Book Recommendation: Zero Saints by Gabino Inglesias

 Dear Reader,

I don't know where to begin. This was a wild ride of a book. The action starts at page one and doesn't let up until the final page's resolution. Mr. Inglesias's expert use of dramatic tension keeps you on your toes the whole time. His gritty style of exposition lends an extra bit of darkness to an already dark topic that gives you the old school film noir chills. The main character's openness as presented in the narrative style makes you feel sympathetic emotions of vulnerability, grief, and terror. The relief that comes in the closing scene is a mixed thing, as messy and complicated as real life.

10/10

Here's the Amazon link if you want to pick up a copy. 

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Saints-Gabino-Iglesias/dp/1940885337

Book Status Update.

Dear Reader,

Since the debacle of my ancient laptop dying, I'm going through my thumb drive where I backed everything up to and trying to find things. It is a disorganized mess. I really need to label things better. Manuscripts is too vague, if you know what I mean. I have found half started short stories, random rants about my complicated history, and some stuff that I honestly can't make heads or tails of where I was going with it from blogs that I was attempting to run about ten years ago. 

As I chew my way through all of this, I think I'll find the short stories that I drafted for my science fiction thing and the continuation of both serial stories that I have going on here. It's a lot of stuff to go through. I didn't realize how much stuff I had on that old machine until now. I think I may need to get thumb drives dedicated to topics or something. Fortunately, they are not super expensive and they're pretty reliable. (knocks wood) But, this is a bigger mess than my project room which we keep the door closed so that stuff doesn't fall out and kill us. (Ok, it's not quite that bad but it makes my kids' room look spotless.)

When you have no inspiration.

 Dear Reader,

I have been struggling for the past year, roughly, to stay on top of my writing. I started out with great plans which then got eaten by homeschooling and then distance learning last year. We're a few months past the one year mark of when New York state (my home state) shut down due to COVID-19. Last week, we passed some threshold criteria for reopening the state. Events are still not happening in many cases because practical people are cautious. What does this have to do with my inspirational block in my writing?

That's a great question and I honestly am not sure what is a good answer to it. I have two boys that are unvaccinated. One is about a month shy of turning 12 and the other is two months shy of turning 14. We want to get them vaccinated at the same time. The problem is both of them are terrified of needles. We literally have to hold them down so they don't flail. The last time that my eldest got the flu shot, the doctor's office had this spray that numbed the area where the injection went in. He handled the business of getting vaccinated a lot better with that. But, we can't get the vaccines at our doctor's office. We have to go to a mass vaccination site. Gods only know how that is going to go for two young men on the Autism spectrum who haven't ever really had to handle a crowd before in their lives. (We live in a small town in the boonies. The closest we get to a crowd is when the folks from out of town show up to visit their lakefront properties. Even then, it's not that big or busy.)

Since the mask mandate has been dropped, virtually everyone is going around maskless. This is terrifying to me. Because we don't have a 100% adult vaccination rate. Some of these people who are wandering around without masks are carriers. I don't want my boys getting sick. And with this new delta-mutation from India showing up here in the USA, I don't know if my vaccination is enough. So, my family continues to wear masks. As of right now, the schools are still practicing the COVID-19 safety protocols. So, when summer school comes along, the kids will be wearing masks at school as will the teachers and staff. Again, gods only know how that's going to be handled in autumn when school is back in session. The uncertainty is awful and makes my brain go blank when the thing directly confronts me.

I have a bad feeling that there's going to be a third wave of deaths due to the country opening up before herd immunity via vaccination is achieved. And I fear that it will cost us a generation who simply are not old enough to get vaccinated. My sons may be vaccinated in time, but my grandniece is barely a month old. And there are countless other children who are not old enough to get vaccinated against this plague. That doesn't even take into account folks like some of my friends who are either to immunocompromised to get the vaccination or who are allergic to components in it. I am legitimately afraid for these people.

It is hard to write as a coping mechanism in the face of this horror that's been unfolding for over a year. There's so many lives that have been lost. There was so much political bullshit games being played that directly caused many of those deaths. The country is on a perilous ground. The January insurrection made very clear the threat embodied by Donald Trump. There is rumblings of another attempted coup in August. It is deeply disturbing. I have a good number of neighbors in the area who would support such a thing.

I feel like I am living in the Weimar Republic shortly before the Nazis came to power. Everyone is hastening to be back to 'normal' and ignoring the danger of the pandemic, the deep seated racist problems, and the economic disparity happening in real time. My side of the family left Germany during that period. They came here looking for better lives. When WWII broke out, they joined the military to go free their kinsmen from the hold that the Nazis had over their country. I now have relatives who I am estranged from for various reasons, among them is their overt support of white supremacy ideology. I have a brother who says that Hitler's only problem was he had bad advisors and that Hitler was attempting to do a good thing and unify Europe (completely dismissing the holocaust and the concentration camps). This brother proudly supports Donald Trump and the white supremacists that have flocked to his banner. He's claimed that they're "good Americans". To say that I was repulsed by that choice of phrase is an understatement.

Come what may, I won't be a "good American" and if the republic survives this bullshit, I'll be pleasantly surprised. But, first, we have to manage not to die in great numbers. 

Well, this has been eventful.

 Dear Reader,

Since my last post my life has been topsy-turvy. First there was the major problems sleeping. Then there was the major depressive episode. These were followed my a significant medication change. That kicked my butt for about a month. Through the course of that month, we had school meetings and family drama. Now we're coming up on the end of the school year (literally within 2 days) and I am scrambling for ways to keep my kids out of trouble. Did I mention that we're preparing for two young men having a meltdown because the school is reclaiming the chromebooks that they've been using for the last year so that they can be prepped for next year? Yeah, that's going to be about as fun as my computer dying and having to find a replacement (which took 2 weeks to get sorted out).

I am going to attempt to get back into blogging on here again. I'm still working out my schedule which has been complete chaos because of all the stuff going on with the kids. To those of you who have waited patiently for new content, I thank you for your patience. To those of you who are new to the blog, I promise I will do my best not to be utterly boring and get those serial stories kick started into motion again.

Also, I will be rebooting my critical analysis of The Artist's Way. I will start by posting links to what I've completed thus far. Look for that in a near to immediate future post.

Struggling with depression sucks.

  Dear Reader,

I've not been sleeping well over the last while. My doctor adjusted my medication but it doesn't seem to be helping as much as I thought it would be. My mood is dropping and I find myself struggling with thoughts like I should give up on my blogs and all of my writing projects because depression lies to me and tells me that it is all going nowhere fast.

My anxiety has been rather high which leads to me over thinking the prospect of writing anything at all. It's at a point that even writing in my daily journal about the random stuff the kids do and what happens in the neighborhood provokes a mini-panic attack. Fortunately, I will be talking with my doctor next week and figuring out the next step to addressing this problem. 

I feel really guilty that I haven't been writing here or on my other blogs. I sit down to write and I get so full of anxiety and fear that the words just go out of my head. Right now, I'm half tempted to delete this whole thing because "no one wants to listen to you whine." My big Camp NaNoWriMo project only got four pages done through out the entire month. That was supposed to be the Lokean devotional project. I sit down to work on it and I get afraid that I'm going to write everything wrong and that some one is going to lob a brick through my window for daring to go so far as to write about this.

It's a combination of C-PTSD from how I was raised and my performance anxiety colliding with each other and leaving me virtually paralyzed on how to act. I am not going to give up on these things. I'm struggling and my brain is like jello right now. I've got about as much focus as a goldfish. All I want to do is sleep, in part because I'm not sleeping well and in part because I am depressed again.

It is hard to do things when your disability smacks you in the face with a halibut. That, however, is where I'm at right now. Hopefully, after a little bit, I'll be doing better and back to daily writing.

A confession.

  Dear Reader,

I must make a confession of sorts. I have not been writing on any platform in quite some time because I have been terrified that what I write will cause harm. I have been terrified that what I write will bring suffering to my loved ones. I have been terrified that what I write will be the cause of great sorrow.

These terrors are in part the fruit of evil that was done to me as a young child. The people who raised me told me that if I wrote about things they disapproved of people would come to burn our house down or kill us. They told me that if I wrote about topics that they disapproved of my entire family would suffer because of it. They told me that if I gave voice to anything that wasn't 'normal' that I would be ostracized and other people would do things to harm me. These lies were repeated so often that they became the backdrop to my early efforts to write.

I have walked away from these people. I have cut pretty much all ties to them. Due to the nature of the psychological trauma that I experienced with them, however, I have these anxieties and terror that seize me when my mood is low. I have bipolar II and I regularly experience low moods because of it. This acts as a trigger for the emotional flashbacks that have been making writing and any form of creative expression awfully hard over the last few months.

I desperately want to write. I desperately want to finish the book I started a few weeks ago. I desperately feel the need to express myself. At the same time, terror stops me. The pressure within is miserable. I ask that you forgive my silence. I am trying to over come this. I will not be abandoning my blogs. But things are very difficult right now because of my disability and life being complicated.

Struggling with writer's block.

 Dear Reader,

Life got complicated recently. I've been trying to sort it out. In the process of all this, I have come down with a bit of writer's block. I'm working to try to resolve it. I hope to have real content for you soon.