Long day of no writing...

Not exactly. I finished prepping A65 to send off. They wanted a PDF of the story double-spaced so that's what I did. And a short synopsis. And I'm really happy with it. No feedback. We'll see how it goes.

I'll work on APoS on the plane and at the hotel, at night. Plotted out plans for the packing. Completed some other paperwork and end of month business since I won't be able to do it while I'm traveling. I don't do anything financial on wifi outside of my place or the office. I don't trust it.

My flight, tomorrow, isn't till 8:15pm and I don't arrive till 10:45pm, and that's if everything is on time. This flight is not guaranteed to do that. But I've got an aisle seat and my new Air is smaller than that PC and my Pro, and works one hell of a lot better, so I'll do all right.

Countdown to Halloween, still...a night of unimaginable horrors for the faint of heart. Like me. Besides, there are too many real horrors in the world to deal with. I don't know if I'm getting smarter (ha) or people are getting dumber, but whatever it is I'm at the point in my life where I'm close to saying, Fuck 'em all. 

Let Mother Nature take control, show us who's boss and restart the march of evolution with cephalopods. They seem kinder and gentler, and a hell of a lot smarter. 

A bit of chaos...

Today I got booked for a packing job in Anaheim Hills, starting Tuesday. So I have to fly down day after tomorrow. Talk about scrambling, and I'm not home till Saturday. Fortunately, it's a continuation of a job I've already done, twice before, so I know the layout of the place and will have space enough to work in. And an assistant who can do the lifting and moving parts.

I still managed to get through three more chapters of APoS, to 1970. That leaves 10 chapters to do, and I can this little Macbook with me, to do a lot of this on the plane. So I will focus on the job, tomorrow and Monday, before my flight.

I've also decided to enter The Alice '65 into the Cinematic Book Writing Competition. Not sure what it's really about, but you never know who might read it. I found the Word doc for the updated paperback I did in March 2021, and read through some of it. And I'm fuckin' proud of that book. It flows so smoothly. I like Adam and Casey and the people around them. So I'm formatting it into the required style and sending it in.

They offer feedback, but I don't want any. I don't need it. I did a damn good job with that story and all I want is the promotional aspect of this contest. I'm not having anyone tell me how I should have written it to be funnier or simpler or crazier or anything. I've already been through that and found it's bullshit.

I wrote a screenplay for a former friend, using her idea -- her mother had been in Senior Lady Beauty Pageants and she thought it would be fun to make a comedy out of it. So I worked up a full story, characters, hit all the expected high points...and made it about a mistaken magical charm switching the mind of an older woman who's about to be in one of those pageants with the mind of her cop son-in-law who's trying to catch a criminal. Set it in Las Vegas, and all hell breaks loose.

It would have been hysterical with the right actors. But that's how it is with comedy -- the actors make the piece live. What comments did I get back? "Needs to be funnier." I've got the cop caught in his MIL's body suddenly having to deal with her estranged husband when the man shows up and wants to get back together with her in an intimate way. And the MIL in the cop's body has to save the life of his partner when they're attacked, and not knowing how to fire a gun or use handcuffs.

Not funny enough.

I no longer own that script. It was taken away from me fifteen years ago. Given to someone who knows how to write comedy. And what's happened, since? Nothing.

When William Goldman said that in Hollywood Nobody knows anything, he was right. The problem is, nobody knows that they don't know, and are sure that it doesn't apply to them.

Halfway

I'm at the point where the Battle of Bogside is about to begin, and it's also where that PC started fucking up my formatting. It's all better now, and I don't think anything was cut, so I'm toodling along and will return to my original formatting once I'm done with this last proofing. Which should be in a couple days.

I noticed I used the same last name for a couple different people and don't want that. I'm having enough fun with the Eamonnn/Eammon situation. Eamonn is Brendan's older brother, who's injured in the attack on the People's Democracy march at Burntollet Bridge.

Eammon is a friend of Brendan's I consistently refer to as wee Eammon. He's the exact opposite of Brendan's brother -- small, red-haired, looking like a leprechaun, and sickly. I like the contrast.

I do like how I've woven in events as they happen throughout the story, so far. Brendan refers to them or hears about them, so he's not everywhere. Sometimes he even admits to a bit of hooliganism, like in being part of the crowd that burned down a few buildings in July 1969.

But for the most part he's not much involved in the actions. His focus is still making what money he can off his repairs and helping his family in his own way. Like making a garden hutch over into a home for Mairead when she marries Tur Devlin and they have a child. And he's not unfair; because a neighbor let his family stay with them after their old home was trashed, he does some work for her, for free.

My hope is I'm building a human being for people to relate to, not a character or saint or flawed hero but a boy living his life as best he can in impossible circumstances.

1/3 done and feelin' like fun...

I'm through the October 5th march, in APoS, and at just over 139,100 words, and feel pretty good about this pass. Not sure why it keeps expanding because I've cut some more repetition. But maybe my words are fucking like rabbits. Or...maybe it's because of...

Halloween!

I'm counting down to the day on my FB page, having fun with it. 

I now believe that if those brats had just given Freddy a good lay, they'd still be alive. I wonder if I should write a screenplay where the hunky jock lets Michael Myers fuck him and winds up his BBF. 

Or go trick-or-treating, then whoever gets the most candy is able to eat Jason Voorhees...

Back to work...

Went through 6 chapters of APoS-Derry, slow and steady. I increased the font size to 18points and found two more missing periods and an absent quotation mark. I also added words a couple of times when I felt they would help the clarity of what was being said.

I cut out a bit more repetition, too. Both times it was a paragraph that was repeating something I'd already written, just in a different way. But overall it's working for me, now.

I had a nice chat with a Mac Technician who showed me a few things I can do with the Air that I couldn't do with the Pro, and sent me links for further info. But what it boils down to is I'll need to get Adobe Photoshop Ps to do the book cover. So be it. I can't buy it, I have to lease by the month or by the year. The one I'm looking at is $30-35 a month, but I can cancel anytime.

Love going online with Twitter to find another mass-shooting, this time in Lewiston, ME. 22 dead and 60 injured. Just another day in the life of chaos America.

God, it makes me tired.

Thank god for Taco Tuesday

It was 10:45pm when I decided to get in my car, drive to a Taco Bell and have an order of crispy tacos. I wasn't feeling very happy and howling at people on Twitter and Instagram and wasn't really hungry, but damn those things changed my mood for the better.

Reason for the mood? I saw the ophthalmologist, this morning, and it turns out I have a vitreous detachment in my right eye. Can't be fixed; I'll have this spot in my vision till I die. Or could lead to loss of vision. I'm due back to his office in 30 days to see if it's stabile or advancing. So fucking perfect.

I've got the beginning of a cataract in my left eye. Skin cancer on my right jawline. Diabetes. High blood pressure. And a host of other old man ailments. It's time to junk me and buy a newer model. And while I can joke about it, now, I was not doing so well earlier.

I'm cutting back on social media. I'll still check it, now and then, but I want to focus on finishing the full 3 volumes of APoS, and then Dair's Window, and the rest of Blood Angel before I have a chance to go blind. It's too damned easy for me to get lost in dealing with idiots on Twitter and Instagram, and they do seem to be multiplying in number.

I've already unfollowed a couple people who've been screaming nonstop about Israel's bombings in Gaza, but who were all but silent when Russia did the exact same thing to people in Ukraine. Both sides are at fault for the catastrophe in Gaza. Ukraine did not warrant having Russia invade and slaughter her citizens. But the world is going nuts for the poor Palestinians while Ukraine is all but being ignored, now.

I know too much history to be kind about that sort of shit. I'm no scholar, but I'm not fool enough to think that forcing Ukraine to give away part of her territory would solve a damned thing, as some really, really, really rich idiots are suggesting. Chamberlin proved appeasement doesn't work in 1938, for crying out loud.

I'm not vanishing, just minimizing and keeping focus on what I need to do. It's probably the end of the world, anyway, since the ice in Antarctica is melting away and soon Miami will be underwater. The Planet will take care of itself, since we're too fucking selfish to do it, and Earth won't give a shit if humanity becomes extinct.

Funny time to be writing a book about a little war in a tiny country on a small island with thousands of years of history.

When will I learn?

I should never take a long nap in the afternoon. I wake up cranky and lost, and it takes me forever to get myself back on track. Then I'm down instead of up and don't want to do anything. I could have just crashed on the couch for 20 minutes and been fine, but no...it was on top the bed under a cover and gone for 2 hours.

Fortunately, this was after I got an appointment for my eye, in the morning, and set up an online chat with a techie about my Mac's capacities for the afternoon. I also had a chat with Caladex and seems the China in Print Fair will happen, next year, and they wonder if I'd be open to going.  To which I said, Yes. I'd love an excuse to get out of the US after the election, especially since there will be madness following if the Blue Wave wipes out the GOP (as I hope it will).

I've got an itch to start on Blood Angel-Franz, soon as I'm done with APoS-Derry. I know the first line in this piece. They want to kill the man I love, and I don't know if I can. The line's a paragraph unto itself. Then the story jumps back to explain what happened to bring this about. That would be the first half. The second half would be dealing with Léonidès' mistake in not killing Franz.

I show in volume two of the story that Leon has no trouble killing, so long as the person deserves it. But Franz doesn't, yet. He's a soldier who's killed other men in battle, but that's considered acceptable. How do you go about killing someone who's done nothing wrong merely on the suspicion they would develop into a murderous monster? A preemptive execution.

Would it have been morally acceptable to go back in time to smother Hitler or Stalin in their cribs, as babies, knowing what they would do when they grew into men? I don't necessarily believe that things would have turned out better. For fun, I once worked out a whole scenario of what might have happened if Hitler had died in jail or as a child, from some disease.

Germany was mess after WW1, and when the Great Depression roared it, it grew worse. There was a growing communist party, growing unionism, growing anger at the rich, still aimed at the Jews. Russia was meddling in the country's politics and, when the capitalists heading the government in Berlin took strong, violent action against the Unions and Communists, Stalin supplied materiel to them so civil war broke out.

Stalin already had designs on Poland and used the country's support of the German Government to roar in and take over, then pushed into Germany to protect his supporters. England and France declared war as Poland's allies, but Soviet troops still marched into Paris. Took over the entire continent. Japan still hit Pearl Harbor, but Russia and Japan were not allies so the US focused on the Pacific.

England could not stop the Soviet war machine because the Russian factories were a thousand miles farther away and they had the materials to keep building bombers and fighters and tanks and guns, so London finally surrendered. And Ireland danced a jig because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And boom -- the whole of Europe became a satellite of Moscow, instead of just the eastern half.

Details, details...

Today was spent working on my new laptop, checking the links, verifying passcodes, updating settings, trying to figure out why some things that did work on the Pro won't work on the Air, and getting my printer to talk to it. That was fun...but finally successful. All while doing 3 loads of laundry.

Tomorrow, I'm harassing my ophthalmologist to look at my right eye, ASAP. I've got a weird shadowy spot that suddenly showed up in my vision, with spidery webs radiating from it. Spooking the hell out of me...wondering if it's a result of my diabetes. It's not strong; in fact, if I'm looking at a dark space or one that has lots of patterns in it, I can't even see the thing. It's when I'm dealing with my monitor that it becomes obvious.

Once I know when I'm seeing him, I'll set up an appointment with a Mac specialist to make certain I'm getting the right version of Photoshop. Adobe is offering several, and there's a monthly charge to license any of them. I want to see if one labeled PS is good for my needs -- designing dust jackets and book covers. And maybe they can explain how I managed to set up the keyboard so that I can change an e to an é and a c to a ç...because I honestly have no idea what I did, and it would not do it, yesterday.

Next comes the push for APoS-Derry, and I'm starting from page 1...and this will be the final go-through, no matter what. I could easily work on honing this book for the next 10 years, if I don't stop myself.

I also now have a gmail address. Not sure what I'll do with it, yet. If it'll be for future business or if I'll shove personal stuff onto that and use my .mac for business/writing only. Whatever happens is what happens.

But I do feel like I'm back on track...

Heaven...

I got my new MacBook Air laptop today, a few days early. Migrated all my documents and files and apps over, and am ready to go. Took next to no time and I'm already liking it. The keyboard feels right. I even splurged on a sleek little mouse that looks more like a piece of fancy sushi but is so elegant to work with, it's a joy. I've upgraded Word to 365 and love how APoS looks on it. I also played it safe and got AppleCare, because it came in handy with the Pro.

I don't have all the details set the way I want, yet, but I'm happy and relieved that this is ready to use, so quickly. Next comes getting Photoshop and working on the cover for the book. I want a sketchpad and stylus but Mac doesn't have those for the Air. I'll have to go aftermarket.

I'm told I can send my old Pro in for credit, but I don't want to let go till I know for sure everything is working okay or migrated properly. I doubt there's a problem, but I'm too unsure of my ability in tech to let that govern me, yet.

What's funny is, I worked out the basic plot for Blood Angel-Franz (volume 3). The Oyim refuse to give Leonides permission to make Franz a Blood Angel because they sense there is a darkness in him that should not be unleashed. Once a human is turned, their true nature is revealed and all lies fall away.

Unfortunately, Franz knows about the vampire world and has to be killed. As punishment for allowing this to happen, Leon is ordered to feed on him till true death. But he can't; Franz is too beautiful a man. So he winds up turned...and a danger to the community. But he cannot be controlled except in the cruelest of ways, and that is not in Leon's nature.

That's why he goes looking for his sister, Gabrielle; to offer a swap. Franz for Dmitriy, because she'd have no problem taking control of the crazy little fuck.

She thinks.

Starting over...

 I shifted APoS from the PC to my old Mac and it's not matching up with the version I'd had, before, page count wise. So I'm starting from the very beginning and going through to make certain everything is properly set. The first two chapters are okay, though I did find another typo. Thek is not a word.

A new job popped up in New Jersey, it looks like. One of those maybe things that I think will wind up being too expensive for the people involved, but you still have to do the work. Give 'em a quote and hope they tell you yes or no instead of just walking away in silence.

There's going to be a 2-job trip to NYC area -- 1 up the Hudson to the Cuomo Bridge, the other in Manhattan's Upper East Side -- all in mid-November. Then comes the LA one the beginning of December. I'm feeling tired just thinking about them.

Nothing much to say. Just want to meditate on these gay weddings from around the world...

Love is love around the world.

APoS-New World For Old

Tomorrow I'm shifting the work I've done on APoS Derry back to my Mac and continue from there. If I'm going to get this done in time, I need to get my ass in gear. I could easily work on this book for another 10 years and not feel it's 100% right. It's time to cut it off.

I'm ready to begin working on volume two -- New World For Old. I'm more comfortable with what happens in this volume because I lived in Houston for eight years and have a basic idea of the city and its layout. Not to mention the small town mentality of it. I want this done fast so I can dig into the final volume, Home Not Home.

Something that's kicked me harder into gear is that Gacy documentary. I remember how caught up in it I was, when it was happening...and that brought to mind the Houston serial murders of Dean Corll, five years prior. I lived in San Antonio, at the time, and Elmer Wayne Henley, his associate, was tried for the murders, there. Seems like the 70s was the decade of the serial killers, both straight and gay.

So there's a moment in the story where Brendan is invited by Henley to go to a party, late one night as he's walking home. It's only because he has a circulating fan in hand and wants to fix it so he can sell it that Brendan decides not to go. He doesn't want to cart it off to a party. A couple weeks later, he learns Henley shot Corll and it comes out that 27 boys had been raped, tortured and killed by the two...and Henley had planned that for him.

It has an effect on Brendan, skirting that close to a torturous death. He'd been brought to Houston after being injured in a bombing, in Derry, and jolted into a catatonic state. He's only just begun working his way out of it by reverting to his old habits. Find junk, fix it up and make a little money off it. This somewhat near-death experience does a lot to jolt him back to reality.

And also get him to decide not to keep so much to himself. The bombing showed him how suddenly life can be torn apart, and having Henley try to procure him for Corll to kill shows him he needs to build a circle of friends, like he had in Derry. People he can trust, because he really is in unknown territory, in Houston.

So I'm sticking to my schedule -- publish APoS-Derry in January 2024. Aim for HNH in June or July.

I HATE PCs...

On this long plane ride back and forth to Seattle, I tried to do a final pass-through on APoS-Derry to check for mistakes, this time on the company PC. It shows up a bit differently, in Word, and that helps me see errors.

Of course, there's no room to use a mouse so had to rely on the trackpad. I made sure it's at the least sensitive setting and proceeded to work...

And that motherfucking POS did everything it could to screw me over. It would highlight words and sentences even when I did not want it to. The cursor would not set where I wanted it. It fucked up part of my formatting and I have no idea how, so I have to reformat the entire text to make sure it's right...and complete. Because the page count is down by 20, even though the word count is the same while I did nothing to shift the margins or font size.

Seriously -- if I even so much as held my hand over the trackpad, it would think I wanted it to do something...and would do it. Like scroll down a page without so much as a query, and so fast I'd get lost. I got halfway through before giving up. It was that or have a coronary. 

My new laptop's not due in till next week, and I cannot wait for it. I'm getting a stylus and pad to work with it, as well as a mouse, and PCs can eat shit, for all I care.

So on the trip back...on a JetBlue redeye that was running late...I watched Casablanca and Singin' in the Rain instead of working or trying to sleep. I cannot sleep on a plane. Too many people around. I can't even sleep in a room that has someone else in it. So even though I've seen both movies a dozen times, I enjoyed them, again.

But then I found a documentary -- John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise -- being offered through Peacock. I watched some of it and now feel a deep dark interest to watch the full thing. It's six episodes and JB only had three, available, but it's another fucking subscription service. No way.

Seattle

Heading out for the Seattle Book Fair, tomorrow, and not back till early AM Tuesday, on a redeye. Quick trip, but I've been to the city so many times I've seen just about everything I wanted to see. Be nice to catch up with some people I know in the book business, but I'm staying at a different hotel so no easy access to Jack-in-the-Box's cheap tacos. Maybe when I'm in LA, beginning of December.

I'll miss doing a ferry ride. I've done one back and forth to Bremerton every time I went, but won't have the time, this trip. But, again, I've done it so often.

I'm not taking my Mac with me, either, so no posting till I'm back. I've got the company PC with a copy of APoS on it and will use that for proofing and for emails. But it doesn't have anywhere near the same links I've set up on my own laptop so little online stuff. Once I've transferred everything on this Mac to my new one, I'd like to recycle this thing. Maybe someone else can get some use out of it, once it's been refurbished. I don't want to keep it.

Spent half the day at Caladex getting ready for the fair and plotting out an addition to a NY job in mid-November. Found out they have a couple more potential jobs in February and March...and though I'd told them I was cutting back from that my bank book kicked me in the ass and said, Don't be stupid. So if anything comes from them, I'll do them. I'm so deep in debt, it's that or bankruptcy.

Besides, I've got the expenses of putting APoS out into the world. Can't let that go by the wayside. I've got the first book's jacket, but the other two will need to be plotted out to at least be somewhat consistent in look and feel, and those will be difficult.

I've gotten some good feedback on the second version of the synopsis. I'll let it sit till I've finished this pass on Derry and formatted the text of the novel for publication, in hardback and ebook. By then, I should know what will and will not work for it.

Rewrite of synopsis...

 

Maybe this is more involving? More Dynamic?

--------

Derry, Northern Ireland. It is 1966 and the Catholic minority has begun to push for civil rights against discrimination by the Protestant majority. One-man-one-vote. Decent housing. Good jobs. These are the most basic of requests, yet are still too much for those in power to accept. So there are confrontations and demonstrations that, step-by-step, grow more and more violent. 

Caught in the middle of this is Brendan Kinsella, a lad who just wants to live his life and follow his dreams. But history has decided to interfere.

Just days after his tenth birthday, his father is murdered. Because the man was a brutal drunk who kept the family in extreme poverty, Brendan is not sorry he is dead. 

However, he was killed by two Protestants, which sets his mother, Bernadette, on a path to Irish Nationalism. The third of her six children, Brendan is the one she constantly picks at and belittles as simple-minded, despite his knack for repairing things. In response, he stays quiet, observant, and consistently goes his own way. Even though it sometimes leads him into trouble. 

Through the next six years, Brendan is caught up in: 

• the Civil Rights demonstrations in Derry 
• the attack on peaceful marchers at Burntollet Bridge 
• the Battle of Bogside, the following August 
• the arrival of British troops to separate the two warring sides 
• the re-introduction of internment without trial
• Bloody Sunday 

There is also his growing relationship with a Protestant girl, one that has to be kept secret for fear of reprisals...from both sides...as he fights to find a place of safety in a world careening towards chaos.

This is volume one of three volumes.

------------

The situation between Israel and Hamas, in the Gaza Strip, is shredding me. I support Israel's right to exist and consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization. They keep needling Israel with rockets fired indiscriminately into the country, hoping they hit something. And sometimes they have, but it's more just an exercise in childish belligerence. 

They've also maintained a corrupt stranglehold of control on the people in Gaza since being elected in 2004, and won't allow new elections. They use the population as human shields, like cowards, and their slaughter in Israel last weekend was flat out evil.

But now Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately. They put out communiques claiming they've only targeted Hamas terrorists, but hundreds of children are dead, and the video coming out has destroyed Israel's image of righteousness. I've also learned Israel refused to let any of the weapons they've developed, like the Iron Dome, be sent to Ukraine for her defense. Like they're on Russia's side.

Russia funded and equipped Hamas, through Iran. Maybe even assisted and trained them in the terrorist attack. And Israel still supports that vile country? Somebody make it make sense.

Synopsis for the dust jacket

This is my first pass at a synopsis for the dust jacket's inner flap:

---------

All Brendan Kinsella wanted was to be left alone to live his life. He has hopes and dreams, but he slowly comes to realize that history has a way of intruding on one's plans.

It is 1966 in Derry, Northern Ireland. The Catholic minority has begun their push for civil rights against discrimination by the Protestant majority. One-man-one-vote. Decent housing. Good jobs. But even these minimal requests are too much for the ones in power to accept, so the push back and forth grows harsher and more violent.

A Place of Safety begins with the murder of Brendan's father mere days after his tenth birthday. Because the man was a brutal drunk who kept the family in extreme poverty, Brendan is not sorry he is dead. But he also has a difficult relationship with his mother, Bernadette. The third of her six children, he is the one she constantly belittles as simple-minded, despite his knack for repairing things. He is also quiet, observant, and consistently goes his own way. Even though it sometimes leads him into trouble.

Over the course of more than six years, the story follows Brendan through: 

• the Civil Rights demonstrations in Derry 

• the attack on peaceful marchers at Burntollet Bridge

• the lead-up to The Battle of Bogside, the following August 

• the arrival of British troops to separate the two warring sides 

• the re-introduction of internment without trial

• Bloody Sunday

There is also Brendan's growing relationship with a Protestant girl, one that has to kept secret for fear of reprisals -- from both sides -- as he fights to find a place of safety in a world careening towards chaos.

----------

I ordered my new laptop, today, but won't have it till October 25th. Doesn't give me a lot of of time to work up the dust jacket before submitting to Publishers Weekly for a review. I'd like a review I could add to the book's dust jacket. They're kind of picky so won't guarantee anything, but it doesn't cost me a dime. Going through BookLife would be $400. Can't afford that, right now.

Set to have my skin cancer cut out on December 14th. Six days later, I'm flying down to San Antonio for Christmas with the family. It'll be my last visit to Texas. Like Florida, I no longer feel safe there. But I can handle 5 days. I think.

I'll concentrate on eating lots of real Tex-Mex and BBQ.

Done, again

Okay, finished this proofing of APoS-Derry and it's at 139,107 words. And I am beat. But I'm off to Seattle for the book fair, on Saturday, so am going to start another proofing, but this time on a PC. It shows Word docs differently from Mac, and that is a good thing. This last pass will be to make certain all the commas, apostrophes, em-dashes and quotation marks are right. There have been issues with them, in the past.

That may be a bit on the anal side. Because like with the quotation marks at, for example, the end of some dialogue that had an extra space after an ellipsis or an em-dash, it would be facing the wrong way. But I've stopped allowing any spaces after em-dashes and ellipses. I just want to make certain.

I'm flying JetBlue so they offer a bit more legroom than Southwest does, so I can deal better with a laptop. And while the office PC I have is bulky, it's better suited to my needs, for this.

In a 6x9 format in Times New Romans with 11 point font, it should be around 350 pages long, in hardcover. If I keep the price at $29.95, I make less than a dollar a book at a 55% discount. But I can't go 40% because a lot of independent book stores won't carry it and Amazon gets nasty about their percentage, and I don't want to charge over the magic $30 till I have to.

I considered setting it up through KDP, but I keep hearing horror stories about Amazon and self-published authors. Things like claiming the book they publish was plagiarized from them, if they also try to set it up in Kindle. Having their earnings disappear. Questionable reporting of sales. And all sorts of difficulty getting it corrected. Ingram's not perfect, but I can deal with them. I've dealt with Amazon in the past and really do not want to have to do so, again.

Issues...

 Betyween the horror in Israel, the terrorism in Ukraine, the fact I am having my (probably) first bout of cancer, and my head feels like it wants to fall off my shoulders and roll away, it's all I can do, right now, to keep proofing APoS, so just thought I'd post a nice story I found on Tumblr.

And here we go...

A bit off-center, right now. Got a diagnosis that one of my biopsies came back with basal cell carcinoma. Which is a relatively mild skin cancer requiring it be cut away. It's along my jawline, so I may wind up with a sexy scar I can claim I got from a sword-fight or something, but at the moment I'm not really with it. God knows what this is going to cost me, monetarily.

That's it. I just can't concentrate, right now. I got some more done on APoS beforehand, so that's good, but I'm gonna hermit, for a bit.

Moving right along...

I'm 40% of the way through Derry, to the point where Brendan is heading out to join his brother, Eamonn, on the People's Democracy March from Belfast to Derry. It started New Year's Day, 1969, and is due to be completed on January 4th--walking 70 miles in just under 4 days.

It was undertaken to highlight the need for fair treatment and housing for Catholics, in Derry. Protestant Loyalists have caused disruptions along the way, but the marchers are refusing to retaliate, hoping to illustrate that it's a peaceful march.

Brendan suspected there would be trouble and learned a number of people were taking a bus to a village called Claudy to join with the marchers on the last leg of their journey. His mother refuses to let him join them, so he sneaks out and walks towards the town...but never makes it. He happens upon a group of men preparing rocks and cudgels to attack the marchers with and cannot get past them.

He tries to warn people, but no one believes him. Sure enough, at Burntollet Bridge the marchers are attacked by crowds of Loyalists and helped along by the Constables who were supposed to keep the peace. Dozens were hurt, but the march continued. They made it to the Guildhall, in Derry, and then all hell broke loose once people learned of what had happened.

I took some poetic license and had Brendan find a few of the injured in a car that ran off the road. He helps get them to Altnagelvin Hospital, about 3-4 miles down the road, and there he learns Eamonn was badly hurt but will get better.

I've done that walk, myself. Took a bus to Burntollet Bridge and walked back. It rained half the time, and I stopped at a petrol station to have an okay slice of pizza and a coke, but made it in about 3 hours. I also stayed mostly dry since I had a poncho with me. Worked well.

It's pretty country, and hilly, and doing that walk shifted that part of the story a little. That's why I keep going back to Derry, to make certain I'm getting at least some of the logistics right. Of course, the road is well-paved, now and there's more development along it, but it served me well enough.

Slow-going...

Looks like my trip to NYC the middle of November is going to be extended. Still waiting on final word from the client, but it means an additional 3 days in the city...well, in Newark. Need to finish working out the costing for it and see how that fits in with the clients preferences. I know the shop this is for and expect there will be no issue with costs; it's just getting some questions answered--that's the hard part.

Dug through more of APoS and only two additional typos found. Another missing "." and a missing apostrophe. Things like that are so easy to miss in a regular font but jump out at you in the larger. I'm finally at the point where this proofing is just part of the deal. I'm not pushing it. It's in the service of the final book. And I am going through it, again, to be sure, once this pass is done.

I'm also finding I am comfortable with 95% of what I've written. I'd made a couple of changes and edits, here and there to add to clarity, but overall it reads nicely. Smoothly. And it's helped that I've removed so many ellipses from the text.

I'm reminded of how I used to put a period after an em-dash, and sometimes a comma before. It was very 19th Century English and people commented on it. Strunk &White helped me on that. I'm also prone to using commas like a Victorian writer, which is no longer necessary.

Now the main deal is having paragraphs that go too long. Apparently, today's readers' attention spans are unable to drive through more than 6 lines of wordage before zoning out. It also interferes with speed readers. God, I wonder how they handle Faulker or Joyce?

At least I'm able to adapt and find a comfortable way of following today's guidelines without becoming slave to them. I have a very conversational style, and sometimes it runs on. But so long as it fits and makes sense, I'm good.

Unless I'm in a freak-out phase when nothing suits me.

No escaping the bastard things...

Typos. They are of the devil. Vile and diseased, with invisibility cloaks to hide themselves from you until you are fool enough to think you've conquered them and then it's all, Ha, ha, fooled you! Not once. Not twice. But, so far...9 times. And I'm only 25% through the text.

They're minor things. A period missing at the end of a sentence. A word not pluralized...or pluralized when it should not be. Another word that could be seen as meaning something in the vernacular but not what I intended, which I can't blame anyone for; I may have actually intended it when I wrote it but now don't think it was actually right in any way, form or fashion.

This is what happens when you increase the font size to double and go through your work step by step, taking breaks to keep from being caught up in it. I know it's human nature to fill in words automatically if you feel they should be there. For example: ...put it back where thought it went. Most would read that as ...put it back where I thought it went without realizing it. Because that's what the context suggests. But it still is a mistake and needs to be corrected.

Swear to God, finding mistakes like that in the middle of a paragraph sends me into cringes of horror. Three different people have proofed this thing, besides me, and none of them caught those typos. Only my anal assholiness is what's bringing them to my attention.

Now I feel the need to go through it, again, after I'm done this time and it's sat a month, and verify I caught them all...knowing I probably have not.

How the hell do major writers avoid this nonsense?

Freedom is...

As is my usual practice, working on APoS Derry has kicked my mind into gear and brought up a possible reason for why Brendan is so hated by his mother. He's not his Da's son. Not sure how far I'm willing to go with this, yet, but I've already set it up that Ma changed after his birth. She became obsessed with cleanliness. She was always distant with him. Discusses how the other children she bore were little trouble coming out, but Brendan took more than two full days. She's never happy with him.

What's more, he doesn't look like his father; he says he looks more like his mother. He has health issues no one else in the family shares. And he consistently goes his own way without real regard for the consequences.

The idea may have been creeping around in the back of my head for a while, now. I got a hint of it when, in New World for Old, he learns one of Paidrig's sisters-in-law was raped and treated like a slut to the point she killed herself. Even into the 70s and 80s, in societies as tightly moralistic as those in Derry, rape would have been seen as the woman's fault unless she was beaten to a pulp or killed, so him mother would never admit he's the product of anyone but his father.

Hell, in some parts of the US, it's still that way, despite the progress in thought. Even now, I hear the occasional story of a teenage girl being kicked out of her home for becoming pregnant, usually by God-fearing assholes. The same type that kick gay kids out while screaming they'll go to hell. The normal Christian crap.

If this does go into the story...and I'm not yet certain of it...I don't think I'll reveal it till the third chapter. That's subtitled Home Not Home, and I need to keep that in my head because it fits. Brendan is using an assumed identity and begins digging deeper into his family.

I've also worked out how Brendan hears his father tell one of his stories. I'd already flirted with the idea, but I know where to put it and how, and why no one's known about it. There was just the one; the rest, he was too drunk to make real sense. Same for when he sang. So the student recording him shrugged it off. The one good story is noted in their files, when Brendan calls to ask about it, and they let him hear and make his own copy. But the school administrators felt no need to seek out the man's family to let them know. It's not like the school was using it for anything.

Just another casual slap against the Catholics.

Publication date set for APoS.

I've decided to self-publish A Place of Safety-Derry on January 2nd, 2024, in hardback and ebook. I'm not even going to consider doing a paperback edition till I have all three volumes out and available. As of now, it looks like the price will be $29.95 for hardback and $4.95 for electronic. Considering the blood, sweat, tears and sanity I've plowed into this tale, it's worth that, at least.

I'm also going to be doing all I can to get it noticed, in advance. Set up advance purchasing on Amazon and B&N, if I can. Get reviews from those who've read it. See if Publisher's Weekly will give me one, or Book Life. Maybe even take out ads, I don't know. I get inundated with people wanted to help my books gain an audience and get read, so maybe I should talk to some and see what they offer.

I know it's going to be a lot of expense and probably get little return on it, but I'm so deeply invested in Brendan's story, it has to be done right. I may fall flat on my face, but at least I'll have tried my best. Because this agent thing did not work, at all. Maybe I should be asking them to rep Carli's Kills. It's got MF sex, violence and rock and roll in it. That sells, they say.

I've also been thinking of turning Mine to Kill into as scary a suspense/horror book as I can, for next Hallowe'en. Horror also sells. I guess I should read more of Stephen King's works to get a better feel for what works in that genre. He's a master at it, like it's a sixth sense when he writes. I loved his early work, but I was reading for pleasure, not to learn. That has to change.

I've also decided to get a MacBook Air 13" with an M2 chip. Get a stylus and pad to use. License Word and Photoshop, which irritates me but is the only real way to go. If i do the Mac Mini, it's limited to my desktop, I have to get a new monitor and the cost is more for what is, essentially, less. It's not like I'm doing great art projects or extreme data crunching; I just need something basic and the Air fits.

Look like life is letting me move forward, finally.