I have lots of excuses for the delay, but no good reasons.
I have been busy. I wrote a new short story based on a semi-dream. A semi-dream is one of those visions or concepts you get when you’re between awake and asleep. The story does not, unfortunately, fit neatly into any genre. It was rejected by Daily Science Fiction; I haven’t submitted it elsewhere yet.
There’s a contest by Winning Writers: The North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books. Both my Just Lucky books qualify, so I’ve been rereading them and doing any editing I might find necessary. Not too much: an extra word here, changing a three-word phrase to a two-word phrase elsewhere, maybe a punctuation mark. That’s taken a while and has been my biggest excuse recently for not writing this.
Water Dragon Publishing, an imprint of Paper Angel Press, is considering unpublished speculative fiction, and also previously published sf as long as the author has full rights. So, I submitted Saving Atlantis and Prophecy of Honor. So that also has taken up time. I needed to reread Prophecy and make sure it was the best it could be.
In the last post I mentioned I was beginning Dean Koontz’s False Memory. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t even get halfway through. He set up a situation and then kept re-showing and re-remarking and revisiting the same sudden psychological aberration of the main female character. I lost patience with it.
I have read a few others, though. Koontz has a two-book story called Frankenstein; he co-wrote both books with a different co-author for each. The first of the two is titled Prodigal Son. I haven’t yet been fortunate to find the sequel at Goodwill, but I keep looking.
I’m reading another Odd Thomas book by Koontz. This is titled Odd Hours and is, I think, the last of the series as far as my reading is concerned. The last book in the series is actually Saint Odd, which I read during the last three months.
An unexpected bit of good news:Page and Spine online magazine is not folding up…sort of. Four more weeks for the current incarnation, then it will get a new editor/publisher, a new look and a new home base. Please go to this week’s End Notes tab for more details. One of the addicted readers that had the wherewithal in time, ability, and whatever else is involved volunteered to keep the publication alive and thriving. I’ll be interested to see how the editorial tastes of the new editor/publisher jibe with the old…especially as it applies to my submissions.
As I mentioned in the last post, I did have cataract surgery on my right eye. However, I have not had it on the left and there’s no hurry. My left eye is not used in everyday vision except for the periphery on the left, and the cataract is not as bad in that eye. My wife had cataract surgery this week. That made for two round trips to LaCrosse this week, one next week, plus a couple of other trips that way. I’m glad that the gas prices are significantly lower in LaCrosse than here in Prairie du Chien.
Something I haven’t mentioned in a long time: if you like reading quotes, or find them inspirational, or amusing, please check out the list on my website in the Right Writes section.
Earlier this week my wife got a phone call and she called me in to take part. This guy (Bob) claimed my wife had won a new Toyota Rav (or whatever Toyota she wanted) plus $850,000. That sure sounded good. Also, they’d paid ninety-some percent of the taxes. All we needed to pay was $200. Still sounds really good. (I was pretty sure from the get-go that it was a scam. First, Bod said that he was from American Cashing Awards and that her name was drawn because she pays the utilities on time and has bought at least $5 worth of stuff at a local grocery store, including Walmart, JC Penny, and a few others. The problem with that is that except for the Walmart, she hasn’t bought anything from any of those places, and I pay all the utility bills. So, I asked him how we needed to pay the man when he arrived with the new car, the check for $800,000 and the $50,000 in cash. (Funny thing here: he had me hold while he conferred with the service guy, Mike Baker. When he came back on the phone he mentioned he‘d just talked with Mike Brown. Yep.) He said we had to pay with a $200 gift card. That confirmed my suspicions. We told him no thank you and hung up. He immediately called back but we didn’t answer.
Then I looked up American Cashing Awards. Google never heard of ‘em. But American Cash Awards had lots of entries, many stories about people that fell for the same scam. The amount of prize money and the car changed, but the one constant was paying $200 with vanilla gift cards.
I wish I’d handled it differently. I should have told him that when the guy came with the car (plus certificate of ownership and keys) and the check and the cash, at that point I’d hand over the gift card. Oh, well, maybe next time.
Thank you for reading this, please continue reading books, magazines, online articles, even social media, as long as you don’t take political commentary too seriously…not even mine.