Surround Yourself With Beauty When You Can

Welcome to the first Substack post made with my new laptop. My old MacBook Air was starting to show signs of deterioration: unresponsive keys, lagging, overheating despite the fan going berserk. I wanted to wait to see if there would be a price drop after the next Apple Event, but everything I read said that there would not be any computer announcements, just software and iPhone stuff. Plus, I was concerned about the up and down tariffing nonsense, so I pulled the cord as it were. I’ll continue to keep the previous laptop around until I am sure that everything is working well with this one, and then we will see if we can get it to work better for The Mrs. Her current laptop is even older than mine, but she rarely uses it for memory intensive function so maybe she can get an “upgrade” by way of hand me downs. At least, that is what she is hoping for.

In the meantime, I am accumulating stickers for this one. It just looks so naked.

I am writing this from what we have dubbed the sunroom. It looks out on the backyard and The Mrs’ flower garden. The roses and peonies are in full bloom and that arch is a wonderful thing to stare at as I try to gather my thoughts.

Part of the reason that I brought up the sunroom is that after almost two years of living in the New House™, we finally got some furniture in here. Well, that’s not completely true. We had the extra chairs from our dining room set in here. I also moved my standing desk in here when it got too warm for fires in the big fireplace. The couch, chairs, and table are actually an outdoor set purchased from CostCo that we will be keeping inside. The Mrs is very happy, especially with the chairs that rock AND swivel. Plus, we got two more hex wrenches to add to our collection.

Ugh. If any of you have cool crafting ideas that can be made with hex wrenches, please reach out to me.

We attended an absolutely beautiful wedding over the weekend which gave us a chance to dress up for a change. The Mrs looked stunning in a dress we purchased in San Francisco a few years ago. I’m sure that the people at the dry cleaners will pass out when I drop off a suit instead of my usual handful of kilts.

On a very personal note, I am pleased to announce that my A1C is actually in the normal range. Yay for modern medicine!

Listening To: That’s Not Right by Scott Meyer. I just started this one yesterday, but the story of a radio personality who discusses the paranormal who is sent on a road trip with a videographer already has me chuckling.

Currently Reading: Laserblasted by Michael Warren Lucas. If you haven’t had the chance to see the sci-fi film Laserblast consider yourself lucky. It’s beyond awful. Mr. Lucas has turned his sarcastic humor and amazing storytelling ability to the task of telling the story that should have been the plot of that late ‘70s stinker.

Current Obsession: Mead recipes. Seriously. I may have a problem. I know that the postal carrier is getting sick of delivering giant jugs of mead.

Work continues on the proof copy of Nightmerica: Corruptions of the American Dream. We waited until we had the physical copy in hand to actually read the submissions (the benefit of working with an amazing editor — thank you Amanda Worthington!). Y’all! This book is amazing. We can’t wait until you have a chance to get your hands on it.

Speaking of, if you want to be one of the first people to grab a copy, head over to the Kickstarter campaign RIGHT NOW! Not only can you get the book for a discount, you also have a chance to pick up some great swag. Even if you can’t afford to back, we would really appreciate it if you could share the link with your friends. Hell, share it with your enemies and maybe they will become friends.

Some People I Have Killed is just about ready to go to press. We are just waiting on some final tweaks to the cover art.

We will not be attending The Stokers this weekend, but we are a sponsor. We wish all of the best to all attendees, especially the nominees. We will be experiencing some serious FOMO.

This is our last “free weekend” before back to back conventions. First up, Curious at the Crossroads next weekend (21 - 22 June) in Flint and then Horror on Main the following weekend (27 - 29 June) in Harrisburg, PA.

What follows will be a political rant, so if you are only here for the fun stuff and/or the publishing news, or if you are just not in the proper headspace for this right now, we understand. Stop reading here and we will see you back here next week.

Still reading? OK then.

I fully expected to have a rant about the party in charge of the country’s hypocritical celebration of Temu Nero after gutting essential services in the name of cost cutting. The point of this would be that if they really wanted to cut costs they could NOT have a parade befitting a dictator and use that money for something useful. I was going to discuss the ugliness of the Big Bill of Bullshit and how convenient it was that the people who voted for it immediately attempted to distance themselves from it by claiming they didn’t read it, even that is their ONE AND ONLY FUCKING JOB.

Then LA happened.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into too much detail about how absolutely wrong and patently illegal the use of the military to suppress riots that aren’t happening is. I’m sure that you have plenty of that on your feed. Instead I’m going to discuss something even scarier.

The optics of the coming weekend.

Temu Nero and his party (never forget the culpability of all of the Republican party) are having a giant military parade at the same time that they are pushing for the use of that same military (OK, to be fair a different branch of the military) against US citizens. Anyone with even an ounce of common sense would see how terrifyingly bad these visuals are. Someone should have pulled those in charge aside and said “You know, maybe right now is not the best time for M1 Abrams tanks to be rolling through the nation’s capitol.”

But it is happening anyway.

There are two conclusions we can draw from this. The first is that this is exactly the kind of image which those in charge want to put out there. Yes, you won’t be able to afford life saving medicine and we’ve dismantled mental health services to veterans and we’ve cut funding to education but if you don’t like it — look it our big fucking guns. So don’t speak up.

I’m sure that this is part of it. As is the case in Los Angels, the goal is to show that any resistance, even a peaceful one (especially a peaceful one) will not be tolerated. If you don’t like the current regime, we are going to throw you in jail, even if you are an elected official (especially if you are an elected official?).

What may be even worse is that the voice of reason that I mentioned earlier? That’s gone. At lest the last time the Tangerine Twatwaffle was in office there were people around him who were willing to say “Dude, that’s not a good decision” or “Dude, that’s fucking illegal.”

Those people are gone. They have been replaced by people who will stay silent as our rights and their very jobs are eliminated. Recall: much of what Temu Nero is throwing out there should have gone through Congress but those officials are willing to sit back and let it happen instead of standing up and at least fighting to do their jobs. I suspect that for many this is because they think that in time the madness will pass and they will be able to say “Yeah, but those were all Executive Orders. I didn’t personally vote for them.”

Yeah, but you didn’t speak up either. To quote the song “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Others, as we are already seeing, are relying on the “Oh, but I didn’t know.”

Yeah, but you should. We’ve been telling you what was going to happen for years now. And yet…

If you will be protesting on No Kings Day (click here for a list of protests in your area) this weekend, I urge you to read these ACLU guidelines.

Be strong. Be safe.