Despite an apparent penchant for neglecting blogs, I am indeed alive!

New projects underway, old projects finished up, other old projects spurned, and a desperate need for income has made me begin hunting for a *gasp* legitimate job to perform on the side while I write and so on and so forth.

I recently finished the paranormal suspense/horror novel The Book Without a Name, and in other news I won the Tales of the Dead horror short story contest (The Tales of the Dead, http://www.foundationforbcpl.org/about-us/news/tales-of-the-dead-contest/ https://www.facebook.com/events/680678415412907/permalink/705694932911255/#)! I got to perform a reading around a fire pit over in Reisterstown, Maryland at the Toast Among Ghosts celebration of Edgar Allen Poe, and my story "Shrinking" will be published on the bcpl website.

I will post the link to Shrinking when they publish it/when I manage to find it.

In addition, as I'm entering the "Dear Lucky Agent" contest hosted by Chuck Sambuchino at Writer's Digest, and judged by the venerable Alec Shane, I am including a link supporting the contest! It's a free contest for writers of thriller and horror in which your work may get reviewed by an agent. Which is pretty much the dream.  http://tinyurl.com/zagnp4r

Wyte

A significantly appreciable time later, if you will pardon the emphatic redundancy, I finished the second draft of Wyte. And now for something completely different (and then returning to hack it to scraps with the murderous machete of editing).

I'll just pretend like there wasn't a gap of two months without posts. I'll update as things become relevant or read-worthy, or as frequently as I can.

Other projects to work on include The Book Without a Name and Walk in the Park, possibly Blessing. Also, I may have a horror short story if I can ever figure a solid ending to it, which I suppose I would post here.

In other news, I have: 
        -Rediscovered Chipotle 
        -Attempted paddle boarding (the garish beacon of my freakishly pale, grub-like skin reflecting the sun likely caused satellite disruption) 
        -Become deeply enamored with red box
        -An anniversary tomorrow with my wife. It's been a good year. Perhaps the night shift-induced isolation has inflicted sufficient stockholm syndrome on her, but either way she has been remarkably understanding and patient with my constant nitpicking over obscure details and my desire to slink away and write instead of attend family functions. I also have a library set up. It is magnificent.

In the realms of book-reading I have discovered that Simple Plan is a very well written thriller by Scott Smith and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is as pretentious as... well... using words like magnificent to describe a bunch of half filled bookshelves of odds and ends that are crammed into a room more notable for its catacomb heaps of empty water bottles and the dusty corpses of vanquished frozen lasagnas. McCarthy is a fantastic writer at times, but I can only take so many. Sentence fragments. Dramatic. Emphatic. Systematic and metaphoric. Portions. Before it becomes so disjointed that immersion is impossible.

In still other news, a lab mouse is an efficient, effective snack from a caloric point of view. Feeling a little sluggish at the gym? One mouse contains about 40 calories, but approximately 4 grams of protein. This is not to endorse or encourage eating wild animals without first consulting a psychiatrist.

Moved

In the wild uncertainty of a world neither known nor understood I can draw a great comfort from the few constants that exist.

Death. Taxes. Miserable interactions with internet providers.

I moved into my new house. It's pretty great. The move has wreaked havoc on my writing time table, however, and on my blog upkeep. Just getting back into the swing of around two thousand words a day. Sometimes even the right ones. Sometimes in the right order. Other times, not so much. But wrong words can be fun too.

Fortunately, in my time away, I've been spared a deluge of topics that are mind crushingly worthless, such as Jenner's genitals (does it matter? I'm not having sex with them), emerging political campaigns (does it matter? No matter what, one of them is going to screw me) and trending hashtags (it doesn't matter.).

Instead, I've been spending my days filled with moving things, accidentally stabbing sofas, trying not to antagonize my brilliant gorgeous and supremely forgiving wife who loves that sofa, and the plight of the lemming. And occasionally, actually managing to read and write.

They're not suicidal, you know. Lemmings. They're just prone to anxiety and if you scare them enough, you can make them stampede in extremely dangerous places.

Some wrong words on a wrong story instead of anything useful, however, are enclosed below. Feel free to skip ahead if you don't feel like reading a tragic story of love found, love lost, ambition and defecation. Any resemblance to my wife's life experience is unintentional* and not at all a real thing*.

The door creaks open on worn hinges, barely a sound disturbing the blackness contained. The room is empty, dark and cool. Vague box-like shapes form the few minimalist contents there-in, and the wash of light from the hallway illuminates only clean floor tiles and sterile white walls. She is alone. She hurriedly slips inside, a quiet anxiety fueling her steps. As her foot crosses the threshold the lights snap into life, taught with a pulsing fluorescent glow that makes everything seem dead and false, washed out, a simulacrum of life. The heavy wooden door softly groans shut behind her, letting out a firm, audible thud as it finds its place. A smile steals a sinuous path along her lips.

“Hellooooo!” She calls out, to no response. A totally vacant bathroom, one that has not been despoiled in the past fifteen minutes, or however long it takes the automatic lighting system to turn itself off. Jackpot.

            With a manic grin she spins around, her hands up in the air, all hips and legs, frenetically flailing her way through a dance she does not know and is pleasantly certain that no one has ever given a name. Her years of training as a dancer lower their head in shame.

            “Hit me baby, one more time!” Oh yes. She went there. The song may have been over ten years old, but fuck ‘em. A true classic never dies. Her smile splits open and surges into a laugh that echoes off the empty stalls and walls.

She flings open the handicap corner stall, wipes for a feverish few moments at the toilet seat with a spare piece of single-ply toilet paper and tosses it into the feminine hygiene receptacle, humming with haphazard enthusiasm along to the song. Even the hygiene box is empty except for the newly wrinkled scrap. College custodians hard at work. She adorns the door’s garment hook with her worn college book bag, packed to unforgiving capacity with worn college books. With a tug, her yoga pants and undergarments no longer restrain her and she plops down on the clean cold white.

She is alone in her sterile kingdom, seated on her porcelain throne, humming with deranged delight. The little wonders see us through. She relaxes, in no rush at all, easing into her processes when a mighty sound blasts across the bathroom.

“Snrrrrrrrrrrrrkgh!” 

It is something between a mighty groan and the fluid garbled inhalations of someone with an acute case of tuberculosis. Her humming stops instantly.

“Wha?” She manages. Waits. 

No sound returns to her but the dull echo of her voice. She peeks under the door. Nothing. No incriminating feet, no judgmental glimpse of boots aiming at her, turned in frowning disapproval at her conduct as someone gazes in to view her shame. No large hooves indicating a reasonable source of such a snorting bellow. She is forced to consider, with grim dread, that the sound had originated from herself, unfelt, unknown, and unwilled.

Back to ground zero on the relaxation process, she notes. Tentatively, she lowers her shoulders from their stressed, vulture hunch and drifts back toward contentment.

“Don’t you know? I still believe, still believe!” She sings to herself, but quieter, more reserved, bursting in with the final chorus line, not in words, but in humming once more. Surely more acceptable.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!” 

She catches herself on the toilet paper dispenser as she topples from the toilet seat, her need to utilize the toilet mercifully and instantaneously quenched.

“The fu-hell-shi-what?” She stammers out, rising to her feet and backing away into the corner, upsetting the toilet brush.

Then she hears it. It starts out low, and starts to grow. Not the Whos down in Whoville, however, no sir. A low, guttural, waxing rush, like waves against a beach. She ever so quietly eases open the door, as if silence now will conceal her. She creeps out, her soft shoes meeting the floor. She stops, looks down, and tugs up her yoga pants. Her eyes navigate the sliver separating the neighboring stall door from the stall foundation, peeking in, checking for any sneaky, hiding inhabitants or lurking, snorting serial killers. Whatever kind of person would commit such a sound. It takes her a moment to discern the tangle of hair and knees and drool from which the sound burst forth, a low, steadily rising, steadily wettening rush of air.

A tiny fellow student is perched on the toilet, open text book in her lap, pale legs bare but shrouded in her tangled messy hair. Her head dangles low against her shapeless chest, her mouth gapes, pooling drool on the open book. Our heroine, realizing she is no longer alone, feels her heart stammer in surprise. Perhaps she should wake the girl. Maybe she should check her vitals. She’s studied nursing for the last three years, perhaps the sleeping girl has stimulated her vagal nerve and passed out from the prodigious effort of pooping. From the unconscious, cavernous mouth a mighty, belching snore rips forth in a tremendous surge of sound and power that betrays its owner's diminutive size.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!”

She takes a step back automatically. In near-reverence she creeps quietly, ever so carefully out the door, letting it slip shut behind her, back into the hallway, a revenant from the sleeping beast’s domain.

Hours later, she finds herself alone once more, driving her tiny blue Hyundai Accent with its forest of air fresheners and a spare pink stethoscope looped over the rear view mirror, howling out Britney Spears to hell and the heavens. There is a two second lull between songs on her CD (It’s not as if vintage Britney Spears hits the radio anymore, no chance of catching it there) which hearkens her back to an earlier time that day. 

She thinks of the messy tiny balled up girl sitting on a toilet, having quite possibly slept through her finals. Having quiet possibly had a brain aneurysm from the force of trying to pass her bowels and now was some necrotic terror waiting in an empty bathroom for the next falsely confident person to enter and plop down beside her.

“Ah, shit,” she shrugs, thrusting her fist up at the ceiling as she double taps rewind. “One more time!”

Insomniacs Anonymous

One need never buy alcohol again. There's a far cheaper alternative that requires only a little patience.

Not hooch, although that kind of fits the bill as well. Toss some apples in a plastic bag in the back of a toilet and you can home make your own jailhouse moonshine if you're willing to wait. 

Although technically, moonshine more frequently involves corn as an ingredient and tastes like rubbing alcohol, while I can only assume that apple whiskey tastes like a hint of rustic pome mixed with dysentery and regret. Of course either of those alternatives would be illegal on the moral grounds that the government cannot properly tax you for poisoning yourself. For your own safety, of course.

Find yourself not in the illegal substance trade but want to experience the same results?

Have a hankering for occasional euphoria? Blackouts? Temporary loss of brain function and balance? Slurred, fumbling words and occasional delusions that border on full-out hallucination? Want to bolster a defiance of social mores? Want to get into more car accidents, but with less guilt? 

Rhetorical questions, of course, because we *all* want that.

Sleep deprivation is the way to go. 

Also, it helps with creativity and makes most social events more bearable, keeps various mental maladies mitigated and makes jokes far more humorous. I'm not exactly a communal butterfly, and the larger the group, the more bolstering it takes. I'm pretty sloshed on it at the moment, so I apologize if I meander.

I'm off in a little town for my wife's sister's wedding. Big crowd, remote place. A lot of older folks, and religious ones of the more judgmental inclination too. Mutterings of hellfire and damnation make a curious backdrop to vivid greens, sticky heat, open water and blue skies. 

"Provincial" is an accurate description.

Helluva view though, and really quite peaceful.

Wedding is in a few hours and figured I could either write or sleep, so I'm writing. And, by the sleep--deprivation metaphor-- I suppose I'm pre-gaming as well. I am not designed for crowds.

Almost done the first draft of Wyte, a full length horror novel about a group of amateur, middle-aged adventurers who wish to escape a generally unfulfilling office life and add the Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia to the list of locations they've seen and conquered. They find themselves confronted with a nature far greater and more terrible than the one they understood, and a presence that is not only aware of them but happy to pursue and conquer them in turn.

Been working on a bunch of other projects too, but the straight-forwardness of Wyte has been incredibly fun to write, and I think it will be good to read, when done. Not as much humor as some of the projects, but a more classical aim at horror.

First draft is hardly the same thing as finished product, but it's progress. From then on, it'll take even more time and patience. Everything with writing does. Patience and a willingness to be entirely cheap. So screw the bars and expensive liquors that taste like the arse end of a hippo, those are only for the grossly wealthy and impatient. Wait a while, instead.

INSULTS

You fornicator of mothers!

A dire insult. Supposedly. I would dare say that most fathers have managed such a feat if you ignore the tentative implications of incest that have sunk beneath the waves of time along with such Titanics as "stymphalist."

This is a public service announcement about the death of insults, of rudeness, of banal, casual cruelty. People claim that instant gratification is the hallmark of the masses today, but that's silly. That's been the moniker forever. Another aborted insult in lieu of a real observation.

The highest casualty of the times is insults.

The internet causes a lot of things, but one of its greatest crimes (and there are a pantheon of great and unwieldy crimes...) is the dearth of proper diction and conviction to malediction. Too many learn too young the simple, laziest sorts of insults.

To quote a few less-than-eloquent youtube enthusiast examples selected at random:

• "your virgin fags who think this ugly hag is hot lmao" 
• "bitch i'm a womyn in days world. open your eyes, only half off us jerk off to literally anything. your gross penis. fuck off." 

And my personal favorite, 

• "The clean dumbbutt roughly pulls dumbbutt's like this. Fart off, you're a stupidface."

Took about 5 minutes of research on a single video, made a few brief tweaks for formatting sake and to condense the last one, which was posted primarily in two word entries.

These are the insults of weary, distracted, low hanging fruit. I love and support rudeness. It is one of my truest hobbies and penchants. There is a powerful honesty to telling someone you don't like them and want to make their day worse, just as there is a powerful and easy defense of ignoring someone's insults because you do not respect them or their opinion. It's like magic, a battle of arcane incantations and mental defenses.

As with many forms of magic, it is endangered. The state of global mockery is unacceptable. When has it fallen from common conversation to call someone a brochity quim? Why not jumentous helminth? Why not excerebrose carnal byproduct?

Yes, some more colloquial vernacular insults have a glorious ring to them. Hearing my sweet, elegant wife shout "Cocksucker!" at the TV warms my foul, beastly little heart. Shitstain, lint-licking cootie queen, warthog-faced buffoon-- there undeniably ARE acceptable commonplace insults, simply because of the beautiful way they roll off the tongue. But dumbass? Not if you mean it as an actual insult meant to wound. No siree.

Call someone a fopdoodle. Or the unimpressive byproduct of a bowlegged whore whose only qualification for producing even such a loathsome example of humanity was an affinity catching the stray misspent sperm from passing truckers. Either one takes more thought, but what you spend is what you get.

Even simple adjectives. There are few greater insults than "Normal" or "Boring" or "Pathetic" if you make them ring true. Even simply looking slightly above someone's eyes and saying "To speak with you demeans me. I do not hear you." gets some pretty fantastic results. No need for yelling that someone is sexually active. Simply tell them truth of your opinion. If they are a coward, call them one. Have reasons and examples to support it. Offer to make a power point, or devise an illustrative play starring sock puppets.

The best part is, if you use an insult with which the recipient is unacquainted, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli resounds that great and glorious chime of "you're too stupid to understand the insult, but you know you've been insulted."

For how much more can man ask?

The reverse, sadly, is true for most slurs. As everyone's favorite N word (nerfherder, clearly) is bandied about, it makes the speaker seem like the window-licking, fetid scrapings of the stagnant scum that forms a skin across the shallowest parts of the gene pool. Use words that have real, abrasive substance. 

"Stupid" is better than "gay" because stupid has a direct and powerful meaning, while the other means a bunch of things, but mostly sounds like you're subtly inquiring about the sex object preference of the addressed while simultaneously announcing that you are indeed stupid.

Most of the -isms fall in this category. Is there some wiggle room? Sure, but if you believe it, you're still the human equivalent of the fecal slime that accumulates around the mouths of gas station toilets and cannot be removed with even the most ardent bleach and scrubbing.

Now, you say, surely these problems have existed before!

Yes. I'm aware. Shakespeare had his high points when he wrote sonnets, The Lion King, and the comedy about how dreadfully defective are the minds of horny teenagers, but such gems as "fat guts" and the dismal stream of penis-length insults are set solidly at his doorstep. Chaucer was a big fan of dropping a "C" word that I'm omitting because I think it would get me in trouble with the wife(although it was more of a "Q" back then. The problem is not new, even among the greats. But the prevalence of the problem has reached untold heights of ecstatic enthusiasm.

The solution? Simple. 

• Watch shows like Archer. Less Adam Sandler. Meditate carefully upon the nature of your dislike for your fellow man. 

• Stop watching pewdiepie. Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/insults and read. 

• Watch some classic videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSEYXWmEse8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHWEZ_IjcSk 

You will like the way you insult people. I guarantee it.

The summary: Don't just say "ass," insult with class. Sonuvabitchretardjerkpunksnotnosedgianttwerpscumbagdickheadassholebastardpenisbreath

ON NOT WRITING

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night keep me from writing when I'm supposed to. No, oh no, I'm much more creative with my reasons for failure.

It starts out with a subtle cue of self doubt, a feeling of "what if I just... [anything else]" to avoid the feeling of inadequacy. So I indulge. I put it off. Small increments at first, and then longer and longer. I can write next hour. That'll be okay, right?

No. Will not.

The feeling of disgust at not writing is the perfect fertilizer, urging that self doubt into a unholy vegetable of man-eating, night-dissolving proportions as it feeds upon itself. And then it's 6 AM again and no progress has been made except for sullen drudgery of avoidance, disillusionment and general feelings of unworthiness. I can either stay up until noon and foul up the following day, or I can accept the failure for what it is.

Anything else can include... well... pretty much anything. I've watched movies, listened to music, read a sizable portion of Wikipedia. Reddit, games, email, you name it. I can recite numbers up through novemdecillions without any hesitation. I can tell you why the average phallus length of an aardvark is not available online. I have learned all sorts of things, useful and otherwise. I've sat and refreshed a browser, not going anywhere. At least when I cave in and read extra books, I can tell myself I'm doing something useful.

Slowly, however, doing things I like(or things from which I could conceivably derive neurotic satisfaction) no longer helps me escape. When writing works, it's such a rush, and most things I've listed there are--let's face it--boring. Mind killingly so. If it's not engaging, it's not a good escape, especially because when writing works, it's makes you feel like your mind is on fire, like electric throbbing through your entire body. If you'll overlook the double entendre.

Since such quasi-enjoyable pursuits are used up, I turn to things I dislike as a penance. I read the news. I make food. I read Youtube comments. I watch infomercials. I write and rewrite a sentence or two. I mentally claw and scratch at anything I've written. I reread old emails that have a special place of scalding in my heart. And then I sit and feel truly abominable.

And little by little I become so consumed with loathing that it's a bitterest mercy when the night draws to an end and the brainless morning birds begin singing... at which point the impending completion inevitably drives me into a frenzy of half-assed writing that I'll have to re-edit the following day.

Some of the biggest precursors to the failfests that occur every few weeks are:

• Too little sleep (I drool on my keyboard when i pass out on it. Apart from the drool spatters seeming vaguely modern art, it's not very effective... unless you want yet another 430 pages of "kkkkkkkkkkkk" inserted into the middle of a project from where my nose was pressed.)

• Too much sleep (I often get more creative as my mind decays into sleep deprivation. Too awake is good for planning, but not for delivery. Must run balance.)

• Games (FPS are the worst. The less creativity, the more issues they cause. Story driven is okay, except for the time sink angle.)

• Online waste (Obviously. Dear goodness the productivity increase when my Wifi is out...)

• Vacations (Terrible news. Never more than one day off from writing at a time, ideally, if that. Doesn't have to be the full 2k daily words, but at least 500.)

• Not writing (Sounds stupid, but it's true. Writing even the literary equivalent of feces still gets it flowing. Writing nothing just makes everything turn to stone)

• Guilt (Deadlines are good and lovely. Beating yourself up for failing them is fine. Feeling guilty about failing them long after the fact is pretty self-defeating.)

• Food (I don't like eating, but not eating does terrible things for the mind and body. Until I bypass the maudlin mastery of mortality, eating is a bit necessary and too often shirked.)

• Feeling out of shape (makes self loathing and self disgust so much easier.)

The weird thing is (while wasting my time on researching it) I started noticing how entirely consistent the problems are among writers. Which is a little depressing in and of itself, since it indicates there is no cure. That being said, doing the obvious responses to the precursors does seem to have some effect. So maybe I should try that on nights like these instead of writing self-indulgent blog posts.

But, as tonight has been a more or less complete waste and I'm chock full of bitterness I'm out to go burn a CVS down--er... pick up my wife from the city. Sorry, my inner Baltimorean is showing. I can at least hope this blog entry will guilt trip me into writing tomorrow. 

HOUSE

A lit window at night spills light out beyond, and all that light makes it very easy to forget that darkness too spills in. Not a deliberate darkness, no overly dramatic caricature of shadow painted against the floor or roiling cloud of blackness curling in like mist, but an intrusion of awareness, a watching from beyond.

Looking out, you cannot clearly see it either, for the light makes a mirror out of glass when you're on the inside looking out. You see only yourself, distorted and pallid and murky, as through water. It's often easy to believe you're alone, that there's no invisible face pressing close, peering in, the vague stirring in your reflection's eyes.

If it had hands, there'd be prints against the glass. If it breathed, it'd leave a stain of fog. But it does not breathe and it has no use for hands. It simply watches, pressing close, invading and drinking in your presence, learning you, grinning coldly at the simple naivete of your perceived privacy, laughing you to scorn as it seeps in, little by little toward the beckoning light. The glass grows cold, feels so slick it's almost wet with the watchers drooling anticipation. To see out, to look for it, you must stand very close and look through your own shadow, into its eyes. And sooner or later it inevitably will slip past the threshold and creep a fragment of itself into even the most mundane of households.

So you put up blinds and shutters, but that is futility in itself. The slivers peeking out are still slivers peeking in, and that is all it takes. It can be very patient, pressed up against the glass beyond. It creaks along the floorboards. It groans like the sound of a settling house. It's easy--very easy, even--to convince oneself there's nothing out there, but to do so is a grave misstep, because glass has been known to crack...

Which is essentially why I don't terribly like social media websites. Too many opportunities for folks to come peeking in, unseen, and impossible to really keep them out. The irony of course, is that this is all written in a blog, which is more or less like a Ouija board, firing out a beckon call to those who dwell beyond.

It's also why I don't like glass doors on a house. It's one thing for a window, a window is for looking, but a door is made for entering, and certain things should not be let in.

All of which would seem like fairly silly verbal meanderings, as I live in an apartment characterized most eloquently by the word "shabby" or perhaps a somewhat nasal sigh. The front door is shared with the other units, and the door to my apartment is a slab of brown-painted metal. I certainly needn't worry about the light permeability of my doors. 

But not for long! I've bought a house.

It is a good house. I quite like it. If it were a pancake, I would likely eat it. If it were a person, I would shake its hand quite warmly. And most likely not eat it, unless I were terrifically hungry and had no better options. I have no desire to follow in the footsteps of Tom Dudley and earn myself a death sentence for eating the cabin boy just a couple days before being rescued, but I suppose the humor in such a sentence is better than starvation.

So. No longer to dwell in the apartment in hell, no longer to linger and lay under the spell of misery, drug use and domestic ire that neighbors display (and on occasion, gunfire). The pounding on ceiling, on walls, and on floor shall certain continue! But I'll hear them no more. I'll have room to raise a child or pet, and curl up comfy behind walls, yard, and debt.

Don't get me wrong, I love the apartment. It's pretty grand. It's cheery and bright and it's home. But between the mice I've had to beat to death, the roaches I've had to beat to death, the neighbors who occasionally beat each other to near-death, the lustily amorous adventures of the neighbors who live above us (they've managed to work sex into a sort of relay race-style scramble of sprinting across the apartment and fornicating at various locations, with a ferocity that I can only call admirable), the carbon monoxide events and the constant haze of mold and pot smoke, I'll be happy to move elsewhere too. I'll finally have an office. A basement. And a reason to worry about glass doors.

Also: if anyone is interested in helping as a beta reader, please feel free to contact me at DanielGJFranklin@gmail.com. Neither of the projects are fully prepped for such a task yet, but i'm hoping to break them into a few segments and ask casual readers for thoughts on a few particular issues before far too long.

7 DEADLY DAYS

The most difficult thing about writing blog posts is not coming up with topics, as I originally suspected. Neither is it the formality with which I should write-- ie, is it better to be mocking ( because mocking is fun, funny, and I'm not at all a bad person for thinking so) or professional (because someone involved in selling anything I write is probably going to Google my name and find this blog)?

The biggest difficulty is forming a proper segue from a topic of discussion to a topic which has some relevant point to writing. 

If I ever had a stalker, I'd not want them sent to jail. I'd pity them. I'd pat them on the head. I'd give them a cookie. From the outside, I really don't do much, and I suspect they'd be terribly bored. I read, I write, I go to the gym, and I pretend my blankets are tortillas and that I'm rolling myself up in a burrito each morning before I go to sleep. No, really, it's true. I'm that cool.

It would be terribly dismal to spend one's life watching that and I just sent out a first group of query letters regarding the novella I wrote. See? I told you I'm bad at segues.

The novella is called Seven Deadly Days, and it's the story of an entirely lonely genius's attempt to destroy the world over the course of a week, following an epiphany that the world has lost all purpose when [spoiler redacted]. It's meant to be humorous. If you've spent enough time in traffic, I'm sure you can see how that topic is inherently lighthearted. The narrator's story is cataloged in an alliteration-laden and somewhat scientifically considered journal of prominent apocalypse designs and why the world is in the state that it is in. And why getting up each morning might really not be the best decision. Stay in the burrito, it's warm inside.

Also contained: Candians, sex robots, and Swiffer wet jets. Unless they're big on law suits, in which case Jiffer Wet Sets feature prominently.

I'll attach a brief bit at the end, so if you have any interest in reading it, or just want to scroll by my mindless babbling, please do, go on down. Go on down, you shameful voyeur. Skip right along to the climax. Traitor.

Writing query letters is terrifying. Writing query letters that you've read over a few dozen times and then spotting a conflict of past and present tense, just moments after you click send, is summarily soul-crushing. 

A query letter is something you spew at an agent saying why they should adopt your book and market it to publishers. You have to sales pitch your way into making them want to read your manuscript among the piles and piles of competing query letters which they haven't gotten around to reading. You're supposed to be professional but charming, engaging and personal but respectful. You're supposed to fully describe your product, and why they should try to sell it. You have about 10 sentences. You are not allowed to lie your ass off. You don't hear back for months.

So I sent a bunch out and I will wait to hear back and then send out more, should they bring in nothing. The success rate for unsolicited queries is somewhere between "No." and "Go home, you're drunk." but I have to start somewhere. If all else fails, I may eventually self-publish, but for now I should try optimism. And besides, I have to do something to keep my non-existent stalker entertained. So here goes:

8:00am

I woke up to the throbbing, groin-clenching auditory stab of my alarm clock and allowed myself the usual 15 seconds of sublime delusion that my waking up is simply a bad dream. Just short of halfway through, I stopped. I could feel it even then, that something was terribly wrong. Those seven seconds of singular simplicity and sweeping ignorance are a blessing I shall not forget. So, I woke up, impaled an interesting pair of slippers that resembled small gutted bunnies with my feet, donned a bathrobe and began my dreadful journey to discover what precisely had occurred. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. I am extremely clever. The world, you see, had ended.

9:00am

            I felt a little bit helpless in light of this. At something of a loss as to where to go from such a realization. I decided to check the news channel. Perhaps the wailing and lamentations of the masses would help guide the shock home and help me to better cope. But the news man had nothing to say, or nothing to say that mattered, at least. Some country with a direction-prefix to its name was upset with its neighbor and they were both pointing fingers—well, mostly the middle finger—at each other. Ludicrous. Child’s play. Unimportant. I tried the internet, but found, as usual, that it is little but a weathered temple to the faded societal ideals of the sacred and the profane—porn and kittens. Some actress had accidentally revealed a portion more of her mammary glands than was deemed socially permissible while on some frivolous award pageant for frivolous viewers. Gasp. Shudder. Insipid. A cat jumped in and out of a box while meowing to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Be still my fluttering heart. The ever-archaic radio neither wept nor beat its non-existent (yet fully concealed, to be sure) breast. Instead, a talk show advising how if I bought the new model of Swiffer Wet Jet, my world would be complete and my floors would be clean no matter what I got on them. It’s better than a traditional mop and bucket, you know. I would be able to make order out of the chaos. Somehow, I don’t think any number of Swiffer Wet Jets will be enough to clean up this tragedy and rubble. At any rate, I’m willing to risk it. Inconsequential.

            As I searched on and on, I came to my second startling realization of the day—way ahead of schedule for before noon, and on a Sunday, no less. The world had not only ended… but no one else knew! You can imagine my surprise. Well, more likely, you cannot, but trust me when I tell you that it was quite an epiphany. But tarry not I in depression! For nothing is truly broken that can be truly fixed. First I decided about fixing breakfast, and then I’d tackle the problem of how to fix everything else. Ever.

FOOD POISONING

At the risk of appearing an erudite, I must take it upon myself to further the education of the world on an eternally significant topic, the paramount import of which cannot be overstated, even with the loftiest of claims and the most Herculean of efforts. Atlas himself could not raise such a burden of truth from his shoulders, and all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot repair the monumental consequences should such truth be transgressed. I speak a note of direst warning, a single toll that cries out not just for me, but for all mankind. And womankind.

As you've probably guessed, it's about frozen food, my real area of expertise.

Frozen food is frequently not food.

That is nothing new. If you've ever left a Hot Pocket in your car  amidst the heaps of books and water bottles and tools, only to rediscover it 6 months later (a circumstance I'm sure we all have faced), you may have noticed the complete lack of mold, of bugs, of any real semblance of decay besides becoming wooden in texture. Ham lasts about two to three days in a car before it becomes truly and palpably foul. Milk products spoil after about a week in their vehicular cell. Bread and the like generally lasts a month or two before they too give in. A Hot Pocket made of "ham" and "cheese" and "breaded crust" lasts an eternity.

It really is no wonder that many were recently recalled by federal mandate due to being composed of the meat of "diseased and unsound animals." (It was the Philly cheesesteak Hot Pockets in particular, if you were wondering. If you've eaten one, I'm pretty sure you weren't wondering.) In the immortal words of Jim Gaffigan, "You can have a Hot Pocket for breakfast, a Hot Pocket for lunch, and be dead by dinner."

Just the same, in comparison to many of their frosty peers(exceptions include those amazing frozen lasagnas by Marie Calendar), Hot Pockets are a veritable gem. Take it from one who has oft spelunked those tainted midnight halls of the forgotten frozen food aisle at Walmart, the very halls that most dare not speak of during the day.

This in and of itself is probably a cause for some alarm, but not quite to my point. You can eat a 6 month old Hot Pocket if you chew hard. Not my proudest moment, but I attest that it can be done. I didn't even get sick, either. In like a brick, out like a brick. Unfortunately, however, if you get new, sketchy brands of discount frozen Chinese food, partially defrost them, and then wolf them down while they're still cold and slippery, you have committed a slight in the sight of the ever fickle fecal deities and their companions farther up the digestive tract.

If you do so while also pouring down a milkshake, hot chocolate, and fast food tacos, you set yourself in something of a quandary, confronted with the choice that all of us must face at some point or another: is it better to throw up in the toilet and risk a diarrhetic disaster on the floor behind, or do one's best to hold the vomit back while one's nether bowels work through their agony?

I can give advice one way or another, but untried, you will never really know. You must make this decision for yourself. I pray you choose wisely.

Fortunately I have a wife who works in an ER and managed to bring me a trashcan in time.

The moral of the story, the very point, is thus: I'd have written a more on-topic blog post, but I gave myself food poisoning.