to get two of my books, which I self-published on Smashwords, on Amazon. One is a children's book, "Stacey and the Monkey King," which I wrote as a Christmas present for my niece years ago. It kicked around, and I couldn't find a publisher for it, so Smashwords seemed a good option. Stacey died when she was just 22. She suffered from chronic sympathetic dystrophy—one of those orphan diseases almost no one's heard of--which left her in pain, for which methadone was a treatment.  She also suffered from several other issues, including something that prevented her from maintaining a good oxygen level in her blood. She was on oxygen at night, but one night, she apparently knocked the cannula loose, and she died in her sleep.  My sister-in-law has never forgiven herself for this, but she could've done nothing about it.

I wanted to have this book as a memorial for Stacey and have physical copies I can sell at book fairs and conferences.  I also did the illustrations, mainly thanks to Photoshop. 

The other book is a chapbook and a fictional biography of the world's worst pulp writer, Edgar Rice Krispies. I wrote the original in the late 1970s, and a short version appeared in Amazing Adventures magazine. I added some public domain pictures with humorous captions and material, such as Krispies' connection to starting World War I. It also includes Krispie's story with his hero Iowa Million in "Raters of the Lost Auk."

On another front, my novel "Prairie Gods" is in the second phase of consideration at Nightmare Press, and I've got my fingers crossed.  I'm also working on several other projects. I just have to get past myself and write without restraining myself.  Sometimes, you have to explore your dark side to uncover your creativity.